Sally's GF3 thread

[Sally PB]

I thought I'd have plenty of time to have a blog when I retired. HA! Three years in, and like a lot of retired people, I have so much to do, I wonder how I ever had time for a job.

So I think I'll start a thread here.

GF #1 is Garden Fresh. Nothing better than fresh fruit and vegetables from your own garden. Like the asparagus we had with dinner.

To me, chickens are a part of my garden routine. Their poop is "the other gift" they give. My compost and soil got a lot better after I got my chickens.

I have two gardens. One, "The Downhill Garden," has loose, sandy soil. The other, "The Uphill Garden," has heavy clay. They are about 100' feet apart, east to west, and close to the same vertically. Why are the soils so very different...? Dunno. Fortunately, the treatment for both is the same thing: lots of organic matter. Dry leaves, wood chips, compost, and of course, chicken poop!

The downhill garden can get frost later in the spring and earlier in the fall. It has the potatoes, onions, garlic, greens, and peas. I also plant green beans (but they might be purple beans) and have asparagus down there. This year, I'm trying sweet potatoes. I ordered them from The Maine Potato Lady. If they can grow in Maine, they should be able to grow here.

The uphill garden gets the tomatoes and peppers. This year, I planted four grapevines up there. I'm also planting spaghetti squash, and hope I can keep the squash vine borers from killing it. Oh, and four loofa plants. If they do their thing, I'll give everyone their own sponge for Christmas.

We have two sour cherry trees, and maybe.... we'll get a few cherries this year. They're 4 and 5 years old now. Our "orchard" also has three apple trees that we've planted and a couple of wild trees that are decades old. They're blooming now, and the smell is heavenly.

 

[Sally PB]

WARNING! this post contains pictures of a fully involved house fire. Some people may find this disturbing, if they've lost a home to fire.

NO ONE was injured. This was a training fire for the local Fire Department (and 3 others took part).

The old farm house. We *should have* redone the roof as soon as we bought it (it was in foreclosure), but we didn't have the money. We did this half of the roof with metal roofing, (which we reclaimed) and patched a hole on the other side. This spring we were going to roof the other side with metal, but the hole patch had eroded, and the 5" of rain we got in one day in April had trashed the (already trash panda trashed) interior.

A neighbor suggested we see if the local FD would like it to practice on. Yes, yes they would, thank you very much. The got 10 (!) practice fires out of it. They brought in a bunch of hay bales and pallets to burn inside to make a lot of smoke. The firefighter I spoke with said that they would go in on their hands and knees, search it blind (due to the smoke), and then put out the fire. Repeat, with other guys (and 3 women, yay!) to give as many people real fire experience. Some of them had not yet been on a call like this, so this was EXCELLENT training for the real thing.

Part of the challenge is a garage that is just out of view in that picture, to the right. It's about 15-18 feet from the house, and we really wanted to save it. We got everything thing out of it, of course.

After that, it was time to burn it down. It started small.

And spread. This is the front of the house. The plan was to burn that side first, and the back (where the garage was) last, and have it all fall into the basement.

There was a slight north wind (the best direction I could have hoped for), blowing the smoke out over a farmer's field. We also had some rain, off and on, not too heavy. It wetted down the grass, which was helpful.

One of the fire fighters told me that the black smoke (which doesn't show well in the picture, unfortunately) was actually fuel for the fire. When the roof was breached, man, it got hot.

The wall behind the fire with the peeling beige paint? Yeah, that's the garage we want to save. See how close it is? They kept hosing it down, and steam would roll off it.

Pushing in walls with a pike. Ideally, it would all fall into the basement, which was very deep, about 9'.

Total success. There is almost nothing left of the house, and the garage is wet, but unharmed. It lost some paint from the water pressure, but the paint was peeling before the burn.

Many of the firefighters came up to thank me personally for this opportunity.

 

[Sally PB]

They're here!!!!

About 24 hours after I got the shipping notice from Mt. Healthy, I got a call from the Post Office.

Meet Sunny, Robin, Pip, Squeak, and Button. 4 Bielefelders and 1 Blue Australorp (Button). They gave me an extra Biel.

They are in the brooder, have had a drink, and pecked at food. Right now, they're under the heater plate, quiet and resting after their shipping ordeal.

I think my brain might explode with the cuteness overload!

 

[Sally PB]

Brome grass, o brome grass!
How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways....
A big, fat ZERO!

If all the brome that is invading my gardens were gone, I wouldn't have any problem with weeds!

I just spent about 3 hours digging the brome out of my blueberry bed. Brome puts out stolons that can grow under thick mulch, send shoots up through or out on the other side, and just laugh at my puny attempts to get rid of it.

But on the brighter side, I took my MP3 player -- yeah, so out of date, I am -- and sang along to lots of tunes. That makes just about any weeding chore almost fun. It's good exercise for the lungs too. None of this la-la-la stuff; I belt it out and too bad if anyone can hear me.

