Hello, all.
The snow is still deep on the ground here in NW PA, but you can feel that things are starting change. the air is still cold, down into the low teens each night, but up into the 30’s and even the 40’s during the day. The sun feels hot, and the roads are losing the coating of ice and snow and patches of bare ground are starting to spread. We have two. One right by the house and one near the pond where a tree broke up the wind and didn’t let a drift form. It’s exciting.
The other week, we made soup for lunch, and I dug last year’s bolero carrots out of the mulch and used them for the soup and also for a snack. It worked really well. Note to self: a flag or a stake to mark the carrots still in the ground would help a lot, especially as we have a bout two and a half feet of snow on the ground still, and the garden was difficult to locate!
Also, it is seed time again. I am working a different silly job now which pays a lot more than my previous silly job, even though with this silly job I’m going to be laid off soon. My previous silly job was in a call center, and this is in an office, but definitely the lowest man on the totem pole type stuff where I literally spend about eight hours a day pulling the staples out of packets of paper, scanning them into a computer, and stapling them back up again. Needless to say, I have been spending inordinate amounts of time thinking up seeds. Unfortunately, my mom who was supposed to be my voice of reason, is not my partner in crime and has been requesting that I add certain seeds to the list. I have a lot of things to plant.
So far, it is a little too early to start many things. I did start a flat of lemon grass the other day, and there are always things that need cold treated. I have hellebore, santolina, inula elcampine (which the dye worthiness of I have never yet been able to determine, as the natural plant dye lady had never heard of it and it was not in any dying books at all, though supposedly the flowers will yield yellow dye and the roots blue) and angelica. There are a few things I am excited to try, but will hold off until they actually sprout.
Started a new venture today! Maple syrup. I may or may not have mentioned that my sister took a family visit to Vermont over the fall and returned with a sap bucket as a present. Last fall, I combed the hillside for a likely sugar maple, and found exactly one within easy walking distance of the house. All our back area has been planted with evergreens, and the majority of the rest of the area is overgrown cow pasture. There is one wooded stand, though, with older trees. There is a fantastic oak, a majestic ash, and a mostly dead sugar maple. So, this morning, my mom, the dog, and I took a little hike and I hopped the barbed wire fence to hand the sap bucket.
I have made maple syrup one time before. My grandfather made a spile out of an elderberry stick split halfways up and hollowed out, and we boiled down the sap, but I remember it being a big pain in the butt and also kind of sugared. Hopefully this time, I will have more patience and do a better job!
I just read an article in the paper about collecting sap. and the gentleman in the article said the hold does not have to be more than an inch to an inch and a half deep. The sap bucket that we have comes in four pieces: a little metal spile, a hook, the bucket and a lid. The spile goes in the hole, the hook fits around it, the bucket hangs and leans against the tree and the lid makes a little tent on top. To make the hole I also followed the cue of the article in the paper and brought along one of the my cordless drills and a fat drill bit.
After almost getting barbed wire in a place that barbed wire should not be, losing (and finding) the hook, and getting the rubber mallet away from the dogs, the hole was drilled, the spile was pounded, the hook was on backwards, the spile was removed, the hook corrected, the spile replaced, the bucket hung, and the lid installed. Now, all we do is wait and check back in a day or so to see if any sap is running.
By the way, this is the perfect weather for maple tree tapping. The temperatures during the day need to be about freezing but it needs to get below freezing at night. This makes the sap run faster due tot eh fact that sap, like water, expands when it freezes. As the upper parts of the tree thaw, the moister within the tree contracts, creating almost alike a vacuum within the tree which brings more sap up into the tree. Then that freezes and thaws and the sap runs more and more. Eventually, they trees bud, and the sap is not good for syrup any longer. According to the newspaper, there will be a short season this year because it took so long for the temperatures to get above freezing.
Over the next few weeks, as the snow melts off, I’ll get a chance ot assess how the gardens did for the winter. I put in a variety of bulbs, and also my mom added perennials to the “hitching post” area and made a new rock garden near the pond that we’ll need to do some more work on. Then there was the new raised bed we added last year. The rock siding on the house will be finished, which will allow the herb gardens to get a little better back there. It’s so hard to wait, but at least seed starting's just around the corner!
Showing posts with label rural life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rural life. Show all posts
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Monday, November 30, 2009
Happenings, Dealings with Bugs, and Some Nut Recipes
Hi!
Well, here it is all the way at the end of November and we are finally getting some snow. It’s coming in waves over the hills from the north and west and beginning to coat the grass and the mud on the road. Yesterday, we had our usual Sunday thing with my aunt and my grandmother and the leftovers from Thanksgiving. The weather was beautiful, low 50’s sunny and breezy. My uncle and one of my cousins and her little boy came up and we cut three Christmas trees and pulled them up to the house from the bottom where the nicer spruce trees are. Last year, we ended up just cutting trees from the verge of the frog pond as there was about thigh deep snow on the ground and it was too hard to get them from down below.
It’s the first day of deer, and I’ve been stuck keeping the dogs on lead. There are a lot of people out hunting, and even on our little spatch of land out back, I wouldn’t recommend going down below to avoid any hunters.
A couple of weeks ago, my mother took the dogs out just before sunrise and got into a tangle with a very large, very aggressive raccoon. She got bit right through her tall rubber boot and the dogs all got bit. Luckily, our oldest dog Sally pinned it down while mom brought the rest of the dogs back to the house, got a feed sack and the go-devil, hiked back out the field, pinned down the raccoon and drowned it in a puddle and brought it back to the house. My sister is a respectable career woman who usually gets a lot of milage out of the stuff we get into down here. She had this whole story published as a “You know you’re a redneck, if...” joke on her facebook page before I had the mud off the dogs. My mom of course had ot go to the emergency room for tetanus and rabies shots, but because she managed to find it and bring it back, I was able to take it up to the health department vet in Erie where they determined it was not rabid and she was able to not get the rest of the shots which would have been about 8 shots every week for the next four weeks. Then, the dogs all needed shots, too but our vet is great and whisked us right on and only charged a regular office call for all three dogs.
Bruce (who tipped the scales at 99.5 lbs. during his last vet visit) has been limping off and on for the last few weeks, He seemed to have a sore shoulder a couple weeks ago and it got better for a few days, but he seems to have reinjured it. Hopefully a few days on lead during hunting season will help him heal up a little. The boys are very energetic and Spencer is also pushing 90. Little Sally is so tiny compared to them and she is still over 50 pounds!
I am getting 2010 seed catalogs and already eagerly planning next year’s garden, which could hardly be worse than this year’s garden which is cause for optimism. I should hardly complain, though, since I am still getting yummy carrots from the garden and had snow peas through the end of October and my calendulas and bachelors buttons are just now spent.
I have my houseplants inside including some herbs that I am trying to winter over, but I am in the middle of battling more (!) bugs. I believe they are thrips and they have eaten up my thyme and my French Tarragon. I checked a whole bunch of books out of the library about healthy houseplants, blah, blah, blah in addition to my four thousand books on gardening. I like the whole organic philosophy that you just leave things as they are until there is a problem, but I have problems! So, the first thing I noticed is that things in a rich soft container garden mix were just infested, including my wandering jew and my herbs, and things that were in the sandier, packier potting mix were okay. Also citrusy things were okay. I tried sprinkling leaves from lemon coleus on infested plants, diatomaceous earth, laundry soap, and then a truly hellacious mixture of fels-naphtha and garlic infused olive oil. The pineapple sage seemed to stage a quick recovery, but the thyme and the tarragon were eaten to the dirt level.
Right when I was about to give up, I came across an idea in the houseplants books which said to dip the plants, pot and all, in hot water (about 140 degrees but I’ve read higher, too). I went one step beyond and prepared a pot with the sandy dirt that the bugs don’t seem tot like as much and completely washed the plant, roots and all with hot water and repotted into a clean pot that had been sitting in the garage for a few months. So far, the plant seems to be sprouting back up and no bugs have bitten it, but I am also misting it and dusting with DE regularly.
Speaking of bugs, I found a very nice old paper back called “The Bug Book” by Helen and John Philbrick with lots of old fashioned anti bug advice. Just out of curiosity, I looked up pill bugs (also called woodlice or sow bugs accourding to the Philbricks). My melon patch was absolutely devastated by these little guys this year, and to that point I’d hardly seen then as pests at all, more like little visitors in the wood pile. Accourding to the bug book, however, they are drawn to goat manure, which of course, I had packed into each hill of melons. So, hopefully next year if I switch to compost or kife some cow manure from the neighbor’s field, I’ll get more than masses of swarming pill bugs in my melon patch.
