DIGGING: GREEN ONIONS

My late uncle, Jess Porras (center, on saxophone) playing with The Mixtures in Los Angeles, early 1960s. Image source: You Found that East Side Sound

GREAT NEWS! The Little Radish Plant that Could is still ALIVE. In fact, it's doing well enough to go outside and join the kale, lettuce and herbs in their temporary home on my mom's patio! I can't wait til we can take all the little plants with us to the Bungalow. I sure hope we're in by Halloween!

Which means I have a vacancy on my mom's windowsill. So the kids and I thought we'd try to propagate a little more from seeds. We've been saving egg cartons for just this occasion. My mom said she heard somewhere that seeds grow better if you plant them in the eggshell itself. Have any of you ever heard this? I never have, but then, as you know, I'm totally new to this planting thing. 

The kids and I looked over our stash of seeds and decided to go with this...

I was going to ask you to guess what it is, then I remembered I put it right in the title of this post. Go, me!

The entire time we were planting, I couldn't get this song out of my head:

I love Booker T. and the MGs. One of the reasons I'm such a fan, apart from the killer music, is that they were an "interracial" group working in the South in the mid-1960s, the very same time my late uncle Jess was in another "interracial" group in Los Angeles, called The Mixtures. It was a very difficult time to be "inclusive" and I really learned a lot from the stories my uncle and my parents told me about those days.

The Mixtures were the house band at the long-gone Rainbow Gardens Ballroom. They had a large local following and backed many of the biggest West Coast acts of the mid-sixties.  My uncle played the saxophone and I can always pick him out on their records.  One of my favorites was his rock/jazz arrangement of the Spanish-language classic, "Besame Mucho".

The family was always so proud of my uncle's music career, and with good reason-they were truly groundbreaking! Music was always a big part of our family life, at the end of a long day there were few things my grandparents enjoyed more than to sit out in the yard, among the nopales and lemon trees, singing and playing guitars long into the night.

I wonder if playing music will help my green onions grow?