shallot (and scape) harvest, Humanity

I sleep with the window open, and on some mornings (like this morning) I wake up and I go, Crap.  Am I sick?  It's cold in here.  Am I under the weather?  I should sleep with a hat on.  But it's JUNE, it's the middle of JUNE damn it!, and so forth and so on.  And so it was that this morning I blamed my congestion on the grey sky and the cool air I'd slept in all night.  By two o'clock the sun was out and, miraculously, I felt much better.  I went out to harvest my garlic scapes, laboring under the premise that if the scapes are allowed to mature the plant will divert energy it would otherwise spend on making fat garlic bulbs.  I want fat bulbs, and so the scapes came down.  There they are (picture right) on my grass pathway.  Picture left are the shallots I pulled just to pull them.  I figured, Why not?  Since I'm not sick and all. 

This morning, before pulling the shallots and cutting the scapes, I was reading my favorite blog, Luke Bloomfield's Humanity, and I was pleased to see that he'd given me and this blog a shout out.  Luke's been in China for nearly a year now, and he's been keeping awesome accounts of his time there, his thoughts about China, the occasional bit of Chinese booze he drinks, and, best of all, the time he spends with the Chinese pre school kids he teaches, and he does all of this with insight that warrants the name Humanity.  For those of you who haven't gotten on board yet, I will say that I hope Luke never comes home from China because China seems to be driving some really outstanding writing.  For those of us who miss Luke, well...let's just dedicate these hose-washed shallots to his eventual return.