Greenery

Chernobyl Rhubarb anyone?

Despite the generally dreary gray weather things seem to be getting green outside.

Veggies in the mud room seem to be thriving as well.

The tall skinny tomato plant in the middle is a "Sun Gold" tomato. It is supposed to be a fast growing variety tagged as 50 days to maturity but it has a distinct almost pot like smell to it.

Transplants and lawn repairs

Squash seedlings were outgrowing their pudding cups so it was time for a transfer to something bigger. Basil is still small enough to remain in its pudding cup.

Cut down 2 liter juice bottles will do nicely as temporary containers

Tomatoes, peppers, and herbs went in to new store bought pots as the ones we have used for the last ten years a bit long in the tooth. Lettuce went in to a couple of sections of old vinyl rain gutter with wooden end caps.

This way they can be put outside during the day and brought in to the mud room at night when it is cold.

Three or four hours a day of lawn work over the last 4 days. Rake, fertilize, grub insecticide, seed, till the soil, straw, and water. As you can see last weeks repair patch is starting to show some green.

Good chunk of change spent on all of it including 3 bales of straw that was still not enough to do all of it.

And a good luck charm? well two of them actually. Last Sunday we cracked two eggs in a row both with double yolks. How often does that happen?

Seedlings update

Manged to score a nice 10 inch tall Early Girl tomato plant at Wallyworld last week.

It was quite well along and had flower buds on it already

The tag on it indicates 50 days to maturity so in theory we should have tomatoes in a couple of months after it blooms.

Acorn and yellow squash is six inches long by now.

Spinach finally sprouted early this week

Lettuce is 2 inches tall by now. I definitely put way too many seeds in each peat pellet.

Mowed the lawn for the first time this year yesterday. The maples are just stating to bloom. Typical of this time of year, I'm doing trying to restore the salt and frost burned lawn along the edges of the property.

Every year its the same routine. I rake up the dead crab grass and loosen up the soil, spread insecticide, fertilizer and grass seed and cover with straw to keep the soil moist. As you can see I have yet to tackle the far corner where my neighbor's snow blowing dumps an unusual amount of sand and salt.  All the corners on my land seem to get an unusual beating each winter. Trucks run over lawn cutting the corner on the intersection, and the two far corners seem accumulate extraordinary amounts of sand and salt. Might try to vacuum some of the sand off those areas before restoring them. Also thinking about putting a spike strip on the outside corner so they learn to stay off it.

 To give you an idea of what I am going on about this is an aerial shot I took of out property last fall. Ours is the corner lot with the house and the gambrel roofed barn surrounded by the red stockade fence in the middle of the photo.

Seedlings

Its a bit cold outside yet but I got some seedlings started late last week.

By Monday my lettuce seeds have sprouted and are 3/4 inch tall

I used Jello pudding cups we have saved over the last year and the Jiffy Peat Pellets from Walmart. Just add water and they swell up.

 The acorn squash seems to be on its way as well, though the spinach has yet to sprout.

Sunday we stopped by Broadway gardens as well and got  a couple of tomato seedlings, two bell pepper seedlings, parsley and marjoram.

All cozy above the Rinai heater in the kitchen window

Curried Beef Tongue

Don't let the looks freak you out. The results are well worth the effort.

One large beef tongue

Trim the fatty bits off. A large chunk on the base and a couple long thin bits along the sides. You do need a razor sharp knife for this. You can skip this part all together and boil it just as it is, but I find it makes for better results if you do remove at least the big chunks of fat.

Plunk it in a large boiling pot of water with one large white peeled onion 6 bay leaves and 2 table spoons of salt. Bring it to a boil, cover, reduce to a simmer and let it go for two to two and a half hours.

After about two and a half hours remove and let it cool for about a half hour.

Remove and reserve the boiled onion. Save the broth as it is good for a soup later.

Once cool enough to handle cut the tongue in half . . .

. . . and peel the outer hide off the thing. The underside is thinner and a bit trickier to remove. Just keep at it you'll figure it out.

When done it should look like this.

Slice it in to nice half inch thick slabs

Puree the cooked onion in a blender or food processor

Melt a third of a stick of butter

Add one teaspoon each of Curry powder, Tumeric and Cumin. Pour in your blended onion adjust flavor with salt and pepper. This part you can play with. I like mine mild but if you like the hot stuff you enjoy twice, knock yourself out.

Toss in the slices and warm them up

Serve with white rice and a side veggie. . . . takes a bit of effort but it is really delicious and well worth the trouble.

Signs of Spring ???

Could it really be?

Just below the kitchen window where the sun hits the hardest a couple of Crocuses have bloomed.

And on the front of the house a few Tulips and some greenery starting to poke through the soil

Que up Alfred Hitchcock

The raiding party assembles

 

and comes in for the attack

 

Cleaning up the bird feeder in no time flat

a sketchy crowd they are

They are gone as quick as they arrived.



Meanwhile in the basement  . . .

After 24 hours of rain on Sunday, the basement sump is now filling up quickly.

 That's 25 gallons of ground water every 5 minutes

And it gets worse than that. Usually at the height of it, it takes less than 60 seconds to fill the 25 gallon capacity sump entirely. I have 2 staged pump so that if the first fails the second will kick in with only a half inch rise beyond what sets off the first one.

Making maple syrup

Last Saturday afternoon we went over to Jonathan's girlfriend Eliza's house in Yarmouth to so see how his new home made maple sap evaporator rig was working.

 A few weeks back Jon and I went scrounging at the local scrap metal dealer for an improved pan. Previously he had been using three separate stainless steel food hot trays on the burner rig and wanted to make one single large one instead. We found the perfect 24"x72" stainless steel pan that once liberated from the table it was affixed to and cut to the right size would work. Not quite sure what the original purpose was, but with the bathtub drain in one end of the pan I figured that it was a cadaver washdown table from a morgue, but Jon pointed out it was not wide enough for a fat guy and he thought they were food serving hot tables from a cafeteria. At any rate we brought one of the big pans home and Jon cut it down and capped the end to suit his burner rig.

The end result worked quite well.

And he was able to fit it all on his home made propane bottle wood burner.

And how do you make maple syrup you ask? You tap about 50 maples trees, wait until you have the right combination of below freezing nights and just above freezing days and the sap starts to run, and collect about 50 gallons of maple tree sap. Which you then pour in your evaporator pan and boil for hours on end . . . .

 . . . you stand around drinking beer in 30 degree F, weather and keep adding bucket loads of sap . . .

  . . . frozen chunks of sap

until it all boils down

And after about 5 hours you decant about 3 quarts of syrup

And then stand around in the now sub zero temperatures eating vanilla ice cream with maple syrup , all the time trying your best to not wring the neck of the pin--headed--egotistic--bigoted--left--wing--guest trying to convince you that all the exiled Cubans in Florida are common criminals now turned criminal capitalist pigs , and that Castro's totalitarian state run Cuban medical system is vastly superior to that of the USA . Along with just about every other one of the usual typically asinine nonsensical and sorely misinformed left wing assertions on the subject . And then laugh while the nut job makes a scene and storms away in an infantile hissy fit because his misguided argument just got poked full of holes .

This is what the home made burner rig look like inside once we remove the cadaver wash-down pan .