Death To Zombies

I’d never eaten turnips until I grew them in my own back yard.  I haven’t cooked with them yet, but I really enjoy slicing them into small chilled rounds and dipping them in a herb dip and eating them like potato chips.

Part of what I’ve enjoyed about turnips is that they have always grown reliably and not really demanded any attention from me.  Sometimes I’ve left them unwatered for weeks and unweeded for months yet they still produce massive yields.

For storage I chopped off everything but the top 1″ of the greens, brushed the dirt off, didn’t wash them and then stashed them in the crisper drawer in glad-lock bags.  Should be good for a few weeks.

Also, today is Creative Ice Cream Flavor Day.  I was planning on making some of my own so I can determine the quality level myself and save some money but I didn’t buy my coffee cans in time.  There’s a method for making your own ice cream that involves sealing a 1# tin inside a 3# tin and then dumping ice and rock salt into the 3# tin then rolling it back and forth for 20 to 25 minutes.  So instead I’m going to stop by Chinatown Market and pick up some Green Tea Ice Cream.  I first had it when I was eating Sushi and have been addicted to it since.

I’ve tried a lot of different ways to organize my pantry and now that I store large amounts of food, I’ve found that I had to reorganize.  A long time ago, when I was exercising a ton, I organized my pantry by Protein vs Carbohydrates vs Fats vs Treats and then separated the essential sundries.  Then for a while I was eating junk and I shoved all my essential long term food way in the back of the pantry and restocked all the crap I was eating in the front of the pantry.

What I’ve now settled on is that I’m best off if I stock the items based on their expiration date.  So I have one shelf that has items that are expiring this month and they are regularly worked into my meal plan.  Then the shelf below that is for all other items that will expire this year.  Then a shelf below I have all items that will expire next year…and so on and so forth.  This helps me not waste food that will go bad soon.

I have also started keeping track of exactly how much food I should have to live on for a year and what I purchase those items for.  Then I watch the sales and if I see someone selling for very cheap prices I will stock up for the full year.  This also helps me keep track of how much I need to plant in the garden.

Also, I shop at local thrift shops and pick up very large tins.  Basically the ones that people sell popped popcorn in.  In these tins I store bulk items like dry beans, canned meat, flour, sugar, tea and coffee.  When I do restock these items, I empty out the tin and place the items with the longest storage dates in the bottom so when I’m in a hurry I’ll just grab ones that are sitting on the top.  This has three practical effects:

1. This helps me organize, inventory and store items that I buy in large quantities
2. It keeps these essentials away from mice who can wreak havoc on long term supplies before I notice.
3. Finally, it makes these food items easy to load into the car if I decide it’s time to head for the hills.

As a side note, but on the same topic, check out PREPAREDNESS MATTER’s recent post about Black Beans and Rice(http://preparednessmatters.blogspot.com/2011/06/cooking-with-basic-food-storage-black.html) from dry storage items.  It’s a simple recipe that I plan to try out soon.

Juneteenth is known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day.  It’s a combination of the words June and Nineteenth.  It is a holiday that originated in Texas and is based on the date that Emancipation of slaves were proclaimed in Texas.

Slavery is an institution that has been around since the inception of civilization and continues until this day.  There are those who are officially still in slavery like the children purchased from Haiti to be house maids or sex slaves.  But there are also those who are slaves to a culture that tells them they must succeed more than their fellow man.  They must subjugate their peers and therefore earn more for their families.  Yet ironically in the current environment that is not how the practice actually works.

Still worse, America now has more people in prison than any other nation in the world.  Do I despise censorship and lack of representation of the people in China?  Sure I do.  But I even more so am disappointed by a nation of immigrants that now hates immigrants.  A nation that imprisons people for silly offenses at the cost of $32k per incarcerated person most of whom are not a threat to our lives and couldn’t earn $32k if they had to.  What is better, to teach people lessons short term and then return them to paying taxes or for us to pay so much to incarcerate our 2.5 million?

