Is This What's Known As An Epic Pail - I mean Fail?

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As I finally get back to this, I see that it's been too long - AGAIN.

Google is killing me.

I have to log out of everything I do in life to post here, then start all over again.  I logged into Blogger and watched all my labor that I had open disappear.   You might say, just log back in and open them all up again...

Ha.   I repeat, a  BIG, FAT, HA!!!!

It's not just 'out of sight, out of mind' but if something disappears from view where I can continually keep my mind fresh, it's like a black out in my brain cells.  My neurotransmitters fizzle, then burn up like a fuse that turns to ash right before the whole thing blows up.

Once, I prayed for amnesia...  You know what they say.

.... what do they say, anyhow?

Once, I prayed for amnesia... You know what they say.

.... oops.

We took a vacation we've been saving up for years, and boy, did we need it.

We spent a very quiet week on Hilton Head Island.   This is the sunrise.   This is what I look forward to the most.   Being down on the beach, in the water, watching the sun rise and standing in wonder, awe, and amazement at God's glory.

I say with some guilt that we wanted so much to visit with very dear friends while we were there, as well as having them come over for a day.   But when we got there, we just shut down.   We did not know just how exhausted we were until we laid aside our stress, tensions, to-do lists and just let go.   We spent the entire week pretty much without calling or texting anyone, but just hanging out together and swimming, boarding, biking, tennis, puzzling, reading, eating, sleeping, rocking, and all the other things you are supposed to do on a real vacation.

We did end up doing 15 miles on the beach one day.   My seat is STILL sore!

On another day we biked across island to the big touristy spot, but all we did was buy some cold drinks, sit on some chairs, and watch the yachts come and go in the harbour.   We did not even buy a souvenir.  

HOORAY for being BORING!

And now we are back home and we still often imagine the feeling of that water around us as we just relaxed and let the waves gently roll past.   Many wonderful memories.

I did find this very cute and light summer dress with scads of flowing skirts.  I wear it all the time at home.  I still feel like I'm in the tropics.

 So the skies have been magnificent lately; all blue and puffy.  Just like Spring loves to be.

I could not resist and expanded little garden in addition to the three tomatoes. It's doing very well.   Just some summer squash, bell peppers, and cucumbers.  I keep it small as we could be asked to leave at any moment, but it's just a little bitty one.

Here's to Spring's first tomatoes!

~Faith

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A Photo Montage

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For 2011, I've decided to look at the world in a whole new way.





Maybe not. I can see the plates go flying on the way to the dining room.

On Shabbat the sunlight hit the greenery we have still not put away, intensifying the colors. The lovely golden hue that was there was lost however.





Michael, testing and finding the roads still providing the perfect skating medium for shoes. Not so good, though, for driving to rehearsals and office cleanings. We went anyhow, very carefully, but there were many wrecks all over town, including in front of us.





I had dug up our pepper plants to save for next year. They lost all their leaves, but had grown lots of new ones. We took them out on days above freezing, and brought them in before frost hit. Until one night we got home too late. I'm hoping they'll come back.





Brrrrrrr.





The horses were shivering, poor things.





A snow angel from the day before.





Photographing used children's clothing for ebay is using up a lot of my time. I can see this is a poor return on my time, but I am grateful for any income at this point. Now, if I can just figure out how to get them up and selling.





Michael is still getting used to the fact that these are indeed, man shoes.





And yesterday, after foraging food for the horses from where ever we could scavenge it from, making snow angels, and having a snowball fight. We did a little outdoor work, planting grass seed.





I'm told that during snow is the best time to broadcast seed. You can not only see where and how much you've strewn, but as the snow melts, it pulls the seeds into solid contact with earth, and next spring it should do very well. This is Kentucky 31 blend, only good for the sunny side of the house.





I hope this old seed is still viable. We've tried to thicken up this grass for years, and it doesn't like to grow. I'm thinking something tall, thick and lush would be mighty fine. Except for mowing. OK, a modification; thick, lush and green. And bad bug repellent. And....

Slap!

Realistically, the days are getting longer. And we have passed the official date where the northern hemisphere begins to gradually warm up its average temperature. Hold on, any faint of heart, we are on the upswing!





There's no place like Figi. There's no place like Fiji. There's no place like Fiji.

~Faith

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Can This Garden Be Saved?

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My focus is all about reducing cost and labor in the future. I tell you what, this body is getting old, and if I don't find ways to cut corners and achieve either the same or better, I'm going to be crying "Uncle" from some hammock in a very cheap area south of the Border, trying to live on 4o bucks a month and learning to love, and I mean REALLY love, rice, beans, and naked chickens hanging from questionable tin roofs.

One of last weeks projects was to see if we can bring any of the garden in with us to live through the winter and get a head start next year. I've known that peppers are actually a perennial, in tropical climates, so they can be saved in a pot indoors. I will do that as soon as I'm done harvesting peppers.

