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By Annette, on January 28th, 2012% Much like the Dervaes clan and their ill-advised foray into attempting to trademark common phrases, The National Wildlife Federation decided it would be a grand idea to partner with Scott’s. The fallout has been rather spectacular and outrage is spreading – if you’ll pardon the term – like wildfire. Scott’s make a variety of chemicals for gardens and lawns, and is also the distributor for Monsanto’s RoundUp. To top things off, Scott’s was just assessed fines totaling $4.5 million (US) for knowingly selling tainted birdseed and for falsifying EPA pesticide registration numbers. The very rich irony here is the statement from NWF about how part of their reasoning behind the partnership with Scott’s is to address the “alarming decline” in songbird populations.
Massive fail.
By Annette, on January 13th, 2012% We have four monarch butterfly chrysalides hanging in the front planting area near the walkway. We had not actually seen the various caterpillars that were munching on the butterfly bush form their cozy little homes, but one day, there they were. Had four, that is: two butterflies emerged from theirs, and two remain, no doubt hibernating against the cold weather.
One of the newly emerged butterflies we found on the driveway on Thursday while Getting Things Done here at the ranch. It was still damp from its chrysalis, and I plucked it off the driveway to keep it from getting stomped by a wayward foot. It is a thing of beauty to hold such a creature, truly.
By Annette, on January 12th, 2012% My sister and mom cleaned more stuff out of the garage today, toting it to the barn and arranging it. They also moved a bunch of dirt, a handful of pallets, and moved a triple stack of large stone pavers from one place to another. I was very impressed by their industry.
What was I doing? My “helper” (my nephew) and I were reconfiguring some of the 4×4 frames up in the front garden into 4×20 frames. Well, mostly, I was doing this, and my nephew was playing with the drill, or playing with the dog, or escaping to ride his tractor around the yard while yelling questions or commentary to me. Three – almost four – year olds do have short attention spans, much like the dogs, so it isn’t anything out of the ordinary, and he’s cute so there’s that. Having his “help” tends to slow down whatever is going on, but it’s good to have him around at this age, and enjoy him before he turns into a sullen teenager who would rather die than be caught hanging out with family.
In the end, the other team got much more done than we (I) did, but I did finish off that reconfiguration. One more down, and that’s good.
A check on the flats showed that the oregano has germinated quite nicely, and at least one of the stevia seeds has as well. Progress.
By Annette, on January 10th, 2012% Watching NCIS (and NCIS:LA), I always get some exposure to the local news and whatever they’re breathlessly hawking as something I should be interested in/terrified of enough to keep the channel tuned after these shows are over (hint: it will never be enough). Tonight’s poutrage involves some pedestrian crosswalk that apparently cost the city of Jacksonville a cool $200K. The news folks – whom of course I trust implicitly to design pedestrian walkways, or bridges, or multilevel structures that may need to hold hundreds of people at one time – want to tell me about the cheaper options. I’m tempted to watch to see if they offer up a solution of buying a couple of cans of spray paint from Home Depot and enlisting the services of some random homeless dude for ten bucks to lay down the lines. But I’m not going to.
By Annette, on January 8th, 2012% And by “all” I mean the incredible stupidity some people possess, someone comes along and says something even dumber. It’s astonishing – especially given the blogger’s own obvious heritage – that they could possibly say such racist, bigoted things, but I suppose it’s a case of “MY multiculturalism being better than YOURS” (click on the About link to see why this is so ironic). It’s also richly ironic that she’s whining about the works of classical composer, who by far are foreign. How fortunate for her that the composers or their governments didn’t decree that non-natives were forbidden to perform their works. Or, in the case of Handel specifically, that the British government did not deem him too “ethnic” and deny him citizenship. That someone took the time to count – and calculate – the percentage of “asians” in an orchestra, and then posit that perhaps certain instruments are “too physically demanding” for them is just astonishing says great number of things indeed. About the person doing so.
By Annette, on January 3rd, 2012% Last night was supposed to be the onset of several nights of hard freezes around here. With that in mind, I did some harvesting late in the day, thinking this morning would see the pepper plants dead and black.
Not so. It only got down to just below freezing, and not for very long, and the peppers were all bright and healthy when I walked around this morning turning off the remote taps. Ah, I thought, another misfire by the forecasters, and another testament to the oddball happenings here in the Bermuda triangle of weather.
Tonight, Mother Nature has decided she’ll show us: it is currently very near freezing already, just past real sunset, and the temperature is dropping like a rock in a well. As one of our clients did something incredibly stupid which requires me to go to the NOC, and since I am not a fan of this type of weather, I am not looking forward to wherever this may bottom out – the forecasters say in the upper teens by dawn.
