Vyxxan's Virtual Venture

Archive for the ‘Other stuff’ Category

Had the day off today from my new job. A volunteer furlough, but I didn’t mind at all. Since I’d been working a 4 day week the past couple years I was almost starting to miss having Fridays off after starting at the new place. However, I am loving my new job a LOT. It’s just so nice to not have to get up at 4 AM and then not get home until after 5 PM. Everything seems to be working out just great at the new job and although it can be tedious, I still like it a lot better than the old job!

So, on to garden news and other stuffs… well, first of all BuddyMack almost killed Ron yesterday while Ron was mowing. Buddy is on a trolley and he went running back to his house while Ron was going by on the mower. Nearly took Ron OFF the mower when he got clotheslined by the chain. Ron’s face is cut up and he lost his glasses but found them again before they got stepped on or worse. I got home from work and Ron was in the house cleaning his ripped up face off. Poor Ron, his face is quite sore. BuddyMack on the other hand can probably be left off the trolley more often. He never goes running off any more… but we still live too close to that road, and I can’t be having my dog getting run over. The trolley is to keep BuddyMack safe. When Ron is mowing, though, might be a good time to let BuddyMack loose. (we let BuddyMack off when we are sitting out in the night and he’s perfectly fine, especially if we give him his own chair, lol)

Last week we had a copperhead snake in the garden, well, right up by the garden anyhow. Ron and I were walking down to look at things and nearly stepped on the snake, argh! I stopped Ron, as I saw it first, and then told him to head for his gun. He was sure it would be gone by the time he got back, but I stood there and watched the snake (and the snake watched me) and Ron was able to come back and shoot it. I don’t like killing snakes but venomous snakes in the yard are not cool at all, so they become dead. I’d rather have a dead snake than a snake bitten family member.

A few days after that I watched a mockingbird chase a nice sized black snake through the yard. I followed to see what was up, and then the snake got into a wood pile and coiled up safe from birds and nosey humans. :) Blacksnakes can climb trees and will eat baby birds, so I’m sure that’s why the mockingbird was after it, trying to keep it away from the nesting area. Those are the kind of snakes I like to see in the yard! (okay, well except for the baby birds thing)

Speaking of birds, so far all I have here at the feeders are male hummingbirds. I’m waiting for the main crowd when I’ll put up every available feeder (I have 6) and be filling them constantly. That’s when the big migration goes through… it only lasts a couple of weeks at the most, but when that’s going on I’ll have 30 to 50 birds hanging around drinking up the sugar water. Should be pretty soon.

I did take some photos to share, but I forgot to go in and resize them before starting this post, so it will have to wait. Probably no one wants to see a shot copperhead, but will want to see sunflowers that have started blooming. Oh, and I have volunteer petunias again… not a lot, but a few tough it out and come up every year. I got those seeds from Ron’s mother before she passed away… I wish I could make them thrive but my gardening is rather lazy. I’m happy if a few bloom every year. One year I had a big clump of them mixed in with weeds… and I sprayed them all with Roundup before I realized what they were.

As far as vegetables go this year, we’ve gotten to eat broccoli twice. I don’t think 4 plants was near enough. We planted twice that in cabbage, but no cabbage heads yet. What the heck I’m going to do with that much cabbage I dunno. Eat a lot of coleslaw, I guess! I’ve also been pulling up radishes. I got some German Giant radish seeds this year and boy, I love those. HUGE radishes, they go from seedling to golf ball sized in no time at all. I’ve had good crops of radishes before, but mostly NOT good. Radishes are really easy to grow, and quick, but the past couple years I haven’t gotten any to do well. Either I plant them too early, or too late, or don’t water them enough or something. I had a small crop that mostly didn’t do anything of ordinary radishes. Then I made a spot for the German Giants. I’m impressed. I’ll never grow another variety. Ron doesn’t like radishes, so I can’t plant too many, but me, I love em so I will plant a small row every spring.

