Wanna Get Married?

 

Or should I just put ‘em up for auction on ebay? The zucchinis, not the Crocs.  I picked these biggies this afternoon.  

  I have to admit that I knew these were growing and wanted to see how big they’d get before I picked them… I couldn’t stand it any longer (no pun intended).  I didn’t want them to go bad.   Seventeen inches long.

Do ya think the zucchini plants like the red dirt? These are my OU Crocs that I throw on to run outside and check on the dogs or to water the barrels… So I thought I’d shoot the zuccs with them so you’d get an idea of the size.  The size is women’s 8-9 or mediums in Croc sizing. This was before I found the tape measure. I didn’t want anyone to think they were ‘baby crocs’.

Now for the weigh-in….

DRUMROLL

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 Yep.  Eight pounds.  That’s 3.62873 kilograms.

Anyway you look at it it’s a lot of zucchini!!!

Planted and watered and lovingly encouraged to grow to an excellent post size for your viewing pleasure by the old red dirty dirt girl.

Snork.

It Runs In The Family…

 

 

One of my nieces sent me the following e-mail…

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What is the difference between Bird Flu and Swine Flu?

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For bird flu you need tweetment and for swine flu you need oinkment.

 

I forwarded this e-mail on to various family members and friends.

My baby brother, a doctor who works at an urgent care division of a hospital, sent this           e-mail back to me…

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I saw a case of "Chirpes."

It is a canarial disease.

It is untweetable.

Laundry Day…

I'm adding a proviso- I have a king sized bed. The jeans and shorts look skinnier on it... The clothes I wore when I was younger would fit two in one pair now.

I did my laundry yesterday. I was having a lazy day inside after I got the outside stuff done early, nobody else was needing to do their wash so I got after it.

I had washed my grungies, i.e. my working jeans and shorts. I threw them on the bed to fold or hang and I got to looking at them…

I had to laugh at the progression. I wear clothes a long time. I wear them o.u.t. When my jeans get stained with whatever, they become yard jeans or painting and yard jeans or nasty cleaning job jeans or car washing jeans… You get my drift.

When they get too many worn places in the legs and knees, they becomes working shorts. I cut them off. The older I get the longer the shorts are cut. When you look at the following evolution of clothing, please understand that these clothes are all CLEAN. They have paint on them as well as red dirt stains and a blood stain here and there.

Enjoy the following photos and be very proud of how clean your laundry looks.

My newest working pants.

Next oldest. Dirt, paint, etc.

My Daisy Dukes. These are probably 15 years old. At least. The red on these is paint, as well as the yellow and white…

These are only about ten years old. They are somewhat longer.

These are my most recent cutoffs. These are the only one of the three pairs I’ll wear if I have to run to Lowe’s or Atwood’s or the grocery or whatever. I don’t wear the other two pairs of shorts except around the ponderosa here.

I do try to dress my age…

Corn Report…

Some days are diamonds, other days…. well, let’s just say I’m a techno-idiot and I need a brain. While reading Robynn’s Ravings yesterday she told about a life changing experience. Windows Live Writer. Another blogger she reads had told her to go download it. It would provide her with a no-hassle way to write her blog, post pictures and more without the headaches of Blogger.

So why not check it out, Helen, I’m thinkin’? Maybe there is a way to blog that doesn’t involve cuss words and stompin’ around the house grumbling in frustration. I have it on my new computer, so let’s go see it dance and shine…

I’m here to testify right now in front of God and all you blogging friends. I could screw up a wet dream. Yep. I could…

I had to first go find WLW on my computer. No problem. I opened up my all programs screen (I know how to go there, I just don’t for sure know that’s what it’s called, but y’all do) and I found it, clicked on it and brought it up and did the happy sitting down dance thinkin’ oh boy I’m gonna tear it up on my corn report.

I loaded the pictures I took to show you all the growth of the corn. WLW even put them where I wanted them AT THAT MOMENT. Then I went back up to the top to start writing next to the first picture… It wouldn’t let me start where I wanted to start. The cursor, a good name for it by the way, would stay right beside the BOTTOM of the first picture. WTF? This can’t be happening. Robynn and two others she suggested I look at all said with happy tunes in their ‘voices’ and flowers dancing around their heads how easy WLW is to write on and post photos on then transfer to their blog.

