Veggies are growing

I actually started growing cabbage, broccoli (another disastrous attempt- all eaten), garlic, lettuce, radishes, and spinach outside before the garden was even completely put together.

Garlic from Ron got planted in the new bed next to the cinderblock shed:


Some cabbage, spinach, the three remaining broccoli plants, and tiny, tiny radishes on the back porch:


Other things are doing well inside. I have a good number of tomatoes and peppers going right now. My experience last year was that many of these aren't going to make it because of disease, insects, and hail, so I'm trying to grow at least as twice as many as I think I actually want.

Garden Progress

So, the garden is finally "constructed"- or at least the main section of the garden is now mulched, irrigated, and fenced.

I merged two of the six planting squares in the hopes that it will be easier to grow peas and beans:


Newspaper goes under the cinderblock walls to keep some of the grass from encroaching into the garden:


The garden today, with the fence almost done. I put deer netting up again, but only at half height. Seems like the rabbits are much more of a problem than deer!


Here's what it looked like in February:

Changing seasons

It's been a while since I posted anything here, so I figure I'll just do a compare and contrast between winter and spring. Actually, there always seems to be very little middle ground here- we swing back and forth between hot and cold in the spring.

For example, here's the thermometer today, just before noon:


And here's the thermometer about a month ago (note that I did not care to go outside to take the picture!):


Here's a view from March:


And from February:


And here's what the view looked like in early April:


Of course, we are still getting occasional frosts at night. Here are some super-cool ice crystals which appeared overnight on the trunk of my car last week:

Maple Festival in March

Every March, Highland County, VA, has a maple festival.
http://www.highlandcounty.org/maple.htm
Who knew you could make maple syrup this far south? Apparently, Highland County is at a high enough elevation that sugar maples do just fine there.

At one place we visited, syrup is made the old-fashioned way by boiling in pans. The steam from the boiling process exits through vents in the roof:



Other places use more modern methods (reverse osmosis).

Here's the old-fashioned way of collecting sap from the sugar maples:

And the modern way (looks much less appealing to me):


A view of a grove of the maple trees. The big box at the bottom of the hill is where they collect the sap using the modern method of tubes- the whole systems is gravity-fed.

Garden clean-up

I finally got around to cleaning up the main part of the garden this week. The peas finally gave up after nights in the teens and a whole week of snow flurries, so I pulled them up and removed the trellises. I hacked the weeds out of the two remaining garden squares that hadn't been cleaned up, threw some fertilizer and pea vines over them and covered everything with hay:

Walnuts, again

So, the black walnuts have been sitting around drying for almost 2 months, and I decided it was time to start the final stage of processing.

Step 1: smash the shell with a small sledgehammer. No, normal nutcrackers can't break the ultra-thick, super hard, spiky black walnut shells.


Step 2: sort into empty shell pieces, nut pieces, and chunks of shell with nut pieces still in them.




Step 3: try to get the remaining nut pieces out of the shell with more smashing or by pulling them out with a dental pick.

I got about 1.5-2 cups from maybe 100 walnuts? I'm still not sure I really like black walnuts! They taste sort of cheesy-fruity, bitter, and smoky all at once.

Thanksgiving pie

The jack o'lantern from Halloween turned into a pumpkin pie:

I used the standard pumpkin pie recipe, and added the walnut topping from this recipe.
It successfully tasted like pumpkin pie, and the walnut-brown sugar chunks tasted good, although some of them sank into the pie instead of staying on top.

Four cups of frozen pumpkin puree turned into 2 cups of pumpkin paste after defrosting and letting the excess water drip out through a towel for an hour or two. It's definitely necessary to extract that extra water- I think the pie would have been a soup otherwise.