I’m thinking I ought to have a farm stand this year. We did get a bit carried away with the veggie garden. Lots of potatoes didn’t come up, but what did… sheesh, that’s still more potatoes than we use in a year. Corn is always too much, but you gotta plant extra because of earworms and coons coming to steal it all away. I’ve got lots of green beans and cukes and squash, too. I forget how many tomato plants we have… too many, though. 14 I think. Even though I will freeze lots… it’s still too many. :) Along with all the grapes and blackberries… we’ll be filling the freezer up this year for sure.

Today we planted cantaloupe down in the spot below the blackberries… a triangular shaped yard between the berries and the barn. We got some 16 ft wide black plastic and laid that down about 2 weeks ago. Moved it and mowed again, and then today Ron dug up 4 spots in the middle. Then he ran some hoses and rings of soaker hose around those 4 spots and we put the plastic back over. I cut out plastic in the middles of the rings of soaker hose and planted seeds. The plastic will keep the weeds down and warm the soil up while also conserving moisture. I’d =like= to get the whole regular garden done like that, but we will see… :) Last time I grew cantaloupes there I got lots, right up until the coons found them.

Well, tomorrow I will add to this with some photos. I need to take a picture of the cantaloupe garden, anyhow, and the other stuff. Plus the new hanging basket I bought myself for Mothers Day. :)

Hugs,
Vyx

I saw one standing in a field just between the holidays. Hey, that’s an eagle! They like to winter here in Arkansas, but I don’t always see them. The local census of them isn’t as high as it’s been, but that’s because of the mild winter weather everyone seems to be having this year, not because there are really less eagles… just less of them being spotted here.

Then there was last year. Our (now ex) neighbor the chicken farmer was throwing culls out the back doors of his chicken houses. He’s not supposed to do that… they have an incinerator for disposing of culls. But the local wildlife loved it… including the eagles. We had an adult pair along with 2 youngsters hanging around for a couple weeks. It was super, except that I never did get a good photograph. Dang camera. Some day I’m going to have to save up and buy a DSLR.

The eagles are back again this year… I haven’t tried to take any photos as I haven’t seen them like I did last year. But it’s pretty awesome when you are standing on your front porch and a pair just fly on by low over your yard… on their way towards the lake and/or that little valley right next to us. Ron was standing right there, so I got to say Hey look! We have eagles!

Then we see on the news how some excursion company is selling boat rides for eagle watching. No need for us to do that, we just have to go out in our yard. :) It helps that we live fairly close to a lake, eagles like to hang out near water like that.

In other wildlife news here… we startled a great big blue heron at our pond. They are awkward fliers, and being startled I’m sure didn’t help any. I wasn’t sure it was going to clear the trees! We get ducks once in a while, and they are much better fliers. The heron is an infrequent visitor, there are easier ponds to get to than ours! Geese fly over while migrating, but never want to hang out in our pond, just too hard for larger birds to land in it being surrounded by trees. I wouldn’t mind having some tame ducks or geese around, but I wouldn’t know how to care for them. Probably wouldn’t be so great for the frogs and fish in the pond anyhow. :) And I can just imagine how it would go when we walk the dogs… pretty soon I wouldn’t have any ducks or geese because they would have left in disgust, tired of being chased. :)

Also this week I saw a critter every morning on my commute to work. Monday was a raccoon, Tuesday a skunk, Wednesday a possum in the pouring rain and finally Thursday a rabbit. I can go a long time without seeing anything, so it was interesting I saw a critter every day. In the past I’ve seen a bear, a wild pig, and of course plenty of deer. Raccoons, skunks, possums, armadillos and rabbits are more normal. Both the bear and wild pig were within about a mile of the house! Whenever I see something unusual like the bear at first I think, wow, that is a big dog and how is it climbing that fence like that? Then it shambles into the road and I have to slam on the brakes to not hit it and realize that it’s a big huge bear! I’d never seen a bear in the wild before. Same with the pig, I thought, that’s a funny looking dog… and then I realize it’s a hog not a dog. Heh, a neighbor at my old house had some Barbados sheep, and the first time I saw those I thought they were funny looking dogs. My brain is flipping through all the animals I know… and I realize they aren’t dogs, nor are they deer. Sort of look like goats, but not. I asked when I got home later and found out that they were Barbados sheep. :)