I've been also taking pinchings and cuttings from just about everything. I have simply never been good at making them grow, but I've certainly been doing a lot of practicing this month.

Here are some failings. These little plants never thrived up there, but they were tough. It took me 4 years to kill them, but they finally died completely about year ago. So I figured it might be time to dump them out.





Do you remember the houseplant I grew so frustrated with, that we whacked it off and stuck the branches in a vase? That was 6 months ago.

Some of those branches were still alive and had grown roots.









So, not having a clue what to do with them, I laid them to rest in this pot.





And covered them up.





Then refreshed myself with a blueberry, strawberry, banana smoothie.





Since I was in a transplanting and cutting mood, this little grass-snuggling-errant from the compost bucket caught me eye.....





Nah. Don't go crazy girl!

The first week of September I planted these lemon seeds. And after about 2 weeks I had a little lemon tree!





As of today, I have a 7 tree lemon grove, and my tangerines and key limes are just about to break free from the soil that buries them, and reach for warm blue skies in Florida. Boy, are they in for a surprise.





And the ginger roots I planted are doing well!





Here are some philodendron (those are easy, except for the time I failed at that, too) I am sprouting for friends, the celery heads are doing well, and..... I'm not sure what else is there in the tiny drag-and-drop view I see. I'm going blind.





So now I'm heading down to the garden to take tomato, pepper, and eggplant cuttings. There's that evil wild amaranth with all the spikes and billions of seeds on every branch.





The tomatoes are feeling better now that the weather cooled off, but it's too late to get much from them. Next year I'll set them up a little better.





I end up with a few tries at tomatoes.









Some peppers.









And the missing giant Jalapeno made a marvelous home for the eggplant I decided to give another shot at life.









The ristras are still coloring nicely.





A special treat, a couple of latent watermelons to enjoy.





I've found my mind wandering more and more to how nice it would be to have a thermal, double-paned, glass greenhouse built all along the south side of a home, about 10 feet wide and 75 feet long. You close it off to the rest of the house, keep it toasty warm, maybe add a few grow lights, and you've got a perfect garden to grow things all year round. Nice seating areas, a fountain, yada-yada. No more of this seasonal prepping, planting, harvesting, and preserving madness. Open it up and cool it off when you can plant a small garden outside...

ah........





Minus the pool.
Maybe.

Reality calls.

~Faith

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Ristras! - August 24, 2010

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Have you seen those gorgeous dried pepper bunches, in intense red colors anywhere before?

Well, these are not them.

These are semi-gorgeous ones.

Last year I learned to braid onions and this year I attempted to make ristras. Of all the plants we grew this year, of course the peppers are producing the most. I have the hardest time letting anything go to waste, which is why I was eating about 2 melons a day for a few weeks.

Well I've got peppers coming out of my ears. You can only use so many of them.

Bell peppers





Anaheim peppers





Sweet bananas





Hot bananas





I apparently forgot to give the Jalapenos their 15 minutes of fame. And I really miss having the beautiful purple peppers I had last year. Those were the loveliest peppers and blossoms!

I also had rafia. Even better than string!





Here's how I did it.

I first pulled out a rafia string and doubled it for stringth. Get it? String-th? Pretty clever, eh?





Get three peppers in a bunch, with stems long enough so that the spicy buggers don't whisper peppery little insults to one another in Spanish about you as you attempt to lasso them.





With a little tail of rafia, so you have pretty raffia tails all through the ristra, wrap the stems tightly two or three times.





Then take the longer, looped end and go down, between two peppers and back up again.





Pull snugly, and you have your first three strung up.





Get three more peppers.





Do the same thing to them, with the long end of the string, maybe about an inch higher.





Draw that string down again to bring the string back up through two peppers. Or one, depending on how you look at it. I never did figure that part out, but you eventually get the hang of it and it doesn't seem to matter whether you know if it's one or two or not.





Pull it up snugly and you've got your second tier.





I kept tying on extra strings as I went up. On later models, and there have been a lot of them, I took to tying all my strings together before I began, making sure to leave each joint with about 5 inches of rafia string on each side of the knot, just to be all pretty and everything.

This is my first one. I later decided that I liked doing about 36 peppers per ristra, or twelve sets of three on each.






And after I'd done three of them, I hung them together, braiding the top of the strings. I am trying to decide if you are supposed to braid the part of them that actually have peppers on them, but I've been so busy with this first stage that I haven't bothered with that yet.





I currently have about 20 of these hanging around my kitchen. Some are on the pantry door, some on my baker's rack and some on dining room chairs. And the peppers are still coming!

I want to let the rest turn red on the plants before bringing them in. I hope they don't rot first. But they are a bit heavy to do while still green, and that makes them a bit more awkward to string up. These are slowly turning red, but I don't think they are as pretty as when they redden on the plant.

By the way - rotten peppers smell really bad. Just so you know.

~Faith

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