Category Archives: Foods

More Strawberries and other Trees?

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Last spring the wife and i bought a Pine Tree, not a huge one. It was somewhere in the 2-3 feet tall range with the idea that it would be mostly an inside tree and would also double as our Christmas tree. But it didn’t do so hot and died. But having that tree spawned the idea of adding other trees to the yard and house.

Rewind as few weeks back when we were looking at Cherry trees we also looked at some smaller inside/outside trees like the Meyer Lemon tree. The idea was that a patio tree would be ideal for our needs. But we passed.

Tangy yellow stuff.

Fast forward to yesterday, when the wife gets an email letting her know that the web site where we bought the cherry tree, http://www.fast-growing-trees.com/ was having a one day 50% off sale. So as we tend to do we started to put together an order.

The we started looking and we noticed that the sale was taking 50% more off then what we thought the sale price was…. So we started looking around for more things to buy, i mean there are always more things to buy right?

 

And we landed on 100 strawberry plants. Because we really love strawberries. …

 

Meaning that this weeks project is not xping Samius, but taking pallets and making an A frame planter.

Pallets! Aka transportation leftovers.

A few boards and some rain gutters. Seems easy enough.

I want something small enough that i can move it into the greenhouse this winter but tall enough to keep the chicks from eating all the fruits of my labor.

After all i need to end up with something that looks like this, right?

As usual i will let you know how things are going once in progress.

<3s

News from the Greenhouse

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Today i want to share a few images i took this morning from the greenhouse.

So this is the current setup for the aquaponics. I plan to have another flood and drain tray to the right again but the tray i used last year had a crack and i was slowly loosing water. So i plan to replace it with the other tray i already have setup. I also hope to have a little more support  setup this year so the tray can stay level and not weigh down on the tank directly.

Something i am trying is using that rain gutter extension as my water return. So far it seems to work well but i am worried now that we are out of the store that it might be too not dark, ie will let too much light in and let algae grow in the return which is not something i want. However, i am thinking i might be able to put some clay pebbles in these tubes with light holes cut in them and have an easy to make drip tube. The ridges should hold the pebbles well enough as long as i can get enough pebbles to stay in place for the plants to be able to grow a reasonable root system.

These two picture what i was able to grow or over winter with no heat. A fairly sad Swish Chard (Top) and some fairly healthy lettuce (Left) even if i started with eight heads and now i have like 3. That just means that i will be able to use this tray for something else soon, right?

This is the current salad bowl trays, to the left (or top damn werdpress fuckn tags hello!) is lettuce and the right (bottom) spinach. They are doing well and are right on plan.

Most of the tomatoes we started from seeds are taking off. I ordered i guess two different breeds this year, Big Beef and Sugar Sweetie. If i am lucky i will like the taste of one of them. But i wouldn’t count on it. And i assume that we will end up picking up at least 3 or 4 more that are ready to plant from the store later, we always do.

Speaking of things from seeds. I ordered like 5 different HOT peppers this year. Including the Trinidad Scorpion aka the hottest pepper around at about 1,463,700 Scovilles. For some degree of scale a Jalapeno rocks s cool 3500-8000 Scovilles. My brother in law was taking a good game last year about eating all the peppers. We will see, we will see.

Guess, i will end with one last image of the strawberries that wintered over. They look like shit but hey if i don’t have to buy new strawberries… well shit i already did and i planted like 30 of them in one of the buckets. I might have a lot of strawberries. Tasty.

In other planting/Gurobo Farms news looks like we are going to try potatoes, bulb onions, and garlic. We haven’t grown any of these things well not intentionally anyway.  Also we have decided to add ducks to our backyard farm animals. Yep, Old McGruobo had a farm E-I-E-I-O. Hell i am even debating on adding a float try to the system full of crawfish. Why not one more group of animals?

<3s

Merry Thanksgiving

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This post has nothing to do with Thanksgiving, but i wanted to put it out on front street.

Yesterday for lunch the wife and i headed to Sonic, she wanted corndogs and i have been craving chili dogs for months. Get there before the lunch rush. We are trained to eat at 11:30 or so. Anyway place our order, the girl reads it back to us and everything sounds right to the TWO of us. That bit is important because when we get our food we notice a missing drink right away. After a moment talking to the bellhop our 3rd drink arrives and we head home to eat.

Getting home we divide to order and realize the entire issues has to due with the fact that she didn’t ENTER my chili dog combo. Aka my food is missing. Grumble. Double check the ticket and yep it is just missing. Funny how she read the order back to me at the car right also…. No big i can just make something real fast.

Jump to about 4 am this morning.

By the way i explained the above so i could tell this.

I have a dream where i design a way for tablets and smart phones can be used for drive ins and drive throughs. Basically using your smart device you visit the restaurant’s web page and start an order either as a guest or better yet set up an account. At each menu thingy (where people enter the orders) you have an number generator. You need a number generator to help prevent order spoofing, in addition to that you also need to set the generator up with a motion detector to “activate” the number you also need that number to identify your location. At the drive through menu you just tell the order taker that you are blasting (or what ever marketing buzz word is hot right then) enter your number the cashier reads back your order prompts you for the up sale and finalizes the order. At a place like Sonic, you wouldn’t even need to talk to anyone until they delivered the food.

I know right now some places are adding touch screens at drive throughs but that seems like pushing the problems not fixing them. Also the nice thing about this idea could be special “apps” for each restaurant chain. I know that is not a good thing on the end user side but from a marketing side that is sweet. Free ad on everyone’s phone/tablet that orders via blast…

Okay time to make a turkey.

<3s