• Gardening

    May—The Month Of….

    Early May to say, within the last week, could easily be designated the cucumber weeks of May. I’m almost willing to call the whole month the Cucumber Month but the last week the Sumter cucumbers have waned, letting the County Fairs take over as producing the abundance of fruit. I might be able to get another round of fruit out of the Sumters but I think they are done. The County Fairs have another few weeks. The amount of cucumbers we’ve been harvesting has been bordering on the ridiculous. I took some to Chris’ field site for the biologists and archaeologists to eat on, then he was home last week…

  • Creative

    A Handmade Blanket

    Sewing is not one of my fortes but I do like to make quilts/easy blankets. Right now however I do not have a sewing machine so I took up this endeavor by hand—something very dumb of me to do in the middle of a big harvest season. My coworker is pregnant and due in a few weeks and I wanted to make something for the baby. Normally I would have used a machine to sew up a quick blanket or even crocheted but no, I did it the hard way. It turned out mostly good with a few blemishes but I think that adds to the charm. I miscalculated my…

  • Hiking,  Outdoors

    Eagle Rock Loop Day 2 | Ouachita National Forest

    Read Day 1 if you haven’t already…. We woke up the next morning around 6 a.m. Dawn had already broke and the sky was getting light. Some of the other hikers had begun to rouse before 6, knowing it would take them longer to get ready and drink their coffee that morning. We were hoping to make maybe 12 miles that day in order to ease our mileage for the third and final day so we wouldn’t be leaving the forest so late for our four to five hour drive back to DFW. The ups and downs of the previous day were mostly over; the topo map showed mostly level…

  • Food,  Gardening

    Storing the Onions

    If you follow over at Sprout Dispatch you may have seen my post about our onion harvest. For a week the onions sat in some deer feeder platforms in our computer room, fan on, door shut to keep the cats out. The room started reeking about a day into it but finally mellowed (or I got nasal fatigue) by the end of the week. Finally last Sunday I took them outside and cut the tops off, leaving a few inches, trimmed up the roots a bit and then stacked them in some storage crates I found at Walmart. Initially I was going to opt for laundry baskets but a few…

  • Vegetable and Fruit Portraits

    Yellow Pear Tomato | Vegetable & Fruit Portraits

    I have to say that these are going down as one of the most prolific tomatoes I have ever grown. They are giving my sungolds a run for their money on abundance. Last night I was picking the golden fruits off the vines in the last bits of light before dusk, I was reminded of black plum tomatoes that I grew in Florida. The shape is different but I was instantly missing my seeds and tomatoes from then. It really is interesting growing tomatoes in a different climate. If I were in Florida still, the vines would have been ripped up for about a month now, or at the very…

  • Thoughts

    These Days

    +These days I feel like most of what I do is garden related, whether it is being in the garden or doing something with the harvest. A couple of days ago I pulled out 21 lbs of food from our garden, carrying it out in one of our black reusable bags—a first in awhile because I always forget and have to pull used plastic grocery bags from the garden shed—worrying that the straps would break on the way to the car from the pressure. Inside I had many fistfuls of endless long, purple Chinese mosaic beans, more cucumbers than I need at the moment because we’ve pickled ourselves into a…

  • Thoughts

    Tidbits

    +When I get out of the natural rhythm of life it always takes me several days to bounce back. +Last weekend I drove to east Texas to visit one of my best friends Michelle. Her daughter’s 4th birthday was this weekend—I can’t believe that one! I came to Texas a few weeks after she was born 4 years ago and met Kylen as a tiny baby and now she’s this tall, long haired, spitting-image-of-her-momma kid! It was fun, there were cupcakes, balloons, meeting Michelle and J.P.’s extended family and friends…it was great! Now that I found an easier way to get there, (I took a different way to get there,…

  • Food

    In the Kitchen | Key Limes & Cucumbers

    Back in March I saw a post on Food in Jars about salt preserved key limes. I bookmarked it and finally the other day I saw key limes for sale at the store. In Florida we had a small key lime tree I grew from seed—even managed to get a few fruits off one year—and while most ‘wild’ citrus was oranges or grapefruit, I once came across a key lime tree! That’s a good find! Staring at the photos on Food in Jars I was entranced and could just imagine sipping a homemade limeade from the juice I would ferment. Oh, it looked so good; I had to make it!…

  • Thoughts

    10 Years Ago

    Rosemarie and me with our friends Robert and Eric. They didn’t go to TAMUG, but Eric sailed on the Texas Clipper II in 1998 with us. Rosemarie and me. Another Rose from TAMUG! Hi Rose! One of my best friends, Erika, and my first college roomate Marsha. When my 10 year high school reunion came up four years ago (!) it didn’t seem that strange, it did feel like I’d been out of high school that long. Well, it has now been 10 years since I’ve been out of college and that does seem strange. Ten years ago I walked across the stage with most of my friends at the…