Starting seeds and stuff

Yay, got some stuff done this weekend :)

First off... got some stuff done down around the firepit sanctuary. Got the keyhole path mowed open to where I want it- and we both love the result. Gives a much better and open view down to the firepit, and when night falls, no more trying to find the path in the dark, lol. We have decided against a pergola down there- it would block the view far too much. So that will end up going elsewhere. Got all the marigold seed scattered along the edges of the keyhole, and about a third of the wildflower seed patched in. Only did a third just in case we get a cold snap before the month is out. Also cut out a bunch of the withies from last year. Not quite all of them, but geez my arms got tired. Also got eight loads of wood debris down by the pit, so now we get to start burning stuff, hooray!!
Unfortunately, the jerks next door also thought it was a prime weekend to baha around my firepit, across the sanctuary, and tear up the easement drive- they were very lucky I wasn't home to see it. But it really has driven home the point that we need to put up a fence between their drive and ours since they have no honor or respect.. Best just to fence them out.

Got most of the pine needles scraped off the driveway and distributed under the triple pines. I'm gonna keep doing that till the whole silly thing is buried- that way I don't have to worry about mowing once we start installing mushroom logs there.

And hooray for a boatload of seed starting!! On the 16th, I planted in rosemary, marigolds, a couple kinds of lettuce mixes and arugula, compacto dill, roman chamomile, oregano, toothache plant, lovage, rue, calypso cilantro, fraise des boise strawberries, purple basil, garlic chives, genovese basil, papri peppers, green zebra tomatoes, ghost chilis, pepperchinis, mini belle peppers, hot pepper mix, and paul robson tomato. On the 17th, I planted in Lancelot leeks, early snowball A cauliflower, mammoth red rock cabbage, snowball x cauliflower, long island improved brussels sprouts, danish ballhead cabbage, pumpkin pepper, the direct seeding of the marigolds and the wildflower mix. Today I merely got some mixed color aquilegia scattered in under my loved office window. It's a pretty shady and dead spot, so I'm hoping it will fill in there.

So here's a couple pics of the seed starting in the solarium..

 Me rolling up some paper pots... Awesome recycling, and makes the pots free! The low pot waaay on the end is the one I used to start parsley seed a few days ago. I think I may end up starting another large pot of the stuff- never can have too much dried on hand with they way I go through it.

 A good shot of the variety of stuff being planted. Yes, those are bags of soil, my compost pile just isn't up to snuff for starting seeds yet... Hopefully next year it will be :)

And a nice shot of most of the stuff... I recycled crapped out pans for lettuce, and the yucky muffin tin went to starting the strawberries. The soup cans are all the different herbs. The pink egg cartons are the roman chamomile, and the yellow ones are marigolds. The paper pots hold veggies. I used a wine bottle for my big pots for toms and peppers, a soda pop bottle for slightly smaller pots for my cabbage, cauliflower, and brussel sprouts, and a small spice jar for my leeks. Why so small on the leeks? so that way I can start hilling them right off the sprout with some of the cardboard tubing I've been saving. By the time they are ready to go into the garden the tubes will be more recycled soup cans. Now I just need to pull out the square foot stencil I made up and figure out which cans to use, lol.

AND OOOHHHH EXCITING EDIT!!! Just checked the seeds... and one whole pot of lettuce is already sprouted and showing heads... I just planted them yesterday!!

Maybe if all goes well this week I will start laying in some of the black plastic. I want to get in on that pretty darn soon if I'm going to have any chance of smothering out the grass where I want to be planting in stuff, lol.

A little bit of spring :)

Well well, Mama N has graced us with some spring weather this week. I got out into the yard for a bit during the weekend and took some pics of the land waking up from her slumber.

The view from outside my office window. Yeah, I am a lucky duck that this is what I get to see every time I sit down at my desk... But it's often distracting too with it's beauty, lol.
We got the seat logs rolled onto the firepit pad, and I'm hoping for dry enough weather this week so I can get out the lawn tractor and mow open the top of the hill. I REALLY want to get some marigold seed in place before we start hauling brush down to start spring burning. And trust me, we got a shitton of brush to be burning off.