I suppose I should have known that the request the user submitted was not quite right, but then again, despite what people think, we do not actually have ESP around here, nor do we claim that we do. Once again, trying to out-user the user has just resulted in the user doing something even dumber than normal.
By Annette, on December 29th, 2011% Bad blogger, bad! No posting on a regular basis, what is wrong with you?
Nothing wrong, just incredibly busy around here. Our season has lasted well into the winter, and we’re still harvesting peppers. The tomatoes that showed some promise going into fall succumbed to massive worm damage, so once again this year, like last, no tomatoes (although for wildly different reasons, given that last year it was a cancer of a different sort).
There’s a monarch butterfly chrysalis attached to the upended cooler by my garage, which is right near the butterfly bush I planted for the other monarch caterpillars that graced us with their presence before moving on to whatever secret place they chose to attach themselves. I’m hoping to capture it as it emerges, whenever that happens to be, and I have the plant cam set up on it.
My dreams have been invaded by images of paintings I’ve never seen hanging in galleries I’ve never visited (or heard of). My subconscious is probably trying to tell me something.
My puppy had to have the top part of one of his (non weight-bearing) toes amputated because he tore the nailbed right away from the bone on a ball-fetching excursion. It’s sad to me that he was in pain, but good that he’ll heal just fine and he’ll be right back to his duties.
The bees have been ordered, and should ship to us in May. We’ll be able to put these things to good use.
Most of this will be gone from the new barn when spring arrives, as they’ll be set up as homes for the three packages of bees (and queens) we’ll be receiving. Everyone is pretty excited about this, including me, and I’m looking forward to spring even more than usual.
Seeds for the new year were ordered and have arrived (mostly), and the next two weeks will be seed starting time in the small barn, under the lights – which I need to rerig for the pulley system I came up with to make things easier to wrangle under them. As with years past, we’ll be attempting a good variety of tomatoes to see what we like, or is we can just get any to maturity and get a harvest. This year will be better planned than previous years, to be sure.
The garlic went into the frames in late October, and is doing wonderfully thus far. By my estimate, I planted out over 2000 individual cloves this year, which will give us plenty to use and some to save as seed for next year’s planting season, I expect. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to sell some as well, since this is not the usual garlic found in grocery stores.
Here’s hoping the new year will be better than the previous years. Be sage, be happy.
By Annette, on October 3rd, 2011% As I was getting a prescription for eye drops filled – for reasons that will become clear – I was looking at all the food (in some cases, that term is used very loosely) that I can no longer eat for whatever reason. Many of those reasons are dental: I have crowns, missing teeth, and some weak teeth, so terribly crunchy things are out of the question, and I have so little tongue movement that some foods I simply cannot move around well to chew enough to get down (lettuce is a huge issue). While some things are really unfortunate – I’d kill or seriously maim to be able to eat a good salad now and again – in other cases, like the sheer variety of Halloween candy, it comes in handy to be able to avoid chowing down. In a lot of cases, I no longer even have the desire to eat any of that sweet stuff anyway. Good and bad, pros and cons everywhere.
The drops were for my eyes, to help my night vision. About three years ago, I had lasik on both eyes. The right eye, where I had an astigmatism, turned out really well. The left eye I was never completely satisfied with, but the folks at the place where I had it done didn’t seem terribly enthusiastic about doing/recommending anything, and in both eyes, night vision is poor. So I found someone else, because lately, the left eye is getting significantly worse, to the point of giving me headaches from time to time. They did a full workup, even doing one of the image captures twice, and the doctor says there is some cloudiness at the bottom of the left lens. Precursor to a cataract? Some side effect of getting blasted with radiation (since the more powerful dose was on the left side, where the cancer was)? Who knows. In the meantime, he recommended doing nothing for now, and rechecking in six months. So we shall see (get it?) where that leads.
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 29th, 2011%
 My sister and nephew came over today to help with hauling mulch in the front garden. My nephew spent most of his time zipping around in his tractor, playing with the dogs, and playing in a kiddie sprinkler. He did, however, help me spread hay over a reseeded area, throwing the hay with gusto – and getting it in his hair and all over Einstein, who of course had to see what we were doing. This was taken by my sister as we took a break, discussing his need to play Wii while we were finishing up the day.
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2012 Harvest Totals Eggs: 703
Vegetables:
Cucumber: 6 3/4 oz
Bean, green snap: 20#
Peas (shelling): 1# 12 3/8 oz
Peppers (bell, all colors): 7# 1 7/8 oz
Herbs:
Dill: 8 oz
Marjoram: 5/8 oz
Oregano: 3/8 oz
Rosemary: 7 1/2 oz
Thyme: 6 oz
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