It is time for us to move on and become a more free nation.  I served with immigrants in the military and I grew up with minorities.  They are people who just want to improve their lives, improve our nation and fight so that we can all be free.

I’m going to celebrate Juneteenth by watching a few films that I’ve seen before and a few I’ve only heard about:

1. Amistad
2. Malcolm X
3. To Kill A Mockingbird
4. Eyes On The Prize
5. Do The Right Thing
6. Glory

You can find out more about the official holiday of Juneteeth at this website, http://www.juneteenth.com/.

Took me a few days to get another post set up.  My old camera died a little while back and I don’t have my camera phone anyhow.  I’m just running an el cheapo Virgin Mobile phone in the thought that it’s not a contract or recurring bill and that I’ll probably get a smartphone whenever I get my next job.  So, this post had to wait for my new Kodak Powershot A490 to arrive.  I would have preferred a camera that accepted external batteries rather than relying on a USB charger but I went for cheap instead.

Enough of the excuses and now for the updates.  I’ve got a plan of attack prepared to handle all my recurring bills and reducing what little fat I had left over in the budget.  I also got my new gardening plan set up for the spring.  I’ve missed a few opportunities to plant things that are very early season, like cabbage, but I’m still early enough to be able to plant a very productive garden.

At the same gardenign store I armed myself with a mole trap and a squirrel trap.  It’s time to stop sharing with the little buggers.  Not to mention, it would be nice to learn how to use a hav-a-heart trap before I really need one.  I doubt I’ll eat the squirrels I catch as I’m not a huge fan of squirrel, but I may cook it up for the puppies so the meat at least doesn’t go to waste.  I tried peanut butter as my bait and caught a squirrel in two days.  In this case I didn’t kill the rabbit as I was just testing out how hard it was to catch them.

I did a fair job of drying my clothes on the fence last year just by draping them over the chainlink but I noticed that the metal did stain some clothing.  So I’ve strung up a clothesline.

Hope y’all are doing well.

Diggity

Since we’ve finally had a dry spell, I’ve been able to make some progress in the garden.  I transplanted 12 green bell peppers and 6 jalapenos into the garden.  I ripped out the arugula that had gone to seed.  Then I harvested all my spinach.  I didn’t get as much out as I wanted.  I wanted to produce 12# this year and I only got out 1.75 but that was due to me not preparing enough space for new plants before the heat came on.  I may be able to make up for it in the fall.

I also managed to get some fertilizer put in and replaced the two sunflower plants that never sprouted due to all the wetness.  I dug a large watermelon and cantaloupe patch but I need some more rain to incorporate the fertilizer and calcium I amended the soil with.  After that I’ll wrap it all in black plastic and put the plants in.  I’ll have to concentrate on early varieties since I’m planting late.

Since it’s June I’ve started my fall broccoli and cabbage indoors.  I’ll plant the kale indoors soon.  I’ve started a ton of flowers indoors, Black Eyed Susans, Morning Glories, Salvia and Purple Coneflower.  I’m going to run the Morning Glories along the fence so I don’t have to run the weed whacker as much.

My Swiss Chard is coming along nicely and my Fennel is looking very nice after I weeded them aggressively during all the rain a week ago.  The rain barrel is really helping me in the garden because my outside faucet froze up this winter and I had to cap the line.  I need to finish setting up my 200+ gallon tote.  I got the ball valve in the mail, but I need to elevate the tote a bit more.  I didn’t understand why I saw some other people using rail road ties to elevate theirs until my small scale 55 gallon barrel started to get low on water.  It’s hard to get the last third of water out of the barrel when it’s too close to the ground.

My first plantings of Radishes are all ready to be consumed and I’ve planted more than I can eat.  But I’ve started to harvest them anyhow, just so that I can start the next plantings of them.  I’ve got 8 tomato plants out.  I wanted to get 16 put in, but again I haven’t prepared enough space for all of them.  Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda…

The potato plants are coming along nicely although I’m not sure how ugly the potatoes are going to be since I planted in an area where theres a lot of gravel in the soil.  The soil in the rest of the garden is definitely coming along nicely though.  It is absolutely easier to dig and weed this year, so that investment in peat moss, compost and sand have definitely paid off.  I’ll keep amending the soil aggressively in future years.

