March/April Update

May 5, 2012
Spring Has Sprung (early!)

It seems like forever since we have posted to the blog! Must be that spring fever that's been distracting me from sitting at the computer. The weather here has been so fantastic all winter with very little snow and pretty mild temperatures with lows only in the 40's. Tulips, daffodils, crocus, Lilly's, iris have all come up about 1 month early this year. These developments have caused us to get right down to planting the vegetable garden extra early.

A little aside about this wacky weather..........today (May 5) just happens to be Climate Impacts Day. If you'd like to check it out, go to http://www.climatedots.org/ there you will find posted photos from around the world connecting the dots to show what climate change is doing to this planet and human kind. And go here to watch a short movie clip - http://act.350.org/sign/video/?akid=1890.571713.TFujPg&rd=1&t=4
Today is also Cinco de Mayo. This celebration commemorates the Mexican army's 1862 victory over France at the Battle of Puebla during the Franco-Mexican War (1861-1867) http://www.history.com/topics/cinco-de-mayo always interesting to read about who was trying to conquer who throughout history. Too bad that hasn't stopped! :o)

Moving on.....here is what has been up with us, in our little corner of the mid-west, over the last part of March and month of April, ..........

Lulu is still playing in the box our worm farm came in. The simple pleasures of being a cat! And we wonder why we don't have room in the house to actually have furniture!

We have been busy in the yard trying to get our vegetable garden boxes ready for planting. We decided to build a new stone box in the front yard out of some of our extra stone from the house construction.

We also modified one of the old boxes to make the path down the side of the house wider. This is where the chard will go.

Rowan loves to run the tiller, so she took on the task of preparing the back bed for planting.

Here is the new front bed about 2 weeks after planting the lettuces and radish.

Here we have tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, spinach, parsley and rhubarb.

The rain barrels (water butts) are already completely full and ready to water all the veg.

We don't have much else in the yard after all the construction in the last couple of years, but what we do have is FABULOUS. The Iris are exceptional this year and bring much needed splashes of color to the front yard.

And of course there are the poppies. Nothing will keep them from coming back. Poppies and cockroaches will inherit the earth :o) 

Now on to food.........with all of this warm weather, we are moving right on to lighter food choices. Most of what we cook now comes from the grill out on the front porch.

Here is one of our favorite Mediterranean meals- grilled garlic and lime chicken, couscous, tzatziki yogurt sauce, feta cheese, olives, greens/tomatoes, hummus and pita bread. YUM! Now, all we need is the ocean and we are in paradise!

Here is another favorite - roasted beets, butternut squash and sweet potatoes. We do these on the grill to keep the stove off and decrease the heat inside the house. The grill gives them extra flavor.

Steel head and scallops will go with the roasted veg.

Sally and Rowan are obviously very excited about what we are eating.

Everyone wants to celebrate the great weather, so our friends Graeme and Millie had us out to their country home for a feast of black bass. We sat on their fabulous screened porch overlooking the woods and all of the wildlife as we had dinner.

Another animal aside.... Lulu has decided she is taking over the linen closet. If we open a door to anywhere, especially a closet, its like sending up a flare to this cat that it is time to 'move in'. If you turn your back for a second, she slips in. Such a bundle of love! Whenever we can't seem to find her, we just start opening up all of the closets and eventually, there she is!

Back to outside and Spring...........In our preparations to get our yard ready for landscaping AND that impending flock of chickens, we are taking drastic measures to prepare our yard. We have had a gigantic black walnut tree (at least 65 years old) removed from the backyard to make room for our chicken coup. Black walnut trees are so acidic nothing grows under them, so we figure this tree is the most OK to remove from the yard, since nothing can grow under it anyway and the walnuts taste like engine oil! We have had our tree guy, Adrian, take down the over 50ft beauty and cut 20ft of the fabulous trunk into two logs we will eventually have made into boards. We will make a bar top and coffee table out of it for the house. Here you can see what we did.......

Adrian, our monkey boy tree trimmer, is an expert at this kind of thing.  Not too many guys in town who will climb a tree to take it down. You will see how good he is as you go on in this post.....

I think he needs to join the US Olympic team as a gymnast. Could you do this while hanging from a rope??

It is really amazing how this man takes down a tree bit-by-bit while he is hanging by a rope! 

 So, you all don't realize yet that he has taken down this whole tree in a 12ft wide area between the neighbors fence and our garage. Talk about holding ones breath when things start falling.....well not one thing hit our garage or the fence. AMAZING!