Funny how the brain tries to make an unusual animal fit into something more normal, like a dog. Or at least MY brain does. :)

In unrelated news: my son has decided he wants websites and/or blogs. I told him I’d help him blog, we can do a Son and Mom blog or something. Collaborate. I’ll also help him set up his forum, since I have experience with that. His goal with all this is for experience… it will look good on his resume when he graduates next year to have some stuff he’s done. Plus it might turn out he’s talented and can earn money doing it. I blog because I’ve had a website of some kind for a long time. I like to share pictures of stuff and having a blog is a much easier way of doing it than a straight up html site. Seriously, the last plain website I had, I was going in, and moving the previous post down, and writing something new. Just like a blog. Duh! WordPress makes it sooo much easier!
Anyhow… look for links here when we go live with stuff. I will of course let y’all know. :)

Hugs,
Vyx

I seem to be about a once a month blogger.

Well, that’s about what it’s come to these days.

The sad thing is that it’s not that I don’t have anything to say… it’s that I’ve been too lazy to sit and write it.  Not really lazy… but I’m not a fast writer.  I can and do spend hours writing about simple stuff.  I just don’t have time most days to sit here at the computer for all those hours.

Anyhow, I’ll try to catch up on some of it…

First a simple recipe.  I was browsing around some of the blogs I sometimes bother to read and came across a meringue recipe.  Well, howdy!  I’ve got a tub of 8 egg whites in the freezer needing to be used.  I looked around at some other cooking sites to make sure I wasn’t heading into a disaster, and then I went for it… with all  of the egg whites!

Easy Chocolate Meringues  (adapted from http://www.bakerella.com/chewy-chocolate-meringues/ )

1 cup egg whites (7 or 8 large)

2 cups sugar

5 heaping tablespoons cocoa powder

4 ounces  finely chopped baking chocolate (or skip this, I will next time)

On very low speed beat the egg whites with the sugar until the sugar is dissolved.  This can take a while… no need to stand there,  I left the mixer running and did chores.   Line your baking sheets with parchment, and get out your cooling racks.

When the sugar is dissolved, switch mixer to high speed and beat the mixture until stiff and glossy.   If you have a good stand mixer with a whip, this will probably go fast.  If you have an ancient Kenmore mixer with just beaters, this is gonna take a while, too, so go do some more chores.  Oh, but you might want to turn the oven on now.  Heat it to 350 degrees F.

Finally, those egg whites are beat into stiff peaks!  Now sift the cocoa powder into the egg and tip in the finely chopped chocolate, too.  Fold that in gently with a spatula or spoon.  Mix it up!  You might even get away with using the mixer, but I didn’t… used a spatula and folded gently.

Now, get out your big cake decorating bag and a big star tip.   Put the tip into the bag, then fill the bag with meringue… that’s the stuff we just mixed up for the last 45 min.  :)   Make pretty little flower shaped poofs about an inch apart on the parchment lined baking sheets… I think I ended up using every baking sheet I own.  Make the poofs a nice size…  say, 1.5 to 2 inches across, and about 1/2 as tall.   Have the bag clog up repeatedly with bits of chopped chocolate that weren’t chopped enough.  Decide to leave that ingredient out next time because you’ve just bent all to hell your brand new tip.

Bake one sheet in the oven at a time for 15 min or until they look like tips are starting to get brown.  You are going to be baking these for hours if you use all the meringue and make them just slightly bigger than bite size.

I didn’t count how many I actually made, but I took a gallon bag bulging with them to work.  Oh, and we still have some left, even Ron is getting tired of them.  1 cup of egg whites makes a LOT of freaking meringues!  So, because I’m nice, I am recommending that normal people use one of the smaller recipes to be found…  like HALF as much.  Seriously, I had to dump some of the meringue out, I wanted to live the rest of my life, not be forever stuck in the kitchen making cookies…  lol!

