Posted on 11/19/2010 5:13:31 AM PST by Red_Devil 232
Good morning gardeners. Thanksgiving is next week and I hope all Freepers enjoy a bountiful feast with family and friends. Don’t forget to give thanks, it can turn a meal into a feast.
A reminder for those of you who have a frozen turkey, for every 4 pounds of turkey it will take a day to thaw in the refrigerator. A 20-pound turkey will take 5 days so you need to start defrosting it tomorrow. If your turkey will not fit into your fridge defrost it in an ice chest with ice.
If the turkey is allowed to thaw at a temperature above 40 ºF, any harmful bacteria that may have been present before freezing can begin to grow again unless proper thawing methods are used.
You can also thaw it in a cold-water bath. Allow about 30 minutes per pound when thawing a turkey in cold water. A 20-pound turkey will take 10 hours using this method. Be sure to change the water often. Turkeys thawed by the cold-water method should be cooked immediately because conditions were not temperature controlled.
Ok Freepers this means no thawing of the turkey on the back porch or in the trunk of your car!
That’s Right!!! Just follow the money...
Boy, would I like to own one of those! Way too expensive for this FReeper. I have been looking at those lawn sweepers that are pulled behind my lawn tractor. My neighbor has one and it dose a good job on all the pine needles his damn trees shed! It is his trees that I have to pick up after!
“... after a two year hiatus due to a family feud...”
Just a thought from someone who has been there.... have Mrs. Bender pick up some “spirits” as well. Chances are you are going to need them!
Waiting for the cool down here to plant garlic, shallots, potato and multiplier onions. We are still having beautiful weather here in IA.
Was so busy with the election I didn’t have time to order anything, and the wet year left me short enough on bulbs I had tdo add to. Was lucky to find what I needed, even garlic which is pretty much gone from almost everywhere.
I need something like that myself. Coming from a yard with no trees to a tree covered yard with several oak trees, leaf management has become an issue this fall. I tried my leaf blower, but that was nowhere near enough tool for my yard. So last week I fashioned a wooden plug for the discharge outlet on my rider, making it into a semi-mulcher. That worked out pretty good, surprisingly. I think that if I had done that earlier before the situation got out of control, I might have won. Now that the oak leaves seem to have stopped falling, I am going to “mulch” the yard again, hoping that it will be the final chapter in this saga.
Just keep your wife’s Buick running another year and you can pay cash for the DR Vac. They make several pull behind models...
What I do is use the riding mower to mulch the lease while blowing them into a pile. I them use the leaf blower as a vacum and mulch them even more. I then load them into a compost pile.
Am getting lots of tomatoes from the plants I dug up from the garden and put in containers to grow indoors. We only have an average of 90 days between frosts up here in the Colorado Rockies so early starts indoors or container plants that can be brought indoors are helpful.
We did a dry-aged ribeye roast for Christmas a couple of years ago.
It was tasty!
This is great to hear. Glad you are having success with those maters!
Apparently Johanns missed the msg earlier this month.
However a person bought and paid for is not likely to notice little details like the public attitudes/preferences.
Optional - Dry Aging the Roast:
This is optional, but if you have the time and the space in your refrigerator, you can dry age the rib roast for several days to bring out additional flavor and produce a more buttery texture in prime rib roast (aging allows the natural enzymes to break down some of protein in the meat).
Dry-aged beef can be expensive to purchase and hard to come by. Some top-quality butchers will offer already dry-aged roasts for sell. If you can find one and can afford one (as they are pricey), purchase the roast. This will cost your more, so the decision is yours!
A food safety note: Home refrigerators aren’t as consistent or as cold as commercial meat lockers. Before aging meat at home, get a Refrigerator Thermometer and be sure your refrigerator is set below 40°F.
How to dry-age beef at home - The good news is that you can dry-age beef at home:
Only the top grades of beef can be dry aged successfully. Use USDA Prime or USDA Choice from the best meat source in your area. Buy a whole prime rib roast, rib-eye roast, or loin strip. You cannot age individual steaks. Unwrap the beef (do not trim), rinse it well with cold water, allow the meat to drain, and pat then pat the meat dry with paper towels.