Approaching the moment of truth.......

This is where I really held my breath......TIMBER!!!!!

What an awesome moment! Adrian has now cut our two 10ft logs and will move them so we can dry them out and have them made into boards. We will store them in our backyard for about a year so they can dry out and then  have the boards planed so we can use them to make that counter top and coffee table for the house. This tree will continue to give us its beauty even though it no longer stands in our yard.

 We are looking forward to seeing how this timber dries out in the next year. We will need to keep it wet over the summer so it doesn't split. Luckily we have those gully-washer thunderstorms to help us out with that. It will be very exciting to see what we come up with this time next year. Stay tuned :o)

Oh, and of course we saved some firewood from the walnut to add to our already very full wood shed.

 Where once was a walnut tree, will now be a chicken coop. Oh the excitement of it all!

don't worry, there is more coming............. :o)

Invasion of the Red Wigglers!

Worm Advisory!!!!
..........So, we brought home our to-go mini worm farm from Nowana's and I couldn't wait to get my very own VermiHut Worm Bin. I went right to the Internet and ordered a 3-tier unit to get things going. The VermiHut units are made from completely re-cycled plastic. The coolest thing is now we can make our own 100% organic soil/fertilizer and reduce our household kitchen waste up to 30% and the worms do all of the work! Worm composting is known as vermicomposting and it works much faster than traditional thermal composting in the garden.

I came home from work a couple of weeks ago, and to my delight, this was waiting for me at the front door. There's no turning back now.

 I got right to setting up the new worm condo. The bottom container is designed to catch the worm juice and has a spigot at one end. I know, it sounds disgusting, but this stuff is extremely good for your plants. As the worms eat your fruit & vegetable waste, they produce compost or worm castings, some of which is liquid. This liquid finds its way to the bottom bin. This very concentrated liquid should be diluted 1 part juice to 10 parts water. Who needs to buy liquid fertilizer ever again? And, it's organic! The piece of white cloth is there to keep the worms from falling in the liquid and drowning. What a way to go :o) Then the first composting tray is added.

 Dampened shredded newspaper goes down first. Worms love damp newspaper.

 This unit came with some shredded coconut fiber bricks to use as a soil starter. You can use any kind of good quality compost dirt to start with (not potting soil).

 I broke apart one brick and added water to make a moist bedding.

 This is mixed up with the shredded newspaper and the worm starter farm from our friend Nowana.

 Another piece of barrier cloth is put on top before the lid goes on. This will keep the worms from crawling out of the condo through the air holes in the lid and finding their way around Rowan's office and onto her laptop and into her slippers! Ewe!

As soon as I got the unit all set up, I ordered a large quantity of red wigglers (500) from a worm farm in Pennsylvania. They arrived in 3 days and once they got to work, this is what the first tray of the condo looks like after only 2 weeks. The more worms you have in a bin the faster they work (they can double in number every 90 days). Each of these trays is designed to hold about 1000 worms with bedding, dirt, etc., so as the worms reproduce, more trays will be added.

This is a REALLY awesome way to do composting. As the weather gets warmer, the bin will be moved outside and as the worms keep producing they will be added to the garden with the soil. Can't wait to see what kind of vegetables will come out of our garden this year. I never imagined I would know this much about worms in my lifetime. We just never get too old to learn something new every day. Thanks, Nowana!

Stay tuned for landscaping and chicken adventures coming soon..............

Mardi Gras - Fat Tuesday

Some catching up from February................

February is my favorite month of the year. Besides being my birthday month, it is also the time we have the opportunity to repent and give up our evil ways, all after doing everything bad to excess during Mardi Gras/Fat Tuesday! The celebrations happen throughout the world (Carnival) but here in the US, we associate Mardi Gras with New Orleans, where it first started in 1699. Go to these links for more history on the event: http://www.eastjeffersonparish.com/culture/MARDIGRA/HISTORY/history.htm
 and http://www.mardigrasneworleans.com/history.html

Our friend Nowana, who has a history with New Orleans, threw us a whoopdie-do of a Mardi Gras party out at her place in the woods. Every detail was perfect, right down to the strings of beads, funny hats, traditional New Orleans dishes, music and decorations. Our friends Kris, Bob and Sally were all on hand to celebrate the end of their evil ways too :o)

Of course, the evening was started with bubbly...........

Oh, and traditional New Orleans Sazerac's too! Go here for recipe: http://cocktails.about.com/od/s/r/szrc_cktl.htm
Looks like Rowan is going to have a lot to repent about tomorrow :o)

The food fest started with Oysters Rockefeller, fresh off the grill. YUM!