My plastic fencing I bought last year broke down in just one season and the dogs and rabbits were easily getting into the garden.  So I’ve finally buckled down and invested in some true metal fencing and more T-posts.

The good news is that I’ve invested probably 80 hours into planning exactly what my nutritional needs were for the full year and then extended that into determining how much I need to plant and how large the garden needs to be.  It appears to be around a fifth of an acre will need to be planted.  That’s big, but that includes a ton of berries, wheat, oats, dark green veggies, orange veggies and a ton of my favorites Arugula and Bell Peppers.

So I’ve been intending to grow Swiss Chard for years but this is the first time I’ve succeeded.  It appears to be a pretty easy leafy green to grow and it tolerates the heat more than Arugula.  I planted two patches of it and the one that was well weeded grew steadily and the one that needed more weeding grew at 1/3 to 1/2 the pace of it’s competitor.  I’ve fixed the weed problem now by removing many weeds and mulching with chopped leaves.

Another nice thing bout Swiss Chard is that you just harvest a few leaves from each plant and it continues to replenish.  Even better, you don’t need scissors or a knive.  Just snap ‘em off and take ‘em to the kitchen.  The only downside is that, like spinach, when you cook it down it rapidly reduces as it loses moisture.  So an entire bunch of Swiss Chard(about 16 leaves I’d say) produce 1 cup of cooked greens which is 2 servings.  They’re really nutritious servings but it’s something to keep in mind when you grow it.

I’m trying to track how much food I intake each year in order to predict how much to stockpile and how much to grow.  You’re now going to see a steady tally at the bottom of each post even if I don’t blog specifically about what I ate that day.

Produced and eaten since 6/1/2011:

1/2c Swiss Chard

Supplemented by store bought:

1 clove garlic

2T olive oil

pinch crushed red pepper

I’ve had my Crosman RM 377 air rifle for about 5 years now and I just love the thing to death.  It is a bit louder than I would like, but I got it on clearance at wal-mart for $50.  It shoots .177 at 825 FPS which is just fine for popping rabbits and squirrels.  And while I wish it was quieter I have frequently shot it inside city limits with no complaints from any neighbors, although I do tend to shoot from inside out a window with the lights off and shading set up to conceal me.  And you can’t beat how cheap it is to shoot .177 ammo.  And it has a nice wood stock and it’s break action, none of that 10 pump annoyance.

Recently though the front sight lost one of it’s screws.  I finally went down to find a screw to fix it, but it’s a strange dimension and I could only find a screw that sort of fit the hole.  Since it was less than a buck I bought the screw and tried to re-sight the air rifle but I just couldn’t shoot tight groups any more.

So I read around and found one guy who was using a nice Bushnell scope with Adjustable Objective, 4-12x40mm, which runs around $100.  But I just wanted to get my $50 rifle back into working order and it chafed me a bit to add gear to the rifle that costs twice what the gun was worth when it was new let alone 5 years old and bit scraped up.  So I stopped in at Wal-Mart to see if they had a new air rifle with mounted scope for less than $100.  They didn’t, as all their air rifles came with the scope unmounted.  I had never mounted a scope before, but if I was going to do that I didn’t want to buy a second rifle.

What Wal-Mart did have was a $17 Tasco scope that was 3-9x20mm.  And while I would never take a Tasco scope out hunting for big game or long shots, I have shot them before on air rifles and was quite accurate with them.  So I checked with the old guy with a huge beard running the Hunting and Fishing section if scopes were returnable.  He assured me they were but did ask that I was delicate opening the hard plastic casing if I thought returning might be an option so they could actually resell the scope.  I’m a reasonable man, agreed with him and made my purchase.

