On the Home Front:

Good morning to you all! Thanks for stopping back by today. I want to put a little emphasis on the importance of ya’ll being good this time of the year. You all know the little bearded, chubby guy in the red suit’s comin! So you better keep it in check for the next seven, eight days or so. I know I’ve put the brakes on my “actin up” for the last couple weeks! Because of this, Deb just LOVES this time of year!

Well, let’s talk about what we’ve been up to this past week.

First off, we had a nice little surprise. Deb and I went out to the compost pile, and good night, at the little tomato plants. They are all volunteers, and they’ve shot up like weeds. We guess they’ve popped up from our juice scraps each day is the only thing we can figure.

So, yesterday Deb and I got out 10 5-gallon buckets, drilled holes in the bottom for them to drain good, and set those baby’s! That gives us 11 total as my Cuz had dropped us off a plant a little while back. He gave us a cherry tomato, which actually had 2 other plants, a nice bucket with basil, and a white eggplant.

We’ve never tried the white eggplant before so I’m looking forward to tasting one of those guys! The basil’s growing leaps and bounds, and we’ll be freezing some of this next week.

We didn’t know how to freeze it, but watched one of Diane Mumm’s video of her technique, and “a light came on!” Deb was like, “How simple is that?” So we’ll put her video up of how she does this.

Diane’s video of her pentas, we put up in our last post, and Diane does a great job with all her video’s. She’s a really nice lady and is a help to all who visit her video channel. She’s very knowledgeable, very informative, and as she likes to say…”is hands on.”

When you have people like Diane out there sharing her knowledge, this makes life so much easier for the rest of us. Check her out…

We love the way she froze it in ice cube trays, dumped them out, placed the frozen basil cubes in a ziplock bag, and there you go. You doing a roast…drop a couple “basil cubes” in the pot!

We might even do this today…I’m kinda lookin for something to get ole Deb busy on today anyway!! LOL! My theory behind this is simple. If you guys (meaning you menfolk at the moment), let your wives have too much idle time, lookout! This merely allows them more time to figure you out some… “honey-do’s!”

So, if possible, you want to line them out first, or, beat em to the punch! Live and learn guys…I have!

Since we started our You Tube channel, just like our website, the people we’ve met are all outstanding. They’re all so willing to take the time and answer questions, share their knowledge, and basically try to get you on the right track in regards to your own endeavors.

Networking today, although I have to admit Deb and I both are dinosaurs in this regard, is so handy, and with the touch of a finger you can link up to basically anything you can put your mind to. We’re learning though, just not very quickly, so hang in there, eventually we’ll get the knack for some of this “networking” I’m speaking of.

Diane is by no means the only one, there’s literally hundreds, if not thousands out there like her, but she does have a really nice channel, and people are lovin it!

As we go along, we’ll share more and more of these, because sharing is probably the main reason for our site, and we’ll be passing more and more of our other friends videos and knowledge as well along to you guys!

I have told you earlier that our greenhouse startup has been delayed, probably, or more like HOPEFULLY, the week after Christmas. The main reason is that our work has taken off here at years end, although this time of the year really, no one wants us on their parking lots on account of customer interference.

You see, these malls are in their busiest time of the year as you all know. So this, along with our economy in such bad shape, I guess you’d have to consider, at least from these retail stores point of view, it’s their “make it, or break it, time period!”

Thus, if they can help it, they want no interference for ANY customer traffic, and we understand this. But we lucked out, and are making a little money that we normally don’t see coming in during this Thanksgiving through the New Year time frame.

By this, it makes not being able to get the greenhouse started not quite so disappointing, but I can still say that in reality we ARE bitin at the bit to get that mutha started! Patience Dub, patience…
Our garden is still chugging along, although in the next day or two we’ll be pullin up our okra, and feeding it to the cows. That stuff produced like a banshee, and we couldn’t have been more proud of what it produced for us. It did really, really well.

Boy the cows love it when a crop goes out, because they get it, whatever it may be…especially this time of the year. The grass has stopped growing pretty much, and they’ve began to drift out of our pastures, and getting out into the swampy areas, or heavily wooded areas.

Once the grass stops growing, we supplement heavily with range mineral, and this causes them to hunt roughage number one, and also supply’s them with the nutrients they need, but no longer get from the grass.

The mineral is also a little hot, so this makes them forage and eat many things they don’t normally eat during the spring and summer. These include tree leaves, palmettos, gall berry bushes, and cabbage palm fronds.

So, they’re just like we are…I ain’t got food on the table at my house, then shoot, I start looking other places, and they do the same. But the cows eat good here, we’re already putting out hay, just not heavy at this point. As the grass continues to go back, we begin to supplement them more and more.

Deb and I are both firm believers in the fact that if you have animals…feed em! Far too many times we see cows, horses, even dogs and cats that aren’t kept up as good as they should be, and we just don’t understand the reasoning behind such behavior?? Anyway…

Our mustard greens are coverin us up, and I don’t know how many bunches we’ve given away. They’re just now starting to come into their own, and I’m sure we’ll make a few families happy during this next week by droppin off a few more bunches for them to have during Christmas dinner.

I love those dern things and will eat em for breakfast from time to time…warmed up with a slice of cornbread and some of my Mama’s chili sauce. Wheaties cereal has already claimed the title of, but to me…greens, cornbread, and chili sauce are the real…”Breakfast of Champions!” LOL!

You know, we were talking about transplanting our tomato plants, and I know most of you already know, but for those who don’t, you can plant these in 5-gallon buckets and they’ll do well…even in winter. You just have to set them on your porch, or cover them during the cold nights. But they will keep you in some good, vine-ripe tomatoes in times you normally don’t have them.

Our broccoli and cabbage are starting to grow off now too. We don’t have any heads on either yet, but we’ll be seein them anytime now.

Also the orange season has started, and by this, it allows us to add oranges, grapefruit and tangerines to the juice Deb prepares for us each morning. This to me, really, really helps out the taste. We’re to the point anymore that our juice tastes good to us regardless, but again, to me this makes it much more flavorful, plus we’re getting mega doses of Vitamin C through their addition to our juice.

On top of this, I peeled probably 25 oranges, maybe 8 grapefruit, ruby red mind you, and probably a dozen tangerines. We then took out the seeds, cut them up in bite size pieces, added two jars of cherries, refrigerated this, and man…what a delicious fruit salad. We’ll eat what we made I’m sure for the rest of this coming week.

Well guys, that’ll bout do it for today, and we’ll close it out by wishing you all a Merry Christmas! God Bless you and yours, and Deb says to holler out to ya’ll to keep a smile on your face, and one in your heart!

Dub and Deb

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2 Responses to On the Home Front:

  1. Sandy Grant says:

    fruit salad sounds wonderful…………….gonna make some myself. I have both white and red grapefruits (from my neighbors), satsumas, oranges and sweet kumquats. You struck a taste bud I hadn’t thought about.

    • admin says:

      Oh Sandy, Mom makes good un! Matter of fact Deb and I made bout a #1 washtub full this past Sunday. We’d of made more, but we knew no company was coming, it was just the two of us! Didn’t want to waste it! LOL…Add a jar or two of cherries, with your citrus, um, um…

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