Broccoli and cauliflower

I don't trust the weather forecast anymore. I feel that in previous years it was more reliable than it has been this year, but in May they kept promised respites from rain, and now that July has arrived (and even in June) they keep promising rain that fails to materialize. Thanks to sprinklers, and copious amounts of time spent positioning hoses and timing waterings, our gardens are looking pretty spry, but corporate lawns along the outer urban road lines are looking pretty dead these days. In fact, it looks a lot like August around here.

And rain or no, we took the opportunity of previously promised rain to hide indoors from the heat (making little sense since don't use air conditioning) to play games and read books.

It was hot.

Speaking of gardens, Calvin and I learned something today. A month ago we planted our square foot garden plots with tomatoes, chart, kohlrabi, beans, egg plant, peppers, onions, and cauliflower and broccoli. Since then we've harvested the chard several times, and waited patiently for the rest of the plants to grow and mature to the harvesting point. I've never grown broccoli or cauliflower before, but I know what it looks like in the store and the little heads of white and green that sprouted weeks ago were like miniatures of the real thing, so we thought the thing to do was to let them grow. Since then we've watched them grow, and grow, and grow, and for some reason it wasn't until today, as I harvesting chard for dinner yet again, that I decided that, from their current state, they could never grow the heads we are so used to seeing at the market. By this time they were tall and gangly...and flowering. For shame. It took only a very brief internet search to realize where I'd gone wrong—harvest the baby broccoli head and next week you'll get more of them, eventually leading to a full, market worthy, head of broccoli. No one told me.

I wonder how many things in life we fail to research and thus let pass us by. I remember reading once that intelligence isn't so much how much or what you do know as the state of recognizing how much you don't know. Calvin laughed with me at over error, and I cursed myself for not taking the time to look into the art of growing cruciferous vegetables. And because I couldn't let the flowers go to waste, and because they had a sort of rustic charm to them, we made bouquets of cauliflower and broccoli flowers and took one to my mother when we stopped by to share dinner. I'm not sure she was amused, but any gift from a grandson is enviable.