drAnn's Art

Everything Except the Tomatoes

We have green cherry tomatoes that we hope will ripen to a nice red in time for a Christmas Salad, but these are store-bought.  Not so the greens, however. All of those we grew hydroponically indoors with no dirt and no bugs.  That is my definition of organic ;-)

The fenugreek sprouts were "hatched" in the Easy Sprouter.  We buy the dried seeds by the pound, as this is our favorite sprout.  I also saved some of the sprouts to plant, as we like to saute and eat the bitter greens they will soon produce.  They are good in a variety of skillet dishes.  Fenugreek is known to help regulate blood sugar, so not only is it jam-packed with b-vitamins, but it has other health benefits as well.

Those are tender green amaranth leaves in the center, and Mizuna to the left.  Top and right are lovely sprigs of purslane, an Omega-3 rich green that is good fresh or cooked in soup and/or beans. 

Retirement is so cool.  We grow stuff.  We photograph it, blog about it, eat it, sleep, and grow more the next day. 

Art Worth a Row of Beans

I've been learning about plants, as I wish to draw them from life.   Until this very week I didn't even know that haricots (which I did understand to be the French name for beans), a variety of string bean we also know as French Beans were actually just the young pods of the kidney bean. 

I found out this way.  We decided to make a big pot of kidney bean soup (artists have to eat!) and I decided to take out a handful of the beans and sprout them just to see what they would look like.  Now I cannot kill anything that I start as long as it is healthy and wants to live, so after they sprouted I put them in a container of grow rocks and poured water over them with a small amount of liquid nutrients and a month later there were buds all over the little puppies.  Then this:

 A work of art if I ever saw one!

Moreover, just two days later there was an inch long bean where this flower had been.  Soon there will be hundreds of them, I hope.  All from a handful of dried beans from the supermarket, stolen from the soup pot.  Life is good.

More on my beans is HERE. 

The same week we got the first flowers on our anasazi beans.

  

Those are the purple and white ones that look as though paint had been spilled over them.  They taste very much like pinto beans, but cook up faster and softer and they have a slightly sweeter, slightly less nutty flavor.   They are good!  Presumably, the snap beans are good to eat fresh as well, but we'll have to wait a few more weeks to know for sure.

Arizona Sunsets

More Edible Art

If you have visited my gardening blog, Ann's Air Gardens, you will know that our living salad bar is chief among my new interests.  We put roasted sunflower seeds, fresh grated black pepper and a dab of Bleu Cheese Dressing on this salad, but I decided to take a picture first:

 

Clockwise, the greens are chicory, purslane, and Kojisan Hybrid Kamatsuna, with three lively sprigs of tender young Magenta Spreen (Lambsquarters) in the center.

Halloween is Almost Here

Yes, and we broke down and bought round chocolates wrapped in eyeball paper--three colors representing peanut butter, caramel, and fudge centers.  Evil, but tasty.   If you see me on my favorite networking site, I'll be using this avatar for a few weeks:

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Art on an Ohio Farm

This, in the words of the chap who showed me the link, pretty a-MAZE-ing:

This view is from a helicopter.  The corn was already harvested when the owner flew an artist in to create the design with a John Deere tractor.   It took over 8 hours to cut into the field.  I do not know how long it took the artist to make the sketch. 

Sarah Was Here

This is on a website called Read My Lipstick, created by women who do not appreciate the way the democrat party leaders and media have been trashing women, first Hilary and now Sarah:

It is showing up on a few other blogs, too, but you saw it here first :-)

Anyone interesting in joining Read My Lipstick can find it HERE.

First the Glossary, Then the Illustrations

I pretty much started this blog not just to share some of my art and encourage others to give in their their creative urges, but also to keep myself motivated to keep learning and keep drawing and keep painting.

I have always wanted to draw plants, and grow them, too, so lately I've taken a bit of time off from the drawing table and started learning about plants.  It is becoming a wonderful obsession, but just as the plants have to fit into some kind of container, I have to somehow compartmentalize all the tidbits of information that I'm learning day by day. 

So I've decided to work on a glossary first, and then add illustrations.

In recent searches for good information, photos, and illustrations of plants, however, I recently found myself going back again and again to a resource published by the Robert W. Freckmann Herb arium at the University of Wisconsin, Steven Point.  This is an invaluable resource for artists as well as gardening enthusiasts. 

In addition to having wonderful photos of different varieties of each plant, they also include representative botanical drawings such as this lovely sketch of my own favorite "weed" -- Purslane

Here is my GLOSSARY:

Taking Art into the Garden

I had fun making some seed packets to use for sharing seeds with a friend from the AeroGarden Growers Community Forum.   She introduced me to one of her favorite greens, the Salad Burnet,  among other things, and I have a few seeds packaged up and ready to share with her, too, as soon as I can get them addressed and in the mail.

Me and My Shadow

For some reason this tree fascinated me:

Its shadow looked lovely on the sandy ground, but I couldn't figure out how to get a good shot of it without me in the picture.  So I went with the flow.

 This was the result: 

We pass that rest area frequently, and I always find something interesting to photograph.  Little did I know that this time it would be me.

The "Andy Warhol" tile bit was done with PaintShop Pro 9, which was the last version of Paintshop released under the JASC name before they sold out to the other guys, and therefore the last one that still included a free copy of their excellent Animator, alas.  I've skipped a few years, but have used Paintshop from its inception, and always considered it high-end in features, despite what used to be a diminutive price.

The picture was taken with a Canon PowerShot SD600.  Canon "elph" has been my camera of choice since one day near the end of the previous century since someone who will remain unnamed here dropped mine in a gallon of water and instead of telling me, left it there until I found it and fished it out three or four hours later.    I left it on a window sill to dry out for three days to dry out and turned it on only to find it still worked perfectly.  This is not something I recommend other people trying.  At one time, the PowerShot was the only full-featured wearable digital camera, but now there are smaller ones that probably work pretty well.  Nevertheless, I'm sticking with Canon.  I wouldn't mind upgrading to 10 megapixel, though.  We saw one at Sam's Club for about $250.  Ahhh, but that would buy two more Aerogardens.  Choices, choices...