My mom still makes an awesome “Everything Relish” I guess it is called, made with sweet Vidalia onions, and it is awesome on pork ribs, chicken, burgers, steak, hotdogs.
The sauce is like “Flo’s hotdog sauce”, which is world famous, but way better. And it is especially great on ribs. And really great on chicken too.
I LOVE onions, even looked up once what it meant if you ‘crave’ onions - I think it was liver issues and I don’t have any :-)
Headed for the new house today, packing up now & I hope to stay at least a week. I need to scrounge some lumber from the back pole shed to take with me. I have been away for almost 2 weeks - hope everything is ok up there. I saw a pretty nasty storm on radar earlier this week ... purple spot just north & it looked like we were in a deep maroon blotch, so that all meant heavy rain.
Projects to work on (most on the ‘to do’ list for a good while, but with 105 - 110 heat indexes, working outside has not been something I wanted to do):
Clean up/season a 10” cast iron frying pan I bought at least 2 years ago at a yard sale for $1.00. I have one here at ‘home’ that I use all the time - really need one at the new house. Inside project if it’s too hot outside.
Work on my rock project at the back of the shop - I still have more to haul up there, but what I do have needs to be put into place.
Make 2 raised beds (3 x 6, out of cedar fence planks) & see if I can figure out how I want to site my raised beds. At some point, I need to do the ‘heavy’ work here and dig up my galvanized beds. I noticed my compost pile from leaves last year is about 12 - 18” high, so the maple leaves have seriously decomposed since they were about 4’, top of the fence, when I put them in there. I am using our trash cans to haul it to the new beds, but I need the trailer to do that & I left it at the new house when I had to dash home because mom had to go to the ER. Parking at the hospital is hard enough with a small car - PU truck is terrible & I doubt I could have found a place if I had the trailer in tow, so I put a lock on the hitch & left it in the barn.
See how it goes to make at least 2 of the DIY posts for a clothes rack. I am hoping to find some 2 x 4’s here that I can use.
If it’s not too hot & the ground isn’t rock hard, work on getting two post holes dug so I can install a 4 x 4 on each side of the driveway. We plan to put a chain across to keep unwanted folks out ... the driveway runs along the side of the property & forks left to go behind the house & if you stay straight, it goes to the barn/pole shed. More than once, I’ve had people show up at the back door & I had no idea they’d come up the driveway. I have since installed motion detectors on the driveway & back door - helps a lot. No WiFi yet and I need that for cameras.
The usual mowing .... some rain up there so I know there are weeds that will need knocking down, even if the grass doesn’t.
Try to trap some groundhogs ...
If I get really ambitious, I might hop across the mountain to my niece’s - she has saved some blackberries from her bushes for me and I am out of Blackberry Merlot Wine Jelly. This is my ‘go to’ for gifting ... people love the stuff. Jalapeno Pepper Jelly is a close second. Another inside project.
Last but not least - last night I was checking the back door around 11 to make sure it was locked. The back floodlight was on ... figured it was Mr. Fox or a raccoon. When I looked out, it was ‘Angel Deer’, the white deer that was born in the spring. She’s all grown up & really beautiful, almost like a ‘ghost’ in the dark. If she had a fawn, it didn’t survive, because I haven’t seen one with her. Another normal colored doe has a fawn following her around - a real cutie pie, even if it’s a future hosta-sedum-rose bush-day lily muncher!
Last weekend in July - where has this month gone???
For a few seconds, the map made no sense but then I realized closer to the equator/sun is different than the angled rotational path of the sun. Missouri is intermediate but the onion seeds I was looking at say "Long day (potentially intermediate)" and they grew good at Baker Creek which is 100 miles South of me so they'll work.
Selecting veggies based on ease of slicing. Some may call it lazy. I prefer utilitarian.
Speaking of sun. I'm having tomato issues. Not getting many and they're slow to ripen. Last year I had shade cloth over the W/NW facing back half of the little garden to give afternoon shade. This year I did it over the whole garden thinking about last two years of near 100 degrees for weeks on end. If it was 20-30% shade cloth it would probably be fine but it's 40% iirc. Peppers are along the South end so they're doing great. Live and learn.
Off to do some more astronomical onion learning.
This past one was another goofy weather week here in Central Missouri. Cool and dry, hot and swampy, some high winds, scattered showers and thunderstorms, etc. It’s been raining enough to keep the grass growing to the point of weekly mowing, but not enough to skip watering things that we’d like to eat.
Mrs. Augie took mowed the house yard and I mowed most of the hinterlands over the weekend. I got the loppers out and pruned Mrs. Augie’s red flowering crabapple trees. They were getting scraggly and hanging too low to get under with the Kubota. I spent a bit of quality time with the weed whacker in the garden patch yesterday. Used up the string that was on the spool and called it good for the day.
Mrs. Augie has been getting a few cucumbers every day now. I’ve been wondering why I haven’t started to get tomatoes and Saturday morning I figured it out. I was headed to the garden with the weed whacker and saw something moving around out there. It was a big fat whistle pig sitting on his haunches chowing down on one of my tomatoes. I trotted back to the house, grabbed my Ruger 10-22, went back outside and gave the varmint a bad case of lead poisoning. I’m sure there’s at least one more in the raiding party so I’ll start setting a live trap out there and see what I can catch.
I watered the chestnut trees yesterday. Three more of them have grown tall enough that the grow tubes need to be removed and replaced with wire cages. I’m out of 6’ tall welded wire so I’ll need to make a trip to the hardware store to pick up another roll.
There are no signs of potato vines around the edge of the compost heap where I put my seed spuds back in the spring. If it’s not raining after work today I’ll try to get out there with the broadfork and see if they made a crop.