The Clatter - Hat and Tortoises

 If you have a group of cattle, you've got a herd.  If you are visited by a bunch of black crows, you have experienced a murder of crows; likewise, a group of whales is a pod.  So what do you have when you have a group of tortoises?  We aptly refer to our group of tortoises collectively as the clatter.

This bright morning in May, I come into the sunlit dining room and look out across my spread, casting a proud and watchful eye on my clatter as I properly drizzle the Cholula hot sauce on my two eggs over easy. There is a saying in these parts, "All hat, no cattle".  It is not a good thing to be labeled as such. One does not want to be found to look the part, only to be revealed to be a pretender.  A shallow facade. A fake.

Here at the Suneson spread, we are the real deal.  Sure as shootin' we harbor no hollow boast under our hat.  I have the Hat AND I have the Clatter.

A proud Tortman - Runnin' four head of tortoise on his spread.
No Idle boast, Hat and Torts guarnan-damn-teed. 

I finish my eggs and Texas toast, wash up the dishes and step out the back door to check on the clatter.  Though you say they are only ponderous reptiles, I say, as a decades long tortman, that these fellows have their own inquisitive personalities and are surprisingly spry.  And just like cows gather around the rancher's truck when he drives into the pasture, my clatter comes a moseyin' toward me when I step into their yard.  I do not like to disappoint my boys, so I usually have saved up melon rinds, lettuce or bok choy for them to graze upon when we meet and greet one another.  It makes a tortman proud to have his clatter gather 'round him.

(L to R) Morph, Li'l Tex and Chomper munch their greens.

This particularly fine May morn, I fetched half a head of romaine out of the crisper and sauntered out to feed the clatter some treats.  They were all out and each expressed joy in seeing me come their direction.  I parceled out lettuce leaves to Isaac, Chomper, Morpheus and Li'l Tex. 

Chomper tucks in to his Romaine vittles 

Mr. Morpheus

I bid them all a fond farewell and remind them that I'll be back before sundown to check on them and make sure these guys (especially Chomper) have not set to rasslin one another and have gotten somebody flipped over onto his back.  It happens sometimes on the range.





















A group of tortoises is known as a clatter.   
[So designated by Susan Suneson]

A Fine Day for a Cardoon

So... What is a cardoon?

What's a cardoon?

I'd never heard of a cardoon.  My bet is most folks have never heard of a cardoon either.  But we've had one at our house a few years, just lurking next to our driveway - surprise! We are the only cardoon house on the block.  The wife has a soft spot in her heart for those misfit botanical specimens, those plants with unrecognized uses and of dubious origins that come with questionable utility.  When one of the local plant nurseries offered a special on some such small, wilting, unsold potted plant; she of course asked what is this?  The knowledgeable sales woman said "I don't really know, it may be a French artichoke."  Sounded like enough of a misfit that the wife paid good money for it and she came home and put it the earth.

Last year, she harvested the tiny, tight thistle heads and steamed them and painfully (they are definitely in the sharp & pokey thistle family) and laboriously treated them as one would best think a French artichoke should be treated.  We ate the tiny little steamed thistle heads (once we removed the thorny covering) and I said, "Umm - that was 'interesting' dear. Thanks".  This winter, while reading in her Culinary of Spain book, she encountered the description of the exotic cardoon tucked away on some obscure page and it sounded suspiciously like what was sitting behind our house.  Did we really have a French artichoke in our garden?  Or, maybe it was something else.  Ah Ha! It's cover has been blown, it has been revealed to be from Espana not France.  She called her brother, a professor of Botany at Midwestern University in Wichita Falls and had him do his research on cardoons and when he came for a visit in April, he confirmed our suspicions, "You're definitely growing a cardoon".


What do you do with a cardoon, now that you have a healthy cardoon growing next to the Globe artichoke?  I have a plan for this very nice first Saturday in the merry month of May.

I will go and enjoy touring the Cottonwood Art Festival and get artistically inspired by the booths of painters, potters, jewelers, fabricators and assorted artisans, then I will come home and make a nice grilled dinner to complement the cardoons.  That evening, after the harvest, we dined on fresh steamed cardoon stalks (eating only that part below the spiky thistle heads) drenched in garlic butter and pared with an effervescent French white wine from the Loire Valley.



So, what is a cardoon?  It is a delectable misbegotten vegetable that tastes like an artichoke that makes for a fine finish to a perfect day of wandering art displays and grilling steaks with fire and smoke and sharing a good bottle with the girl who loves to plant unknown, unloved, spiny little plants and put them on my dinner table.

I'm wondering - did Paul Simon on his Graceland album, record the lyrics to a song on that album that goes; "I don't want to end up a cardoon in a cardoon graveyard"?  Maybe Paul knows about cardoons.  If you play the Graceland album backwards you can hear a secret message; "Paul is dead wrong about French artichokes".