 Discovered we have quite a bit more flower action than I thought in the brush area down by the raspberry patch that I started cleaning out last year. I think instead of moving them all I'm just going to promote them to fill in that whole spot. These are in the fence side section. I figure, heck, I am not going to be planting anything else there for quite a while since it's going to take forever to get the scrub tree crap cleaned out anyway.

 And we have these little lovelies outside the patch area, next to the lilacs. Looking at the area in the sun, I fear I might have done a bit of too good of a job cleaning out the area- there were what I was pretty sure were blonde morels in that spot last year- just not sure that they will come back this year since I really opened up the area to the sun.

 This is a nice fuzzy patch of moss growing at the base of one of our maples. So vibrant and alive!! Our neighbor told us the other day that what we got are sugar maples. Maybe there will be some syrup production at some point in the future.

 The first catkins are appearing on the magnolia tree, hooray!! The first fuzzies and buds are starting to appear on a lot of the other trees too- very exciting :)

 This is a shot of the house from across the pond. Kind of surprising, you can see little ducks on the pond that the swans haven't chased off. Apparently they are too little to be a bother :)

A shot of the creek that feeds the pond. Not actually our property, though it's fine that I get to wander around on the back 40's. It's almost like I have my own huge park to wander around on, and for that I am deeply thankful.

So, in other cool news... We now have a hot tub!! Took a bit of tinkering around by the neighbor to get it up and running, but today is it's first successful test run. We are letting it run for a while today to get up to temp. It's part of the exchange we made for doing up the paperwork for the new easement lines. Now I have to do my part of the job and figure out how to fix the cover for the darn thing. The vinyl is all good, but the underside is junked up. Keeping my crafty fingers crossed that I can actually fix it- to my understanding a whole new cover would be pretty frigging expensive. I'm going to check with the local pool and spa place anyway to see what their prices are just in case I royally screw up trying to repair the cover.
Sadly with all the fill and drain we have been doing to get the thing up and running- we have realized we got some pretty serious sediment coming up from our well. Might be nothing more than well drillers clay, might be indicating a more serious screen problem. I have to dig out the paperwork from the bank to find out who the company was that tapped the well, and give them a ring about it. LOL, if it ain't one thing, it's another.

Ocelot... Well, the first two weeks of antibiotics didn't work too well. So we tried pills- that really didn't work- one time of her taking a bite of food with the pills in it and she foamed, drooled, and puked. The second time of trying the gun, and she scratched and bit. So she went back on liquid, a different one this time. Either it's having a good effect, or she is finding somewhere else to piddle. No bad puddles in any of the bathrooms or in the kitchen that we have found for a couple days. Seriously hoping the next urinalysis comes back clean, or else it's back off to the vet for more tests. And we really can't afford that :( So I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will come back ok.

It's supposed to get into the 70's this week, so hopefully I will be able to write next time about really getting some yard stuff done!!

Soup!! And happy anniversary Growbox Hill!

Ok... Just as a quick hooray... We have now been here a year!! Woot!! And have survived it :) Hoping this year we can really proceed with plans as we want. I had already planned on our first year being checking out the property and seeing what we can do and need... So I consider ourselves right on schedule for year two. This year it's mostly gardening and setting up the yard for yet more future plans :)

So soup. Had a heap of spinach and beans leftover so I decided it was either a pot of spinach soup, or a couple pots of other soups. I opted for a couple pots. A batch of bean and ham, and a kind of Zuppa Toscana.

Had half of a bone in picnic ham left over that's been in the freezer for a while... That went to making up a big pot of porky goodness stock. I quick boiled a couple cups of the dried bean mix I made up in the fall, drained them... And added in porky stock goodness, a bunch of chopped carrots and celery, and a handful of chopped onion. At the end I will add in the chopped up bits of mere poix from the stock, all the ham I stripped off the bone, fortified with goodly bit of spinach and beans.... YUM!!

