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Tangled Branches: Cultivated

happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia

Monday, September 01, 2008

Extreme Gardening

Greetings from the last day of my stay-at-home vacation! The weather is beautiful! It rained for 2 and half days and again Saturday night. I'm completely serious when I say this is beautiful weather. The garden looks happier than it has in weeks and I got a chance to catch up on some reading and basically just loll around the house.

As I leafed through a stack of magazines, I found a theme emerging - extreme gardening. I suppose I was primed to look for it. Early in the week we watched a video about competitive growers of giant pumpkins. This video, Lords of the Gourd, is worth seeing even if you don't think you're interested in enormous cucurbits. The focus was on the human drama of competition - the motivations and emotions - wrapped in a humorous package. Even the spouse enjoyed it and he usually has little patience with films that don't feature car chases or espionage.

I picked up the September issue of Saveur and browsed the cover story on watermelon, where I learned that Hope, Arkansas (of all places) is the Giant Watermelon Capital of the World. Some neat old pictures of the festival are here (scroll down). There must be something about cucurbits that inspires competition. But then I discovered that there's an entire forum on GardenWeb devoted to Giant Vegetables, including okra, sweet potatoes, tall amaranths, and I don't know what all else. Doesn't appear to get much traffic though. Probably the growers of giant vegetables are all specialists and only hang out in specialist forums like bigpumpkins.com.

Then there's the chile peppers. You may have noticed the huge interest this year in growing Bhut Jolokia (the spouse says Bhut means ghost in Hindi and Jolokia is the name some use for chile peppers). Bhut Jolokia is the world's hottest pepper as measured by the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State. Dr. Bosland of the Chile Pepper Institute wrote up some tips for growing it in the March 2008 issue of Chile Pepper magazine. If you want to know more about how this pepper became a global sensation, there's a looooong article at fiery-foods.com that covers just about everything. I'm not growing this pepper, but Ki, Layanee, and Miles are. Anybody else?

Well, if I have an extremely long life I should still have plenty of time to grow extreme vegetables. Sunset magazine did a feature in July on California centenarians, and at least some of them attributed their longevity to gardening. The article prompted letters to the editor (published in the September issue) with more anecdotal evidence supporting the theory.

We've been extremely lazy in the garden during our stay-at-home vacation. The most strenuous thing I've done is pick some big tomatoes. I guess I better get back to work if I want to live to be 100.

Labels: magazines, vacation, vegetables

posted by Entangled at 9:04 AM ::: Permalink

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