Wifey and I were finally able to get ‘Rusty’ into the vets for his shots and what will be his first professional grooming. We’ve had him for 6 years and he’s never had a bath. The only way we’ve been able to brush him is to put a muzzle on him and then I’d hold him down while my other half brushed. Usually we could get 5 minutes (or so) of compliance before he started flipping out.
Rusty has never met a human that he didn’t want to bite and so his presence has always provided a sense of security. No one and no thing was coming close if he were loose. He bites everyone (except immediate family) that turns their back on him. We finally got him to stop biting the vacuum cleaner, but if we want to use a broom we’d have to put him outside. If outside he will attack a leaf blower, weed-eater, tiller, mower, etc. and has to be put indoors for half an hour or so before he will calm down enough to be set free.
He’s smart and knew something was up but still he played along and was marginally manageable as we handed him off to the staff there without bloodshed.
We are to call this afternoon to see what time he’s to be picked up. I can only hope that my strong warnings to the staff about his demeanor were heeded.
I put up some sauerkraut on Saturday morning and have been closely monitoring the ‘build’ since. This is the first time that I’ve used the E-Jen containers for fermenting and am/was a little concerned with the inner seal rising out of the kraut. Here is a short video on how the container works.
Now the problem that I picked up on is that the plastic insert/seal was being pushed up by the gasses that the kraut produced. I’d open the outer part and find that while a ‘seal’ was being maintained, one portion of the plastic would be about half an inch higher than that it was on the other side. It was sitting catiwompus.
I’d pull the little plug in the center of the inner seal so and push it back into place and re-plug it. 6 or so hours later I would check on it and the seal would have risen again. A lot of forces are at work in that little box.
The kraut has 2.5 pounds of green cabbage, 1.5 pounds of red cabbage, a large sweet onion, one large carrot, and two granny smith apples. I’ve put this mix into two E Jen containers: one that holds just under a gallon one that holds about half of that. On the smaller one I’ve added five 1 inch long dried sprigs of Asian Super Pepper (about 80,000 SHU’s) to give it some bite.
I’ve got several more containers on orders from Amazon and they should get here on Wednesday. That means that on Thursday I’ll have the pleasure of driving the Huntsville, AL and back (an hour each way) to visit an Asian market that has a good variety of Diakon radish, Napa cabbage, and Chinese chives.
I’ve already picked up some pre-blended kimchi base (I’m not quite ready to build up my own) so by Saturday I should be awash in pungent and delicious veggies.
I’m always being dogged for playing 20 bucks a week on the lottery. “Why would you want to give your money away like that” they say. My answer is always the same: My 20 bucks, bite me.
The facts are plain, the lottery is won every single time. Some one somewhere always ends up with a smile on their face and an outlandish tax bill. I’m in.
Neither of the two biggies have been won in a while so the values have grown up to be in the ‘stupid money’ range. By my best guess the net (cash after taxes) is $133 M for tonight’s Powerball and $198 M for tomorrows Megamillions.
Stupid money could get you a little piece of land on the left coast.
“The Kristofferson Ranch. For the first time in over 40 years, the 557+- acre Kristofferson Ranch is now available. The ownership of the ranch dates back to 1980 when Kris Kristofferson purchased the property. Steeped in history, the origins of the ranch began in the 1800’s when it was originally developed as a dairy farm. “
“As a testament to old world craftsmanship and design, the original road house and barns still stand to this day. Just below the road house sits the cavernous rocky outcropping, known as Devils Basin. This dramatic setting played host to the filming of Karate Kid 3 and is considered some of California’s most pristine coastline. With nearly 1 mile of ocean frontage, cattle, timber production and residential development, the ranch offers endless possibilities to the next owner. “
“Multiple building envelops with panoramic ocean views run along the ridge lines throughout the property. The well-maintained road network throughout the ranch will carry you from water’s edge to the coastal meadows overlooking Manchester State Park. This is a place of solace. A fortress of solitude.“
Wifey alerted me on Saturday that I had overbought eggs: we had 40 in the fridge. We typically go through somewhere between a dozen and 16 (or so) a week. So I decided that what the world (or perhaps just this household) needed is more pickled eggs. I tried my hand at this about two years ago and I guess I got a hold of bad recipe because they were inedible. Not so with the batch I made up earlier today.
I tripled the recipe (except the eggs where I used 21) and used 3 quart jars with 7 eggs each. No fresh dill sprigs so I used dried dill weed (a little less than half a tsp per jar) and scratched the onion. I couldn’t pass on the opportunity to add several sprigs of dried Asian Super Pepper (about 50,000 SHU) to one of the jars.
A taste test of one egg a short while ago let me know the recipe is indeed spot on. The challenge now will be to keep my paws out of the jar until they’ve aged for 6 or 7 days.
I put out a couple of bales of hay and topped off the minerals for the cattle earlier today. I’m down to 6 remaining bales (that’s the bad news) but they have really backed off of it as the fields begin to green up (the good news). We’ve had three bail to the greener pastures to the west (my neighbors place) so they’ll not be munching on the dwindling stock over here.
I was going to gather up some composted manure to work into the garden soil, but decided instead to go with some decomposed wood from a fallen Hackberry tree.
Two trips to the ‘corpse’ of three buckets per trip was enough to enrich the organic material in four 4×12 planting beds. I turned it in some with a shovel and will give it a month or so of rest before i take my small Honda cultivator to it. I still need to move two more beds from the south (abandoned) side of the garden to this side.
Lining the planting beds keeps the dirt from the wood and extends it’s life by half a dozen years or so.
I’ve collected another clue on the mysterious lone pear tree in the front pasture: Its bloom time.
Mystery Pear in the Front Pasture
It was a good thing that I thought to cut scion wood from these trees last week. Had I waited even as much as a few days it would have been past the time when it would be a viable grafting limb. Those cuttings are in my fridge.
Kieffer Pear from the Garden’s Orchard.
Bartlett from the Garden Orchard
As educational as this all might be, I may have the names of pear tree I planted backward! I won’t be certain that I have them named correctly until they produce fruit. The near term hurdle on the pear trees is concurrency; The trees that I planted will all need to be in bloom at the same time or I’m only going to get one variety to bear fruit.
Speaking of a single variety, one of my plum trees died and I’ve got one left. It is a ‘Santa Rosa’ plum and self pollinating. I saw a couple of blooms on it last year but no fruit. Today it was absolutely loaded with blossoms.
I gathered scion wood from all three varieties of pear trees I have on the property and placed them in 3 separate plastic bags along with moist paper towels. They are resting in the fridge along with the 3 new varieties of apple tree I picked up from Burnt Ridge Nursery. The apple scion does not have the circumference I expected so it’ll be ‘interesting’ to see if it grafts as easily as last years trees. Root stock will be sent this way next week and I’ll have 22 new trees to babysit for the next few month.
