STORMY WEEKEND

Woke up Sunday morning about 8:30am and checked the radar...

The red dot is the farm...and those storms were moving straight through.  It was slow moving and heavy and ultimately headed to Houston as well.  I went back to sleep.

2nd Man made a pan of biscuits...

This is a great thing to wake up to, ha.  Biscuits, butter and apricot preserves.  Yum!

Then a couple hours later, "J" from 2nd Family sent me this picture.  This was taken in what would normally be broad daylight.  She said it looked like the end of the world out there.  Winds were strong but not too bad, lightning, thankfully no hail, and we ended up with about 1 1/2" rain.  

By the time it made it to Houston though, it had grown strengthened and we had 60mph straight line winds, tornado warnings (and an actual touchdown) and widespread trees down, power lines down (200,000 people without power at one point) and some localized street flooding.

So no fun weekend update of planting or mowing.  This coming weekend will be busy for sure.  

SATURDAY GOALS WASHED AWAY

Well today is was a beat the clock day for sure!

This is the headline on our local weather site:

So the plan today is was:

Stop and get soil to top off the new raised beds.  

Get trimmer line for the weedeater.

Mow.

Edge.

Plant the third tree.

And that was going to be it for today...

But that weather headline of today being muggy and mild was wrong.  I created this post to pop up this morning after I left for the farm.  But instead, we were awakened to thunder, I checked the radar and the storms were already here.  The farm is the red dot and this was just another band of rain/storms coming through. 

Tomorrow has the potential to be even crazier with the weather.  I guess it's a good weekend to stay in and read.  And nap.  And relax.  And eat.  

Not necessarily in that order...

Hope you have a better start to your weekend!

KITTY CAT OF THE EAST

OK, so first of all, no cats were harmed in the making of this picture and it's not our cat ha.  

We found this online and it made us laugh.  The person took the opportunity of their cat sleeping under a cabinet (they said their cat slept there all the time) to add a pair of fabulous ruby slippers to her feet...and then boom, just like that, she became the Wicked Witchcat of the East! 

I don't think any of our cats (past or present) would stand for anything being on their feet for ANY length of time, ha. 

TGIF!

OUTDOOR SOAKING TUB INSPIRATION THURSDAY

Every Thursday we like to post a picture of something we've found online that inspires us to do something similar at the farm. Sort of our own blog bulletin board so that we can eventually look back and someday, hopefully anyway, recreate it...enjoy!

I've always wanted an outdoor tub.  Don't ask me why.  Maybe it is images like these that do it.  Just always seem to be so peaceful...

And beautiful...

And serene...

Oh sure, I totally know these things could totally have a snake in them when the cameras aren't on.  But still, they just draw me in and I imagine a long hot day outside being capped off by a dip in cool water with a glass of wine.  

Hey a guy can dream, right? 

We have a friend with a tub just like this that is in their storage and said we could have it anytime we ask for it, if they don't use it first.  Hmm...we'd go ahead and ask for it but we don't have a place to really store it (well, it would fit in the barn but I don't want to start loading that up with stuff for later on just yet).  If we don't get that one, we'll get the one we are meant to have when the time comes.

Be inspired...

SWEET AND SOUR ROASTED NAPA CABBAGE RECIPE

When we had our recent harvest of napa cabbage, we needed to find some ways to cook it. We found this recipe from Cooking Light.  It was yummy!

Full recipe at the end of this post.

We started with a beautiful napa cabbage.

Sweet and sour sauce for cabbage

Then you make the sweet and sour sauce of olive oil, apple cider vinegar, brown sugar, dijon mustard, garlic, salt and pepper.  

Stir together, taste for seasoning (if you need more salt, etc).  Plus it's just darn good!

Brush cabbage with sauce

Cut the cabbage head lengthwise into quarters.

Cabbage cut side down with sauce in oven

Coat one cut side and place that side down on a baking sheet.  Roast the cabbage in a 450 degree oven for about 6 minutes.  Remove, coat the other cut side with sauce and place that cut side down and roast for 6 minutes more.  

Remove from oven and turn broiler onto high.

Place them cut sides up, baste well with remaining sauce and place back in oven.

Broil on High for about 3 or 4 minutes or until it starts to brown and caramelize. 

Remove from oven.  It will have nice brown bits and edges and the sauce has flavored it beautifully. 

Sweet and sour oven roasted napa cabbage

Serve a wedge and enjoy!  We had it alongside a farro and beef dish that 2nd Man makes.  It was a great accompaniment!  Soft, full of sweet and sour flavor and the caramelized crispy bits of cabbage are just wonderful.

Ingredients:

• 2 TBSP olive oil
• 1 TBSP brown sugar
• 2 TBSP apple cider vinegar
• 2 tsp Dijon mustard
• 1 1/2 tsp garlic
• 1/4 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp pepper
• 1 head of Napa cabbage

Step by step instructions, as usual are above.

