I ate 'em and they turned my stomach, some. Not sure why?

My Tubers{sweet potatoes} were beautiful in the way they grew around eachother. I have, for a long time been enamored with the "tubers" growth and beauty. I have seen such parallels inside the body, as I colored, with the Sweetpotato in pictures. This time I grew some for myself. What a proud moment to pull them out of what looks, on the surface, like a fruitless garden and have these beauties smiling and looking at you. I must eat you right now, and I could have bitten into the raw one, but I dared not. City girls don't eat their own produce. One never knows whether the process has been completed rightly. Was there too much miracle gro or too little insecticide? How does that process work with sweet potatoes?

I nearly forgot about the holes in the sweetpotatoes. They looked like worms had tried to get into them. That concerned me some. I found that when I cooked them the skin had absorbed the eating of the worms and the inside of the potato wasn't harmed or touched. Very different from apples, that the skin having been penetrated by the worm, will keep the little thing inside as a gift for you if you don't watch out. The sweet potato seems to be eaten by the worm and save the meaty part of the potato for me. The skin seems to be softer than a white potato, but far more resilient to the elements. I don't know why?

I washed and boiled them and ate them with my "legume enriched" meatloaf. I had a serious stomach problem the whole night. Was it the legumes or the sweet potato? No one else got the problem, so it must have been the sweet potatoes. I will try it again tonight, just to make sure. Or I may wait a week.

I I really never harvested sunflower seeds before. I hadn't put the 2 things together, in my mind. "here to sunflower seeds come from?" was one of the questions that got crushed in its earliest inception. I have grown them before and I have eaten them before, but I had never spent the time to pull them out of the "face". I guess I was like Ethan when he found out that cucumbers were edible and not just a cartoon character. I always thought of that part of the sunflower as the face and not so fruitful.

I sat for a half an hour or so trying to extract them whole after having dried the flower in the house for a week. Sweet syrup was coming off of the flower and I wished I had been a bee to get it out. I licked it and said "YUM!" This is yummier than the seeds. You should have tasted my fingers after the extraction process was completed. Yummy! " do love icky sticky stuff"to quote Pooh Bear.

I know that I am very sensitive to tactile on my fingers. {I used to go into the wool aisle and just stick my fingers into the different skeens to enjoy} Sunflower seeds are very similar in tactile delight. They are sticky sweet and dry at the same time. They stick to your fingers just a little and then leave the stickiness on your fingers and become dry. I am typing with the stickiness, because I don't want to wash off the sweet flavorfulness. Yuck!

I intend to plant mine and not eat them. Partly because I want to associate the experience in my mind with the sweet flavor and not the seedy flavor that I am used to. And partly because I want more sunflower seeds to harvest, If I can get some more before winter, somehow. Maybe they won't bloom again, but I'll try putting them in dirt and seed what comes of it.

My millet came up far more beautifully this year, than last year. They were bigger and thicker than last years batch. I do love millet, as difficult as they are to process. I must be a bird some where. I usually would blend them in something and enjoy it in a bread. It is a reminder of Dr. Manion and Grandma Ruth who told us how he would use the different whole grains in a well rounded diet. I haven't fully inculcated that as a practice, but I do occasionally use the different grains and millet is a delightfully different flavor of grain, to wheat.