I'd like to say a few words about agriculture in the Pacific Northwest. Not the greenhouses filled with water-saturated tomatoes or the acres of blueberries or even the fields of cabbage on Highway #17 that spend the winter looking like mud/dirt fields filled with bodiless heads. I've always assumed there isn't enough of a market for cabbage to justify cutting the heads and taking them to market, so they just sit there looking bodiless, week after week, until they are plowed back into the fields in the spring.
No, what I want to say is that, although I've grown vegetables in Idaho and in New York and in Los Angeles and in Massachusetts, I have never had as unsatisfying an experience growing vegetables as growing them in Point Roberts has turned out to be. You can grow potatoes and lettuce here, it is true. Even an incompetent can grow potatoes and lettuce here. But there is little sense of achievement in it. The potatoes just grow in the compost if you send them that way. The slugs aren't particularly interested. The lettuce is possible only a good distance above ground because of the slugs. I have had some success with snow peas and I have once grown a zucchini with a satisfactory amount of zucchinis upon it. But really nothing else. No tomatoes, no bush beans, no peppers, no basil, no corn, nothing that really requires heat. It's a great place to grow fruit, adequate for herbs (other than basil), but it is not a great place to grow vegetables.
With the exception of kale. If you can get a kale plant past the place where the slugs' interference is not the end point, a kale plant is a plant that gives and gives. You have to like kale, of course. I don't know many things to do with it other than to eat it by itself, steamed, but that is pretty much enough. Six kale plants will take you a long way. And, at the end of a year, just as your new kale plants are beginning to take off, your old kale plants which have fed you all through the previous summer, fall, winter, and now spring grow to be ten feet tall and sprout lovely little yellow flowers. The picture is of the very top piece of a ten-foot kale plant, I think Russian blue kale. It's the Miss America of vegetable gardens, in my view. You can see an even larger version of it
here.
And when I am finally finished with the kale plants, they go to the llama and goats for a final dinner: flowers, leaves, stalks, and all.
