Your morning slice of Lowcountry life:
I called Dempsey yesterday and heard that the tomatoes aren't in yet. Cathy says the tomatoes are ready if you like to fry yours green. A friend of mine has a whole host of recipes for pickling and preserving green tomatoes. The best of the lot is something called Crystal Tomatoes.
But the sweet corn is in.
The government requires me to include this warning: All This Stuff May Make You Want To Slap Your Mama.
Okracoke is an interesting place. They Burned the Bridge. Actually, they never had a bridge.
Here's the doctor's full list.
Dr. Beach puts a lot into his choices, and tries to keep communities like ours thinking about good stewardship of our asset.
Take your own survey of a beach you like in this questionnaire by the National Healthy Beaches Campaign.
Dr. Beach is complimentary of Hilton Head Island.
But here's part of what he says about our beaches. Is this true?
The beaches on Hilton Head run the gamut from very good to less than desirable at the island tips. The best beaches are in the middle of the island, far from the inlets.
The beaches are fairly flat and very expansive at low tide, which often exposes tidal pools for the kiddies. We stayed at Sea Pines Plantation because of the tennis and availability of a house rental on the beach. The rental people insisted that the beaches were good here, but I knew otherwise.
The strong tidal currents carry the nutrient-rich broth of the bayside salt marshes into the ocean on a falling or ebbing tide. This makes the water so turbid that you cannot see your toes in a mere inch or two of water. The sand tends to be draped with mud so that the kids get really dirty when playing on the low-tide beach. Jellyfish were a problem (not the stinging type, mind you), but all the same a nuisance. So don't listen to the realtors who tend to fib a bit about the beach; stay away from the tips of the island where the water is the murkiest and the beaches less than sandy.