Soaked beds, whole foods

I left the soaker hoses running in the vegetable garden overnight. Because I am a fool. The wailing of the younger at 4:30 am this morning must have fired my one remaining functional synapse and somehow reminded me that I had dumped a rather large volume of precious water onto my unsuspecting plants. The beds are raised, so they drained fine, but what a waste.

In addition to my perpetual foolishness, I had a couple of pints as I rumbled around the garden yesterday afternoon. One pint of Old Speckled Hen, which brought me a shameful amount of joy, and another pint of Crispin Apple Cider. The apple cider was good, but my wife wondered if it was a little too sweet and fizzy to be considered acceptable for a serious ale drinker to imbibe. I think she may be right. Not that my drinks need to confirm my testosterone level, but I do have an image to keep up. An image I already push to the limit by writing a garden blog.

I bought the two cans of drink at the giant Whole Foods in downtown Austin. The place is a wonderful temple of all things good to eat and drink, and it stays packed with hipsters, hippies, the bourgeois and people that seem to simultaneously belong to all three categories. When I go, I wish I had hair to muss up and act like I didn't mean to. Even bald, I just try to look as aloof and disaffected as possible. This proved especially difficult yesterday, as I tried to check out in the self check lane with the two beers and about 5 items of produce. It turns out that finding the little sticker on my produce, entering it and weighing the produce takes me longer than a trained checker. OK, I completely screwed it up. Twice. And the one checker assigned to 4 self check lanes had to come over and help. Twice. All this while a line of customers took time out from thinking deeply about eating locally to join together and hate me for taking so much time. I was beginning to sweat by the end and had to stifle the urge to look behind me and apologize with a wan smile at the angry mob that had gathered. I did not look hip as I thew my organic, local vegetables into my recycled paper bag and fled.

In actual garden news, I ran by the Natural Gardener and I bought my potatoes - Red Pontiac, Kennebec and Yukon Gold. I also bought onions, the varieties of which currently escape me. I'll update later.