Wrap the roast loosely in a triple layer of cheesecloth or a plain white cotton dish towels; and set it on a rack over a rimmed baking sheet or other tray. Place the wrapped roast on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator (which is the coldest spot in your refrigerator). Refrigerate for 7 to 10 days; the longer the beef ages, the tastier it gets. After the first day, carefully unwrap and then rewrap with the same cheesecloth to keep the cloth fibers from sticking to the meat.
When ready to roast, unwrap the meat and, with a sharp knife, shave off and discard the hard, dried outer layer of the meat. Shave away any dried areas of fat, too, but leave behind as much of the good fat as possible. NOTE: There can be much waste as the dried and sometimes moldy meat needs to be trimmed away before cooking and eating it. Roast whole or cut into steaks.
Most of the garden has been put to bed. I still have a couple of tomatoes under row covers. I will transplant them into pots and bring indoors soon. Spinach and lettuce are doing nicely under row covers. Hoping to have fresh XMAS salad. Carrots planted for spring harvest are doing well.
Hubby still has carrots and onions in his garden, which we are pulling as needed. Eventually we'll have to pull them all. Winter wheat is up, and it looks like Spring every time we look out the door.
Almost all of the walnuts and butternuts are hulled. Cracking them and picking out the nut meat makes a great project for Hubby during the winter.LOL. Then we vac-cum pack in a seal a meal type package, and freeze.
We decided to buy a couple more trash cans at the end of the season to use for rain barrels. Too late - they went up from $15 to $25 - almost 67% inflation.
Every one have a great weekend and Thanksgiving. God Bless.
My garden is done for the year, but I got my first seed catalog of the season!! I’m trying to narrow my focus with next year’s garden, the priority is “cash crops and erosion control”, and I think I might be able to do both at once. Roman chamomile is popular in teas and medicinal herb mixes, it grows 4 inches tall, and according to the description at least, it spreads like wildfire. I think I’ll plant it near the road on my land and get a good seed crop established, then I’ll worry about growing a cleaner patch for harvest and sale. Right now one of the recurring fights with my neighbor is over the mowing of the shoulder, he thinks that because he mows it (withOUT permission) that he can relandscape my land at his own whim, and has the audacity to try and charge me for it. I’ve reported him to the police once already. He’s actually known around the area as “The Agricultural Terrorist” because of these kinds of stunts he pulls. (He once hid steel stakes in amongst a farmer’s corn, nearly destroyed the man’s combine.) I haven’t dragged him to court yet is because my health has been so poor, and I have no money for an attorney. (And, well, technically there is a rule in that district that the road shoulder must be kept mowed to 3 feet from the edge. But still, he NEVER asked!)
Ok, I could rant about that jerk for ages, but the point was, a plant that only grows 4 inches tall would never need mowing, so I’m collecting seeds for such plants, and roman chamomile fits the bill.
My other planned cash crops are pyrethrums, german chamomile, red clover (and other wildflowers currently growing there), and fresh basil. The flowers will be dried and sold through an herbs broker as soon as I find one, but the fresh basil will be sold through a tiny local-foods shop near my land, which often buys from small farms and home growers. I got a peek at the prices they were offering for herbs, and basil was $8 a pound. (Would have loved to study that list further, but I was reading it upside-down as the clerk was looking something else up.)
I would love to plant sassafras on my land, but I’m having trouble finding it at reasonable prices.
I hope so, but I’ve been disappointed often enough I’m not betting on it.
Morning Freeper Gardeners!
Week four of Master Gardeners class is interesting. Plant and Soil nutrition and then Composting. Not sure why, but I have it stuck in my head that composting is more difficult than everyone tells me it is. But I’ll be starting a compost pile soon. Not required for the class, but something I want/need to do.
Tip of the Week: After planting bulbs, plants, etc, flip the pots over and cover the new plants. Then spread your mulch without worrying about burying the new plants. And the pots will keep a few inches around the base of the plants clear of the mulch too.
Since I use raised beds, I asked about the use of pressure treated lumber. I have avoided PT so far, but our MG instructor said since copper arsenic was banned from the PT process, they have seen no adverse effects of using PT lumber. I think I will look for more confirmation on this, just to be extra safe, but good news if true.
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