#6: Feeling faint
I really don’t mean this to be a food blog. Really. But the “only eat food from my own property” part of this little experiment has necessarily captured my attention while I recover from injury.
This afternoon I weighed in at 178 pounds. Six days ago I was 186. For the math-impaired, that means I’ve lost eight pounds in six days. That’s crazy. I look skinny now, to the point where my partner said I look a little weak. Which obviously isn’t good. That’s not what I’m aiming for here.
Tonight I’m just going big on calories, to the extent I can. I grabbed a ton of gigantic pumpkin leaves off the plant in the garden and threw them in a stew with a few onions and potatoes, and of course some red New Mexico chile powder.
Here are the freshly picked pumpkin leaves:
If that’s not enough, I’ll eat the three cucumbers and two tomatoes I’ve got in the pantry with a healthy smothering of olive oil. And if that’s not enough I’ll go out to the blackberry bushes and gorge on everything I can find.
The real disappointment today was the crabapple tree, which has apparently become completely infested with tent worm. Yea, I had to look it up too. It’s what makes these spiderweb-looking nests that cover the apples, which obviously makes them inedible. Our crabapple tree dropped enough fruit last year to make probably 50 gallons of hard cider, but this year it’s looking grim.
Here’s what two out of three of the apples look like:
Not great. I was counting on the apples to mature and start being my go-to fill-me-up snack throughout the day. But if the crabapples are out, I need to wait around for the tree in the front yard to start maturing. But those apples are looking pretty sad too. Fewer than last year and more worms as well.
Something is up this year, and me in my recently-moved-from-the-city naiveté had just assumed an annual bounteous harvest would miraculously appear annually.
Climbing
Tomorrow I’ll get back to climbing, promise. I’ll work out for you what my strategy was for getting to 5.12, and how a lean and strong as hell 60-something climber down the street introduced me to the “pyramid.”