Sealed up in an airtight container, these seem to keep dang near forever.  They bite really fragile, but they carry pretty tough… and probably if you tried to ship them somewhere the recipient would just get a box of crumbles.  Still, they are mostly air with chocolate flavor, they feel like you are eating nothing much at all.  The big bag I took to work lasted only a couple days… but we have a lot of women where I work.  Some of those gals really liked the cookies.  Some said “ugh, meringues!”   And one said she doesn’t like chocolate…. huh!

Okay… so… on to the next post…

hugs,

Vyx

 

 

It’s really amazing…  normally it’s all dead, waiting on autumn rains.  I would have been struggling to keep things alive and probably failing.  I am still having to water some stuff, but I’m no longer worried about our big trees going dead.

This year… well, we got over 5 inches of rain in August.  VERY unusual.  Our hay field which would normally be brown and dry and nothing… is now all green.  I wish I could show you, because it’s incredible.  The johnson grass especially loved the rain.  Grass is taller than I am, and this is September, not May.

I can show you a bit…  the bermuda grass and other grasses aren’t as tall as that johnson grass…. and the johnson grass is mostly up by the house.  Photo from the corner of the dog walking path…

See how tall that grass up by the house  looks?  It IS tall, it’s way taller than I am.  The short stuff is almost knee high…

If/when the guy comes to cut the hay again… he’s gonna get some good hay this time.  We had a thing where this guy would come hay our field and haul it away and we never got anything from it other than it was cut twice a year or so.  For a while they also put chicken litter on it (I’d rather skip that step, thank you… it’s bad enough I have to smell it from the chicken houses to the north as it is).  Anyhow, this year I decided that someone else should cut our hay and sell it for us.  The only thing is that the guy I picked had too much on his plate.  He has a farm, he runs a business… and cutting 160 acres of hay pays a lot better than cutting our 3 or 4 acres.  But he swore he sent someone out… I remember the tractor driving by with the hay mow.  Went and cut someone else, lol!  (we keep forgetting to ask about that…  bet that was a shock for someone)

So, when we’d given up hope, out regular guy came over and asked why we didn’t want him to hay us any more.  I told him because it’s worth a bit of money, even if he does all the work.  I keep it free of thistles and such, and fertilize it.   He should be paying, even if it’s just $5 a bale.  But he was here when it was all brown and dry… No one was expecting another cutting at that time.  We told him if he wanted THAT hay, it was free.  Next time, he’ll have to pay us.  He agreed…  we have good hay with it being mostly bermuda or johnson grass.   In an average year hay runs about $30 to $40 a bale (BIG round bales).  We want what is fair… he does all the work of cutting etc., but it’s OUR hay.   In a bad year for hay, good hay can run $60 a bale.  So, the normal guy agreed to pay us.   He knows how to cut it and when, so this should work out well.

I’d love to show a photo from the house down to the end of the property… only I’d have to stand on the roof now to take that photo.  Not happening.  :)

Still waiting on my muscadines to get ripe…  probably another month before that happens.  Red grapes got picked a bit late, but I still got about a 1/2 gallon.  Those are some sweet grapes…  just pure sugar, eating them is like eating cotton candy.

I’m having a staycation this week…  off from my paying job, lots of work here at home to catch up on.  Maybe a day of fishing during the week, and of course I’m firing up the bbq tomorrow and cooking a huge pork roast.  Low and slow… I’ll let it smoke all day, then cook it even longer wrapped in foil.  As a friend pointed out, I can always freeze the extra.

That’s all for tonight…  I’ve gotta run out and grill some burgers quick before chat time!  :)

hugs,

Vyx

I’ve got grapes!  Not a lot, but enough to pick and maybe do something with.

I picked these Wednesday evening.   This is just from one vine planted last year… I have two vines of this variety and  the other vine didn’t do as well.  I didn’t even bother picking the few grapes on the other vine.