I currently have the two varieties above and can’t help but wonder who would dish out $150 for a 4 foot stick. I paid $35 each at a local nursery for the 3 pear trees and 4 apple trees I purchased a couple year back. The new 10 pear trees will cost under $3 each (the cost of the root stock) and the dozen new apple trees will cost $6 each (root stock and scion).
As far as I can tell there are 11 different type pear trees that are self-pollinating. I should be able to determine the type of pear that the old tree up front is once the fruit on it begins to mature. We’ll see.
I had to run upfront on an errand and stopped to take a photo of the pear tree I mentioned in a post yesterday. I took a look at Google Earth’s historical imagery and could see that it’s been in place for at least 16 years. I left the jeep in the photo to give you a hint at the scale.
That downed wood you see along the base of the tree is what remains of an apple tree that was adjacent to the pear. It came down last year.
The year before last I went in and heavily pruned the tree and thought that I could get enough of the dead/dying and in-growing limbs cleared out to get it healthy. It didn’t help, and the in growing limbs (see below) have all but consumed the old girl. That my SIL inadvertently got in to it with the tractor last year did not help, but I’m thinking that it has gone through it’s life cycle anyway and is about to check out.
There is plenty of new growth on the limbs to pull good scion from and so my plan is to graft up 4 of these to the Quince (semi-dwarf) root stock.
There is/was no other pear tree within half a mile of this one and it always produced fruit. It could be a Bartlett (a somewhat self pollinating variety)given the density of the fruits flesh and the way it held together while it cooked down when making preserves.
My butt is dragging today, I spent several hours yesterday moving soil and gravel from the south end of my garden (which I’m abandoning) to the north side (that I’m refurbishing and reinforcing).
The most valuable thing in the garden is the soil, so I wanted to make sure that I recovered as much as possible. As for the gravel: I need it, it’s there, so a little sweat makes it a lot more affordable than it otherwise would be. So I shoveled the gravel into the yellow buckets…..
….and then move those to the 20 gallon buckets sitting on the rack on the back of my jeep.
I’d then drive those to the north side of the garden to build out the new planting areas.
So I put my brain and fingers to work (they were about the only thing still working) and ordered additional root stock and scion for my little orchard. I purchased 12 apple root stock (I went with EMLA 106) and 10 root stock for pear (Provence Quince). Both are semi dwarf and produce trees that are roughly 65 percent the size of a standard tree. I’d love to get root stock for full sized apple trees,but there two problems with that: first, I’d like to plant a tree that fruits in my life time. Secondly, I’m getting a little long in tooth and no longer amused by falling from high places. Semi dwarf will work just fine.
This will be my first year grafting up some pear trees and I’ll be pulling scion from the Kieffer and Bartlett I planted a couple of years ago and from an old dying pear tree that sits on the front of the farm near the hay barn.
I have no idea what type of pear that old tree is, but I do know that it makes great pear preserves (think of hot breakfast biscuits with homemade pear preserves splattered across the top). The recipe goes something like: Peel and core as many as you can and stick them in a very large pot. Pour 3 or 4 cups of sugar on top, cover, and let set overnight. Simmer until it reduces by half. Pack the result in half pint jars and can with a pressure canner. I cranked out almost 2 dozen half pint jars and, owing to my wife’s generosity and some obscure southern rule about gifts from the garden, a week later I had two jars left.
I’ve got 16 apple trees now. Red Delicious, Yellow Delicious, Fugi, Wagener, Harrison Cider, King and Gala. The scion I ordered is for Cox Orange Pippin, Granny Smith, and Gold Russet.
These 22 additional trees (12 apple 10 pear) will just about fill up the little area I have between my garden plot and a gravel road that runs up to the equipment barn. I can see part of this area from the cabin so in a couple of years it will look great in the spring when they bloom. The cost per tree, on average works out to a very affordable 8 bucks or so.
I’ve been wrestling with a heat/AC problem for about a week. I’ve got two split units, one for up, the other is for the downstairs. They are heat pumps and so the air handling units are indoors and the compressor is outside. The problem is with the production of heat in the upstairs unit: it didn’t/wouldn’t.
Between closing the unit down, resetting breakers, tripping/setting relay controls, pulling unit side fuses/breakers/disconnects, grounding circuit card test tabs, and knob-dicking the electronic thermostat I could get the SOB to work after an hour or so.
I couldn’t figure it out because the clues to what might be broke would change. : one time it would be the 50 amp breaker for the indoor component sometimes the 30 amp breaker for the outside, once it was both (several times it was neither). A couple of times it was shut down for faults that sensors in the outside unit detected and they’d throw a ‘blinking light code on two LEDs on the circuit card. Several time the card would indicate there was no power to the AC when there was.
It was a real pain and I was mulling over getting the AC guy out to take a look at it when I remembered the last time he came to look at my downstairs AC unit (about out two years ago): It cost me a fortune because it took so long to troubleshoot (he was good at ‘troubleshooting by replacement’) and the actual problem was that a relay had failed on the AC unit because the 50 Amp breaker for the heat unit was not well seated in the breaker box. The problem was not in either the indoor element or outdoor element, but rather with the breaker not being seated well. In short, if the power fails to the indoor air handling unit (like when the breaker burps) then it removes a needed signal to a relay in the outside unit that allows power to the fan/compressor to energize. If the breaker ‘chatters’ (as this one did because it was not well seated) it will eventually break the relay on the AC (even though the problem was not in/on the AC unit).
With that thought in mind I began to think I had a weak breaker and that it was tripping because of the heat strips that augment the heat pump were coming on. So yesterday PM I drove into Pulaski’s Home Depot grabbed a 20 dollar 50 amp breaker and solved all of my heat/AC problems. OBTW, I’ve concluded that the loud banging was the logical outcome from the outdoor compressor having power removed from it suddenly while under load.
George Santayana was right you know, those that forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
I was so damned pleased and excited as I opened the box of my Ruger’s new laser sight. Slapped the battery in that puppy and went to mount it…only to find that it was made for the Ruger LCP and I had a Ruger LCP II. Dammit. Good thing that Amazon gives do overs (at no cost), so I’m back to waiting for my new laser once again.
Holster arrive and It’s great. New below and old above.
I’m pretty safe around fire arms. Even still, there are things in the environment that will remind you just how deadly they are and how quickly things can go south. This last November one of my neighbors sent me a note asking if I knew who it was that shot himself in front of my place. That kinda talk gets your attention real quick. Turns out it was a hunter that lives about 15 miles south of here (near Rogersville) and he was on the road that separates my property from Alabama. I found this on his Facebook page a short while later:
What got me thinking about this event was the challenge I have with clearing my LCP. It was made for shooting, not for unloading. Here is why:
That is a 380 round sitting on the ejection port of the LCP. There is zero clearance for an undischarged round to clear the port. It fires well, and I’ve never had an expended shell fail to eject but clearing it with an undischarged round is a real pain. Here is another view:
In the grand scheme of things this means that if you own an LCP and carry with one in the chamber then you will always have a challenge clearing the weapon. That pesky round in the chamber just becomes too comfortable in it’s circumstances to dislodge easily. Despite these two major drawbacks (no external safety and undersized port) the weight and ease in concealment make it my weapon of choice.