For the zuppa, I pulled out a bag each of turkey stock and broth from the freezer that I made up off the Tday turkey carcass. Browned up my sausage and pulled it to drain. Used just bacon grease instead of the half pound of bacon to sautee the onion, and since I'm out of fresh garlic, used a palmful of garlic powder. Put in my three pounds of unpeeled sliced up potatoes and the turkey stock and broth... Topped it off with some of the porky goodness stock. Once that finished boiling up I will add a couple cups of milk.. I don't have any cream in the house, so I will be fortifying the milk with a few tablespoons of dry milk solids. Then I will dump the sausage back in and the other half of the leftover spinach and beans.

Between the two not only will we have some gratutious dinner action, but I'm figuring probably 12-16 more portions to go into the freezer for future meals!! Gotta love it when a pile of leftovers and think ahead cooking combine in deliciousness!! Thank goodness for cooking school too. I was a pretty decent cook before, but I learned a tremendous amount of on the fly cooking action.

Future plans for my cooking action will be getting back into safety and sanitation. I want to study up and get my Michigan proctorship... That way I can spread my love for food and my driving need for safe and wholesome food to other people. I want my proctorship so that I can help disadvantaged people get their s&s certs. Like cottage industry, medable makers, school kids... People that can't really afford the classes necessarily, but require that proctor attended testing.  I'm willing to give my knowledge for free if they are willing to pay for their own testing fees. The other nice part? I will already be fully certified for when Growbox Hill starts developing and selling food type products. Which yeah, makes me think about the upstairs kitchen. It's totally yoinked right now anyway, so I'm thinking when we do start working on it, it's going to be done up to commercial specs :)

Time to go stir the soup!!

MMMMM weekend success

Cook and bitch weekend was a success!! One person brought a shepherds pie, a couple loaves of homemade Hawaiian bread and made a super taco dip, another brought a big bowl of spinach and beans- and made another batch so we could learn how and brought peanut butter chocolate goodies and made a badass chili dip, I made chicken Parmesan and guacamole.. and one of us played the harp for kitchen music while the rest of us cooked. It was divine. A perfect weekend of gossiping and eating.
We all agreed we need to do this again :) Maybe I will hold off till it's truly spring and have a couple more people come out and we can all do camping food in the yard, that might be pretty cool.

And I love our neighbors behind us. They are such good and honorable people. Had a nice sitdown with Dave today- they want to eventually build a house on their back 40 but need to change the easement drive paperwork to do so. Instead of fighting city hall for grandfathering the current easement, he sat down with us and asked if we would be willing to work with them about just changing the paperwork a bit. It won't even change anything in the yard itself at all. We said "Of course!" Being the awesome guy he is, he offered to help us out on some repair action we need done around here, most notably help with the garage and solarium roofs. Hooray!! He also let us know that reworking the koi pond in the solarium into a people soaking pool was ill advised... But he may be willing to let us have a small hot tub they just got sitting in storage in their barn instead. How cool is that? I imagine the whole process probably will take a while for everything to come about, but they are really good people, and we are so happy to work with them. Such a HUGE difference from the general asshole attitude of Chicago.
As an extra hooray, and I'm super excited about this. In the spring when he gets a cat to re-even the easement drive and spread out new gravel, hes willing to haul as much horse poo as I want to where I want it in the yard!! Fully mature horse poo too, so I'm thinking a couple dumpings where the boxes are gonna go and a good dump in the compost patch. It will save me dozens of trips with the wheelbarrows, I am so happy about that if I had a tail it would be wagging :)
It was also pretty cool to just sit and chat, talk about the stuff we are doing out here and want to do with him, hear what he likes to do and wants to do in the future.