What with being stuck inside and the chilly damp weather and all, I’m baking. I made two loaves of white bread and three of multi-multi which smell very nice, but always fall in the oven and have a very unsatisfying crumb, and while grain breads are fun to concoct, it’s very difficult to have a good result. White breads are so much more pleasing!
Anyway, I have some fun recipes. These first two are from this little fundraising book called “Gifts from the Kitchen” which was a fundraising thing that my sister’s kids’ daycare sold a few years ago. They are these little fliptop books with nice little recipes for things like cookie and soup mixes in jars. This one has pickle and jelly recipes and even soap making with lye. The first recipe is very easy and will spoil you for ever paying too much for those fancy almonds at the fair:
Glazed Almonds (tho’ recipe originally called for pecans)
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
2 tsp. unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
Dash of salt
3 cups almonds (or pecan halves)
In large saucepan, combine ingredients. Boil 3-5 min, tossing and stirring. (Boil dry)
Spread on a waxed paper lined cookie sheet to cool. Store airtight.
Spiced Vanilla Pecans (more work - 1-2 days to prepare)
1 lb pecan halves not broken or chopped
6 c. water
1/2 c. superfine sugar
3. Tblsp. melted butter
1 Tblsp. corn syrup
1 Tblsp. vanilla
1/4 tsp. each: salt, coriander, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice
1/8 tsp. pepper
Boil pecans in the water for a minute. Drain well. Mix butter, syrup, vanilla, and sugar in a large bowl. Add hot pecans and stir to coat. Cover and sit for 12-24 hours. Next day:
heat oven to 325. Put nuts and sauce on a rimmed cookie sheet. Cook 30 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes. Mix together spices in another large bowl. After nuts are cooked, toss in the bowl with spices. Cool in single layer on a cookie sheet. Store air tight.
And this is a recipe I tried because I recently raided the outdated section at the grocery store and lucked into a few bags of slivered, blanched almonds. I also made ghee with the butter sticks that were softening for cookies and the dogs bit them, but I couldn’t bear to feed all the butter to the dogs and I couldn’t actually throw it away either! (Is that too much information?)
Samsa (Tunesian almond pastry, from Countryside magazine March/April 2008)
1 1/2 cups blanched almonds (you can do this at home or buy blanched, but you will pay for them! Unless you buy bags of outdated nuts at the local store. Which I recommend, because blanching almonds is a pain in the behind!)
1 1/2 cups white sesame seeds (the dark unhulled ones won’t cream up, don’t try them!)
1 1/2 cups clarified butter (ghee) (do this at home or buy already made from the specialty shop, very expensive!)
1 package (1lb) filo dough (let thaw at room temp accourding to directions)
1 1/2 cups sugar
2/3 cups water
2 Tblsp. lemon juice (bottled is fine)
2 Tblsp. orange blossom water (come on, now, just use OJ)
In a 350 oven spread almonds and sesame seeds in a shallow pan. Stir occasionally until just browned. Pulverize the almonds and seeds in a blender (handy chopper, magic bullet, or a really clean electric coffee grinder all do well) and set aside. Butter 9x13 cake pan. lay down the filo 1 sheet at a time, brush with the clarified butter. Lay down 1/3 of the sheets, buttering each layer. Spread out half of the nuts and seeds. Lay down another third of the sheets. Put on th e rest of the nuts and seeds. Put on the last of the filo (butter every sheet, the whole way through!). Brush top with remaining butter. Cut into diamond or square shapes. Bake in 400 oven 5 minutes. Lower to 300 and bake about 30 minutes more until sides are light brown. While the pastry cooks, make sugar and water in pot for ten minutes, stirring over medium heat until sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat, add lemon juice. Place back on the heat, boil. Take off heat and add OJ, keep warm. Put the pastry under the broiler in the oven a few minutes right before removing to brown up the top. Turn to keep even. Broil until golden brown. Remove from the oven. Pour hot syrup evenly over the top. Cool and serve.
So there it is, a selection of easy to medium to downright complicated recipes that use lovely nuts just in time for the holidays!
Well, here it is all the way at the end of November and we are finally getting some snow. It’s coming in waves over the hills from the north and west and beginning to coat the grass and the mud on the road. Yesterday, we had our usual Sunday thing with my aunt and my grandmother and the leftovers from Thanksgiving. The weather was beautiful, low 50’s sunny and breezy. My uncle and one of my cousins and her little boy came up and we cut three Christmas trees and pulled them up to the house from the bottom where the nicer spruce trees are. Last year, we ended up just cutting trees from the verge of the frog pond as there was about thigh deep snow on the ground and it was too hard to get them from down below.
It’s the first day of deer, and I’ve been stuck keeping the dogs on lead. There are a lot of people out hunting, and even on our little spatch of land out back, I wouldn’t recommend going down below to avoid any hunters.
A couple of weeks ago, my mother took the dogs out just before sunrise and got into a tangle with a very large, very aggressive raccoon. She got bit right through her tall rubber boot and the dogs all got bit. Luckily, our oldest dog Sally pinned it down while mom brought the rest of the dogs back to the house, got a feed sack and the go-devil, hiked back out the field, pinned down the raccoon and drowned it in a puddle and brought it back to the house. My sister is a respectable career woman who usually gets a lot of milage out of the stuff we get into down here. She had this whole story published as a “You know you’re a redneck, if...” joke on her facebook page before I had the mud off the dogs. My mom of course had ot go to the emergency room for tetanus and rabies shots, but because she managed to find it and bring it back, I was able to take it up to the health department vet in Erie where they determined it was not rabid and she was able to not get the rest of the shots which would have been about 8 shots every week for the next four weeks. Then, the dogs all needed shots, too but our vet is great and whisked us right on and only charged a regular office call for all three dogs.
Bruce (who tipped the scales at 99.5 lbs. during his last vet visit) has been limping off and on for the last few weeks, He seemed to have a sore shoulder a couple weeks ago and it got better for a few days, but he seems to have reinjured it. Hopefully a few days on lead during hunting season will help him heal up a little. The boys are very energetic and Spencer is also pushing 90. Little Sally is so tiny compared to them and she is still over 50 pounds!
I am getting 2010 seed catalogs and already eagerly planning next year’s garden, which could hardly be worse than this year’s garden which is cause for optimism. I should hardly complain, though, since I am still getting yummy carrots from the garden and had snow peas through the end of October and my calendulas and bachelors buttons are just now spent.
I have my houseplants inside including some herbs that I am trying to winter over, but I am in the middle of battling more (!) bugs. I believe they are thrips and they have eaten up my thyme and my French Tarragon. I checked a whole bunch of books out of the library about healthy houseplants, blah, blah, blah in addition to my four thousand books on gardening. I like the whole organic philosophy that you just leave things as they are until there is a problem, but I have problems! So, the first thing I noticed is that things in a rich soft container garden mix were just infested, including my wandering jew and my herbs, and things that were in the sandier, packier potting mix were okay. Also citrusy things were okay. I tried sprinkling leaves from lemon coleus on infested plants, diatomaceous earth, laundry soap, and then a truly hellacious mixture of fels-naphtha and garlic infused olive oil. The pineapple sage seemed to stage a quick recovery, but the thyme and the tarragon were eaten to the dirt level.
Right when I was about to give up, I came across an idea in the houseplants books which said to dip the plants, pot and all, in hot water (about 140 degrees but I’ve read higher, too). I went one step beyond and prepared a pot with the sandy dirt that the bugs don’t seem tot like as much and completely washed the plant, roots and all with hot water and repotted into a clean pot that had been sitting in the garage for a few months. So far, the plant seems to be sprouting back up and no bugs have bitten it, but I am also misting it and dusting with DE regularly.
Speaking of bugs, I found a very nice old paper back called “The Bug Book” by Helen and John Philbrick with lots of old fashioned anti bug advice. Just out of curiosity, I looked up pill bugs (also called woodlice or sow bugs accourding to the Philbricks). My melon patch was absolutely devastated by these little guys this year, and to that point I’d hardly seen then as pests at all, more like little visitors in the wood pile. Accourding to the bug book, however, they are drawn to goat manure, which of course, I had packed into each hill of melons. So, hopefully next year if I switch to compost or kife some cow manure from the neighbor’s field, I’ll get more than masses of swarming pill bugs in my melon patch.
What with being stuck inside and the chilly damp weather and all, I’m baking. I made two loaves of white bread and three of multi-multi which smell very nice, but always fall in the oven and have a very unsatisfying crumb, and while grain breads are fun to concoct, it’s very difficult to have a good result. White breads are so much more pleasing!
