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By Annette, on October 2nd, 2011% Sometimes, it seems like days just start off badly, as if the world wants to crack an eye at the sunrise, yawn, and roll over for a bit more sleep.
This morning was one of those mornings. The plan was to get up in the wee hours, get the smoker going, and have some pulled pork ready by the 1 PM games. I thought I had slept through my alarm, having had only two hours of sleep the night before. Not the case: I simply set it for PM instead of AM in my fog. When I did get up and go to get the smoker going, I found that the smoker portion of my Bradley was not working at all. I also found that I was going to have to go to the NOC to take care of a server that was simply down for no apparent reason and which would not respond to a reboot request.
Thinking the smoker issue may have just been built up sawdust in the feeder, I left the heating side of the smoker on, so it would be fully to temp by the time I got back, and hurried off to the NOC. Problem found: blown power supply. Easily enough solved by swapping out the power supply, but a pain in the ass for interrupting my day, which was already not starting off well.
Back at the ranch, I finally discovered the motor that powers the feeder arm was simply not working at all. I figured I could just rig something to keep the microswitch in the down position, hoping this would keep the smoker from knowing the arm was not moving. Didn’t work – the timer that feeds the wood expects the switch to trigger and then depress when the motor arm comes around once more. The switch is also not in a position easily reached when the control unit is back together. Alas, no smoking available. But the heat still worked, so I went in to rub down the butt and get it in the thing.
I made the rub, using my usual 20+ ingredients, and then dropped one of the bottles straight down on the tile while putting it away, shattering the thing and spewing glass everywhere. Swell.
By 9:30, the butt was finally on the smoker. We didn’t eat until the late games were well underway. It was good, but not as good as it usually is, of course. I also made rolls, mom made potato salad, and I’d made a huge batch of barbeque sauce the last time around, so at the end of the day, my sisters, newphew, mom, and I had watched a bunch of football and eaten good homemade food. Not a bad end to a day that started off so poorly.
On the plus side, it was another absolutely gorgeous day on the ranch, although unlike yesterday, almost all of which I spent outside, I did nothing outdoors today at all. Tomorrow after getting one of my eyes looked at, I hope to transplant some tomatoes at least to get the last ones out of the flats. From there, I’ll be left with the brassicas and the onions to get into the frames, and will be able to move on to breaking apart the garlic bulbs into cloves and prep for that planting. The great garlic plantout of 2011 is at hand.
By Annette, on September 20th, 2011% The new seed garlic has arrived – all 71 pounds of it.
 This year, as last year, the seed garlic is from Big John’s Garlic. The bulbs this year are much larger than last year’s.
Our seed stock this year is Chesnok Red, Inchelium Red, Metechi, and Lorz Italian. I had thought I’d not ordered the latter, but apparently I did, as five pounds of it is in the boxes. By far the most we will be planting are the first two, at 30 pounds each. I’ll leave it to the math majors to figure out how many pounds of Metechi that means we have.
This is also a lot more garlic than we planted last year, so should be interesting to see how many frames it takes to devote to getting it all out. If next year cooperates and it doesn’t go from mid-70s to near 100 in the span of a week, our harvest should stay on track and give us enough goodly sized bulbs that we can save the largest bulbs for replanting next fall. Not that I mind ordering from Big John’s, but it takes an awful lot of garlic to keep us supplied here between what we use and what we provide to family, so we do need a decent amount of seed stock over and above what we will consume.
By Annette, on September 12th, 2011% One of the additions we made this spring to the ranch was berries. I’d never really considered small fruits before, beyond the wild blackberries that grow all around the property, but while I was wandering around the garden center one day, there they were. At first, we had picked up two, but went back for four more. All went into the front garden area and then we waited.
 Well worth the wait, I must say. This was just one of many harvest rounds – the smaller harvests didn’t actually make it into the house at all, between my mother and my nephew. Although I can no longer eat blueberries that way, they are still spectacular in muffins, pancakes, and my shakes.
By Annette, on September 11th, 2011% Yesterday, we had some additional labor on the ranch. Today, we did not – not much of a surprise, as the sheer physicality of much of what we do is not something that most people enjoy or can do, even if there is money involved. That’s fine: never underestimate girl power in the realm of Getting Things Done. Today we finished laying down the rest of the plastic around the front garden, reset the fence (and I added three more gates while we did this), started trenching for the edging around that, did finish the edging around the herb garden, weeded, hauled trash out, mowed, watered, cleaned up all the detritus and tools from our work, and generally worked from sunrise, took a break during the high temp hours, and continued until sunset. The moon rose as we put up the last of the tools.
