Fall Chores

The unbearable heat has finally lifted in East Texas and we will hopefully have nice fall days for at least a month or two before it starts to be freezing all day long.  The weather here is unpredictable and last year all of December was cold with a very small amount of snow. Since that was the first winter I spent here since we moved out here five years ago I thought it would be warmer.  Sometimes is it 72 degrees on Christmas day.  During this short time of pleasant weather I have a big list of things I want to get done.  I have another couple of weeks before rifle hunting season starts, but my shooting lane is pretty well cleared out.

In the next four weeks I need to:
Clear all the down limbs from around the pump house:
        These have been down since Huricane Ike and this will make the third time I have cleared this area                 because both times before were followed by Huricanes that knocked down a bunch more tree limbs.

Clean out the cistern and the pump house.
      The concrete cistern  holds about three hundred gallons and gets  a layer of silt that comes up out of the         ground with the water and needs to be cleaned out from time to time.

Clear the area next to the old garage for a goat area.
      Around Easter it looks like we are going to be adding a rabbit because our youngest is not gonna let up,          but I want to get a couple goats in the early spring.  It should cost around three to four hundred bucks and       I need a good spot to put them in.

Build some type of green house.
     This will probably be a 4x4's framing out a base, a metal canopy that we already have and some plastic           sheeting.  Hopefully, it will be enough to let us have tomatoes in the winter.

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October 5, 2010: Guess Who's Ready For Winter!

Who's that under the blanket?

I think I see a black nose and ear.

Ahhh, it's Annie! She's having dinner in bed ;-)

Otto doesn't eat his dinner in bed, but he does spit out his kibble and vitamin onto the rug, while he picks out the chicken and green beans. He does finally eat the vitamin and the dog food, but not before all the "good" stuff is gone.

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October 6, 2010: %#$!@*&^

Pardon my French, but I'm hopping mad. I went over to the Charter Cable office yesterday, to find out how to snowbird my internet account while we are in Arizona. I was informed it could not be snowbirded, as I was under a two year contract, and even if it was unavailable to me, I still had to pay the monthly charge or pay a $75 cancellation fee. That's not what I was told when I had it last year. I was told I could pay $7 a month while I was gone to keep the account active. I opted to just cancel and pay the $30 reconnect fee upon returning. Now I'm told I agreed to a two year contract for special pricing. They were the ones guaranteeing me a price that wouldn't change for two years, nothing at all was said about my having to keep their service for that length of time. The rep said a contract was mailed to me about two weeks after I began using their service. Like I told her, I never even received a statement from them for nearly two months, as they were sending it to the wrong address! It wasn't until I called to find out what was going on that I discovered they were using my house address (site of installation) rather than my PO box (on the order), so everything was being returned to them.

That's the same thing I went through a few years back with Clearwire. They changed their policy on snowbirding accounts, without notice, after I had signed with them, and it took letters to the state attorney general and the BBB to get their cancellation fee waved (I think it was around $135).

Looks like I'll be back to square one trying to find an internet provider next spring.

Now that I have that off my chest.......

Mr. Granny decided to help me in the garden this afternoon. That man is worse than a bull in a china shop! He removed all my pepper plants and, as he shook the dirt off the roots (into the paths, of course), peppers were flying everywhere! I scrambled to pull them off the plants and off the ground, and ended up with a goodly amount. Seventeen pounds of them, to be exact.


I do wish they'd have had time to turn red. I'm not fond enough of green peppers to want 17 more pounds of them in the freezer, so calls will be put out to the kids to "come and get 'em".

Annie and Otto made their yearly trip to the vet today, for booster shots and a wellness checkup. Annie has been scooting on her bottom a lot lately, so an anal glands check was also given. Annie was really full of it, Otto not so bad. Of course, both dogs had to have baths when they got back home.



Poor Annie. She just can't seem to lose any weight. In fact, she's gained over four pounds since her last checkup. She's had her thyroid checked, and it's OK. She's a really lazy dog. She doesn't get much exercise a t all, she's rather sleep in her blankie most of the day. I play fetch with her, but she doesn't fetch, so I have to go get, and I wear out faster than she does. I have really put my foot down on Mr. Granny lately, because I know he slips her food she's not supposed to have. I have her on a very strict diet, and I stand over her so she doesn't gobble her food and then go help Otto with his.

Tonight she had her regular dinner of lean chicken and green beans, then she kept butting my leg, wanting me to feed her some of my dinner. After suffering through much eye rolling and nose butting, I finally gave her two small chunks of cantaloupe, which she gobbled up like a starved woman. The nose butting kept up while I was loading the dishwasher. I had the trash can out from under the sink, and Annie got in the cupboard and wouldn't come out. I had a large lettuce leaf in my hand, so I lured her out with that. I really didn't think she'd actually eat it.....but she did!

At least it's not fattening!

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October 6, 2010: Internet Update

I just got a phone call from Charter, apologizing for what happened at the office yesterday. She said they do not want to lose such a good, long time customer. They will snowbird my account.

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Rain Farmer

The weather was, well you know -wet. I left the studio for the bus at 4 pm. I got home at 5 pm. I jumped in the van and hit traffic on Ocean Parkway, but still made it before 6 pm. Above, Solidago sempervirens at Jamaica Bay's edge.

I only had so much time. Why was I so committed to planting mesclun mixes, radishes, and arugula in the rain anyway? Because of the letter from Ranger Thaddeus T. that says we must cease gardening on November first. November first? C'mon. Well, my protest is performance, because I well knew that was the end date. Is it silly? Yes. The best way to get good gardeners into these plots is to get a site manager that actually understands gardening. They could then change that silly date to December fifteen.