 Enjoy!

TWO OUT OF THREE

This weekend was an off weekend for mowing.  I was going to edge but other factors stopped that, ha.  The biggest goal though was to get the three citrus trees planted.  

When I left for the farm, it was 75 degrees and overcast.  So I stopped at Home Depot on the way.

Loaded up my Jeep with soil and compost.  Yeah, we know, someday we need a pickup, ha. 

I had forgotten how hard it was to get the beds lined up.  These three new beds are going in between the other eight but of course they have to be lined up, if I was off it would be harder to mow around, etc.  Plus when Google Earth takes its next picture and I see them out of alignment, it would drive me crazy, ha!

So I had tape measures, angles, and landscape timbers to measure space between.

I layered the compost and bags of soil and then stirred it around and leveled it off.

The sky was darkening so working fast, so I got two of the three beds filled and then I decided I better go ahead and see if I could get trees in them. 

I planted the lime and the orange and just after finishing that, it started raining.  It was back to the porch to start wrapping things up and that's when the wind started.  I went to the backyard (where the trees are) and saw that the trees I just planted were starting to lean over in the fresh soil.  Oops!  I ran to the shed and got some twine and staked them off from three directions.  I know not to leave it like this of course so next weekend I'll do something less abusive to the trunk.

All three trees have tiny fruit so I'll have to pluck some of those off.  Of course, citrus trees will produce large amounts of fruit while growing in a simple pot so we'll leave a few on each tree just to see what happens. 

This was the sky as the rain started and the temperature dropped more than 20 degrees.  It was 54 by the time I left.  We almost broke the all time low record high for the date going back to the 1800's.  No freeze, thankfully, but wow, the weather is changing that's for sure.  On the upside, at least the trees got watered.

I didn't have time to edge so this coming weekend, Mother Nature permitting, I'll probably have to mow and edge and then will get the last tree planted. 

After this, the next part of our raised bed mini-orchard is to clean up the beds of the random straw that started sprouting over the Winter and figuring out what to do at the base of the trees.  Companion plants maybe?  Or just weedblock fabric and mulch?

We'll see.  

Hope you had a great weekend!

WEATHER CHANGES AGAIN

Got to the farm yesterday and it was 77 degrees and overcast.  

I stopped and bought soil and compost and tried to get all the trees planted but the wind started blowing, the rains came and the temperature dropped to 56, all in about 30 minutes.

More of an update tomorrow. 

Until then...

...here are ducks from 2nd Family that came to visit recently.  We love having them come visit.  They are friendly, just walk around while we are busy doing whatever and at the end of the day, they go back home.  It's the best of both worlds, ha. 

Hope you are having a good weekend.  

2nd Man is baking an apple pie right now.  The apartment smells divine.

FRIDAY FUNNY

We saw this online the other day and thought we would share.

Of course it helps that we still both love watching The Wizard of Oz from time to time.  I guess kids nowadays don't get the magic of seeing it once a year as an "event" at Thanksgiving like when we were little.  I remember counting down the days until it was coming on.  

Anyway, yep, this is pretty accurate, keep an eye out during the watch, you never know what might be coming down the road.

Take shelter with the warning though because all hell is about to break loose, ha.  

GUESS WHAT DAY IT IS AGAIN

1st Man has a birthday!

Hi all this is 2nd Man posting today for 1st Man. I'm not as good on this blog stuff as he is so I will keep this short (oh and this weekend I will answer your replies to mine, thank you all).

For today, I want to wish him a happy birthday and thank him for all he does for us. He single-handedly keeps up the property at the farm. I know it is hot and long work and often difficult and at times frustrating but he's doing it for our future, and that means everything to me.

Love,

2nd Man

CITRUS TREE RAISED BEDS BUILT

So the other goal this weekend (other than mowing as I posted yesterday) was to get the three raised beds built for the citrus trees.  Building them is really the hardest part because they become unwieldy as they take shape.

Home Depot lumber

I started the morning (you may have seen this on our Instagram post) at Home Depot and got the boards I needed to do the project.  Love the smell of the lumber department, ha.  I get 8' long boards that are 12" x 2".  They offer free cuts so I have the boards cut in half.  That way two boards give me four pieces to make one 4x4 bed.

Six boards gave me twelve four foot long sections.  I loaded them in the Jeep and headed to the farm.

Here's a fun part.  The last couple of times I have built them, I used my cordless drills.  They work but half the time they aren't fully charged.  When I finally get them charged and use them, the torque is sometimes too much for them and the batteries run down quickly.  So I was thinking to myself that I wished I had a corded drill.  I got the wood unloaded and then I remembered that once upon a time, my Dad had an old drill that he called his standby.  I couldn't remember if we kept it or if it was given away somewhere along the way (he has been gone 17 years now).  I rifled around in his workbench  that I kept, nothing (except his cordless ones).  Then I remembered the bottom drawer of his large red tool cabinet was filled up with tools I hadn't gone through yet.  I opened it, dug around and found this!  