Yesterday was a welcome reprieve from the constant rain here in southern Tennessee. It’s back again today with all day showers/storms forecast/expected.
A constant breeze yesterday set up conditions where I could get out and work without sinking into the saturated soil so I took a stab at clearing out some of the gravel around the planting beds in the garden and stuffed some more hay into the hay rings so that I wouldn’t have to do it today. I won’t melt but the tractor will tear up the pasture when They’re drenched.
Today is a different story, the rain came for a good long while and I spent the morning working up my veggie and seed order from Victory Seeds (site here). I found everything I needed but the Besser Tomatoes. Amazon has them and they did just fine last time I went there.
Just as I was rounding out my ‘shopping cart’ at Victory I got spam mail from another seed provider that I’ve purchased from in the past: Harris Seed. A quick look at their site and one thing became immediately apparent: Someone is doing drugs in Rochester.
I thought someone had had erred so I dug a little deeper and found that the people over at Harris (site here) must really love their seeds.
When it comes to tomatoes there is no limit to the varieties. The same goes for other edibles but not quite so apparent. Baker Creek (site here) has some pretty wild heirloom varieties. I’ve done business with in the past and they were the only firm that bothered to mail me (as in someone carries a physical object and places in a box near your home) a color hard copy of their seed catalog. Unsolicited.
Description from Baker Seeds: Large, elongated cherries in clusters. The color (and flavor!) is a full-blown assault on the senses—lavender and purple stripes, that turn to Technicolor olive-green, red, and brown/blue stripes when fully ripe. Really wild! Fruit holds well on the vine or off, making this amazing variety a good candidate for market growers. Olive green interior is blushed with red when dead-ripe.
I’m was going to pass on all of the novelties this year and get back to the very basics of a country garden, but what’s the fun in that? I’m ordering these multicolored gems and the large yellow beefsteak (below).
Description from Baker Seeds: Sweet, lemon-colored fruit is blushed in lovely salmon pink. This heirloom was resurrected from near extinction. The tomato is a beefsteak from antiquity with such magnificent flavor it is a true wonder how it was lost for 107 years!
I’ve still got to order root-stock and scion wood for apple and pear, but that’s an adventure (and story) saved for another day.
All of the ice and snow has converted to liquid and started it’s long journey to the sea. Last week we got down to -6 and it stayed at or below freezing from Sunday the 14th until the afternoon of Monday the 21st. Just when we cleared that hurdle another is being thrown in our path: flooding.
Wifey was able to get out to her hairdresser who lives/works about 5 miles away; I drove the route in advance in my Jeep to make sure all of the residual ice was cleared from the road and that she’d be OK. Between the time she left at 9:30 and the time I left to make sure she could get back in (noonish) enough rain had fallen to flood the low areas along the route. The most significant was along my drive. Here is what my valley looks like in ‘normal’ times:
Looking down into the valley at the creek from the cabin. (Summer)
Looking up to the cabin from the valley floor. (Summer)
Now here is what it looks like when the wicked witch of the west frowns over my piece of paradise. Looking down at the valley during a heavy rain.
My drive that crosses a ‘feeder’ (or wet weather stream) that feeds the creek.
Now here is a photo looking east along the ‘feeder’. Notice how much higher the wall of the trench look in the distance than they do near the road. As the water washes down it flows out of the banks and spreads across the terrain from near where base of the tree that is on the left of the photo near the road.. It also flows out of its banks past the tree on the right of the photo. In short, it flows broadly and swiftly through this area.
So after weathering the ice and snow of last week the rain and floods are thrown my way this week. I guess flying monkey are next. All of this for a boy that spent his formative years in an environment that looks like this:
I posted about my garden ambitions a short while ago and this morning I got to wondering why it is that the garden is on my mind at this time of year. Then it hit me: sauerkraut and hot sauce. I made a couple of hot dogs the other day and placed store bought (Vlasic) sauerkraut over the dog and splashed on just a few (a judicious few) drops of some hot sauce I had made a couple of years ago. That stuff is both hot and has a great flavor and I’m down to my last bottle. Oh, by the way: to say that I made it a few years ago is only kinda/sorta correct as it is still slowly continuing to ferment.
It’s made from fermented ‘Super Chili Peppers’ shown above. These weigh in on the top of the medium range of Scoville Heat Units (SHU) at 50,000 SHU. They are also know as ‘Asian Super Chili Peppers’. They are a dead ringer for the ‘Thai Chili Pepper’ (shown below). Thai Chili Peppers have a SHU rating of 100,000.
If you had bushes from both varieties in your garden then you’d not be able to distinguish between them on looks alone. Here is how to tell the difference: pick a couple of peppers from the plant, then reach down and grab your genitalia. If you quit screaming within a week then it was a Super Pepper, any longer then it was Thai.
I found a site that shows 470 pepper varieties and their respective Scoville Heat Units (SHU). It is located here. The table is by SHU (vice alphabetical) so the search/find feature of in your browser is your friend.
Ferment the peppers by coarsely chopping and then toss them in a jar with salted water. Things will get wild for a while and then calm down after a couple of weeks (I let mine go long). Everything, including the brine, goes into the blender until it is completely liquid. Poor it into bottles (Amazon is your friend) and you’ve got a great hot sauce that is, as far as my tastes go, on the upper limit of heat.
The sauerkraut made me think about the garden as well. Once you make your own, at home, with cabbage from the garden (notice I didn’t say your garden), store bought just doesn’t quite scratch the itch. Beyond remembering the great taste of past ferments, I ran across this as I was looking through old links.
Ingredients: cabbage, red apple, caraway seeds, whey, salt and spring water. Can’t wait to see if I can make this ferment work!
So even though I can’t get out of my driveway I’m thinking of a garden and what kind of great stuff can be created from 5th year soil (vice the dirt Ive been growing in for the last 4 years).
I feel like I’ve crossed the finish line of a long challenging race. Today, at 9:01 the temp got above freezing for the first time in more than a week.
With some luck the driveway will be clear enough tomorrow to permit passage.
We’ve been locked down since Monday of last week and it looks like that’s about to end come this Monday. Still have to get through one more night of damn cold (vice fu@king cold) weather tonight but 6 is not unbearable. It was 6 when I took the dogs out for a walk at 5 this morning.
The rain may pooh-poo a Wednesday fishing opportunity, but it’s not like there’s not plenty to do around here. My largest major project is the downsizing of my garden. It’s not that it is too large for the amount of planting I want to do, it’s just too large a task maintaining the ground that I’m not planing into.
