INADVERTENT GODS

Late this afternoon I was hovering around the big pot of cantaloupe-orange nasturtiums that's sitting on the deck railing (while the deck is under repair), very conveniently positioned for gathering the new pale-green nasturtium seeds to use in my salad; sliced like micro-onions, they add a crispy zing, sort of a cross between watercress-horseradish and something completely unknown. The flowers and buds, small leaves (or thin-sliced large leaves) are eminently saladable too, for that same taste, though without the crunch.

If you just let the seeds do their natural thing they quickly fall and change to the unpalatable beige you see in nasturtium seeds for planting, at which point I must swear I was going somewhere with this, I wasn't planning to ramble on thusly about nasturtiums-- which is not to say they're not worth rambling on about, but-- oh yeah: as I was hovering here and there around the pot like a giant whatever, right in close so I wouldn't miss any of those devilishly clever bud-mimicking seeds, I noted in my cranial travels an awful lot of extremely tiny frogs, more like nanofrogs, who were living very comfortably in the vast paradise they'd found among the green tendrils, enjoying the protective umbrella of the scalloped green leaves, the flowers to which many bugs were attracted bringing deliciousness to the nanofrogs as well, but the tiny green beasties kept thinking I was hunting for them.

Needless to say (following which phrase whatever it is is always nonetheless said, as here), the nanofrogs had never in their couple-days-so-far lives seen a human head swinging here and there just inches away from their tiny bodies, patently hunting for something and why not them; nor did their genetic data base have any specific info on such an occurrence.

Thus it was that every time I moved my head, the pot positively rained tiny green frogs, leaping for their very lives out of paradise and into the non-pot abyss. By the time I'd extracted all the nasturtium seeds from that green-and-orange tangle, I'd chased all the nanofrogs out too. I hadn't meant to drive them out of paradise, but life often imitates the Bible, sometimes with us as God. I thought of all the nanofrogs just now, seeking dominion in their new world, as I savored the paradise in my salad.

Here are some good nasturtium blossom/bud/seed recipes

Another excellent source on edible flowers

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