The garden managers have a never realized dream of tilling the whole acre under every year at season's close. I'm not fond of that idea, but reality is that no one's moving there hardscaping anyhow. They also want to shut off the water -that's the biggest concern, drain the pipes before a good hard freeze. Fine, I say, turn the water off, but let us keep going with the kale, broccoli, and greens. It's usually wet and cool enough to get by without watering at that time of year.

So there's the push to rush those greens seeds in, even though it meant getting soaked in the dim light of an October evening. I planted rather hastily, with crooked rows, and uneven seeding. I was more concerned with the big footprints I was seeing in all my empty patches -the places I seeded cilantro, parsley, and spinach. One really needs fences. Only a knowledgeable gardener suspects a bare patch is planted with seeds at such a late date in a warm season garden gone dismal. But then, why tromp through a garden at all, why not follow the trenches? It's better not to ask.

The old broccoli patch now seeded with different mesclun mixes and arugula.

The bell peppers are having a hard time turning red with all the rain and cool weather.

The collards are beginning to look fantastic without all the 'pillar holes.

Today's semi-ripe tomato haul. There's still another four dozen or so on the vines. Every tomato that rests on the ground has the buckeye rot. If it remains in the air, it has no buckeye rot. Next year -all tomatoes will be off the ground. FYI -the net isn't my attempt at decorating the shoot, although I know you're thinking how fabulous it looks. In fact, it's window screening I had in the van and made a convenient way to carry the tomatoes back home.

Elsewhere around the Ft. Tilden Community Garden:

One of the new gardeners that came in with us has planted Kale, and it's looking good.

My favorite farmer has reaped his amaranth and tackled his corn. This man operates like a real farmer, with two or three seasons of different produce. He planted his corn and amaranth around August one. Before that it was beans. Do you remember this?

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On The Mushroom Trail

We arrived in darkness the evening before I hit the trail of the woods, anxious to see it in August, never have I been present so late in summer. I was told it would be cool and dry this time of the year, but it was warm and humid, much like the NYC we had left behind. There had been significant rains in the prior weeks, leaving fresh signs of muddy torrents. The mosquitoes told the same tale, trailing me, humming it in my ear.

On the northern slopes, where the forest canopy is nearly impenetrable by sun light, and amongst the few plants, there is much fallen timber. Whether or not something is wrong with this woods, as it appears to my senses, the tangle of twigs and timber is the understory. There is little to no leaf litter, no humus, not much of anything. But, on those fallen trees, there are fungi of all sorts. Ever since my experience in the Pine Barrens of LI, I've held a casual, but definitively greater curiosity about mushrooms.

The beautiful, velvety, green and white Turkey Tail, trametes versicolor, or, if not, possibly Stereum ostrea.

Unidentifiable mushrooms were fruiting everywhere; the cool blue-tinged browns, grays and greens of the understory punctuated by yellows and oranges.

Of course, there are rotting logs and timber everywhere for the saprobic fungi to decompose.

Dappled light occasionally appears on the forest floor. Wait, is that? Yes, those are mushrooms.

Hundreds of small white mushrooms growing on a few logs, dappled by sunlight.

They are humorous in appearance -in that pubescent way.

But also a bit alien, mysterious. These turn out to be Lycoperdon pyriforme, pear-shaped puffballs, edible when young. Tom Volk says the name can also mean pear-shaped wolf fart, if translated -"Lyco" meaning wolf, "perdon" to break wind.

An aging Coral mushroom, possibly Ramaria stricta, along side the little puffs.

Simply striking.

And startling.

Well named and creepy, Dead Man's Fingers, Xylaria polymorpha, easily spooks those prone.

It is hard to seek out mushroom IDs on the internet. The characteristics often necessary to ID fungi are often overlooked, often underneath, sometimes microscopic, and often discovered after the fact.

Quite possibly Chinese Snow Fungus, Tremella Fuciformis. I'm guessing "Tremella" for its shaky nature and "Fuciformis" for its seaweed-like form. Am I getting good at this?

I really want this to be called Bread of the Woods, Panisilva mellidermis!

And these could be called Toadstool People, Mycosella minipopulus.

Any

suggestions

for

these?

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A Free Lunch

So I decided to buy a sack of corn this morning and set up my feeder even though I have a full month and a half until rifle season opens, but I figured I see if they will come this close to the house or if I need to move my feeder a little further down the line.  The corn cost 5 bucks for a fifty pound sack and this year I am going to try to keep track of what I spend on hunting season so I can see if it is cost effective.  Bow season opens in a couple weeks and I am tempted to pick up a bow on Craigslist and give it a shot, but so far I haven't been able to bring myself to spend the money.  A new bow goes for a minimum of two hundred fifty bucks  with the average around four hundred and the top end around a thousand bucks.  You gotta put up a lot of meat to make a thousand dollar bow pay for itself.

The feeder has a light sensor which will set it off about a hour after sunrise and an hour before sunset.  The little metal plate spins around allowing the corn to flow out and be scattered around the feeder.  The black box holds the light sensor, a six volt battery and a controller that allows you to test the motor as well as set the amount of time the feeder spins.  I have it set to the minimum so that I won't have to fill the five gallon bucket as much. I know the deer are out there so really I am just trying to lure them a little bit closer and hopefully at a convenient time.  Apparently they have never gotten the message that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
The main reason I put it out now was to see if it draws the hogs into the area.  On the the east side of the creek where Luci's cousin bow hunts all he seen are hogs, at her grandmothers place a little ways down the road they have trapped ten or twelve this year.  If the hogs come I will have to take the hunting more seriously.  You can't have them to close. They tear up gardens and can be dangerous.

This feeder has to wait a full twenty four hours to set its internal timer for sun-up and sun-down so it wont be until the morning after next that I will hear the clinking of the corn and I can start watching to see how long it takes for them to go for the snack.

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