Anyway, I have some fun recipes. These first two are from this little fundraising book called “Gifts from the Kitchen” which was a fundraising thing that my sister’s kids’ daycare sold a few years ago. They are these little fliptop books with nice little recipes for things like cookie and soup mixes in jars. This one has pickle and jelly recipes and even soap making with lye. The first recipe is very easy and will spoil you for ever paying too much for those fancy almonds at the fair:
Glazed Almonds (tho’ recipe originally called for pecans)
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
2 tsp. unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
Dash of salt
3 cups almonds (or pecan halves)
In large saucepan, combine ingredients. Boil 3-5 min, tossing and stirring. (Boil dry)
Spread on a waxed paper lined cookie sheet to cool. Store airtight.
Spiced Vanilla Pecans (more work - 1-2 days to prepare)
1 lb pecan halves not broken or chopped
6 c. water
1/2 c. superfine sugar
3. Tblsp. melted butter
1 Tblsp. corn syrup
1 Tblsp. vanilla
1/4 tsp. each: salt, coriander, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice
1/8 tsp. pepper
Boil pecans in the water for a minute. Drain well. Mix butter, syrup, vanilla, and sugar in a large bowl. Add hot pecans and stir to coat. Cover and sit for 12-24 hours. Next day:
heat oven to 325. Put nuts and sauce on a rimmed cookie sheet. Cook 30 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes. Mix together spices in another large bowl. After nuts are cooked, toss in the bowl with spices. Cool in single layer on a cookie sheet. Store air tight.
And this is a recipe I tried because I recently raided the outdated section at the grocery store and lucked into a few bags of slivered, blanched almonds. I also made ghee with the butter sticks that were softening for cookies and the dogs bit them, but I couldn’t bear to feed all the butter to the dogs and I couldn’t actually throw it away either! (Is that too much information?)
Samsa (Tunesian almond pastry, from Countryside magazine March/April 2008)
1 1/2 cups blanched almonds (you can do this at home or buy blanched, but you will pay for them! Unless you buy bags of outdated nuts at the local store. Which I recommend, because blanching almonds is a pain in the behind!)
1 1/2 cups white sesame seeds (the dark unhulled ones won’t cream up, don’t try them!)
1 1/2 cups clarified butter (ghee) (do this at home or buy already made from the specialty shop, very expensive!)
1 package (1lb) filo dough (let thaw at room temp accourding to directions)
1 1/2 cups sugar
2/3 cups water
2 Tblsp. lemon juice (bottled is fine)
2 Tblsp. orange blossom water (come on, now, just use OJ)
In a 350 oven spread almonds and sesame seeds in a shallow pan. Stir occasionally until just browned. Pulverize the almonds and seeds in a blender (handy chopper, magic bullet, or a really clean electric coffee grinder all do well) and set aside. Butter 9x13 cake pan. lay down the filo 1 sheet at a time, brush with the clarified butter. Lay down 1/3 of the sheets, buttering each layer. Spread out half of the nuts and seeds. Lay down another third of the sheets. Put on th e rest of the nuts and seeds. Put on the last of the filo (butter every sheet, the whole way through!). Brush top with remaining butter. Cut into diamond or square shapes. Bake in 400 oven 5 minutes. Lower to 300 and bake about 30 minutes more until sides are light brown. While the pastry cooks, make sugar and water in pot for ten minutes, stirring over medium heat until sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat, add lemon juice. Place back on the heat, boil. Take off heat and add OJ, keep warm. Put the pastry under the broiler in the oven a few minutes right before removing to brown up the top. Turn to keep even. Broil until golden brown. Remove from the oven. Pour hot syrup evenly over the top. Cool and serve.
So there it is, a selection of easy to medium to downright complicated recipes that use lovely nuts just in time for the holidays!
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Come on, Spring!
Spring is coming slowly to Northwestern PA this year. Usually, there are a few days between February and April that warm up into the 60’s and 70’s, but that has not really happened this year. It has been wet and cold.
Surprisingly, the damage from the winter has not been too great, considering we had almost two feet of snow the week before Halloween. I had some carrots which ended up over wintering in the garden. Most of them were not really storage carrots so they were no good, but some Bolero carrots went just fine with a pot roast just a couple weeks ago. I’m planting those for sure again. Also, I never got my strawberries mulched, and it seems they are not going to make it this year. that is also fine, because I never like the location they were in. they were a permanent feature of my lower vegetable garden that had started on the edge but had somehow gotten into the middle after a couple garden expansions. My neighbors are nice kids, but they use herbicide between the little row of arborvitae they have planted as a property line marker, and my strawberries suffered mightily from deformations cause by herbicide blow off. Not sorry to see them go, though I still have not decided where a new strawberry patch should be placed.
Seed starting season is here. I have a good selection of really fun sounding plants this year. I ordered from a lot of different sources. One of the seed companies I order from sent the order really late along with a note of apology. It seems they needed to hire a bunch more people because so many people were ordering garden seeds this year. I feel like my orders were really conservative, actually, about equivalent to last year, though I also ordered a fancy potted plant which was a splurge. I’m working full time. I should have a fancy dwarf pomegranate, right?
Right now, all I have started is my onion plants and some slow to germinate herbs and flowers. I’ve never started onion plants indoors before, but that is how they sell them at the farm coop, in big clumps of pre started plants. You can get sets, too of just really normal types of plants, but for specialty things like sweet onions, they sell plants. My onion plants are for red onions which are also supposedly good storage onions. I am a little tired of never having red onions for summer salads, so this is plan C 2.0.
We are getting into some landscaping plans this year. I have a raised bed I’ve never been happy about, and this is the year it gets new sides, a fresh load of topsoil and compost and hopefully a new lease on life. Right now, it’s full of stove ash, and the cats have been using it as a littler box. Except for the one kitten my old dog Zora chomped, we still have all of last year’s kittens. The girls Bili and Boots have been moved into the house and spayed. Our regular vet has turned out to be a great advocate of kitties and is willing to accept the wild cats from the garage for spaying a neutering as long as we can get them in. One of the cats has already been spayed. We kept it in the house right after the surgery to keep it clean, but it appears to be a combination of very scared and very stupid, and hasn’t gone back outside yet. I’ll be going downstairs in the middle of the night to take care of the fire and I’ll see it crawl up into the ceiling of the semi finished basement room or it will fall out of a closet when I go to hang up clothes. We keep leaving the basement door open for it, but no luck.
Speaking of pets, I took the plunge after saving up money all winter for another Weimarnaner puppy. I had a couple of kennel visits lined up and more cash than I needed to get my truck last year. By chance, I was at the bank and one of the neighbor girls who just moved to a house down the road from me mentioned she was getting a puppy, and I said I wanted a puppy, and the other bank lady said her son just got puppies, and I said I wanted a Weimaraner, and she said, these were Weims, at least their mom was, and there were a lot of them, and they were cute.
So a couple days later, I went down to see some half Weimaraner and half chocolate lab puppies. Interestingly enough, some of them were female and dark brown but most of them were black with a little really dark brown on the ears and male. One of the little brown females was still there and, she was really pretty. According the the lady we got them from, the last of the little brown females was actually going to some relatives in Texas.
One of the males, a kind of chunky labby-looking boy crawled right into my mom’s arms the second she knelt down by the puppies, so I had to get that one for sure. Then, I picked the prettiest one I could find who looked most like a Weimaraner despite being almost black! That was also a male, so I’ve spent the last month and a half having my house torn up and laughing my rear end off at these crazy boys!
Spencer is the little goofball on the left, and Bruce is the handsome “angel” on the right!
I wish one as the good one and one was the bad one, but mostly, they just take turns! It’s good having young dogs again! I actually use my back yard now to make the dogs run around. I barely walked back there for months!
Other than puppies, not a lot going on right now. We went to the outdoor show up in Erie a few weeks ago, and that was nice. you can always visit with land management people, but I missed the retriever demonstrations. My mom chatted up a guy who sells deer plot who recommended clover and chicory as a good seed for our wet back field. I found yet another taxidermy person, but this time we were actually able to get my uncle’s tiny bear skin to him. I personally love fur and would probably trap or shoot something for fur except it grosses out my mom, so I only get to indulge myself at things like outdoor shows or fur trapper re-enactors. There’s this newer arts festival they’ve had out in Russell the last few years which I consider like a “man” craft show with lots of furs and blacksmithing and things like that. Possibly an idea for a future entry!
