Peas on the Pea Plants!!

Yes indeedy it's true!!When I checked the plants Friday afternoon, sure enough there were about 10 peas on the plants. They are by no means mature enough to pick but it's a good sign of things to come. Unfortunately, something has been eating the plants and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do to stop whatever it is.

Of the 12 foot long row, there is about a 2 foot section that is completely bare. I mean gone. No pea plants at all! I don't know what ate them but they're sure enough gone. It's strange too because they are on the inside of the fence - not out by the woods or exposed to nature in any way except over the top of the fence. Wally said it could be a mole and now that I think about it, there was a hole in the ground about the size of a tennis ball and it was so deep I didn't want to stick my hand in it....he said I should put a rock over the opening and see what happens. Goodness knows I have a few rocks to spare!! LOL!!

I guess it's a good thing I planted two rows of peas since something has decided part of them are free to eat as you please...So, yes there are peas on the plants, they aren't fat with pods yet but they will be if they can survive whatever is out there. I still plan to par boil and freeze them and I have plenty of baggies awaiting the day. According to my garden journal, they should be ready to pick sometime around mid-June. Woo Hoo!! I can't wait to get all set up on the front porch with my chair, my basket overflowing, the sunshine warming the day and nothing to do but shell peas. Care to join me?

I hoped to get some weeding done but that never happened. Just after dinner Friday night it began to cloud up and when I heard thunder, I went out and closed the windows on the truck and brought in the rest of the groceries. It wasn't a huge downpour but it was enough to keep us indoors. The rain turned everything a bright, shiny green just as if it had given the world a bath. All the trees in the yard looked brand new :) The grass looked like it grew a couple inches and will be ready for mowing again this weekend coming. We sat and had our cheeseburgers at the table while the rain drizzled in the yard, dripped from the porch overhangs and pounded lightly on the tin roof of the cabin.

I watched as the birds came to clean out the feeders and the sacrificial geraniums got the water they were hoping for. I have filled my hummingbird feeders twice now with no birds to show for it. I'll refill them again tonight and hope for the best. Claudia says she has about 20 birds flying around and drinking from her feeders every evening just before dark. The water goes sour after a few days so I'll change it again and see if they come back. A lone female turkey crossed the front yard heading towards the woods. The rain seemed not to bother her a bit...

The thyme that Teri brought me is ready to plant. It has little roots on it that are about an inch to an inch and a half long. I'll pick up some pots when I'm in Fred's this afternoon. When she was here I showed her the delphinium plants that came up not too long ago. She said that's not what they are. She didn't know off hand what they were but she knew they weren't delphinium plants. Well, that's okay. Whatever they are, we'll know before too long because they continue to grow and don't seem to be phased by whether it's sunny or shady. I put them in both locations not knowing which they preferred.

The wild roses have opened up and the fragrance coming from them reaches all the way around to the front door. I'll have to get a picture of them this afternoon - again, if it's not raining still. They are so abundant and beautifully pink! Now that they are blooming, there are literally hundreds of flowers out there. They are just on the edge of the woods for the most part but a few have come up under the tree right in front of my garden area. They look so pretty whether in fullness or sparseness. There's just something about a wild pink rose that captures your attention.

Other things that are blooming on the farm are daisies and goldenrod. I didn't plant either of them but they grown like wildflowers all over the yard. Right now the daisies are white with yellow centers. Soon there will be yellow with brown and black centers like Brown-Eyed Susans. I don't know that they are called Brown-Eyed Susans because they are certainly wild but that's what they look like, so that's what I call them.

I planned to get some sunflower seeds in the ground but that didn't happen either. I guess you're wondering what did happen since nothing I planned on got done...Well, we had to go to a funeral service Saturday. We found out Tuesday that a dear friend of Wally's passed away on Monday. She was 62 years old had been suffering with cancer for just over a year. Wally met her about 20 years ago when he was working in New Orleans and from what I heard about her at the service she must have been a lot of fun to be around.

I'm into this whole tostada thing right now and coming up with new ideas seems to be working out for both of us. I'm trying new things and Wally gets to eat them. I buy the whole wheat tortillas and, on the advice of Dizzy Debbie (yes, it's true!), I butter just the very outside edges of them. I set them on the broiler pan and then under the broiler for barely a minute. They puff up and get crunchy like a very thin pizza crust.

