Tag Archives: Food

Food, Gardening, Geek stuff, Homestead, Life in general

Some days

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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.

Food, Gardening

The next round of antivampire planting

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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.

Food, Gardening, Homestead

Honest labor

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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.

Cats, dogs, chickens, and other critters, Food

“I can eat fifty eggs”

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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.

Food, Gardening, Movies

A way to get angry, and a way to get motivated

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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.

Food, Gardening, Homestead

Dreams of spring

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It’s true that every place in the world has its own seasonality. For some reason, many people, when they think of Florida, think that all of Florida is exactly the same, and that there is never a real winter here.

They’re wrong.

Northern parts of the state, while not reaching the epic lows of other places, do have their share of frigid weather (as do other parts of the state – anyone who has ever heard about risks to the citrus crops will understand this is the case). We live with it because our winter is generally blissfully short, and when spring comes, it rapidly passes through like so many birds migrating through on their way to other places: some years, true “spring” weather can be measured in weeks, rather than months as in other places.

Knowing that winter is fleeting and spring just a bit less so is a tad frustrating for those of us impatient to get seed flats started so they can be planted out to take full advantage of the long growing season we have here. Start too early, and the young plants go leggy and bound in their pots, awaiting prime weather. Start too late, and there is no proper spring period to harden them off before summer comes blazing in.

Last year, I started too early, but managed to work with the plants to keep them in shape until they could be safely planted out, and if our season here had not been interrupted by medical issues, I think we could have had quite the bounty. I’m trying not to make that same mistake this year, and forcing myself to wait until February to begin the flats under the lights in the barn. That’s made difficult when the seeds and plants start arriving, mocking the farmer champing at the bit to get moving.

This is the first round of received seed from the massive order I placed: Johnny’s, Burpee, and Territorial. The other day, I received plants from Willis Orchard, just in time for another untropical few days and nights: four types of bamboo, a couple of dogwood trees (“How can you tell a dogwood apart from other trees? By its bark, yuk yuk.”), and some blackberry canes to replace the ones the dogs ran down (long story) and the ones the redneck neighbor killed by spraying some kind of horrible chemical along our common fenceline. I’m still awaiting shipments from Fedco, Bountiful, Shumway, Gurney’s, and Vesey’s, as well as backordered and separately shipping items from the first three through the door. As you might imagine, we’re planning a big year here. There are still some things to complete, like building and filling the final row of frames for the rear garden, and I have almost convinced myself to redo the irrigation lines in all three gardens, but I have no doubt that we’ll be ready when the time comes to plant out the babies as spring makes an appearance at the ranch.

Food, Gardening, Homestead

Reprieve

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I just noticed that last post is number 500 on this incarnation of the blog.

A reprieve from winter today: glorious, spring-like day, with a light breeze, a clear sky, and the scent of air that makes you want to draw in breath after breath, deeply inhaling some of the best Mother Nature has to offer. It was me and the boys today, traipsing out to turn off the taps and uncover everything so the plants could enjoy our one day stay of winter weather. We’ll start up again tomorrow in our quest to get summer loving plants to survive through what will be a brutal week here on the ranch: we expect to get into the upper teens here around mid-week, which will be a challenge in protection under the covered wagons. I have no idea if things will make it through, but that’s sort of the point in all this, isn’t it (until I can build a real greenhouse, that is): experimenting.

Another experiment we’ll be trying here on the ranch: growing garlic for seed stock, not just for our own use. It occurred to me while chatting with some folks that this would take expansion, but what if we went vertical rather than horizontal, terracing it much like the rice paddies at the feet of mountains in far off lands? There are seven eight foot fence panels at the back of the pool, and over that fence is nothing that’s in use. The failed attempts to grow corn in that area gave way to a massive effort to rebuild the sand/clay into real soil – an effort that has worked, I might add, since I worked to break up the area and then sow it with alfalfa, clover, buckwheat, and other good nutrient-dense vegetation. There is no question there will be no corn planted there in the immediate future, but a series of steppes along the back of the fenceline would provide more area to grow a crop that is tasty, economical, easy both in terms of maintenance and growing, and that yields good prices when sold for seed (especially if grown naturally, without chemicals as we would be doing). With that, of course, will necessarily come some meetings with my accountant and lawyer, as no doubt there are rules about this sort of thing, and why do that research on my own when that’s why I pay them?

I started five horseradish roots a couple of months ago. Someone helpfully dug the holes for me and filled them with a nice mixture of soil and compost to give them a fighting chance. At first, I thought they’d died right off, as the roots had been languishing in the fridge throughout the summer of surgery and recovery. As it turns out, the roots will last practically forever if they’re kept chilled, and they have turned into quite healthy things indeed, with giant leaves soaking up sun and moisture. The boys, though, keep peeing on them, so a fencing adjustment is in order for those and for the berries that we put in along the main fenceline (grapes, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries).

We’re also considering selling seed – organic only, if possible. This and the garlic would be a good starting place for Lazy Dog Ranch branding, I do believe. At least, the dogs don’t seem to be presenting any particular objection.