Also, I can’t keep my mouth shut about a couple of issues in the news I’ve seen recently. One was under the headline: “Alternative energy quest threatens birds” and was about how domestic energy production like growing crops for fuel and windfarms threaten birds’ lives and habitats. Lumping in with this, bafflingly, was mountaintop removal coal mining. Now, logically, you can look at a toll of birds randomly hitting obstructions at wind farms, or habitat displacement due to more corn farming for ethanol as a change that will have a toll on birds, but none of these could possibly compare to the complete destruction of mountaintops in WV and KY and the filling in of miles of streams in the valleys in terms of habitat loss. And when did coal mining become alternative energy anyway? I’m not against even strip mining in a lot of cases. You can fix that once you get the coal off the top layer, but the tops of mountains can’t be put be back on and no one but no one is going to do the work to restore the streams once they’ve been filled in. And I know the Obama administration’s EPA has recently put on hold a lot of these permits to do his mountaintop mining, but it was also the Obama administration’s EPA that grouped mountaintop removal mining with wind farming as a threat to habitat.
From the EPA to the FDA: There is no stopping a proposal that has been floating around the FDA and the Agriculture department to have all farm animals marked with microchips and RFD tags. People who keep livestock, eventually at any scale, ae going to be required to report on the location and condition of the livestock using electronic monitoring and questionnaires on the internet. All of this is going to be done at the owners’ expense, which will be considerable for small “homestead” type farmers and basically only benefits big producers. The idea is the keep the food supply safer by tracking livestock from the farm to the slaughterhouse. It’s of course vastly counter-intuitive since most of the contamination takes place in the slaughter house after the individually monitored animals have been mixed with hundreds if not thousands of others. This is basically expensive window dressing to relieve factory farms of liability for who knows what, but it is also looking to add significant costs in money and time to small farmers who possibly only produce meat for their own consumption.
No time today for links to either of these issues, but google both of them, and you can see that it is real, AP news type outlets which are reporting on these and not just conspiracy theory people, sitting in little houses, in the middle of nowhere, trying to decide how many tomato plants to start this year because we’re getting lulled into sheep-like complacency by government agencies which dictate the sugar content of processed food to guarantee a certain amount of sleepiness, obesity, and disease in an increasingly failing effort to distract and occupy the rich, vital energy of our people!
Surprisingly, the damage from the winter has not been too great, considering we had almost two feet of snow the week before Halloween. I had some carrots which ended up over wintering in the garden. Most of them were not really storage carrots so they were no good, but some Bolero carrots went just fine with a pot roast just a couple weeks ago. I’m planting those for sure again. Also, I never got my strawberries mulched, and it seems they are not going to make it this year. that is also fine, because I never like the location they were in. they were a permanent feature of my lower vegetable garden that had started on the edge but had somehow gotten into the middle after a couple garden expansions. My neighbors are nice kids, but they use herbicide between the little row of arborvitae they have planted as a property line marker, and my strawberries suffered mightily from deformations cause by herbicide blow off. Not sorry to see them go, though I still have not decided where a new strawberry patch should be placed.
Seed starting season is here. I have a good selection of really fun sounding plants this year. I ordered from a lot of different sources. One of the seed companies I order from sent the order really late along with a note of apology. It seems they needed to hire a bunch more people because so many people were ordering garden seeds this year. I feel like my orders were really conservative, actually, about equivalent to last year, though I also ordered a fancy potted plant which was a splurge. I’m working full time. I should have a fancy dwarf pomegranate, right?
Right now, all I have started is my onion plants and some slow to germinate herbs and flowers. I’ve never started onion plants indoors before, but that is how they sell them at the farm coop, in big clumps of pre started plants. You can get sets, too of just really normal types of plants, but for specialty things like sweet onions, they sell plants. My onion plants are for red onions which are also supposedly good storage onions. I am a little tired of never having red onions for summer salads, so this is plan C 2.0.
We are getting into some landscaping plans this year. I have a raised bed I’ve never been happy about, and this is the year it gets new sides, a fresh load of topsoil and compost and hopefully a new lease on life. Right now, it’s full of stove ash, and the cats have been using it as a littler box. Except for the one kitten my old dog Zora chomped, we still have all of last year’s kittens. The girls Bili and Boots have been moved into the house and spayed. Our regular vet has turned out to be a great advocate of kitties and is willing to accept the wild cats from the garage for spaying a neutering as long as we can get them in. One of the cats has already been spayed. We kept it in the house right after the surgery to keep it clean, but it appears to be a combination of very scared and very stupid, and hasn’t gone back outside yet. I’ll be going downstairs in the middle of the night to take care of the fire and I’ll see it crawl up into the ceiling of the semi finished basement room or it will fall out of a closet when I go to hang up clothes. We keep leaving the basement door open for it, but no luck.
Speaking of pets, I took the plunge after saving up money all winter for another Weimarnaner puppy. I had a couple of kennel visits lined up and more cash than I needed to get my truck last year. By chance, I was at the bank and one of the neighbor girls who just moved to a house down the road from me mentioned she was getting a puppy, and I said I wanted a puppy, and the other bank lady said her son just got puppies, and I said I wanted a Weimaraner, and she said, these were Weims, at least their mom was, and there were a lot of them, and they were cute.
So a couple days later, I went down to see some half Weimaraner and half chocolate lab puppies. Interestingly enough, some of them were female and dark brown but most of them were black with a little really dark brown on the ears and male. One of the little brown females was still there and, she was really pretty. According the the lady we got them from, the last of the little brown females was actually going to some relatives in Texas.
One of the males, a kind of chunky labby-looking boy crawled right into my mom’s arms the second she knelt down by the puppies, so I had to get that one for sure. Then, I picked the prettiest one I could find who looked most like a Weimaraner despite being almost black! That was also a male, so I’ve spent the last month and a half having my house torn up and laughing my rear end off at these crazy boys!
Spencer is the little goofball on the left, and Bruce is the handsome “angel” on the right!
I wish one as the good one and one was the bad one, but mostly, they just take turns! It’s good having young dogs again! I actually use my back yard now to make the dogs run around. I barely walked back there for months!
Other than puppies, not a lot going on right now. We went to the outdoor show up in Erie a few weeks ago, and that was nice. you can always visit with land management people, but I missed the retriever demonstrations. My mom chatted up a guy who sells deer plot who recommended clover and chicory as a good seed for our wet back field. I found yet another taxidermy person, but this time we were actually able to get my uncle’s tiny bear skin to him. I personally love fur and would probably trap or shoot something for fur except it grosses out my mom, so I only get to indulge myself at things like outdoor shows or fur trapper re-enactors. There’s this newer arts festival they’ve had out in Russell the last few years which I consider like a “man” craft show with lots of furs and blacksmithing and things like that. Possibly an idea for a future entry!
Also, I can’t keep my mouth shut about a couple of issues in the news I’ve seen recently. One was under the headline: “Alternative energy quest threatens birds” and was about how domestic energy production like growing crops for fuel and windfarms threaten birds’ lives and habitats. Lumping in with this, bafflingly, was mountaintop removal coal mining. Now, logically, you can look at a toll of birds randomly hitting obstructions at wind farms, or habitat displacement due to more corn farming for ethanol as a change that will have a toll on birds, but none of these could possibly compare to the complete destruction of mountaintops in WV and KY and the filling in of miles of streams in the valleys in terms of habitat loss. And when did coal mining become alternative energy anyway? I’m not against even strip mining in a lot of cases. You can fix that once you get the coal off the top layer, but the tops of mountains can’t be put be back on and no one but no one is going to do the work to restore the streams once they’ve been filled in. And I know the Obama administration’s EPA has recently put on hold a lot of these permits to do his mountaintop mining, but it was also the Obama administration’s EPA that grouped mountaintop removal mining with wind farming as a threat to habitat.
From the EPA to the FDA: There is no stopping a proposal that has been floating around the FDA and the Agriculture department to have all farm animals marked with microchips and RFD tags. People who keep livestock, eventually at any scale, ae going to be required to report on the location and condition of the livestock using electronic monitoring and questionnaires on the internet. All of this is going to be done at the owners’ expense, which will be considerable for small “homestead” type farmers and basically only benefits big producers. The idea is the keep the food supply safer by tracking livestock from the farm to the slaughterhouse. It’s of course vastly counter-intuitive since most of the contamination takes place in the slaughter house after the individually monitored animals have been mixed with hundreds if not thousands of others. This is basically expensive window dressing to relieve factory farms of liability for who knows what, but it is also looking to add significant costs in money and time to small farmers who possibly only produce meat for their own consumption.