Back to the drawing board for me. I guess I’m going to have to find someone with a lot of patience to help me figure out this computer stuff. Now I’m going to upload the photos I wanted to put on my corn report. I don’t have a clue where they will end up on here. Then I’m going to try to “transfer them to your blog”, not yours, of course, to mine. I was just quoting the tutorial…

So here’s mud in your eye, as I raise my glass of Diet Pepsi. We’ll see how it goes. The good day corn is on the left. The bad day is to the right. Good. Bad.

You see where good and bad is typed next to the photo. That’s where WLW wanted me to start typing. If you look at every other post I’ve done I like to start at the top of the photo and write beside it. I tried moving the cursor by clicking at the top of the photo… no luck. It just showed up at the bottom like the above. I tried backspacing… took out the photo. I tried cursing the cursor and I swear I saw little hands waving on either side of it and a little pink tongue giving me the raspberries. Naner, naner poopoo.

I hope this will transfer to my blog. If it does, I’ll be ever so thankful. If not, I’m going to go pull weeds. It’s only supposed to get to 104 today and I’m hotter that that right now.

No Monkeys Around Here...

Just barrels of fun.

That’s what we have around here. Grab a cuppa as my friends 'down under' would say... This is a longer than usual post but I hope you enjoy it. I had fun getting this one together.

Let’s talk recycling and re-purposing. You’ve seen the tree branches we used in the garden for our pole beans. We also use them for gourds and I’ll be putting some more up for the cucumbers. Carol came up with the idea to keep and use them instead of burning them. I just executed the idea.







Here’s another idea or two…



Old dryer tubs. This one Carol took the spray paint can to it so it would add some color. This one has a tomato plant in it.



Old washer tubs... which I don't have any of yet. I'm looking though. I think you could make them look really neat with the all the drain holes that are in them.










Old or new wash tubs. This one Carol planted petunias in and it's looking good.











An old plastic barrel that was cut down for use as a water barrel for horses. It was here when we moved on to the place and we don’t have horses, so…

This horse watering barrel is now producing tomatoes. The first ripe tomatoes came out of this barrel. Notice the marigolds in with the tomato plant. Adds a touch of color and the marigolds are good to run the bad bugs away from the tomatoes.

You can see some more of the tree limbs laying in the background waiting for me to think of some fun way to use them.




Large plastic tubs. My cousin and her son gathered up a bunch of these for me. They have a cattle operation and these tubs are what they get their minerals in that they feed the cattle in the fall and winter. These are a great size, as you can see, and they are easy for Carol to tend from her wheelchair.

I still would like to build some raised beds, but as you know, money has been tight all over and there were other needs that needed to be met first. That is the beauty of these tubs. You can use them as your primary garden or when I get one of those “round-to-its” we can use them to expand and/or compliment our yet to be built raised beds.







When I brought these tubs home I flipped them over and drilled drain holes in the bottom so when we water or it rains the water doesn’t just stand in the tubs. We had some old chunks of styrofoam that we had saved from different things we had purchased and that I had gotten out of dumpsters.

Yep, folks, I have been known to dumpster dive… anyway we have used it before as filler in some of our larger flower pots and I had a bunch stashed in our goat shed. Most of it went into the dryers, but I had just a bit left over that I used to start our tubs. Then I ran out of it. Head scratchin’ time…


As you can tell, we do like to recycle and repurpose. From where we live to recycle pop cans is about 12 miles. In order to recycle plastic we have to drive almost 20 miles. So why not use them here on the plantation for now? Seemed reasonable to me. So I filled up tubs with our soda cans and plastic bottles to about the halfway mark and then we filled the rest with our planting dirt and the results have been great.

The plants are easy for Carol to tend from her wheelchair and easy for me to water and weed, too. I don’t have to bend over so far and if the next injury is a knee or an ankle I have a scooter I can get around on and they are the right height for me as well. It affords us ways to use cans and plastic bottles that we either had to drive to dispose of or put them in the trash where they’d end up in landfills so I consider it a win-win solution. And while you may not know any cattle ranchers it might be a good excuse to hang out at a feed store and meet some and beg for tubs… or watch for yard sales that might have something useful for cheap.