Generally I’m set up as in graphic below. Excluding the fruit trees the area is 60 feet by 120 feet. The small rectangles are 4×12 foot raised planting beds made with treated deck lumber. The large rectangles are 30 by 40 foot planting areas. The planting area at the top of the graphic is covered in heavy woven plastic sheeting with holes burned into them at 1 foot intervals.
The area between them is covered with ‘crusher run’ (gravel) over a heavy plastic cover. Here is a view (south side of the garden looking north north east) of my Roma tomatoes in the raised boxes.
This photo taken from the north side looking south. Young pepper plants in the foreground.
The perimeter fencing is 8 inch by 8 foot treated poles (little black squares) concreted 2 feet into the ground. between these poles I’ve pounded in tee posts and then wrapped the area in 5 ft high fencing. To keep the deer out I’ve run two lines of metal weaved plastic line (normally used in electric fencing) across the top of the posts and then half way between the post and the fence. I’ve had a lot of people tell me that what I’ve done will not keep deer out of a garden. That may be so, but it’s kept deer out of my garden.
The maintenance problem arises from the spaces between the planting boxes. Any blown seed that lands on the gravel will begin to grow. I know it’s hard to believe but 80 percent of the time I was spending in the garden was spent on beating back the weeds. I’ve had enough of it, I’m going to cut the garden in half lengthwise.
move the boxes that are on the south side to the north sided and place them on top of the existing boxes.
Cut the large planting area on the top of the graphic by more than half
Overlay the large planting area on the bottom right with plastic weave.
Reestablish the fencing
Taken together the total time I spend on weeding should be reduced to a very doable 40 percent.
But first, I’ve got to get through these next two days!
I was able to get to the hay barn and get a couple of roll out to the cattle yesterday. It was a day ahead of my ‘every three days’ schedule mandated. I could feel the tractor sliding on the hills so I did use the alternate route I mapped out and posted earlier. No warning lamps or error codes on the New Holland, that’s a relieve as the previous use had me staring at a dash that looked like this:
Simply read what the panel says is there is a non-critical problem with the engine and the error code is 17359. Now, I’ve got an operator’s manual for the New Holland and no where in the book is there a list of error codes and how to fix them; no where. If you go online you find exactly the same information you find in the operator’s manual: none. As fortune would have it, when I started the machine yesterday the fault and the lights associated with the fault had cleared. Another mystery to go along with the mystery from last week. The machine went down hard and ‘de-rated’ and so I had to borrow a Kubota 108 from my neighbor. The mechanic came out from Huntsville and said ‘I don’t have a clue, I’m going to have to dig into it’. I haven’t got the bill yet, but I’m sure Huntsville Tractor is going to make the trip well worth their time.
The coon hound (Maggie) absolutely loved the snow and once she hit the door she was gone for a couple of hours. I could hear her up and down the valley treeing squirrels and running deer. That attitude changed today as the partial melt from yesterday refroze the top layer of snow and created a pretty significant ice layer on the surface. She, and our other border collie (Rusty) struggled to get to a spot where they could stand and take care of ‘serious’ dog business.
We got to 6 below zero day on the Tuesday morning with no major problem. I did have the pipe running to the downstairs toilet freeze and the down heat unit would not hold 68 degrees: the auxiliary heat was on and the temp was 65. Not bad for a cabin with 23 ft. ceilings. I built this cabin using ‘pex’ vice pvc or copper so there was no busting of the pipe, it just froze. Tonight will be 9 degrees and I really should be more worried than I am, but just can’t seem to get there when its going to be 15 degrees warmer than it was two nights ago.
The coming week promises a warm up and hopefully a little time on the river is in the cards.
There’s a guy on the Weather Channel explaining why the ‘primary’ roads will be cleared before the ‘secondary’ roads; I’m not sure that anyone who didn’t know why that’s so before he explained it would understand why after he explained it.
I’ve got 18 head of cattle in the front pasture. They are OK right now but will need to get more hay into the hay rings tomorrow after the snow quits. I suppose that getting to the hay barn will be as challenging as it was the year before last when I had to go off-road with the tractor. Here’s the set-up:
The tractor is in the barn at the lower right of the image above. The hay is stored in the barn in the upper left. Both sit on high ground and the terrain between the two incorporate low ground. The normal path is along the solid red line: down a steep hill then up a steep hill. The ‘backup route’ is via the dashed red line: I go down the hill in the pasture adjacent to the equipment barn where it is not steep. Through the woods along the side of a ravine and after crossing a cattle gap (pictured below) I go left into the woods and climb the hill.
Here are a couple of pictures from last year that shows the challenge:
This taken while standing in front of the cabin and looking towards the equipment barn.
This from the valley floor looking back at my cabin. That’s my good girl standing adjacent to a concrete drive in 5 inches of snow.
This photo was taken from the same place as the previous one but facing the opposite direction. It shows the road going up and to the left and the valley running along the right side.
Finally, this is the alternate route. Photo was taken from the same spot as the previous two but looking up the secondary valley (red dashed line). On the extreme right in the photo is the starting point of the steep path through the woods.
Trying to get up and down very steep roads consisting of ice covered concrete is a fools errand so will be off-roading the tractor come tomorrow.
For more than 7 years this had been part of our morning routine in our little spot here in Tennessee. ‘Dixie Star’ was her name and, like clockwork, she would wake us up at 5 AM for her morning walk. There were no shortcuts with this girl, you were required to trapse down the shallow draw, up the opposing side, across the field to the barn and then weave your way back to the house.
After the walk she and ‘Rusty’ our other border collie would get a couple of treats to hold them over until breakfast and then Dixie and I would watch the news; actually, I watched the news and she had her belly rubbed for 15 or 20 minutes.
Day in and day out.
That ended this last Tuesday when she suddenly got sick. We had her at the vets in Loretto on Wednesday morning and she passed that afternoon. She was a good girl.
I’m not OK with folk calling me a sniveling bitch (even though I’m acting like one). It’s the weather you see; for a brief period (I guess about 6 hours) yesterday the forecast low of Tuesday evening was raised. It went from 0 to 2 and then to 3. In my naivete I thought that ‘they’ would keep raising it a couple of degrees each day and then, come Tuesday, we’d get by with a balmy 12 degrees or so. It turns out that that glimmer of hope has vanished,
I feel like an ass for not seeing the weather big picture. I was looking at the forecast and was fixated on the coming Tuesday night low. It is now forecast to be at 0 (zero) degrees. When I first noticed that Tuesday’s low would be bone chilling, it was forecast to be 13.
The big picture that I didn’t recognize until this morning is when the sun goes down this evening it will not get above freezing again for an entire week. Thursday of next week is showing 37, but I’m think that’s just some guy working the models spreading a glimmer of hope.
Bad new: I’m unprepared for a week long event. Good news: I have time (today) to recover.
So I’ll be off to Wally-world a little later in the day and pick-up some 2nd class goods via 3rd class services. Here’s a little cold weather cabin porn that’ll remind us that it is going to be as beautiful as it is torturous.
My son-in-law and granddaughter climbed into the ‘shoot-house’ the other day and was she was able to knock one down.