 

[Sally PB]

Long live Queen Charlotte! Long live the Queen!
My husband named her...

 

[Sally PB]

I meant to post more pictures of the bee install. Hubby is doing the handling, I'm taking the pictures.

We had the nuc box in a mesh bag in the back seat of the car. "Nuc" is short for "nucleus colony." It's 5 frames of drawn comb. There's brood of varying ages, some honey, the queen, and lots of bees. 6000-8000 bees.

It's important that the 5 nuc frames go into the hive in the same order they were in the nuc box. I have 8 frame boxes. Then when I have a box full of honey, it'll only weigh about 60 pounds, instead of 80.

All nice and snug now.

There were a few bees still in the box, so we left the box sitting on the ground in front of the hive.

 

[Sally PB]

What does it take for the FD to do a practice/training burn on a house? LOTS and LOTS of paperwork! This is using tax dollars, so they have to justify the training. Since we're about 12 miles from the nearest fire hydrant, they have to truck in the water, which is a reason to do the training in and of itself, for pumper truck training.

We got the ball rolling for this last May. We had to have the house inspected for asbestos. Yup, there was some. We had to have that removed. Those two things we had to pay for ourselves, out of pocket. $2650, so not pocket change.

The FD took care of the rest. I think they had to register the demolition with the state (or county? Not sure; the fire chief took care of all that). Then there's the coordination with all the fire departments. Somebody had to stay at the station in case there was another call. That's why they were so glad to be able to get so many fires out of this. The did 5, rotated crew back to the stations, and bring the other people, do another 5 fires. I think there were about 40 fire fighters involved, all told.

In case you think we get a big tax write off for this... nope. It doesn't qualify as a donation to the fire department, even though they may think of it that way. The government doesn't want people using this as a way to get rid of a structure and get a big tax break.

 

[Sally PB]

Bee pick up has been pushed back to this afternoon, instead of this morning. It's an hour and a half drive each way, so was hoping to get them this morning and have the afternoon for the install and watching them. We'll be getting home around 3:30. So it goes.

I watered the garden, since it hasn't rained in several days. That should make it rain, right? Please?

So far, I have about a pound of red onion sets planted. I have about as many to go, and should have planted them by now, but other projects have gotten in the way. Unless the weather is really crappy tomorrow, I'll plan to do that.

I have about 85 pots of starts sitting out hardening off.

Most of them are sheltered in a couple dog crates. I cover them with bed sheets:

That keeps them warmer at night, and from getting sunburned when they're first set out to begin hardening off. Sunday, we could get down to 39 degrees. I plan to cover the crates with sheets as above, and also some plastic tarp. Or maybe carry them all back to the green house.

Most of my starts are tomatoes. I planted seeds March 27 in the green house. The green house is only passive solar heat, so if no sunshine, it doesn't warm up much in there. Fortunately, it doesn't take much sun to warm it up. An hour or so will do it.

I need to reread my notes on what varieties of tomatoes I planted. Some didn't sprout and needed to be replanted. Thus the differences in size of the plants.

 

[Sally PB]

They're on their way!!
3 Bielefelder and 1 Blue Australorp pullets!

To celebrate, I had Hagen Daaz chocolate peanut butter ice cream with caramel sauce for dinner.

The caramel sauce doesn't seem as good as it used to. Of course, nothing compares to home made. Which leads me to...

 

[Sally PB]

GF #2 is Gluten Free.

I don't have celiac, THANK GOODNESS! but I am gluten sensitive. Really throws a monkey wrench into any baking. Non-wheat flours just don't work the same, and you lose the elasticity. Buh-bye, stretchy, chewy stuff like pizza crust. Still looking for a recipe for that.

It really surprised me how many foods have some wheat flour in them. Like licorice! I loooove black licorice, and have only found one brand that doesn't have wheat flour: Gimbal's Licorice Scottie dogs.

So from time to time, I'll post some recipes I make that are GF. Please feel free to post any recipes you like, too.

Here's the home made caramel sauce recipe. Waaaay better than store bought.

1 ingredient: sweetened condensed milk, 14 oz can(s)

You need a pressure cooker; I use an Instant Pot. You also need a pint canning jar, lid, and ring for each can of condensed milk. You can do as many as will fit in your pressure cooker; I can do 3. Wash/sterilize the jars, wash the lids and rings. I use wide mouth jars so that I can scrape every last bit of caramel out of the jar.

Pour the milk into canning jar, put on the lid and ring. Tighten the ring finger tight. Put a trivet in the pressure cooker, put the jars on the trivet. Pour in enough water to be above the milk level in the jars, but below the rings. High pressure, quick release. Remove the jars (they will seal) and let cool.

How long to process...? I do 20 minutes, and it's pourable, like what you'd pour over ice cream. Or cake. If you process it longer, it gets thicker. I haven't tried doing that, since I like the results at 20 minutes.

Ok, I'll confess. If I made it thicker, I'd eat the entire jar with a spoon.