No time today for links to either of these issues, but google both of them, and you can see that it is real, AP news type outlets which are reporting on these and not just conspiracy theory people, sitting in little houses, in the middle of nowhere, trying to decide how many tomato plants to start this year because we’re getting lulled into sheep-like complacency by government agencies which dictate the sugar content of processed food to guarantee a certain amount of sleepiness, obesity, and disease in an increasingly failing effort to distract and occupy the rich, vital energy of our people!
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Oh, Yes, it is Fair Time!
Hello!
It is true. I’m a sucker for county fairs. I love them. I want to marry them. Last year I went to three different county fairs plus the Spartansburg Fair. On multiple days. From the time I was a little kid on, I used to enter all sorts of things in the fair. Flowers and flower arrangements and pictures and painted ceramic animals. When I was older, I switched to baking and needlework. I want it on my tombstone that I once won the blue ribbon in drop cookies at the Warren County fair for my gingercream cookies. That is some cutthroat competition, I do not lie. I haven’t entered in lately, but I really plan to get back into competing at the fair within the next year or so. My ultimate dream in life, more than publishing a book or having someone who actually says things that I believe getting elected President would be to win the big homemaker award at the fair which is a special ribbon for a person who has the most wonderful all around fair entries in the household goods department. I’ll never do it, because I’m such a poor seamstress, but I can always dream.
Okay, it is easy to be dismissive of fairs and everything like that. David Foster Wallace wrote a really, really funny essay piece about a trip to the Illinois State Fair that was kind of meant for the non-fair-going audience which really kind of played up the hickiness and oddity of the whole thing. But, if you look at the fair as kind of a trade show for people who live in the country, it becomes much more plausible. Because, really, that is what it is. At the vegetable competitions, you can see what other people are growing. You can stop by the commercial buildings and learn about different water systems and banks and electric companies. All the big ag tractor people set up and show off their new models. All the state, county, and federal land management agencies have informational booths and tables. The political parties are there handing out freebees and registering people to vote. At the Spartansburg Fair, the local medical clinic sets up and does health screenings and even gives out free tetnus shots, which I will definitely take advantage of this year as I'm coming due.
You can check out new breeds of chickens and ducks and geese especially, and a lot of people offer rabbits and things for sale right at the fair. It’s great for kids, because they can sell the animals they raised all year at the the livestock auction, and it’s especially great for people to get around animals and walk around all day and realize that there is a lot more to do in life than just watch things on TV and play video games. If you want to plan on moving out of town, it’s really inspiring, and if you are already set up with a little land, it’s a good way to “shop” for things you might want to fill it up with. And like at a regular trade show, there are usually a lot of fair specials where you can get discounts on anything from a tractor or a four wheeler or a fancy sewing machine.
I never got over being horse crazy. I can’t understand how these people have all these horses, though. I know they cost a lot, and then you have to take care of their feet and take get vet care, and the tack costs a lot, and they eat a ton. Horses are surprisingly fragile, and you can’t just blow off buying hay and chop spruce boughs and throw them in the pasture like you can with a goat. And you have to have a real fence, because a horse can go a long way when it gets out, and, also unlike a goat, when it gets into things that aren’t its regular food, a horse can get very sick and die very fast. My goats have been known to snack on latex gloves with no adverse effects at all. And when they "run away", I never have to look much farther than the nearest piece of landscaping or a tomato patch. The goats stay better than dogs. They walk with me better than the dogs, too! When I want the edges of the pond trimmed down, all I have to do is drag Don the goat down there with his brother Matty and let them rip. I take a book and have a nice old time. Les chevres preferent Proust, naturelment! Pardon my French! I can't spell in English, let alone French.
Eventually, I want to get a pony to have up here. For my nieces and nephew. “Yeah, right, whatever,” as my four year old niece would say. I’m pretty sure that I could pick out a good pony that I could ride, too, as the the munchkins are starting to catch up with me in size. They definitely are getting their height from someone other than my sister who has been having the “I’m taller than you!” argument with me since we both quit growing at about age eleven. And we were not tall eleven year olds!
So, right now, until I can get the lower pasture cleared and fenced and get a barn built down there and be able to take care of a horse well enough to not get called in to hooved animal rescue, I really look forward to the fair. I like to watch the shows in the ring, but also, they have harness racing at Crawford and sometimes at Erie which is a lot of fun to watch. the draft horses are the best, though, and for drama and excitement and competition and (a little bit) of danger, I go to the draft horse pulls as often as I can.
I’ve never been to a tractor pull, and people keep thinking that I would go just because I like to watch things pull heavy things, but it is not so. In a draft horse pull, teams of two hitch up to a load and try and pull it a set distance. If they can do it, there is more weight added, and they try again. These are some big horses. The heavyweight teams have horses that easily go a ton apiece. They also wear a couple hundred pounds of harness and just walk by, jingling. They have they slow way of stepping, but they are so big they still go by fast.
The early rounds are almost casual. At the lightest weight, drivers can even skip pulling at all. Depending on the competition style, the horses are either pulling a dynamometer truck that has a mechanism in it that creates as much pressure on the wheels as they are pulling that round or, more commonly -- I’ve heard it called “Ohio” style -- they pull a boat or sled with concrete weights ratcheted down to it on a packed clay track. I’ve been to both kinds, and they each have an appeal, but when the boat is used, and the weights get high, the horses can see that the sled is bigger, and they get more excited. Then, you get to see who is the better driver and which teams work together. There is a lot of drama because, even though the drivers and teams get three chances to move the load, the horses are living creatures. If they get flustered or get on a bad night, even the best team can get knocked out relatively soon in the competition.
At the end of the competition, some of the horses are so worked up, they try and bolt away. Sometimes, you get to sit quite close to the pulling track, and I’ve had to leave my seat more than once. I’ve seen horses throw shoes, snap harness, step over the traces and even slip, but I’ve never seen any terrible injuries, which is one of the best things about the competition, because it is tense and exciting but not really risky for the animals. By the end, it all gets very dramatic, because you’ve been watching the drivers and horses come out for sometimes a couple of hours, if it’s a big competition. You’ve picked your favorites and the horses are usually pretty fired up. And there’s a whole weird, professional golf element where, especially at the end, you just try to sit as still as you can while the horses are pulling because if you were to make a mistake and clap too early or make any sound like saying “go”, the horses might hear “whoa” and quit before they pull the distance. The drivers’ helpers often follow along behind the sled, holding up their hands to the audience to remind us to keep quiet, and, I kid you not, you can still hear people gasping and “ahh” -ing, it is just so darn exciting!
The Warren County fair is this week, and it is about the earliest in this area, and it has a great horse pull where the competition gets up to 10,000 pounds on a regular basis. It’s inside under the lights in the same building where they have the big country music concert earlier in the week, and you can sit at floor level if you want. But the Crawford County Fair, which is the biggest in the state is coming up soon. I like the horse pull at Warren, but I try to get to Crawford for everything else at least twice during the week of the fair. I bet I’ll spend the equivalent of a week of days at different fairs this month, and I’ll enjoy every second of it!
Here’s a recipe for officially blue ribbon winning cookies. Even my molasses-hating sister can’t resist these if I put the frosting on them!
Gingercreams
1/4 c. Shortening (or soft butter)
1/2 c. white sugar
1 egg
1/3 c. molasses
1/2 c. water
2 c. flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt (I always leave the salt out of everything!)
1 tsp. ginger
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. cloves
Temp. 400
Cream together fat and sugar. Add molasses and egg and cream. Blend water on a low speed. Sift together flour, soda, and spices into wet ingredients and combine. Drop by teaspoons onto a greased cookie sheet. Cook for 8 minutes until middles are springy like cakes and bottoms are just starting to get some tan color.
Let cool.
Frost with a thick glaze of confectioners sugar and milk. Put a couple tablespoons of milk in a shallow bowl and add confectioners sugar. For extra yumminess add a couple drops of almond extract to the glaze. Dip the tops into the frosting bowl and shake off. Frosting should be opaque but not spreadable. If you can see through it or it runs off the cookies, it’s too thin, add more sugar. Top before the frosting sets with a sprinkle of ground ginger.