They live in Huntsville but have a cabin right next to the one I live in here in Tennessee. She’s having this one mounted to go along with the others they’ve got hanging on the wall. 2 for her and 4th for the cabin. She (and he for that matter) will only take a 8 or better buck, but as the season comes to a close they’ll bring down a doe or two for jerky meat.
The processor will carve all of the meat for jerky and what can’t be done that way will be hamburger.
I’m 10 miles away from a boat ramp on the Elk River, 14 to several on Wheeler Reservoir, and I can’t seem to get there.
It’s a sordid tale.
Years ago, in 2016 I think, Gander Mountain was sliding into the abyss. I lived in Huntsville (AL) at the time and Gander was selling off all inventory and chaining up the doors locally, as they soon would be nationally. I was late to the game and pickin’s were slim by the time I realized they were selling off inventory. I picked up several poles and reels that formed the core of my fishing tackle at the time. This was right after I bought my boat and before I really understood which poles (and reels for that matter) went with which species and how lure weight needed to be tied to pole characteristics, etc,etc. (many, many etcetera’s)
I did a bang up job of frustrating myself. I thought the problem was me when in fact it was me AND the gear. This last year I started taking fishing a little more seriously (if a person can actually do such a thing). I began reading ‘how to’ articles and then saw some reviews on Amazon for KastKing fishing tackle. I sprang for a baitcaster called Royal Legend II. It was of surprising quality and I could actually cast the sucker without backlashing/birdcaging. I wondered what it could do on a quality pole (also from Kastking) and the difference was amazing. Over the course of a few months I bought 5 new poles and 7 reels.
Baitcasters from left to right Royal Legend ‘II’ (3 of these), Royal Legend ‘Elite’ and Zephyr BFS (finesse). The two spinning reels were both Royal Legend ‘Glory’ in the 3000 frame.
Four of the poles were ‘Perigee’: 6’ (for the BFS reel), 6’.6”, 7’ bait-casters and one 7’6” for one of the spinning reels. I put the other spinning reel on Kast Kings 7’ ‘Resolute’ spinning rod.
I had all of this equipment loaded up and out on the boat for about a week in September; casting away…living the good life when Maggie showed up. Maggie, an absolutely stunning Black and Tan coon hound, appeared on my doorsteps at 1:30 in the morning. I thought someone had lost her while hunting or she had wandered away from her owners so we set some food and water out and went back to bed. The next day, still there. I brought her into the house and placed her in the laundry room and she was content there and would not leave that room except to go outside to do her business and then she would come right back to the door. When I went out she crowded me so much it was almost impossible to walk.
Monday rolls around and we cart her off to our vet in Loretto (TN) to see if she was ‘chipped’: nope. The vet looks her over to see if she’s ok and, after giving her a blood test, tells us she has Heart Worms. Well shit. The vet says there are two general ways to treat her: Fast or Slow. Fast is expensive, painful to the dog, could kill her, and we would have to completely limit her physical activity for at least a month (if not more). The reason for limiting her activity was because the ‘fast method’ kills all of the adult worms in two mass killings a month apart. When the worms die they decompose and that material ends up coating the walls of her lungs and she would literally suffocate if she were to engage in any exercise greater than a slow walk and only then to use the rest room.
This is going to get back to my fishing in a moment, just stick with me.
We opted for the slow method where he treats her for any larva that may be in her blood with an injection, gives us heartworm meds to keep her from getting reinfected, and pills that are given to her twice a day to sterilize the adult heartworms she currently has. The sterile heartworms would die off at a slower pace over time. We would have to limit her movement for a month, but not as severely as with the fast treatment. We’d walk her on a 25 foot leash and she was content with that. Things were looking up and I’m all set to hit the river and lake in late September when wifey, while walking the dog, trips—falls—and breaks her hip.
We went to the emergency room, they admitted her and operated the next morning. Long story shortened: 3 days in the hospital, ambulatory ride to inpatient rehab for a month, then a month of in home physical therapy followed by a little more than a month in outpatient physical therapy. My fishing went dark for the last 3 months of last year.
The good news: the entire ordeal with my wife breaking her hip: emergency room, surgery, hospital recovery, ambulance ride, inpatient physical and occupational therapy, home care nursing and physical therapy and then outpatient physical therapy (and all of the food and meds my wife took while in care) set us back a grand total of (drum roll) $1.69.
One dollar and sixty nine cents.
Interestingly, every person involved with the care, facilities, food, meds, transport, etc.) knew what was/was not covered by Medicare and Tricare and everything they did was correctly coded and submitted with the exception of the $1.69 overcharge by a radiologist.
Insurance? Medicare (because we’re ‘dated’) as primary, Tricare (thanks to my 20 years in the service) secondary. So now the Social Security Administration is going to raise the price of Medicare by 8 or 10 bucks and I am more than happy to have them rip it from my monthly check.
Now that things have moderately returned to normal I’m ready to hit the water. I’ve got some heavy duty insulated and water proof overalls. coat. Boots, gloves and balaclava. A new thermos and inflatable life vest that can be worn under the coat. I’m ready, but the weather has gone to hell so, well, shit.
I’ve been away from the keyboard for a good while now; just shy of a year. I have missed posting and exchanging ideas with a few stalwart readers (and the odd passerby).
I’m going to turn it back on and so I’m whipping the lazy electrons that lurk just beyond the surface of my keyboard and, with a rapidly receding hairline and diminished cognitive function, will expose the world once more to the ramblings of a cranky old soldier and die hard Zonian.
A good early winter weather pattern is setting in and I’m almost all set to hit Wheeler reservoir and the Elk River. Here is what the out week looks like:
I’ve invested in a good set of insulated weather gear and once Amazon sees fit to deliver my watertight boots I’ll be all set. I changed the engine oil and gear oil in the bottom end and took the boat out two weeks ago. Surprisingly, I landed a 3 or 4 pound very aggressive large mouth on the large chartreuse (yeller) spinner-bait shown below.
The redish colored spinner above the yellow one I tied on earlier today after watching a couple of videos by Alex Rudd and saw the mass of bass he was pulling in from like type waters (he’s in eastern Tennessee) with a lure that color. I had one like type (kinda/sorta like) lure in my tackle box but it resembled a fish and I wanted to get a closer match to the crawdad so I picked up the one on the right above from Wally-world yesterday.
Here are a couple of video’s that demonstrate how well this type of lure is working right now.
Here is lure that I already had: colors are a good match, but (again) mine is fish like and I needed one that resembles a crawdad.
I’ve got several spots marked out where all the smart folk say the bass are hanging around this time of year. On the map below it’s about 6 miles from the star to the right most triangle. The ‘star’ on the map is where I launch, triangles are where I intend on filling the live well.
I could throw a bucket of bits and bites into my Jeep and drive them to where they needed to go and it would be faster than my internet service is this morning.