For our Sunday breakfast I started out in just this manner. I fried some eggs and broke the yolks - I didn't let them get all the way done so some of the yolk would be running on the crispy tortilla. I chopped up some turkey lunch meat and some pepper-jack cheese and topped the eggs with those. I spooned on some salsa and spread it around as much as I could. With the cheese and turkey, it wasn't so easy to do. I'll put it on first next time...anyway, I slid the broiler pan back up under the broiler and in no time we had bubbling hot cheese-topped breakfast tostadas!

There are so many combinations out there just waiting for me to try them! You'll be hearing more of these recipes as days go by... :) Feel free to send me yours too!


The funeral service was very short and sweet and since we didn't know too many  people we opted to head back to town shortly after it was over. Around 3:30 pm we made it to Centerville for Claudia's cook-out. Of course we were quite late and everyone had left but we stayed for a couple hours, ate dinner and sat on the porch when the rain had quit. Claudia has some beautiful plants around her yard and is great about sharing them. She has a huge blue hosta that she's going to give me a division of as soon as it's ready to be divided. It is at least 3 feet in diameter and the leaves are so dark green that they look blue. It's magnificent! It's happy in the shade or in full sun and it will even bloom come summertime.

She has peonies that are already in decline but I could tell they were beautiful in bloom. There were hundreds of spent pods on the bushes. She has a honeysuckle vine that is dark red and climbing about half way across her trellis. She calls it a hummingbird vine because the hummingbirds completely cover it when it blooms. She promises to get me a cutting from it as well. :) :) Now I'll just need to come up with a trellis...hmmm. Unlike in Florida, the honeysuckle will not take over house and yard. Here it dies back sufficiently to keep it from spreading across the world! lol!

She showed me her irises and promises plenty of those as soon as she has a chance to dig them up. I told her not to get in a hurry because I have plenty of work to do as it is. But I'll welcome the irises whenever they come as I would love to have some bloom in my yard next year. I thought I would have them this year but apparently that wasn't meant to be. It's not that I didn't plant enough of them...Lord knows I did. They just didn't bloom for me...oh well. Everyone says sometimes they take a year or so to get established when you  move them so I'm going with that theory. What else can I do?

Sunday we awoke to yet more rain. While this does my garden good, it makes for a difficult time when you're weeding...hence no weeding got done :)  Indeed I'll have my hands full with weeding all I want this weekend coming up. The garden does look good even with something eating my peas and grass growing within the fence...lol! The beans and onions are getting taller and the feathery leaves of the carrots are now almost a foot tall. There's no mistaking them at this point :)

I spent Sunday getting the laundry caught up - I had to break down and use the dryer as the rain refused to let up enough for even one load to dry outside on the line. This turned out to be a plus because little did I know the temperature was going to drop to the mid to low 40s while we slept. The dryer is right below our room so the heat comes right up to us when it runs. ahhhhhh warmth!

I also FINALLY put all my tax paperwork together. Yes, I'm overdue. Whew what a chore it was! Of course everything was right were I could find it...hahahaha! Actually, it wasn't all that bad - just lots of paperwork to look at and sort out for the CPA. I'll mail it all to her and she'll finalize it and submit it. I know, I know, these days everyone does their own on-line...well I have too much confusing stuff to do it that way and she's up on all the new laws and benefits so I prefer to have her take care of it for me. She does a great job!

I had so much trash after taking everything out of the envelopes that we stuffed it in the fireplace insert, lit it on fire and burned it all. It seemed like we would have a nice little fire to warm us on that chilly, rainy, day but it went up so fast we barely knew it was lit before it was out...lol One really good thing came of it...I cleaned out another box! I still have a couple of them that got piled up and I never got around to going through them. I was on a mission to find my 2009 taxes and thought maybe that's where they were. Well, the taxes weren't in that box but a bottle of extra virgin olive oil was in there (I got it on sale at the HomeGoods store just before I moved) along with a couple of candle holders that I had been looking for and a dozen pint size canning jars!!!!!!! Now that's like finding a box full of treasures for me :) :)

Since it was Sunday and since we had been gone all day Saturday, we were in no mood to leave the farm. From the freezer I took out a bag of field peas with snaps and another bag of speckled butter beans. I had a couple of ham steaks thawed out so I decided to cook them all together. I even used one of my precious bags of chicken broth to season all of it. I got the beans and peas into the big red pot with the chicken broth and then trimmed the fat from the ham. This was the last of the ham steaks from the pig we harvested last year. Amazing it lasted this long. All we have left are a couple of fat pork chops and a couple bags of sausage. I have the lard I rendered from the fat and that's it.