From Tippy and friends... Found out what the deal is with white kitty. Apparently when they were still living here they had a white kitten that went feral. We are pretty sure that kitten is white kitty. Sure does explain why he seems to like hanging around here so much. Way to wild for a pet, but still likes to hang around the house hes used to. I think maybe next winter I will build a little cat shelter for him. Kind of getting too late in the season now to worry about it much. Also learned today that still having the chickens wandering around is almost a miracle. I already knew we had horned owls in the area, but I didn't know they had a taste for chicken! Apparently horned owls are more than happy to swoop down and pick up a critter as large as a chicken.

It was a good weekend, and a nice kickoff to the week :)

Ah, the first glimmerings of spring

I look out my office window right now and I see the first light of spring. You know, that soft light quality of sunset that spreads a mantle of warmth over the land instead of a mere retraction of brittle winter light for yet another evening.

Frigging yay.. I'm just dying for spring. Not dying for the presumed storms and power outages, but I'll take it.

I think this week I will start up some of my parsley seed. Had to buy a little jar of the stuff the other day because I ran out, and gack a buck for a measly .5 oz jar. Seriously, I got the seed and I really need to grow some up- a buck for a packet of seed that I can probably harvest a pound off of. I use flat leaf for growing, I think it tastes better. Also thinking of starting up some moonflower seed for my loves office garden. That takes a while to grow up to my understanding.
Still a tad too early to start kicking off other seed for now.. hurry up and wait for a week or two. Still a bit low for overnight temps in the solarium, and I'm chomping at the bit!!
The water garden: The two coco noirs have been dropped into the adult tubes and are thriving, hooray!! The totem toms.. Not too sure about those, they are such tiny sprouts we aren't sure about them surviving in the baby tank. We put one in to see how it goes. The eggplant seed, nada. They ain't doing anything yet. I'm not sure, but they may end up seeing a second test run for sprouting.
I did get confirmation today that using recycled soup cans are good for blanching leeks, yay!

Enough drooling for spring and the gardening.. Haven't done anything on Food in a while so...

Making a stroganoff tonight. Picked up some almost gone mushrooms on sale yesterday, and yeah, by today all three packs of them are going into the pot. I knew I should have dehydrated some yesterday, but I tweaked my back loading stuff into the car at the store and ended up in bed instead. I also picked up three big bags of almost gone mixed greens (the braising kind, not the salad kind) that I'm going to be braising up individually and packing away into the freezer.

So.. pound of ground beef, a couple packs of fresh mushrooms, a medium onion, few cloves of garlic. Cup of water, a bouillon cube, some salt and pepper, parsley, sour cream. A carb to serve it on, my favorite for this is egg noodles.

Brown up the beef with the onion of garlic. Toss in the mushrooms and stir them in with a little salt and generous pepper. Cover and allow to burble up to heat. Stir and repeat. Once you got some decent liquid rendered in the pan, pour in a cup of water with a beef bouillon cube dissolved into it and a palmfull of parsley. Cover, reduce heat and just let burble away for a while till the mushrooms are all cooked up nicely. Take the cover off, and bring the heat up again to cook off most of the liquid. Stir in the sour cream and adjust the seasoning if needed. Serve over the egg noodles- I like to butter them just a tad.

And the greens I'm braising up? Maybe they will end up making a batch of beans and greens, or get added to a soup or skillet.. Perhaps just seasoned and used as a side dish. I have found that we like pot herbs just as much as spinach when it comes to greens.

And as a cooking shout out.. Hell yeah to my friend Lanie!! She never fails to be a source of cooking inspiration to me. And Hell yeah to my sister Stacy!! That woman is a constant source of awesome sweet creations.

Future food yumminess... The cook and bitch is this weekend, and I am sooo looking forward to it. Looking forward to the food and the company, some of my favorite people are going to be here. My agreed on dish is chicken Parmesan, and I am seriously thinking about making mozzarella for it. To my understanding it's basically the recipe I use for making ricotta, just heating up the curd a bit and kneading it to mozzarella standard.