Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Legwork and Life, week of 5/8/19

This is Legwork and Life, where I track the legwork and opportunities in my career as an autistic advocate, and also describe parts of my adult autistic life, including my perspectives on everyday problems and situations.

The transplanted field garlic is still alive!  Though it's not entirely happy.  I have two pots, and have moved one to an even shadier location on the offchance that makes it happier.  It's been trying to perk up a little during the rainier weather, but yesterday it got sad again when there was more sunshine.  So I'm not really sure what the deal is, but neither pot is dead yet.  So the experiment continues, and I have yet to harvest from either pot so they have the best chance of survival.  

I kind of wish I had a third test pot to try growing indoors, which... I guess nothing but the trip out to where they grow is stopping me. I technically already have a pot, it's just small.  So I'd need to find a smaller clump of field garlic.  And then make sure I remember to water it.  ...If I'm being honest with myself, this third pot would probably die the fastest unless I make reminders for myself.  

It's funny because there aren't really guides to this sort of thing.  Allium vineale (field garlic, or crow garlic) is very definitely an invasive weed.  It's edible, like many invasive species (that's why it was brought here).  But people haven't tried to cultivate them for quite a while, so the Internet doesn't seem to have anything on the subject.  I'm just trying to replicate the conditions I found them in, sans the competition with other plants for the soil. 

Related to foraging and wild plants, my friend has lent me her favorite foraging book!  So I'm going to read that and try to get better at spotting other plants besides crow garlic, dandelions, and cattails.  Speaking of cattails, they've just started to sprout, so we went to a local area and harvested a couple for practice.  The area is a drainage ditch, and cattails soak up heavy metals like nobody's business, so we won't be eating the sprouts.  Still, it was a cool experience. 

Going a bit further back in the week, it was my spouse's birthday.  My parents took us both out for dinner on the day of, and then on Saturday I'd planned a day-on-the-town kind of excursion.  We played arcade games at Dave and Busters, ate lunch at a restaurant, saw a movie, went for ice cream (sorbet for him) afterwards, and then had dinner.  All this meant the vast majority of the day was spent celebrating him, which he seemed to enjoy. 

It was a fun for me too, but I stressed pretty hard coming up with the stops on the excursion, and made it extra difficult on myself by having everything be a surprise for him.  We share calendars, so I couldn't just plan the events in a nice, neat, easily-referenceable order.  Next year, I'll look into whether I can set events to private or hidden or something. 

Either way, it's been a good week, I guess. 

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