It is true. I’m a sucker for county fairs. I love them. I want to marry them. Last year I went to three different county fairs plus the Spartansburg Fair. On multiple days. From the time I was a little kid on, I used to enter all sorts of things in the fair. Flowers and flower arrangements and pictures and painted ceramic animals. When I was older, I switched to baking and needlework. I want it on my tombstone that I once won the blue ribbon in drop cookies at the Warren County fair for my gingercream cookies. That is some cutthroat competition, I do not lie. I haven’t entered in lately, but I really plan to get back into competing at the fair within the next year or so. My ultimate dream in life, more than publishing a book or having someone who actually says things that I believe getting elected President would be to win the big homemaker award at the fair which is a special ribbon for a person who has the most wonderful all around fair entries in the household goods department. I’ll never do it, because I’m such a poor seamstress, but I can always dream.
Okay, it is easy to be dismissive of fairs and everything like that. David Foster Wallace wrote a really, really funny essay piece about a trip to the Illinois State Fair that was kind of meant for the non-fair-going audience which really kind of played up the hickiness and oddity of the whole thing. But, if you look at the fair as kind of a trade show for people who live in the country, it becomes much more plausible. Because, really, that is what it is. At the vegetable competitions, you can see what other people are growing. You can stop by the commercial buildings and learn about different water systems and banks and electric companies. All the big ag tractor people set up and show off their new models. All the state, county, and federal land management agencies have informational booths and tables. The political parties are there handing out freebees and registering people to vote. At the Spartansburg Fair, the local medical clinic sets up and does health screenings and even gives out free tetnus shots, which I will definitely take advantage of this year as I'm coming due.
You can check out new breeds of chickens and ducks and geese especially, and a lot of people offer rabbits and things for sale right at the fair. It’s great for kids, because they can sell the animals they raised all year at the the livestock auction, and it’s especially great for people to get around animals and walk around all day and realize that there is a lot more to do in life than just watch things on TV and play video games. If you want to plan on moving out of town, it’s really inspiring, and if you are already set up with a little land, it’s a good way to “shop” for things you might want to fill it up with. And like at a regular trade show, there are usually a lot of fair specials where you can get discounts on anything from a tractor or a four wheeler or a fancy sewing machine.
I never got over being horse crazy. I can’t understand how these people have all these horses, though. I know they cost a lot, and then you have to take care of their feet and take get vet care, and the tack costs a lot, and they eat a ton. Horses are surprisingly fragile, and you can’t just blow off buying hay and chop spruce boughs and throw them in the pasture like you can with a goat. And you have to have a real fence, because a horse can go a long way when it gets out, and, also unlike a goat, when it gets into things that aren’t its regular food, a horse can get very sick and die very fast. My goats have been known to snack on latex gloves with no adverse effects at all. And when they "run away", I never have to look much farther than the nearest piece of landscaping or a tomato patch. The goats stay better than dogs. They walk with me better than the dogs, too! When I want the edges of the pond trimmed down, all I have to do is drag Don the goat down there with his brother Matty and let them rip. I take a book and have a nice old time. Les chevres preferent Proust, naturelment! Pardon my French! I can't spell in English, let alone French.
Eventually, I want to get a pony to have up here. For my nieces and nephew. “Yeah, right, whatever,” as my four year old niece would say. I’m pretty sure that I could pick out a good pony that I could ride, too, as the the munchkins are starting to catch up with me in size. They definitely are getting their height from someone other than my sister who has been having the “I’m taller than you!” argument with me since we both quit growing at about age eleven. And we were not tall eleven year olds!
So, right now, until I can get the lower pasture cleared and fenced and get a barn built down there and be able to take care of a horse well enough to not get called in to hooved animal rescue, I really look forward to the fair. I like to watch the shows in the ring, but also, they have harness racing at Crawford and sometimes at Erie which is a lot of fun to watch. the draft horses are the best, though, and for drama and excitement and competition and (a little bit) of danger, I go to the draft horse pulls as often as I can.
I’ve never been to a tractor pull, and people keep thinking that I would go just because I like to watch things pull heavy things, but it is not so. In a draft horse pull, teams of two hitch up to a load and try and pull it a set distance. If they can do it, there is more weight added, and they try again. These are some big horses. The heavyweight teams have horses that easily go a ton apiece. They also wear a couple hundred pounds of harness and just walk by, jingling. They have they slow way of stepping, but they are so big they still go by fast.
The early rounds are almost casual. At the lightest weight, drivers can even skip pulling at all. Depending on the competition style, the horses are either pulling a dynamometer truck that has a mechanism in it that creates as much pressure on the wheels as they are pulling that round or, more commonly -- I’ve heard it called “Ohio” style -- they pull a boat or sled with concrete weights ratcheted down to it on a packed clay track. I’ve been to both kinds, and they each have an appeal, but when the boat is used, and the weights get high, the horses can see that the sled is bigger, and they get more excited. Then, you get to see who is the better driver and which teams work together. There is a lot of drama because, even though the drivers and teams get three chances to move the load, the horses are living creatures. If they get flustered or get on a bad night, even the best team can get knocked out relatively soon in the competition.
At the end of the competition, some of the horses are so worked up, they try and bolt away. Sometimes, you get to sit quite close to the pulling track, and I’ve had to leave my seat more than once. I’ve seen horses throw shoes, snap harness, step over the traces and even slip, but I’ve never seen any terrible injuries, which is one of the best things about the competition, because it is tense and exciting but not really risky for the animals. By the end, it all gets very dramatic, because you’ve been watching the drivers and horses come out for sometimes a couple of hours, if it’s a big competition. You’ve picked your favorites and the horses are usually pretty fired up. And there’s a whole weird, professional golf element where, especially at the end, you just try to sit as still as you can while the horses are pulling because if you were to make a mistake and clap too early or make any sound like saying “go”, the horses might hear “whoa” and quit before they pull the distance. The drivers’ helpers often follow along behind the sled, holding up their hands to the audience to remind us to keep quiet, and, I kid you not, you can still hear people gasping and “ahh” -ing, it is just so darn exciting!
The Warren County fair is this week, and it is about the earliest in this area, and it has a great horse pull where the competition gets up to 10,000 pounds on a regular basis. It’s inside under the lights in the same building where they have the big country music concert earlier in the week, and you can sit at floor level if you want. But the Crawford County Fair, which is the biggest in the state is coming up soon. I like the horse pull at Warren, but I try to get to Crawford for everything else at least twice during the week of the fair. I bet I’ll spend the equivalent of a week of days at different fairs this month, and I’ll enjoy every second of it!
Here’s a recipe for officially blue ribbon winning cookies. Even my molasses-hating sister can’t resist these if I put the frosting on them!
Gingercreams
1/4 c. Shortening (or soft butter)
1/2 c. white sugar
1 egg
1/3 c. molasses
1/2 c. water
2 c. flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt (I always leave the salt out of everything!)
1 tsp. ginger
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. cloves
Temp. 400
Cream together fat and sugar. Add molasses and egg and cream. Blend water on a low speed. Sift together flour, soda, and spices into wet ingredients and combine. Drop by teaspoons onto a greased cookie sheet. Cook for 8 minutes until middles are springy like cakes and bottoms are just starting to get some tan color.
Let cool.
Frost with a thick glaze of confectioners sugar and milk. Put a couple tablespoons of milk in a shallow bowl and add confectioners sugar. For extra yumminess add a couple drops of almond extract to the glaze. Dip the tops into the frosting bowl and shake off. Frosting should be opaque but not spreadable. If you can see through it or it runs off the cookies, it’s too thin, add more sugar. Top before the frosting sets with a sprinkle of ground ginger.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Midsummer Day's Dream
Hello!
We’ve kind of reached that point in summer where the hard work is really over and the rest is just trying to keep everything balanced. The greenhouse is empty and down with plants either plunked into empty places in the gardens or tossed into Plant Heaven at the edge of the yard. I’ve been staking tomatoes and tying up vines and of course weeding, weeding, weeding.
Right now, my biggest problem is varmints! Something, probably raccoons, has been raiding the compost pile. We’ve been eating a lot of those cute little seedless watermelons, and the rinds have been irresistible to critters. I’ve tried burying the pile in tons of hay and straw. I put wire over the top. Nothing works. The wire is always peeled back or the little guys just drag stuff out right through the wire! I’m going to have to raid the scrap lumber from the goat shed to make a sturdier, non peeling-back cap for the pile. I’m a bad builder, but I’m going to have to get over that, because the old particle board closet that was left behind here that I moved into the basement and have been using as a storage cupboard is on its way out. The damp down there has finally gotten to it, and it is bowing out, and the shelves have started to drop.