Ping (Packet Internet or Inter-Network Groper) measures the time to query and respond between two IP addresses. The test above was to and from HughesNet. A ping speed under 20ms is true goodness, acceptable is between 50 and 100. Ping above 150ms is bad. Measured from one speed test provider (above) showed that I’m double ungood very bad at 1045 ms. A test from another test provider (below) verified this suckedness.
My ‘jitter’ also sucks: Jitter is a measure of the time delay in the sending of data packets over a network. Essentially, the longer data packets take the more jitter can negatively impact video and audio quality. 150 ms (I guess) is considered the maximum tolerable jitter.
I’ll not go into my upload/download speeds. Numbers this bad remind me of the dark ages of computing and my Commodore 64 with a dial up modem.
The fiber optic install guy is scheduled for 10 this morning. He will be bringing a new ‘whole home’ modem that I assume is WiFi 6 enabled. I’ve ordered two Amazon Firestick 4K plus (WiFi 6) for my older TVs. They will arrive this afternoon. I’ve shopped around and found a TP-Link’s ‘ WiFi internet adapter for the computer that is rated at speeds greater than my planned fiber speed ( 2.4 GHz at 400 Mbps and 5 GHz at 867 Mbps). 250 Mbps is what I’m slated to have installed. Frankly, they could install a 20 year old mule and I’d have faster action than I currently ‘enjoy’. More to follow.
I kicked my own ass yesterday with the weed-eater. I knew better than to get out during the heat of the day, but was jammed up on time and wanted to make sure that the ‘fiber guy’ could access the clam shell they put in on the edge of my property a couple of weeks ago. I started at 9 AM and by 3 PM the body started pushing back with heavy cramping in the fingers and toes; it was time to quit for the day.
Today, if the weather holds this afternoon, I’ll finish what I started yesterday and trim up some around the house. I also need to get the water line cover back in place from my ‘improbable’ water leak from last week. It’s improbable because the place that the leak occurred was a crack in brass connector between a 3/4 inch PEC tube and the pressure regulator adjacent to the cabin. I have no idea how that brass cracked/split.
And so with the promise of rain, the need to reinstall the water cover, trim around the house, finish trimming the fence line on the front of the property, run to the vet to get the dog her pharmaceuticals, clean up the mess I made while the wife spent the last couple of days at the kids house, and cucumbers/egg plants/potatoes/beans that need to put into the ground (all of which needs to be done today) I’m thinking the posting will be light for the next day or two.
One thing for certain though, I’m going to slow down enough to experience the beauty and wonder of this place. Have a great week.
El Leon is the first of two currently built Mangusta GranSport 54’s. The third is under construction in Italy and should be completed later this year or early next. Stock price is 34 or 35 million Euro.
It’s a sweet ride if you can get into one.
I’m thinking it would take around $50 million to acquire, staff, and moor/dock this puppy for 10 years or so, It’s on my hit list when I win the Power Ball.
Of course a 54 meter boat is not the first major thing I’d spring for, the top of my list (once I cash in and make distributions) is a little spot on the Tennessee River. This is what works for me:
It’s almost 18,000 sf and weighs in at $9 million. The good new is that the curtains stay (as does everything else). Great photo’s here.
There is a hell of a back story associated with the house. It seems that the guy that built/owns it was a plumber or pipe fitter out of Muscle Shoals who ‘done good’. Flush with cash he begins building this thing on 27 acres. He likes fast cars and HD’s and so builds a huge garage/shop a little ways off from the house and throws up a couple of those fake old school pumps in front of his garage.
Well one of the neighbors, a male Karen, came snooping around and began investigating the pumps peeking into the building. Big mistake for three reasons: 1st, they are inop. 2nd, you really shouldn’t be wandering on a country boys property. And 3rd, you never want to fuck with someone that can afford to hire a good lawyer.
So now the place is up for sale because, I’m guessing here, The owner (David Duplissey) freaked out at a race track that he owned and beat the shit out of an employee that tried to boss David around. He lost the track and the house is now up for sale.
That’s the way we do it in the south boys and girls. It’s just like living in a trailer; easy come and easy go (in stormy weather).
My best guess at the cost to acquire, staff, and maintain the property for 15 years: Just short of $18 million.
After a rummaging through my seed bank I found that I had 5 varieties of carrots. Two packages are labeled for 2019 use which means that, as a guess, I stand a 50/50 chance of those seeds being viable. Carrot seeds are said to be viable for 3 years but what I don’t know is when the seeds were ‘put up’: 2019 may have been the third year of seeds saved from 2016. Guess I’ll find out in about 14-21 days.
So I turned the soil again in 5 of my raised beds, leveled them off, and planted the onion seedlings I had going and the seeds from the 5 carrot varieties.
Amsterdam Minicor (54-75 days). A gourmet carrot from Holland, grown for tender baby carrots 3-4 in. long, or 6-7 in. long when grown to full size. Sweet, fine-grained, deep orange, and uniform in size and shape.
Danvers 126 (65-75 days) . Carrots have a firm and crisp flesh with excellent flavor. Very productive and a fine keeper.
Danvers 126 Half Long (70-80 Days) An improvement on the original Danvers Half Long variety, it has a sweeter flavor, better crack resistance, and heavier yields. Fine grain, and a deep orange cortex and core without a halo.
Autumn King (70-85 days): Bright-orange Imperator-type roots that reach up to twelve inches long and two-and-one-half inches in diameter.
Berlicum (80 days) Beautiful 8”, good-sized roots are extra-smooth, long, and blunt. A deep orange color with a fine carrot flavor. Slender roots tend to stay tender and not become woody.
My ass is dragging today as it’s been several months since I’ve done that much bending over (OBTW, keep your dirty mind to yourself; that type of bending over ended when I retired!).
I don’t know if home gardeners face he same dilemma I do each spring. After seeing a highly favorable monthly forecast (my April forecast below) the temptation is to blow off caution and to get the party rocking in the garden.
For each passing day that the forecast proves to be kinda/sorta right the pressure to plant mounts. By the time the 17th of April (my average last frost date) arrives I’m typically battling both the ‘spring urge’ and the pressure that comes from seedlings that are rapidly outgrowing the seeding trays.
April weather forecast for Minor Hill Tennessee
Without fail, we always (always, always, always) get a killing frost in the last week of April. What I can’t understand is: If I know that it will frost in the last week of April, why am I forced to battle the temptation to fill in the garden before the 1st of May? .
It’s not like I don’t have better things to do in the early spring. So why the look of indecision on my face?
I went up and did some needed dirt turning in the garden earlier today. I was going to put it off yet again until I ran across some photos I took late last year. Here are a few of those. that got me off of my ass and into the dirt. As I recall it was a salsa making day!
This tray had some peppers: bell, orange bell, Anaheim (green narrow ones) banana (yellow and lower in the tray)Japalenoes and CilantroRoma’s, bell and banana peppers
A countertop consumed by fresh salsa makins.
