Seed Money

While Texas swelters in the unending heat, I have headed out to Las Vegas in order make some seed money for next years garden. The temperature here is a cool 105 and a little muggy. Hopefully, my departure will allow Texas to finally get some rain. Bad weather tends to follow me, so by next week it will be 130 here and 75 with a few days of rain in East Texas. Sadly many farmers have been hit hard by the lack of rain and the price of corn for animal feed has nearly doubled. Every where around us is a brown as could be and I would guess that at time when ranchers will need supplemental feed the price of that will be going through the roof as well. The hot, sunny weather has mostly been good for my gardening. Other than having to use a good deal of water, most of the garden grew has grown well this year.
When I left a few days ago I had bell peppers, cherry and Roma tomatoes, and egg plants growing. The sorano and pablano peppers were just about to produce, new cucumber and zucchini sprouts coming up. Unfortunately the six cantaloupes where torn to pieces by raccoons. This year I made a earthen dam around each plant in order to hold the water right where it was needed and let it soak down to the roots and watered each plant with watering can. This both fed the plants better and keep the garden from having many weeds.
Next spring I want to get even more planted and hopefully I can use my time in Vegas to plan for the 2012 planting. This has to be a big one since I have to prepare for December because according to the History Chanel the Mayans predicted the fall of civilization that day. Since the History Chanel is never wrong I better get prepared.

it ain't sunshine and pretty flowers

Gardening can be down right disgusting at times, with a hint of discouraging and disappointing.  The stem of the pumpkin plant has been eaten by some type of bug, maybe ants.  When I pulled on it slightly  the stem became completely detached.  I am not sure if I should have left it down, but I pulled the whole thing up and chucked it into the compost pile after I pulled the two pumpkins.

I am not sure how long these will survive, but I will keep them in the house in the hopes that they last until Halloween.  I was hoping to get four pumpkins. Two for the kids, one for our niece, and one so that I could try to make a homemade pumpkin pie.

And the Survey says!

When you live in the concrete jungle you usually have a pretty good idea where your property lines begin and end.  Of course there are many a neighbor who have had a dispute over small patches of land, but it gets even harder when the boundaries are out in the woods covered with over grown brush in areas where a fair number of poisonous snakes are found.  The survey crew has been out in the woods over the last week trying to big up these old markers.

Some of the points are fairly easy to locate because the corner posts from the old fence are still standing in a couple places, but just getting back to those corners can take a whole bunch of hacking through brush with a machete.  Even more to get a clear signal for the GPS devices that they use to mark these spots.  Luckily the kind of survey we are have done does not require them cut a line of site from one corner to next.  If that had to happen I would have to cut the lines myself due to certain budget restrictions.

Most often each spot is marked with some type of buried metal.  Pipes, old tools, sometimes old rifle barrels where used to mark property corners.  Working from the field notes on the deed they have to locate each one and clear enough area to get a GPS signal. Most often the marker hasn't got any actual marking on it at all, but since that should be the only reason to bury an old piece of rusty pipe out in the woods you know when you have found it.  With two machetes and a metal detector they have found all the marked corners of the property and are drawing up the survey. 

Some of the markers are from when this property used to be part of one large piece owned by the Kirby lumber company.  The survey crew says that a few of these concrete markers should have had some brass plates on them with field notes them from way back when, but the plates have come off.  They don't need to find the plates if they locate the marker, but I am going to check around these areas with our old 1970's metal  detector and see if I can dig any of these up.  I figure that in ten years I will be able to do the survey with an app on my iphone.  It might be sooner if they ever figure a way to get a better signal out here in the boondocks.

Old Fashion Organic Pest Control

Going through the garden over the last month I have spotted a couple of these weird patches of eggs.  Most are on the top of one of the upper leaves and easy to spot.  I rip the section of leaf off and feed it  to the chickens.  I am not sure if they even notice when they eat these tiny eggs.  Yesterday, I filled over a pumpkin leaf as I was tearing open a section and realized the underside was covered with these things and they had just hatched. Tiny gray insects with short black legs were swarming all over the leaf.  The chickens may have enjoyed eating that one.  Today, I went through all the plants in the garden trying to look under the leaves for these eggs.  I only found one other leaf that was covered on the underside.  Mostly, they appear on the leaves and are easy to spot. 

