Red Neck River Days

Just a couple of pictures of a trip we took to a church BBQ..seemingly an everyday even but where we live even the mundane can be an adventure..check out the bridge in the photos below.

It was a hot sultry day along a small river on one of the parishoners farms.

The bridge was built in 1901

But no fear, it got a thorough going over due to the efforts of the President of the United States...not Obama...Eisenhower.

It was pretty spectacular scenery.

Farmstead Update

Lots of activity this month, harvesting, canning, freezing, and preparing for the fall garden.

We are harvesting cantelopes, watermellon, pumpkins, squash, green beans, tomatoes still...

Holly is very proud of the 40 or so pumpkins we have harvested so far....overkill to me but she likes them.

We have literally bushels of green beans needing to be picked but we are sick of them. You can only can, pickle, freeze, and eat so many fresh green beans before it just gets out of hand.

The babysweet watermellons are great though, you can eat them right down to the rind and they are just sweet as can be.

Judy and Holly have sold several cantelopes, watermellons and pumpkins....I think it averages out to them making about $.02 per hour...farming is tough.

The first of our potato harvest

We have had such a variety of fresh tomatoes we have gotten spoiled but we have frozen some, canned a bunch, made salsa, ketchup, marinara etc. BUT THE BEST USE of them is to take a purple Cherokee and slice it thick, fry up some farm raised smoked bacon until its crisp, take some crisp lettuce from the garden and then put it all together on toasted home made bread with a good dab of mayo and your in heaven.

Bandit was over visiting and needed a nap.

These are called Autumn Crocuses and they just popped up out of the ground with no green foliage...apparently they are about a month early this year.

They are in the back of the Lilac and by the front porch...very strange etheral flower.

The Crepe Myrtles came back nicely from the winter damage, we thought they were mostly goners but they just bloomed a little late.

Judy planted these elephant ears from bulbs ...in May...

Since we have harvested all the corn cobs we are letting the stalks dry out so we can harvest them and use them for Halloween/Thanksgiving decorations.

And the Sorghum we were told we were too late to grow?...Its now tasseling

We are letting the seeds develop and dry out on the sunflowers before we harvest them, this butterfly seems to like it.

I believe he is a Monarch

First Corn Harvest and Other Happenings Around the Homestead

We have been selectively harvesting corn from our first planting to eat everynight and it finally got to the point where we had to harvest and can. After purchasing a pressure canner, we harvested 140 ears from the first planting and almost all of them were fully poolinated with sweet full ears which was really gratifying as we have never grown corn before and our knowlege all comes from books and the Internet. Several neighbors have had a poor corn harvest and incompletely pollinated ears (they will be missing rows, the kernals are small etc) so I think they way we planted 8 rows deep and in rows about 50 feet long helped. We also didnt use any fertilizer beyond organic compost and some composed horse manure nor did we use any pesticides so we ended up with horn worm on the ends of most of the ears but we just cut those parts off. We decided early on we didnt want to use roundup or any type of weed killer and we sure didnt want to spend all day weeding so we layed old hay between the rows and we intensively planted closer than what was recommended (the rows were just wide enough for me to get a push mower through to keep some of the weeds in check). We still have about 20 or 30 ears on the first 4 rows and the whole second planting to harvest in a week or so....more than enough for us to can and freeze for the winter.

All of the ears were fat and full; very few culls.

They are so sweet we were nibbling on them raw.

The gals shucking the corn, I cut off the horn worms.

Now we have to process them.

We froze 34 ears as corn on the cob following the Ball Blue Book instructions, we took 16 ears and made pickled corn and the rest we cut off the cob and canned using the pressure canner.

It can get tedious and we had to do several batches.

Presto 16 quart pressure canner worked like a champ....but we could have used the 23 quart.

While we were at it, we harvested some tomatoes, added onion, garlic and basil from our garden and popped them into the oven to roast.

Pureed them when they were roasted.

And we had the tastiest roasted tomato soup for dinner.

The pickled corn is in the pint jars and its very good...the whole house still smells like corn.

And while we were out the other day we found this wing backed chair for $68.00' its not an antique but its a nice chair and almost brand new without a mark on it.

We also found this swivel rocker for $15.00; again not an antique but not a mark on it and it just needs cleaning.

At a yard sale on the way home we bought some things for Judy and found these chairs for $1.35 each (we got 4)...not our style but they will due for temp use and the price was right.

We also found this old play bill in the frame for a couple bucks

We both had a long hard day watching the ladies do the canning.

The Cross Country Journey

We stayed 2 days in Bellingham with Alex and enjoyed helping him start a garden and watching movies. We then travelled to Bozeman Montana where we ate in one of the best steak houses I have ever eaten in...it was fairly non-descript and advertized a casino so we werent expecting much but good grief we ate great steaks for about $15.00 and it was top of the line....and I have lived all over the world and obviously like to eat. We next drove all day and stayed in Sturgis SD where we had a great burger at the American Road House but though the area was beautiful...Sturgis is way to commercialized for the biker crowd. It disappointed. Our final stay was in a truck stop in Iowa and we had fun there too....I guess that happens when your retired.

Along the way we saw literally hundreds of deer and probably a thousand antelope (I-90). I have driven that route before and never remember that many Antelope. We also saw hundreds of pheasants in Iowa and many wild turkeys. We stopped at the Little Big Horn National Monument to see the site of Custer's Last Stand, Wall Drug in Wall SD and of course the Corn Palace. We had great weather the whole way and only turned on the wipers to clear the bug guts off the windscreen.

We enter South Dakota

Holly May at Little Big Horn National Monument

Brevet MGEN Custer's headstone. The markers are all where they died and it was a very nice monument. The area is very small and you really get a sense of how desperate their plight was and how foolish militarily the positions were that they chose.

7th Cavalry Soldiers werent the only ones who died that day

Still in the west..fun place.

Holly in front of the Wall Drug Store in Wall SD. If you havent gone go...We will return with our camper. Its campy, its kitch..its a lot of fun.

Like I said, its campy fun.

I couldnt keep Holly off the Jackalope..it was real...seriously.

Its a very small town but really nice...like I said, we will return.

Holly at the Corn Palace in Mitchell SD..those are corn cobs on the outside of the building...Cotton isnt King..Corn is in these parts

It was a fun trip all around.