Now here are a few pictures of the garden while it was producing last year:
Cantaloupe growing on a trellis Trellised beans and cucumbersSeveral varieties of lettuce cabbage and other greens early in the season
Some of plantings I’ll be making in the garden this year are ‘cautionary’: things that I’ll probably not harvest in earnest unless the economy tanks or the supply channels become more shaky. To that end I’ll be planting a great deal of those thing that can be easily preserved and provide good nutrition should the hard times come.
A few of the things (mainly some types of tomatoes, peppers, egg plant, cantaloupe, lettuce and cabbage) will be put in so as to harvest the seeds later in the year. Tomatoes are an example of this, over the last couple of years I accumulated seeds for 14 different types of tomatoes. I’ll be growing cherry tomatoes (Chadwick, Besser, Tommy Toe) for consumption and dehydrating. Two determinate paste varieties (Roma and Martino’s Roma) and one indeterminate (Amish Paste), are for this year’s canning and various sauces and, believe it or not, jam. Slicers are Homestead 24, Mortgage Lifter, Bonny Best, Beefsteak, and Red Brandywine. The rest (Katinka Cherry, Melanie’s Ballet, a VF variety of Roma, Bonny Best, and Red Brandywine) are being planted to keep a fresh supply of seeds on hand if needed.
I started all of my seedlings two weeks later this year. Last year they had grown sow large before I could get them into the garden that they were, in many cases root bound. My average frost date is said to be April 17th, but that ain’t the things have been breaking for the last 7 years or so: My garden goes in beginning on the 1st of May.
A pleasant and less traveled trail along a east running ravine at my place.
I’ve been on that ‘road less traveled. for a little more than a year. It’s been rough and rewarding. It’s been a good while since I’ve subjected unsuspecting web crawlers to my self-absorbed drivel. It looks like their luck may have taken a turn for the worse.
Now that I’ve got the electrons working (mostly) the way the developers intended (vice the way the hackers and other sundry villains had devised), I’ll soon be exercising the keyboard once again. I say mostly working because I’m still constrained by my satellite dependent ISP whose speed can quite literally be measured as a baud rate.
After more than 2 years of phone messaging and unanswered emails to Loretto Telecom, they called me out of the blue 3 weeks ago and said they were laying fiber optic cable and asked if I would I be interested. They have three plans 250, 500 and 1,000 Mbps (both ways). the 250 is $55 monthly and I’d owe another 20 bucks for phone service. I’m over 100 monthly with Hughes.net now and the last time I checked the speed it was 1 Mbps. And, oh bye the way, it doesn’t work in the rain.
At first I thought that installation charges were going to eat me up as they will need to run the fiber underground from the edge of my property to the cabin: 2300 feet. They said that it cost 85 cents a foot for every foot over 400 from the property line. After a few exchanges we agreed on 600 free feet if my daughter and SIL signup as well. I don’t know how they can dig a trench, run the fiber and fill it back in for 85 cents a foot but they assured me that was the installed price. Once in, we will owe for 1700 feet (2300-600) times 85 cents divided between me and the SIL. That’s a little more than $700 each. Sign me up!
Along the bank of Second Creek (the first creek east of Wilson Dam).
Anyway, I’ll soon be back from the road less traveled and be able to post with reasonable certainty that the site won’t ‘time-out’ before my electrons work their magic.
The garden is beginning to push out the first of the many promised goodies of the year. While I’ve been pulling and sharing three lettuce types for a couple of weeks, it looks like my variety of cherry tomatoes called ‘Katinka’ are coming into their own. I’ve got 5 of these plants, three are pruned to a single vine while the other two have two vines each. The fruit when mature is orange/gold and they are a blast fresh from the plant.
This is the first year that I’ve pruned my cuc’s to a single vine and the first year that I’ve gone with fermenting them instead of pickling with vinegar and canning. I’ve never previously pruned a cucumber plant, and it was painful. Here is a video that explains it better than I ever could:
It’s painful because I worked so hard to get them from a seed to a seedling, through the transplant, past the frost, and finally growing on a trellis. To cut them back is counter intuitive.
I pulled enough yesterday afternoon for two quarts of pickles. I drove over to the Puncheon Church of Christ and filled 12 quart jars from the hillside spring and boiled it to get rid of the bad stuff/things. I figure that I’ll be putting up several quarts per week so I’ll have extra water prepared. I’m going with spring water for all my ferments from now on, the crap that comes out of the faucet just doesn’t cut it. Here is a re-post of the spring from earlier this year:
I pickled using 2 TBLS salt per quart of water (vice quart of pickles) and added dill seed, thyme, garlic, fresh cracked black pepper, a touch of cumin and a little bit of tea out of a ‘Red Diamond’ tea bag. I hear that the tannins in black tea (and in grape leaves) will keep the pickles crisp for a good long while.
Glass weights topped off inside with a loose fitting lid outside and I was done. Will know in about 3 days if/how I need to adjust.
I see that my Patty Pan squash has begun to yield. There are few things better than roasting halved Patty Pan with butter and seasoning as a topping. Good eats!
A couple of weeks ago I went a little north of my place, 2 or 3 miles at most, to look at an old cemetery that sat on property a friend owned. Divorce forced the sale of the 500 acres he and his kids enjoyed on weekends and he now lives exclusively in Huntsville, AL. In addition to the ‘cabin’ he erected it had an old cemetery and an extremely old cabin that was once both the home and ‘office’ of a rural physician. The old cabin has been sold off and moved; the tiny cemetery remains as a reminder of things, thoughts, and people past.
It’s really hard to wrap your head around how different a world it is in this area of rural America. Little has changed over the many decades since the doctor plied his craft and, given the proximity of the cemetery to his home, he was not always successful in beating back the death and disease. The cemetery has a bell that, no doubt, was meant to summon God’s angel as the countryside is as void of a people then as it is now.
Every now and again someone will ask ‘why Thomas W(h)ispered’ if I’m not going to talk up God and bash various Christian religious shortcomings. “Garry, why don’t you compare and contrast the sayings in Thomas with the books of the bible?” “Why not use your platform to inform minds and shift opinions?” My answer to this prodding is: “My heart is not black enough.” What terrible hurt/harm comes from challenging a belief that brings comfort to the otherwise inconsolable. Consider the tombstone above and, given such a loss, how would a young couple go on in this world without the belief that their child now sleeps with Jesus? ‘Blessed Thought’ indeed !
How remote is it? The orange arrow below is the cemetery and the blue where the old doctors cabin once stood.
A broader view provided by Google Earth shows that there really is nothing much more than farmland nearby. The orange below is the cemetery and the blue is the Puncheon Church of Christ.
The Puncheon Church is wedged between a rural road on the left and a creek on the right. Obviously this neck of the woods is not real big on ‘minimum setbacks’ that restrict building encroachments on roadways or this church might never have been built. It could not have been built on the left side of the road, the steep ass hill prohibits it. The right side of the church bumps up to a fairly robust stream so it could not have been erected there. So exactly why was it built where it is? I’m guessing it has something to do with the strong spring that can be seen on the left side of the road in the photo below.
