It’s been a while since I’ve grown parsnips, but I saw a contestant on the Great British Bake Off make a parsnip cake (as opposed to a carrot cake), and that’s got me itching to grow them again.

Hah! Well you’ve hit the nail on the head, I’m in California and clam chowder with good fresh clams is a rare treat.

I use canned clams in my chowder, and I usually reach for some fatty pork product to render fat for sauteing the veggies and as a finishing garnish (I once splurged on some guanciale, but wasn’t a discernable enough upgrade to be worth repeating). Interesting to know that the chowder isn’t traditionally thick. I can’t think of a single time I’ve had it at a restaurant where it wasn’t, which is why I was adding extra thickeners to try to match that expectation.

Yep, didn’t have any bacon in the house, but I like having a little meaty salty bite in my chowder, and turns out spam fried until crunchy fits the bill!

Oh certainly try it, clam chowder is one of my favorite soups. Both New England and Manhattan style are delicious, but my inner fatass prefers the New England.

I differ from the usual recipes in that I’m a sucker for really getting some good browning on the vegetables before adding the liquid. The flavor is worth the trade off of having a tan colored chowder rather than the pale cream of the traditional New England style.

I agree, soup weather is the best!

I second Lorn! Dark ambient electronic sprinkled liberally with glitch elements is chef’s kiss.

Also would recommended Amon Tobin. ISAM is one of my favorite albums, and Lost and Found is often the song I’ll put on to introduce folks to his style.

I really do, Halloween is a close second for my favorite holiday. I like to diy-ish the decorations, especially using stuff I’ve grown (the straw here was actually dried garlic stalks), and I’m slowly adding stuff year to year with the eventual goal of being that house.

Hah! I love how different the reactions are. Some kids seem to have no sense of fear, while I’ve had others straight nope out. This year I had a mom grab her kid under the arms to drag him screaming towards me (but don’t worry, heard him giggling back down the driveway with a “that was scary!”), and another one shouted “now you die!” (using his flashlight as pistol) after I startled him. 😆

If you see my set up from a previous year in my other comment, one of my favorite reactions was a trio of teenage girls where one saw me approach and let out a “FUCK THAT!” and ran, with her friends on her heels. Left me standing there holding the bowl with a faint “wait come back, I’ve got candy…”

I go through spurts where I’m posting and commenting a bunch, then I get weary of being online and disconnect. When I am posting, it’s usually to places with stuff I like to take pictures of, like !beebutts@lemmy.world.

Oooh, you can try what I’ve done before. Leave the front door open with the interior dimly lit and her hiding in a dark room beyond. When the kids come, she steps from the darkness into the dim light, and it’s a pretty good effect with a masked costume.

[Image description: a dimly lit red room, with a dark masked figure with horns standing in the doorway beside a table draped in black with a vase of dead flowers. An illusion of hands pressing through the wall is projected onto the wall beside the figure.]

You’re in luck, there is a best of Lemmy!

I’m in southern California and I think most houses have gas hookups for driers, often with gas stoves and gas water heaters too.

I had the exact same experience with the elephant garlic, they took forever to sprout, long enough that I actually dug one of them up to check that they hadn’t been eaten or something.

I wish his paintings had titles, or at least numbers. So hard to tell people about my favorites of his without already having a link handy.

It might be! That was one of the varieties I planted this year, though the cloves I put in the ground looked like normal shaped cloves, just scaled up a bit.

First time ever growing radicchio, but I’m 100% keeping it in my garden from here on out, not for eating (actually was not a fan of the flavor), but because it seems to want to bloom eternally. I swear this one plant has been blooming every morning for months now, and I’ve never seen sweat bees in such numbers, they seem to especially love these blossoms.

That makes sense, he was really undersized compared to the rest.

Yeah… the thought has crossed my mind, even though tomatoes are my absolute favorite thing to grow. If I knew for sure it’d really reduce the population, I could probably convince myself, but how sad would it be to have a tomatoless year just to have the mites back in full force the next. 😕

Hard to judge, as not one of my next door neighbors is interested in gardening, despite my efforts at offering seeds/seedlings/help.

I haven’t gotten to really connect with any gardening groups in my area, but the handful of folks I have talked to also have problems with spider mites, though not sure if to quite such a severe degree.

That’s a fair point, didn’t consider that my generalists would probably also be happy snacking on my good guys. I released them along with the G. occidentalis back in May when it was much cooler, in the hopes of preempting the spider mite spread.

The N. californicus I released in mid June, and though I didn’t happen to grow any corn in the garden this year, hopefully the volume of spider mites is enough to keep them well fed.