Those of you that don’t have room for a garden “in the ground” could always use planters for a patio garden. Or a balcony garden in apartments. Anywhere you might have a small amount of space.


So this is my tip for today. But I do think it’s fun and we all have those things we love to eat fresh so I thought I’d share what we are doing around here… in the red dirt land.

Yes, I Did...

I ran away from home... but only for a few days. My Bro drove me to Ft. Worth Friday night for a visit with our baby brother and his sweet wife. Ben had called Wednesday and said why don't you run down this weekend. I told him it hurt yet to drive and I was trying to be mindful of what the doctor said about if it hurts, don't do it. Well, he called back Thursday and said he was going to twist my arm a bit. Who wants to add injury to injury?

He was off Friday through Sunday and was kicking on the smoker and the grill Saturday with the kids and grandkids coming to visit, swim and eat, and eat, and eat some more. I will say that Ben can smoke up some good meat. And he and Diane, his wife, can both grill a hamburger and hot dogs. Then there are the things for the sides... My niece's husband is an excellent cook and made up a big batch of baked beans, my niece is no slouch in the kitchen either and she made buttermilk pie. The grocery deli made the potato salad, but Ben's oldest son Wil made homemade cookies, chocolate chip-oatmeal-peanut butter cookies. Oh.my.goodness. I felt like I had been stuffed by the taxidermist. You want to talk about feeling like a waddle princess.

I just sat around and groaned. From too much good food instead of pain. It was almost worth the drive down. Ribs, smoked sausage and all the stuff to stuff along with them. Well, yeah, it really was worth the discomfort from the drive. I mean, after all, what else do I have to do but pull weeds and water and sit around and read blogs and write a bit and just recuperate?

Thanks Ben for twisting my arm. Thanks Diane for making sure I was comfortable and keeping me from doing stuff I shouldn't be doing. And a major thank you to my Bro for doing the driving. I felt like I was the star of the old Greyhound bus commercial... Leave the driving to us.

It was great.

What I Have Been Up To...

In all this heat.

Garden is underway. If you click on the photo to "embiggen" it, as Laura says, it is a bit easier to see. Of course, I recognize that not all people are as blind as I am...

This photo the bushy plants are black-eyed peas. In back of them, the taller plants are zucchini. Please note that there is very little grass mixed in with them, thank you very much. I've been working on cleaning out the grass and the weeds from around the veggies. With the wet spring, all the weeds and grass almost got the better of me.



Yep, those are my dirty fingers you see... it's what happens when I pull weeds and grass. As you can see, I'm showing off baby yellow crook neck squash. And yes, there is some grass there, but not like it was even a week ago.









This is one of the zucchini plants. They are BIG this year. I'm either going to have to eat a lot of squash or freeze some because I think I'm going to have bumper crops this year.












Especially if I can keep pouring the water on... The zucchini plants are on the right edge of the picture. In the foreground are the bush green beans and where you see the sprinkler going are the pole green beans. The poles are from limbs out of the creek willows along the road that were cut back hard in the spring a year ago when the storms, both ice and thunderstorms, broke off part of the trees into the power lines and knocked out power for several hours. The power company cuts the trees under the lines back, but they don't cart off the branches so we trimmed the little limbs off and kept the long pieces to use around the place.








Here's a view from the other end of the row. The plant on the lower right part of the picture are some of the yellow crook neck squash plants.

















All the feathery stuff are asparagus plants. This was their second spring so next spring we will be able to lightly harvest some. The fourth year they say you can harvest heavier and then after that if cared for I should be able to enjoy asparagus for a long time.






Aren't these beautiful.












And this is the beginning of the corn experiment. This row are the ones I planted on the best day according to the zodiac planting signs. Tipper, over at Blind Pig And The Acorn, enlisted some of her readers to try out planting according to the signs. On June 23rd, which was deemed the best day of the month we planted half (10) of the seeds that Tipper shared with us. Then on the 26th which was deemed the worst for planting corn, we planted the other 10 kernels. I'll be posting pictures along so we can see if things really do better by the signs. So you all will probably be tired of 'corn' by the time this experiment is done.

All this is why I've been going outside early instead of going back to bed. With the 100 degree temps we've started having the only smart time to garden is early. I guess I'm getting smarter in my old age...