How to Seed a Pomegranate

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Food, Fruit Trees, Gardening
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In lieu of a podcast this week, I thought I’d offer a short video on my favorite method for seeding a pomegranate. While there are as many ways to accomplish this tedious but rewarding autumn chore as there are roads to Rome, I’ve found this particular technique the easiest.

First choose a large bowl to prevent splatter and subsequent spousal arguments. Then slice the pomegranate in half along its equator. Take a spatula or other sturdy object and then spank the back until the seeds release (this sounds more erotic than it actual is). If I’m lazy I just pick out the pith from the bowl. If I’m more thorough I’ll fill the bowl with water so that you can easily skim off the pith which floats to the surface.

Our tree gifted us with an abundant crop, so this has been a daily practice for the last month. This is also confirmation of my theory that the easiest things to grow make the most work for the cook.

What’s your favorite pomegranate seeding method?

What we think about when we try not to think about global warming

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Reviews
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book cover

In the comments of a recent post, one of our readers recommended this long-titled book: What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action by Per Epsen Stoknes (Chelsea Green).  Of it, she said, “For the first time in a LONG time, I feel hope and possibility when it comes to climate change.”

So I read it, and now I feel the same way. Thanks, Brigitte!

And the introduction of the book says pretty much the same thing, except the praise is coming from Jorgen Randers, one of the co-authors of The Limits to Growth. This is a man who has been waiting, pretty much fruitlessly, for us to wake up and change our ways for the last 40 years. So in 2011 he gave up on us and wrote 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next 40 Years. It was not, as he said, a description of an attractive future.

He’s a doomer’s doomer, yet in the introduction he says, “This book gave me back the hope I’d lost over forty years of futile struggle.”

So, if Stoknes can help me, Brigitte and Jorgen, maybe he can help you, too.

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Saturday Tweets: Lazy Ants and Hallucinogenic Honey

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Saturday Linkages
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When it’s time to remove a tree

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Back to the Garden, Garden Design, Gardening
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I was standing in our friend David’s back yard, talking with him about the difficulties of re-designing your garden. One of them is removing trees and shrubs, not because of the physical labor–though that is considerable–but because of the psychic cost.

David shrugged and said, “I don’t know–when they get to be as tall as me, and I go to take them out, it feels like murder.”

I agree with him. It’s hard. One of the old rules of gardening is that you can’t be afraid to be ruthless in achieving your vision, but one of the realities of gardening is that most of us are not ruthless and often live with less than ideal situations because we don’t want to make those changes. Or we make the changes, but feel bad as we do it.

This dynamic is interesting, because we are told by our culture that we can do whatever we want to nature, because nature is just a pile of insensate matter for us to work our will upon. Fine. But it doesn’t always feel that way, does it? Oh, well…that’s just because we’re foolish and sentimental. Right?

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