Sally making something green because it is good for us. We need to have at least one thing that is good for us this evening........teehee.

Jambalaya, red beans, sausage and rice. Authentic fare from New Orleans.

The table.....

......including the crystal king.

Lets hear it for repenting (tomorrow) Cheers! :o)

Oh dear.......now it's on to dessert. Bananas Foster. Here is the actual recipe Nowana used: http://www.brennansneworleans.com/r_bananasfoster.html

A movie of the flambé. This part is always so exciting!

Extremely delicious!.........

....and something that goes right here (guess who?)! But we don't care because we will give it up tomorrow for lent :o)

So, while at Nowana's fabulous country home, she showed us her latest hobby: worm composting.

Yes, she has this fabulous worm condo complex for housing her worm family while they produce the most wonderful composting dirt for her garden. Who knew one could have a farm like this in the comfort of their own home?!  The worm bins can be ordered on-line, and they come with everything one needs to start the farm, even the worms!

 

Just a little shredded newspaper and some good quality vegetable garden dirt (not potting soil), kitchen vegetable trimmings, egg shells, etc. (anything you would normally put in the compost pile), and some red wigglers worms will get you going (don't use night crawlers). Go here for info on the worm bins:     http://www.woodlanddirect.com/Outdoor/Worm-Composting and here for info on how to do it: http://deq.louisiana.gov/portal/default.aspx?tabid=2101 - a hilarious read. You can get the red wiggler worms here: http://www.unclejimswormfarm.com/ - this is where I got mine (500), or you can go to a bait shop and get them in smaller quantities. The more worms you have, the faster you get good composting dirt.

Nowana gave each of us a little to-go worm farm as party gifts before we left. The most unusual gift I have ever received and the most sustainable. This gift will just keep on giving and help make our garden produce better everything. We will also be able to feed our chickens worms once in a while. Yes, we are getting some chickens later this spring..........that will be posted in a later blog, so stay tuned :o) Now, have to get that chicken-coop built!

A Visit From The Left Coast

We were very excited to have a visit from our dear friends Nina and Kim in mid January. They came out from the Left Coast (Monterey, CA) to spend a week visiting us and also Kim's mom, who lives just north of us (wacky coincidence). Leaving the beautiful, mild, central California coast to come east into old man winter isn't the usual choice for most, but Kim's mom was having a BIG birthday, so here they are. Luckily, our old man winter seems to have gone off to Europe this year, so our winter has been pretty mild. However, just not to disappoint, we did have a little snow and an ice storm while the girls were here. Something they never see in Monterey, so it made their visit more exciting :o)

Jenni, Kim Rowan and Nina

Nina and I have spent many years in the kitchen together cooking up great eats, so no time was lost getting right to what was going to be created this time. Home made pasta (butternut squash tortellini with brown butter sauce) and salad nicoise is what will be on tonight's menu.

Nina, the pasta master, preparing the pasta in the flour bowl on the table. As she beats the eggs they absorb the flour and turn into the pasta dough.

 It was so great to spend time with one of my best friends.

 Rowan was all over the pasta making as she will be the one doing it once The Master leaves.

 Cutting the rolled out pasta dough.
The filling: butternut squash, olive oil, herbs de provence, salt, pepper, shallots, garlic, ricotta cheese, nutmeg

Here is the video of all of us making the tortellini. It was a blast.

The perfect tortellini!

 The brown butter sauce: butter, fresh sage leaves, toasted walnuts, dried cranberries, kosher salt, pepper,  grated parmesan. YUM!

So, that evening while we were enjoying our fabulous meal, we were unaware of the impending doom of an ice storm taking place outside. Luckily, I went to let the cats out just as we finished dinner and noticed the ice at the edge of the porch. Our two guests, Mary & Sally, who drove to our place decided to giddy-up and get on their way. It was fortunate they only live a stones throw from each other so could follow each other home.

Here is what we found when we woke up the next morning: Every inch of everything was covered in ice. Nina and I had to hold on to each other to get the few steps from the porch to their car in the driveway. While Nina started scraping, I went back in the house to get some water boiling so we could get the frozen doors open.

 The windshield was a sheet of solid ice.

Nina did this to all the windows while I chipped the ice off of the concrete around the car so we could even walk around it.

It's so great to have old friends from the Left Coast come to visit. We cherish these times together as they don't happen often enough. Can't wait till our next trip out west.