The meat market

Saturday morning we took the kids and drove up to the Kirbyville auction barn.  It is one of the few livestock auctions left around here. A good number of the small towns around here had livestock auction barns at one point, but over the years most of them have closed down.  If you Google Kirbyville auction barn a the first thing you find is a site called Manta that says the it is estimated at doing five to ten million in sales, but somehow I can picture this place doing that kind of business.  It is easy to see this place as it must have been in the early sixties when it was built, filling up all the pens and churning through the sales, but now only a couple pens had cattle inside. 

This one is about forty minutes away and is probably the closest one left in the area.  I would guess it had around a hundred and fifty seats and on our visit probably forty people were inside.  Definintly an old school kinda place, one of the few places left where you can smoke while you do business inside.  In nineteen sixty five this place was probably packed full a chain smoking, cowboy hat wearing, ranchers and farmers every Saturday.  These types of places were the center of comerce for a rural areas, but even when this was built the small farmers and ranches were probably fading fast as businesses and really only surviving as hobbies.

We mostly came to see the goats and pigs. Both, sold for for twenty to thirty dollars each for young ones and the grown goats could go up to a hundred and fifty.  The only grown pig for sale was a boar and since you can't eat it it only sold for thirty bucks even though it was a big fella. Most people were interested in buying feeder pigs.  They will fatten it for five or six months and then butcher in the winter.  We aren't quite ready for livestock yet, and when the girls realized we were serious about not buying anything today they were not interested in waiting through the cattle auction.

The first harvest

As the girls eagerly await the first cucumbers and tomatoes of the year the squash and zucchini has exploded.  This is one day of picking and there will be at least this much tomorrow, possibly the same the next day.  I may have planted just a little to much this.  I didn't expect to get this much out of what I planted.  Next year I will stagger each group of four zucchini and squash seeds by a week so that they roll in a little more evenly.  One week I will plant a group of each kind for about a month maybe five or six weeks.  That should help spread out when things are ready to pick.  If I had much more I would have to find somewhere to sell some of this stuff.

The only thing fresher, than fresh, FRESCHETTA

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of FRESCHETTA® for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.
Living in the deep dark woods of south east Texas we are mere hatchet throw away from a big, plate of super fried chicken and biscuits at couple dozen so called restaurants, but for pizza our options are limited to something that comes from a hut.  Since I haven't perfected a homemade crust we often consume a slice of the frozen pie.  I do like to heat it up a bit first. The good folks at FRESCHETTA were nice enough to send me a sweet coupon for one of there pizza by the slice products.
FRESCHETTA® By the Slice

They got four fantastic flavors of single slice pizza options: BBQ chicken, vegetable medley, chicken-spinach-mushroom, and the SIX CHEESE MEDLEY!!!! Since I like my chicken deep fried, dipped in butter and my veggies come from the garden, I went for the SIX CHEESE MEDLEY. Cheese is what pizza is all about and this slice-a-pie was tasty.  It's a darn good thing there was only one slice in there or this would have contributed to my overwhelming gluttony cause I could have eaten a whole big ol' pizza pie. It was tough to resist the temptation to use the second coupon they sent me so that I could get  another slice of this tasty pizza, but that one I am giving away to someone who leaves a comment on this post saying they would like to try the new Freschetta By the Slice.

What you thought this was over, no chance man, because Freschetta also sent me this six piece LaCuisine locking round storage container set.  No way! Yes way! With the gardens booming I know someone could use this to hold some of the their veggies.

FRESCHETTA® By the Slice
http://www.facebook.com/freschettapizza That link your gonna need cause when your finished with pizza your going to want to head over to Facebook and give it the thumbs up.

Eating Wasp Larva

Not for me.  I watched some survival show where they ate wasp larva after they snatched the nest during a rain storm.  That was the first thing I thought about when I saw this thing a minute ago.

No way I could snack on these things unless the options where pretty limited. I think I might rather end up like the cannibals in that book The Road than slurp down some of this.