Brought it home and mounted a scope for the first time in my life.  It wasn’t difficult although I was a little hesitant in my first few tries.  I really thought the rails would be a little bit deeper than they are.  Then I took it out back and sighted it in.  I have to say that it takes a whole lot of clicks to move the reticle.  I ended up having to move it 60 clicks to the right and 40 clicks down but then I was punching a whole in a varmint sized kill area with every shot.  Now the dog gone rabbits that were invading my garden have moved on.  But still, I’ve extended the life of an existing and reliable gun and for much less that I was originally thinking of paying.  If the rabbits come back, I’ll be ready.  And any time I want to burn some time working on my trigger pull I have the ability to train cheaply and in my back yard.

Here’s how I sighted in.  Once I knew I was shooting tight groups, I did adjust sometimes after only one or two shots.

It is certainly wonderful that I know I won’t wither away anytime soon, but a full freezer means that I don’t have any space to put up produce as I harvest it.  Certainly, I can dry and jar more than I was planning on but there are some things that don’t lend themselves to those food preservation methods.  And I don’t actually have all the food stored that I wanted to have stored.  Here are all the things that I am running short on space that I was planning on acquiring this year:

30# of catfish

Photo by cliff1066

40 whole chicken fryers

4# of brats

15 rabbits, dressed out

70c of blackberries

70c of strawberries

20c of frozen melon balls

14c blueberries

photo by Nick Saltmarsh

6c peaches

18c raspberries

20c grapes

9# broccoli

10# spinach

7# peas

4# cauliflower

How did I get my freezer so full so early in the season you ask?  Because I’ve been shopping all the local deals.  When stores sell items at a loss to lure me in, I’ve been buying up the amount I’d use for an entire year of that particular item.  It’s a great way to save money.  So I’m probably going to have to use a few different methods to handle this problem.

When it comes to chickens and rabbits I may have to come up with a method that is me slaughtering them as I need them.  Tractor Supply Company only has chicks for a month or so as far as I can tell.  I just did some research and it turns out that some hatcheries will let you purchase smaller amounts, as low as 10 or 8 chicks at a time.  So that is probably how I’ll end up handling the meat issue.  I will also stop stocking up on items that I rarely use but picked up because they were cheap, like roasts and stew meat.

I’ll also thaw out that nasty spaghetti sauce I made with spam that just never turned out any good.  I’ve been procrastinating eating that stuff for a year now.  I’m sure the dogs will love it.

As for the rest of it, I think I’ll have to keep my eyes open for a slightly larger freezer or a second small freezer.  I hate to consider it though as I’m already tight on space in the house.

The Dervaes family may be more liberal than many of my readers but they have also plotted a course that many of us only dream of.  Leave politics aside and see how they feed their family on a tenth of an acre and bring in $20k in income to boot!  Don’t criticize and instead learn from those who are willing to share and then implement their lessens in your own life.  You CAN change the world, change yourself and live the way you dream to.

So, spent 4 hours building the sandbag wall up higher in Parkville, MO.  They still need help, and they estimate they’ll need it until 9 pm tonight.  You can check for other updates over at the Parkville website, http://www.parkvillemo.com/CivicAlerts.aspx, It was a pretty diverse range of people who showed up to help out.  There were pimply kids, middle aged workers(some out of work unfortunately), old aged men and god bless the young woman who showed up with a plunging neckline.  I could have kept passing her sandbags all afternoon long.

But in all seriousness, if you’re local consider stopping by and helping out.  They’ve got plenty of ice cold water, free tetanus shots and some snacks.  They activated this activity pretty early compared to when the flood water is expected to arrive.  Since this is a result of opening dams upriver of us, they can actually predict that the waters will rise in a week to two weeks.  In essence, this is a result of the hard winter much of the nation had and added to the rocky snowpack.

I am dog tired and spent most of the afternoon laying in the air conditioning and letting my muscles twitch.  Now I need to eat a nice meal.