An old JC Penney drill.  

I plugged it in and it worked perfectly.

Thanks Dad!

The last time I built them, I did them on the porch because it was just easier on there I guess.  But then I had to carry them, fully completed, down the stairs and around to the back of the house.  They are heavy when built.  Very heavy.  Since we built those, the last time we had electrical work done, I had an outlet put on the backside of the house.  I almost forgot about it.  Woohoo, I loaded up my cart with the boards, the screws, the brackets and the drill and headed around to the back yard.

We had some extension cords from when we ran lights outside at the house in town to prevent freezing pipes a few years back and so I grabbed those and brought them with me.

Raised bed corner brackets

After I had everything together, I built the beds in the spots where they were going.  I was able to build them and just lay them over and it was done.  

The brackets make this process SO easy.  I never use the screws they come with, instead I buy a box of outdoor rated 'deck screws' so that they don't rust, etc. while out in the elements.

Here is the link to the type of brackets that I have bought on all the raised beds we have:

Plow & Hearth DIY Raised Garden Bed Corner Brackets

When I bought them, they were in the off season and the price was about $25 for a set of four (sale).  They are $35 now but maybe you can catch a sale on them.  Still not a bad deal if you consider the wood is the only other expense.

   

I put them in between the other beds, centering them between each row in both directions.  Three fit perfectly and I still have room to mow around them.  

By the way, don't judge me on the grass in the existing beds, ha.  It's actually the "straw" that I put down last Fall, somehow it sprouted!  It's not supposed to do that.  I guess I'm growing some sort of ground cover.  Lucky for me, it pulls up easily.  what you see in each bed are clumps that just pull right out of the soil.  I'm leaving them alone until I come up with an alternative to prevent weeds (thinking of weed block cloth with stones on top).

Raised beds for fruit trees

Here they are finished.  This was the hardest part.  The next part is to buy all the bags of soil to fill the beds.  I turn the soil underneath and smother it with cardboard and then fill with soil and plant the trees.  By the time the roots get down to the ground the soil should be starting to change and allow the roots to penetrate the clay.  The other trees have grown considerably over the last two years they've been in their beds so it's working well so far.

This coming weekend (weather permitting) will be the soil turning and cardboard and then the first weekend in April will be the trees going in.  We have a lemon, a lime and an orange on the porch, all three in full bloom.  Can't wait to get them in their new homes.

The upside now is that they will now be easy to water and with a power outlet nearby, we can string up lights if there is a freeze coming.

PRODUCTIVE SATURDAY

The day started off mostly clear.  It was cool which was nice.  I had several projects to do but started with mowing.  Just wanted to make sure I got that part done because next weekend looks to be rainy.

A view down the driveway as I mowed.  Now you can see why I call it my Zen Machine.  It's just so peaceful to be out there mowing.

It started getting darker.

But I finished.  Always a good feeling.

Clean and neat.

And it never rained.

I even created a few new paths from the still dormant winter growth.  I always walk the area with a stick to make sure no animals and no large stones or stumps and then I just slowly drive over it with the mower.  After two or three mows (consecutive) nothing grows back there and it stays clear with just grass year round.  This is a new path to the area we like to call the "secret garden" where I hope to plant a lot of colorful flowering plants (it's by the large huisache tree, more on that in an upcoming post).

Here are the stats from my mowing app.  After the last mowing a couple of weeks ago being 2 hours, I'm back down to almost normal.  A normal mow is about an hour and a half.  I'm guessing the new "path" was the extra time. 

I also edged around the house the barn and shed and some of the fence line and as I was going to do the raised bed fruit trees, I ran out of the line for the weedeater. Sigh. Oh well, I'll work on that next time.

Dinner (Saturday night) was chicken and fettuccine Alfredo (after Friday's post, notice this was my plate, thigh and leg, ha).  I went back on Sunday and worked on another project.  More on that tomorrow.

EDIT: I had scheduled this to post Sunday morning but I put "PM" instead of "AM".  Oops. So it posted late yesterday but because there wasn't much traffic, I'm going to repost it today and then I will update tomorrow with the other part of the weekend.  

Hope you had a great weekend!

THE GREAT CHICKEN DEBATE

We saw this online the other day and it sparked debate in our household.  2nd Man likes white meat the best, the breast and the wing.  His least favorite part is the thigh.

I on the other hand love the dark meat.  Thighs are my absolute favorite, to me it's the perfect piece of chicken with the most flavor.  He will eat thigh meat if it's chopped up and included in a recipe but just fried chicken?  Nope.  The thighs he leaves for me.  I'm fine with that.  I leave the wings for him.  

SO good readers, what part of the chicken is YOUR favorite?