Some kind of white table grape… I was going to look up the name, eh.  I have a chart with what grapes I planted where, but I don’t remember what I did with it.  Not on the computer.  Oh well!  White table grape works for me.

The skins are tough, they didn’t pollinate well, and they probably didn’t get enough water.  Some are seedless, but some have seeds, which is weird.  I figure I’ll be cooking them up and putting them through the food mill anyhow, and freezing the juice/pulp for later use.  The flavor is kind of Meh…  they are grapes.

I also took a photo of the vine after I’d scissored most of the grapes off…  It looks pitiful, but that’s partly because of insect damage.

And yes, bermuda grass is right up there, poor grape vines!  There is landscape fabric and 3 inches of mulch under that grass, though… and a soaker hose for water.  I do the best I can with roundup on the grass…  wish the darn stuff would go take over the hay field, bermuda hay is better than “mixed” hay.  Stay away from my plants!

I wasn’t real hot about training the grape vines I bought locally…. I did better training with the muscadines, as they were smaller stems that weren’t all curved and such already.  I figure as long as I prune well in winter I can eventually train the others better.  I hope.  Heck, I know nothing about growing grapes except what I’ve read online and learned the last year or so.

While I was out with the camera I took a photo of some flowers I grew from seed this year.  Milkweed family, I guess.  Common name is Snow on the Mountain.  My friend Jan had some of these last year, and I had to have some too, so I hunted down seeds after she told me the name.  I hope they reseed well, although fighting the bermuda grass like everything else does here… well, it’s iffy.

I love the white and green variations, and so do the butterflies (and some wasps).  They aren’t as big of a draw to butterflies as I thought they would be… the purple flowered weed does much better with that.  I don’t care, I love how they look, they are different!

Along with table grapes I planted some muscadines.  One never grew, that’s why I have 2 of the white grape.  Another one bled to death this year after I pruned it… died all the way back to the root.  But it came back to life!  It sprouted out from way down on the stem and is starting over.

 

Now, it’s not as great as it looks…  all the lower part is the muscadine.  But along that top wire is my RED table grape which was getting 90% of the water this year until I figured out that the soaker hose had a split in it.  The red grape made a LOT of vines, but also some good clumps of grapes.  They aren’t quite ready yet, but that’s a grape thing.  Did you know that grapes don’t all get ripe at the same time?  You’d think they would, but a cluster of grapes are like anything else… some ripen earlier, some later.  You try to pick them when most are ripe.    I’ve tasted the red grapes and they are wonderful…. very flavorful.  Took a photo, too, of course, so you can all see how some are getting ripe and others are not.

Hmm, not such a great photo, but see how some are red on one bunch and another whole bunch hasn’t even started?  These are another locally grown table grape that I should know the name to.  I’ll find that paper or notebook… and then tell ya.  But in the meantime, I can’t wait for the red grapes to get ripe!  LOVELY flavor.  Still that same tough skin, but heck, that’s probably my fault.  I’ll eat some, I’ll cook up the others and mix it with the white grapes and have some strange hybrid jam.

Oh, but wait, there is more!  I said I’m growing muscadines!  The one muscadine that survived set fruit like you wouldn’t believe.  That beer flat of grapes?  That’ll be nothing compared to what I’m going to get from the muscadine.  Let me show you a close up of a cluster…  and the vine is covered with these clusters…

Of course these won’t ripen until really late in the season…  perhaps September or October, I’m not even sure.  I have a freezer for the early stuff, you know me, I don’t can anything in summer if I can help it.  Certainly not jams.  I’ll use up the white grape juice to stretch out the muscadine juice…  but yum yum!  I am really fond of muscadines, the flavor, that is.  They have tough skins like the other grapes I’m growing, so all that I can do is juice them.  Well, I know I’ll eat some, but that’s squish the grape out of the skin into your mouth, and then spit out seeds.  Like eating concords.  :)

Well, that’s all the story tonight… I’ve got grapes.  I apologize for not blogging as much lately…   it’s summer and I like to be outside.

hugs,

Vyx