The chicken broth thawed in the pot with the beans and by the time it started to bubble, the ham was chopped up and ready to go in with it. I fried the fat for the dogs so they could have a warm treat on a chilly day too... :) I added some black pepper, some recaito (in the Spanish section - it's a cilantro soup/bean base) and a couple cubes of cilantro bouillon. mmm mmm good! It was hearty and warm and healthy and filling all at the same time. Of course I made some mayonnaise biscuits to sop up the juice...

As the day wound down, we watched the race and "Hogs Gone Wild." Apparently there's quite a problem with these feral hogs invading Florida, Texas, Hawaii and Tennessee. There's enough of a problem for them to have a television show about it. They should just have an open season on them, like they had to do with the alligators a long time ago, and get rid of them all. The meat can be donated to homeless shelters or food banks across the nation. On the Cape Canaveral Sea Shore park, the park ranger said there are upwards of 5 to 6,000 of these hogs roaming the land. Tell me that much pork wouldn't feed a few homeless shelters for months...????

There are people making a good bit of money just by offering their services of coming out to your land, trapping the hogs thereby lowering the population and saving whatever farmland you happened to have. What a great job - hunt hogs for a living. It's like the guy who got the first sponsorship for fishing on national tv...smart man there.

They aren't just invading farmland though. They are everywhere. We watched last night as the trappers got 5 of them in one night on the property of a church in Tampa (or was it Texas?). It was right out there in public on a main road in the town! Amazing. If you're looking for a job, this could be your opportunity....hahahaha!

The roosters have begun taunting Colt and Ruger. They work their way up almost to the door and then the dogs run them off. Not to be deterred, within about an hour or so, they work their way back up again. I guess they're hoping the dogs won't notice or won't care but they've come to like their dog food and have decided the roosters will no longer be allowed to partake of it...lol!!

It's so funny to watch. The roosters peck the ground all around the dog house, the dogs play and romp around like they aren't there. When they take one step too close, the dogs pounce and run them off!! LOL the roosters start crowing and flapping their wings like they are the offended...guess you have to be here to see it to get the humor? LOL I just stand there at the kitchen window cracking up at their antics.

The tulip poplar tree appears to be just about done blooming but the day lilies are coming on stronger than ever! My oh my there's going to be a bumper crop for sure this year! The Allium stalks have grown to about 3 feet but are in no way ready to bloom - they'll be at least another month I would say. The tiger lilies are fat and ready to burst open just any day now and since my tulips never bloomed, I bought some at the Food Lion for just $1.99. They were closed when I bought them but opened up very nicely on Saturday morning. They are bright pink with white trim and they smell divine :) :) :) As soon as they are done blooming, I'll stick them in the ground and hope for the best next year - I seem to say that a lot when it comes to flowers blooming around here...lol!!

I hope you planted a little something in your garden or in pots on your porch. Flowers to cut for a vase? Vegetables to cook and eat with friends or family? Herbs with which to season your food? Well, guess what? If you didn't plant anything this year, there's always next year...!! hahahaha but it's never too late to plant peppers in FL - they love the heat!

We finished off Sunday evening with my famous fried fish and some leftover potato salad from Claudia's cook-out. The fish was crispy, lemony and just a little spicy. The potato salad was cold and tangy so the two complimented each other very well. With my laundry caught up and the kitchen cleaned, we were ready for bed just after sunset. It was too cloudy to see the stars but I know they were there...that's one thing I can always count on.

They say the cicadas (sounds like see-ka-das) will be up out of the ground before too long. I've never seen one but that's because they don't come up in FL. They stay underground for some 13 years and then out of nowhere, they start coming up out of the ground by the thousands. They are short lived so garden damage should be minimal but won't that be a sight to see when they come up. I'll have to check the almanac for dates...if I have the chance I'll get some pictures of them - I'm curious myself!

Enjoy your Monday :)

"Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all." ~Sam Ewing