Speaking of critters, I have finally taken care of a bad muskrat hole in the walkway on top of the dam on the pond. Muskrats will dig in at the water level and then build a big den uphill from the entrance. A lot of times, this will cave in, and that’s what happened here. It was getting treacherous to go over the top of the dam with the lawnmower, so I was working on getting some better drainage around the garage by chopping down the sod and regrading the yard off the cement pad there and ended up with a couple three hundred pounds of dirt and sod. I wasn’t aware that the hole was so big, but almost all that dirt and sod went into making the walkway flat again and building up the side of the pond. I always keep a good amount of grass seed and cover crop on hand to use when I do my yard repairs. It is easier than running into town every time I throw some dirt around, and they don’t always have grass seed at the feed mill. I refuse to pay what they charge for grass seed at Tractor Supply. My A-Number-One money saving tip for saving money is never buy anything there. Don’t even set foot in the store to look. Everything is overpriced, and everything is made in China.
The last thing I bought at Tractor Supply was a hose nozzle, and it was too expensive and didn’t work. How can a hose nozzle not work? Then, when I was looking for an exchange for it, I found the exact same thing in the sale bin for five dollars less except for the one that I was returning was tied to a card and the cheaper one just had a sticker on it. Same manufacturer. Same weight and features. I just returned it and went someplace to purchase a reasonably priced, made in America hose nozzle. I know they cheat people by charging too much for stuff you can get at real farm supply places, but this was a little too far, and I haven’t been there since.
Anyway, I’m lucky that the muskrats seem to have abandoned the pond. The only way to get rid of them, really is to off them, and I’m not quite ready to do that. Though, I might shoot some bunnies here very soon! They are really doing a number on my lower garden away from the house, and I really like beans. The rabbits are cute, though. They play little jumping games on the yard in the mornings, and maybe a cat will eat them and I won’t have to try and actually hit anything with my gun, though I bet I could get my sister’s husband to do it. She had a raccoon in her garbage right in town the other evening, and it was all she could do to keep him from shooting it. He really wanted to. It would have been perfectly safe. He’s a firearms instructor and a good shot, but it would have been just too hard to explain if they had actually got in trouble for shooting in the city
My uncle who was born in Kansas in the ‘40’s said that they used to catch rabbits in sacks in the summer when they mowed hay. They would mow in a square and the rabbits wouldn’t run out of the long grass, so they could just pick them right up and pop them into feed sacks. They ate rabbit all summer to the point where they couldn’t even look at rabbit, but a lot of times, that was all they had for meat in summer.
We have stray cats out the ears right now. Two mother cats brought their kittens ot the garage. Three of the kittens are really gentle and nice, and the four from the other litter are wild. We’re going ot have to figure out what to do about all those cats, but I’m hoping they keep down the mouse problem. Last year, I was on the verge of getting a few cats from the farm where I buy milk. They have really pretty cats. A lot of calicoes. However, I have ten garage cats right now and one house cat. My cousins named the older little all weird names from comic books, but the nice cats are Boots, Smokey, and Billi. Billi used to be named Whitey, because he has more white than any of the other cats, but we decided he needed a less culturally fraught name, and so I called him Billi which is Whitey in Ukrainian. My grandmother always has grey cats and they are always named Sivvi, which means “grey”. She’s on about Sivvi IV or V by now!
That’s about everything going on here! I’m going to start fall crops of broccoli and cabbage very soon and the lettuces are about over until it cools down a little, too. I paid a visit to my other uncle’s garden the other day, and I may change my mind about using black plastic , since the cool weather has really slowed down my melons and peppers and he says the plastic keeps the soil warm as well as cuts down on weeding. I’ve done two batches of strawberry jam and two batches of currant jelly, and my kitchen is starting to fill up with jars. hopefully, the bunnies will leave me some pickling cukes because I’d like to try that this year.
I need to go and hang out a load of wash which is another great way to keep the electric bill low over the summer. I even hang out clothes in the basement over the winter next to the wood stove. In Ontario, they have actually made it illegal for planned housing communities to write bylaws that don’t allow people to hang out wash in an effort to keep down the drain on the grid. My sister runs central air in her very large house all summer but hangs out her clothes, and her bills are the same in summer as they are in winter! That dryer costs a lot to run! Interestingly enough, the yearly report from the power company says the peak draw for our area in 2007 was actually in February when the weather was so cold. My cousins from down south can’t believe how few people in PA have AC in their houses. We actually have an air conditioner. It’s one of those ones that hang out the window, and it’s still in the box it came in. Up on the hill, it is consistently 10 to 15 degrees cooler than it is in town, and there is always a breeze. We bought the air conditioner for my brother who was too lazy to install it even though he was living in my aunt’s upstairs apartment which was melting hot, and it’s just been passed around between different family members, none of which have actually used it!
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
The Last Week of Spring!
Hello!
What a busy time it’s been this month!
Basically, the gardens are done, though there are some more tomato plants that still need to go in, a row of peas or two, strawflowers to plant, I’d like to get in more sunflowers and some broom corn. Pumpkins still need to go in, but it was cold, really hot, and now cold again! So no use rushing those! Same with the melons which are doing fine in the green house for now. But most of the tomatoes, the green peppers, beans, cukes, carrots, cabbages, onions, lettuces, and corn (sweet and pop) are all in the grounds and growing along with some gourds and most of the sunflowers plus annuals and herbs and all good things like that. The birds and critters did not eat the corn seeds out of the ground, and it looks like the sunflower seeds will remain undisturbed, as well.
I have also been up in Erie almost every week day baby sitting my niece and nephew. I also made a trip to Buffalo to hear the finals concert in the guitar concerto competition they have up there every other year. I’ve gone up twice, and both times I’ve been rooting for the soloist who played the Castelnuovo-Tadesco concerto to win, and it never happens! I love that piece. But that’s neither here nor there. I only had to worry about using up too much gas, since the weather was so bad, there was no way that I could work outside. I love going to hear the Buffalo Philharmonic play. If I ever get rich, I’m going to have a little apartment in Buffalo so I can go and hear concerts and go to hockey whenever I want and not have to worry about weather! But I’d still spend most of my time here. Or the south of France. With French cooking utensils.
We have been having our usual Sunday afternoon get togethers. Sometimes in winter, we get snowed in and have only my grandmother and sometimes an aunt, but in summer, we get swamped every Sunday. Last weekend, we had my grandmother, my aunt, my dad, my sister and her husband and their kids plus my mom and I. My mom has been on a strange mashed potatoes and fish kick. That’s all she ever wants to eat, and my sister brought cedar planks and a giant salmon steak. My sister hates fish. I find this hilarious because her husband is a fisherman and works in law enforcement for fish and boating. She was really brave and tried to wrestle this almost four pound piece of salmon out of the bag and prepare it, but she just couldn’t do it. I handle stuff I don’t plan on eating all the time, since I’m veg-veg but I’ll cook anything, so she yelled instructions from out of fish-smell distance, and we got it done.
I guess it was good, because everyone but my dad liked it, and he only likes plain and mostly canned things. So that’s where I get it from. Basically, you can get short little cedar boards, about ten inches long, six inches wide, and maybe three quarters of an inch thick. My sister got hers at Linens and Things, but you can get them at grocery stores with good seafood departments, too. You soak the planks in water for about an hour, and get the grill heated up to about 375. (You can also do this in the oven, but I would guess the taste is not as smoky.) While this was going on, we put olive oil on the fish and used one of those spice rubs. Then you put the fish on the wood, skin side down, and put the whole thing right on the hot grill for about fifteen to twenty minutes. Keep a water bottle handy to put out the plank if it catches fire! The fish is done when it starts to flake.
Theoretically, you can reuse the plank, but I found that hard to believe after seeing how charred it got.
The planked salmon went over really well, even though our family is pretty spoiled because we have smoked steelhead in the fall and fresh perch that is just breaded and fried in a pan. That works on the grill, too. All you need is a deep cast iron pan. Junk shops and estate sales and yard sales are great places to find cast iron cook ware. You don’t have to buy the new stuff which generally comes from China and isn’t of the greatest quality. If you get a really gunky old cast iron pan, just toss it in a campfire or the fireplace and let it burn clean. Wait for the fire to get cool, scrub off the pan, rub it with cooking oil or fat and call it good. You can use a heavy cast iron pan to fry things in oil on top of the grill and keep the house from getting too stinky and smoky. Afterwards, though, I always play a little game called “Where can I dump the fish fry oil where Sally Ann is not going to roll in it and then jump in my bed?” I usually lose, and the dog ends up in my bed with greasy cornmeal stuck all over her.