It reminded me quite a bit of this.
 Why? Because the females of the hive are the worker bees. That’s how it turned out for us today.
Speaking of bees, my sister and I will be taking a beekeeping course this Saturday, as I want to get things in motion to have bees next spring. I don’t each much honey straight off – I don’t drink tea any longer, and honey alone is a bit too acidic for my mouth – but I do a lot of cooking with honey, and other members of the family use honey on a regular basis, so I thought it would be cool to add that to the list of things we produce (or gather, as it may be) on the homestead. We would get the added benefit of having pollinators on the ranch so as not to have to rely so much on the incidental pollinators we get around here.
Butternut squash soup tonight for dinner, with onions and garlic right from the ranch. It will be just as good tomorrow for breakfast before diving back into the work that never ends.
By Annette, on April 6th, 2011% Captured on the Lazy Dog Ranch timelapse cam that is currently awaiting the unfolding of a sunflower, from March 27 near dusk.
By Annette, on March 29th, 2011% 
Well, maybe not. After all, I can no longer drink alcohol thanks to the radiation treatments, and no one here is a big wine drinker anyway. But, for fresh eating – especially for my nephew, who has quite the fondness for fresh fruits and vegetables while here at the ranch, even though according to my sister doesn’t when he’s at home – these will be just fine.
By Annette, on March 28th, 2011% It’s amazing what you can find when you really take a look.
This the the everbearing strawberry group, in the early morning hours before the sun has kissed away all of the dew.
By Annette, on March 24th, 2011% Wisteria
Leeks
Oranges
Dill
Sage
Meyer lemon
Fig
Grapefruit
Peach
Blueberries
By Annette, on February 25th, 2011% Someone will have to, eventually.
The days are getting longer, the girls are a bit older, it’s warmer, and apparently they’re beginning to hit their stride. They must have heard our nefarious plan to replace them, and kicked things into motion. I suppose we’ll have to keep them, and when the new chicks start laying as well, we’ll be getting a lot of eggs in any given day. Hopefully people around here will be ready to have fresh eggs always on hand.
Oh, the quote: if you’ve never seen Cool Hand Luke, you should.
By Annette, on February 19th, 2011% No, it does not involve brainless or rude clients this time.
The other day, I sat down and watched some documentaries, mostly (of course) related to food and the production of it, one after another.
We Feed the World – Subtitled. About the production o food in various countries and the lives of people who create it.
Our Daily Bread – No dialogue. Images of production and processing of foods from tomatoes to beef, and the people working on the lines or in the fields (or, in some cases, in what amount to hazmat suits, spraying down the vegetables).
The World According to Monsanto – This is, as you would imagine, about Monsanto, the giant conglomerate that controls a lot of how food is produced. The format is a little cheesy, with segments starting off with Google searches, but the information is sound. And a little scary.
The Future of Food – Primarily about GMO (genetically modified) and GE (genetically engineered) foods, and the companies that want to control food from the seed to the supermarket.
Food, Inc. – An overall look at how a handful of major corporations control about 80% of the food that is produced and the conditions under which livestock is raised and processed. There is also a segment on organic foods, and ironically, some of the more well known organic outfits are owned or are subsidiaries of giant multinational companies, something many people don’t know. There is also a segment on Monsanto’s “farm police” who go around to farmers and accuse them of infringing on Monsanto’s patents just because their GE crops cross pollinated into another field. I have to admit, this sort of thing as seen in various of these movies really did make me angry – and it’s why that while I hold a number of stocks in my portfolio, Monsanto will never, ever be one of those.
Watching all of these back to back is enough to get angry and disgusted, but also enough to boost up the motivation to grow some things on your own if at possible. And really, it is possible: you don’t need acres of land like I have (even though it will take years more of work for me to rehab the soil to make it viable, leaving me to grow in frames for the time being), and you don’t even need a huge back yard to do it. From people growing tomatoes in pots on their balconies to people who have built a couple of frames in their tiny back yards, it is possible to supplement or replace the often tasteless things you can buy at the store. And it will be something where you know exactly how it was grown, how it was handled, and who grew it. Because you grew it yourself. Anyone who has plucked a ripe tomato off a plant and eaten it while standing in the sunshine breathing in the green smell of plants and the gritty earth knows the difference. I highly recommend that everyone give it a try.
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2012 Harvest Totals Eggs: 174
Vegetables:
Peas (shelling): 1# 12 3/8 oz
Peppers (bell, all colors): 7# 1 7/8 oz
Herbs:
Marjoram: 5/8 oz
Oregano: 3/8 oz
Rosemary: 7 1/2 oz
Thyme: 6 oz
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