Here is another look at the spring. That’s about 15 foot of waterfall from the head to the ground. The spring doesn’t always run this strong, but it always runs. A magical place.
This entire region of rural America is full of clues on how generations past viewed God and how He framed their lives. From the baptisms in the stream near a tiny rural church to the summoning of angels from a lonesome hillside bell these folk managed to squeeze by. A life consisted of grabbing enough land to build a home, raise and feed a family, and then lay at rest in the arms of God once the work was done.
Not much has or will change here. America can run through it’s gyrations with black lives matter, reparations, the mainstreaming of queers/steers/transvestites, and the chaos of pandemics/vaccinations/inoculations/masks and TP gluts and shortages. One day the nation may come crashing down with rubble congregating at the feet of those that took more than they gave, destroyed more than they built. When that happens I really don’t see it having any impact on this corner of the world. The flow of light from the little church, waters of life from the spring, and the rest of souls on a nearby hill all persist. And despite what all those in the cancel culture believe, that’s a good thing.
Your host today in the backwoods of Southern Middle Tennessee
I took some time away from the endless series of tasks in my garden today to engage in a little idle thought in the endless garden God created. He’s a lot better at gardening than I am, but then again he had a running start.
Sometime during the late afternoon I had the odd feeling that more and more things in my life were beginning to transition to autopilot. I guess the repetition that comes from keeping a vegetable garden contributes to that feeling in no small way. I battled back and broke away in the jeep to an old trail on the north side of the property, following it down into the valley where our little stream flows. And flows, and flows…….
It occurred to me that the valley exists because of the stream. For thousands of years the little stream flowed; moving a pebble here and there. A stone on a good day. The little stream has kept about it’s endless task of terraformng this small little part of the planet long before man ever tread on the continent. For a brief while I fell into the slipstream of time the flow of water had created. Time
Time. There is much to little time to spend any of it on autopilot.
Yeah, I know I’ve been sounding like a whiny little bitch as of late and I know that this weather has certainly placed other good folk in much more uncomfortable, and in many cases dire, circumstances than I’m in. But (insert appropriate expletive) I’m iced in and the forecast says the temps will remain low enough to keep me locked down for the next couple of days.
Placing my self-centeredness aside briefly, let me wish each of you safe passage through this terrible winter storm. Stay safe out there !
Sure as shit, shortly after I posted the forecast for Sunday being marginally sufferable (in the teens), the forecast changes for the better. I love it ! 24 is bunches better than 17.
For the last several weeks the local weather has been forecasting a night time temp that was in the teens. In every instance after a day or two the forecast would change and we would enjoy milder temps in the mid 20’s or so.
This 17 degree low popped up two days ago and continues to haunt the forecast; creeping closer day by day. While I hate weather that cold, I guess this is a small discomfort in what has otherwise been a mild and very enjoyable winter. We had a new calf appear two weeks ago and thankfully it is far enough along to take this very brief low spell in stride. Plenty of hay in the barn. the pond is filled with water. all fences repaired, and our little creek flush with rain late last week.
The garden is completely closed and all of the beds and planting areas were reinforced with compost, fertilized and then tucked in nicely under woven cloth. All the seeds I’ve ordered have been delivered, a germination test on the beans I purchased at the grocery store (pinto, black, lima, and kidney) all came out well and I have a pound of soy seeds left over from my soy sauce ferment, so along with the bean seeds I’ve purchased (Kentucky Wonder and Blue Lake) I’m good bean-wise.
My mold spores came in on Monday so I’ve got 4 gallon jugs filled about 4/5th full with what was a molded soy and wheat substrate and water drawn from a spring near the cabin. This is a long running ferment (6-14 months) so it will be quite awhile before I’ll know if I inoculated correctly (or nay).
Hope each of you find a way to stay warm and comfy during the days of cold !
This is a great video by a couple of rural folk talking about their garden. One thing they hit on was the scarcity of seeds across the entire industry. That chat begins at about the 6 minute mark.
In the first few days of this year, after watching one of the Liziqi videos, I decided that a good way for me to introduce a little more frustration into my life and to waste both time and money would be to try my hand at fermenting soy sauce. Because I’m pretty much pleased with life and I’ve not quite saved enough for the funeral that would surely follow if I attempted the Korean variety, I decided on fermenting a traditional Japanese sauce.
Off I went looking at the types that are commonly made and the methods used. I settled on a Aspergillus Oryzae mold and found a source in Austria. These folk seemed to know what they were doing and had a great tutorial, in English, on exactly how ferment ‘Shoyu’. That tutorial is here.
I’ve got pieces and parts of the recipe inbound. Mold from Austria, soy beans from Iowa, wheat from Washington state and salt from the Bahamas. I’ll use water from one of the springs that feed the little stream out back.
I had wanted to make this from soy beans raised in my garden and wheat from a nearby farm, but it will be another 8 months before my garden will kick out the beans. This has got a brew time of 14 months so I’ll be in soy heaven come March of 2022.
There are both pro’s and con’s of living a rural life. For some the relative isolation is unbearable, for others a God send. Dragging my butt 25 or so miles each way to pick up weekly groceries is a pain and now that I’m aged, my back hurts and my legs are cramped on both ends of the journey. While I think the thousands of pro/con comparisons weigh heavily towards the rural, I’m obviously a minority as only 17 percent of Americans feel the same. The other 83 percent live the urban/suburban life.
The 17 percent number is eroding exponentially. Right now rural areas are loosing roughly 300,000 annually while city dwellers are growing by a little over 2,000,000 annually. As things stand, our 330 million in population is split 273 million to 57. As this degradation in population continues so goes the political influence and value system. In 10 years little or no consideration will be given to the wants/needs of the rural population in America. It’s probably a good thing that the most important want/need is centered around ‘keep the hell out of my life’.
In short, we are insulated from the insanity that springs up in the population centers. No riots, no BLM/Antifa, no men running around in skirts with green hair and nose rings. But, to think/say that we are immune to the decisions made by politicians (and their fine constituents) is a mistake. Case in point: canning lids.
You may be able to detect that I’m still pissed about not being able to instantly go on line and execute a resupply. There is absolutely no logical reason that a commodity that is used almost exclusively by a rural population, a population that is shrinking, should be completely sold out at every retail outlet in the country. What few items are available are selling at 5+ times their normal price. Lids are now so expensive that, when they can be found, you can actually buy two 12 packs of canning jars (with glass jars, rings, and lids) for less that 12 individual lids. This is insane!
I’ve solved my lid issue. I’ve invested in bunches of ‘reusables’ that are said to have an 8 year life. I’m not sure that whatever drags us back into the stone age is going to last that long, but I am sure whatever causes it can be laid at the feet of the wondrous ‘leaders’ the urbanites install into office.