This year is just going to be a crazy bumper crop year of all things berry. Something really drastic is going to have to happen to mess this up. The strawberries are ready to ripen, there are more currants than I have ever seen. The black raspberries are loaded, and even the troublesome blackberries are having their best year at least since the first year I had them. Even with all the pruning, there are going to be just mounds of grapes. I have been struggling to keep bird netting on the currants. We get a mighty amount of wind up here, and the netting just doesn’t want to stay at all. With the strawberries, I just tack the netting down with poultry fence staples and reach under to pick. When the netting is on the strawberries, it is better to go barefoot in the garden, because the netting catches on any kind of shoe tread, and button up shirts also present a problem. My strawberries are also about a week and a half behind the ones closer to the lake. The lower temperatures up here really make a difference. And I probably just jinxed myself and my berries since it is getting pretty chilly out there. I don’t think it’s going to frost or anything, but it will be in the forties the next three nights or so.
Speaking of weather, the National Weather Service finally released the snow total map for the season. We were right on the line between the color for 120-140 inches and that for 140-160. I thought we had a little less snow this year than last, when we had 180 inches. We ran out of wood bad this spring, though. I need to get on the ball with that, since our backup propane tank is almost empty, and with everything going up, filling it is falling farther down the list of priorities, especially since we have a nice new wood stove. Though, we did stretch the tank through three winters just with what was in it when we moved here. Little did I know that was going to be like getting a thousand dollars free with the house! We had our 36th coldest spring on record, and I’d like to think that if we’d had a little closer to normal temperatures and not so much rain that I could have either not run out of firewood as quickly or been able to get another load, but it never happened. I have a little bit of a jump on it this year, though, since my uncle brought a partial load as a Mother’s Day present, and I got another partial load from my aunt’s yard where a big piece of her cottonwood tree fell down.
That’s all I can think of which I’m just sitting around waiting for it to quit raining.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Some "Real" Digital TV Answers
Hi!
Okay, when they were talking about doing this two or three years ago, I wrote to Senator Arlen Spector and said, basically: Don’t get rid of analog TV. And if you do, don’t spend millions or billions of dollars to buy people converter boxes.
I really think the whole switch was just to trick people who didn’t know better into having to buy new televisions or paying for TV. At its least sinister, there were still a few big electronic companies who stood to make a lot of money selling converter boxes or new TV’s to people who knew about what to do. And the coupons were just handing money to big electronic companies who make cheap electronic crap in Chinese factories and turn around and sell it at high profit to the American people, thereby taking advantage of everyone: the Chinese people, the American people, the federal government, anyone who pays taxes to the US, and anyone who just wants to be able to find out if that tornado is going to smack into their house and has just found out that their TV is no good, their TV band on their emergency radio is no good, and no one really cares about them anyway!
I still think all those things. I am really spoiled right now, because for the first time in my life, I get free TV. When I wrote my original letter about saving analog over the air signals, I had never actually lived anywhere that really had free over the air TV. No kidding. When my sister moved to Erie, she and her husband were sitting around and twiddling their thumbs waiting to scrape together enough cash for cable or dish, and I was like: “Go get an Antenna.” My sister has basically lived everywhere that I have lived, but her husband is a veteran and lived all over the country and overseas for a while, and neither one of them realized, that in a lot of places, TV is like radio, and you can just watch it with an antenna without paying for it. A lot of places in the country get a fuzzy channel or two with a big, ugly ariel, but we never lived close enough to a TV station to make it worth doing.
So, this year, when all those commercials started yapping about how TV was going away unless you did the thing, I was all mad. I finally had free TV, blah, blah,blah. There’s no way a digital signal is going to reach us out in oogah-boogah land. I get all my stations but one boosted through a translator that I have no idea of the origins or locations. And I checked every digital TV answer site and message board I could think of just to see if the analog signal death date has anything to do with translators serving rural areas without finding any real answers to my questions.
I am always very pessimistic about technological advances. Because I am a gadget person, and I really like electronic toys and computers and things like that, you’d think I’d be like: Oh digital TV! Now the world is perfect. But I’m typing this on a really nice imac that is connected to a 26k telephone line. I kid you not. That is the top speed. Most of the time it is 24, and sometimes 18. There is one phone company. They do not offer high speed. There’s no cable. There’s no wireless. That’s what you get. And all those nice calling packages that are advertised all the time: pay this little amount and get unlimited calling. We get the ads for that in our phone bills, too, but they don’t really offer those prices out here. You can’t even get them on the phone to complain.
In Pennsylvania, there is a law that says everyone has to be wired for DSL by 2010. I’m pretty sure there is a loophole that’s going to let the phone company get out of doing it up here, since it also takes about five days to get anyone to fix the lines when the phone goes out. I don’t even have a phone hooked up to the landline because even talking on it is so crackly and noisy.
And I did write to complain, but the answer I received was even more frustrating than the original situation. Apparently, there is another law in PA that says there has to be a line deployment plan, and the way the phone company decides who to rewire next is if enough people in the area sign a request for service. So, once there is X number of people or a percentage of the population, the phone company has to wire them. It sounds cool, but really, all it says is that they get put on a list to get wired. And by signing the request for service, you are also agreeing to subscribe to a year of their service, whenever it is that they install the lines. There is no time line, no prices, no real explanation. If you signed it and then moved or died or became Amish, what would happen then? Would whoever lives next in your house be forced to pay for a year of high speed internet service. And also, we pay more for phone service and for electrical service because of line maintenance fees. Probably that would be the case for internet, too. Call me a little whiney party pooper, but I’m guessing the phone company show up to put in those lines right about the time we get effective wireless or broadband by powerlines or something.
Meanwhile, I did write my local PA congress guy and told him that the whole requirement to purchase service aspect of the law was a little ridiculous considering the phone company has no commitment to do a thing for the consumer, and he wrote me back a nice letter assuring me it was a really good law and much to my advantage as a consumer that it got passed. Oh.
Meanwhile, back to digital TV. I decided the only way that I was going to be able to find out the answer to my questions was to just go and find out the answer to my questions. In February, right about the time they started advertising, I went to www.dtv.gov and signed up for the coupons. Okay. I signed up for two, even though I only have one TV. My sister has four thousand television sets, and she can use my spare coupon.
Even though, they started saying in early March coupons were being sent out, I didn’t get any until last week. They look like little debit cards , and they come with a nice list of places you can go in your area to get a converter. Most of those places are Walmart, but I went to a really little Radio Shack and got one. At a bigger store, there might have been more choice, and they might have been cheaper, but I ended up having to chip in about $20 dollars for the box even with the coupon. And there are also some converter boxes you can pick up all your digital and all of the remaining analog stations, but the one I bought does not. So, to watch digital, I need to hook up the box, and to watch analog, I need to pull the plug on the digital and rehook my antenna back into the TV.
Hooking it up was very easy. It came with a little Coax cable, and there is a plug in for AV cable, but it didn't come with one. I don't have any spaces left on my TV anyway, so that was just fine. You just plug the antenna in the back where it says "In from antenna" and plug the other cable in where it says "Out to TV" and put that one in the back of the TV.
Of course, this made remote control #5 for me, and all of these remotes are supposed to be universal, but none of them do everything that needs to be done just to change the channel or watch a DVD and turn up the volume.
Watch digital, you say? YES! I hooked the thing up and scanned through the available channels and found myself pleasantly surprised. Other than public TV, only one other station in Erie is using a full powered digital signal. That came in fine, and I was able to actually see the CW channel, which I’ve never looked at before. My cousins will be thrilled the next time they come to stay with me, because they always want to watch Smallville. Two other Erie channels showed up but didn’t actually come in, and I was able to get another CBS TV station from somewhere in Ohio that came in pretty well. Then, I unplugged the converter box and switched back to regular TV because I still get more channels that way.
I live on top of a hill, with very little interferance of any kind about 30-40 miles away from the TV towers. I still was just using my rabbit ears, and I suspect if I wanted to put some ugly big antenna on the top of my house, I’d get more TV, but I don’t want to! My cute little house doesn’t want a big ugly TV antenna on it!
So, the verdict is, I should be able to get local news and weather on one channel, and my cousins will be able to watch Smallville, but unless the signal strength gets a lot better, I’m going to lose all but CBS and PBS next year. Which is fine. I’m not one of those TV snobs. I really like Law and Order, so I’ll miss NBC. I hate PBS, and, ironically, it comes in perfectly. (You should just hear me cuss when I do a Marxist/feminist deconstruction of "Antiques Roadshow".) But I mostly like TV for local news and football but the radio is just fine for football, too. But if there’s a TV show I like, I’ll just watch it later on DVD. That’s what the library and Netflix are for.
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