65*, 60*, 70*, 50*, 60*, 68*, 20*.  AND SNOWING!  Yeah Arkansas.

Just thought that I would bring to everyones attention that there is a new page on 2greenthumbs which you can locate at the top of the screen, called recipes.  From time to time I come across good recipes that are earth shattering for me and I feel the need to share them.  The recipe that is posted currently is for whole wheat tortillas.  We used to buy a lot of tortillas.  It was an organic brand and they were just ok.  Nothing stellar, but my kids loved them.  Paul was having issues with the waste that said tortillas accrued, meaning we were throwing away too many bags.  “There has to be a better way!” Paul said and he rushed to the internet and found a whole wheat tortilla recipe.  Also, we have a 50 lb. sack of whole wheat flour …it was a no-brainer.  At first I felt that it was going to be too much trouble, it sounds as if it would be, but it wasn’t.  Now, I am addicted to making my own tortillas.  They are so much better that anything I’ve ever bought at the store, I don’t think I can ever go back to doing so.  Yes, it is a little more work, but the outcome is well worth the 20 minutes it takes to make them.  It’s also a plus to know the exact ingredients involved in making them and to know that they didn’t have to travel from California to get here.  So I encourage you to try something new and make your own whole wheat tortillas.

Yesterday a high of 73 degrees.  Beautiful, reminded me of late spring/early summer.  Today a high of 39 degrees.  Ugly, reminded me that it’s going to get colder before it gets warmer.  It was Mother Nature’s little tease.  Stay tuned.

Since August of 2008 the garden went into cruise control.  The weather got hot, the growing slowed down (except my lawn), and the workload decreased.  What peppers were on the plants remained to ripen, as with the tomatoes.  The basil was still cranking which was nice, but it started to get really stemmy and that takes away from its curb appeal.  My attempts to grow summer/fall squash like spaghetti and butternut were squashed ( : D ) by all of the rain that stunted a lot of our other gourd/melon/squash ventures.

That brings me to this point.  Looking back over my season (our season), I just have to laugh at the big dreams that I had.  Not that big dreams are bad or non-realistic, it just goes to show my farming naivety.  There are forces involved that you cannot control no matter how hard you pray about it, rain dance about it, shout up to the stars about it.  And that’s the long and the short of it.  So if you are a control freak, I suggest you start small, like some herbs in your kitchen window.  It’s just so funny and all I can do is laugh about it.  Things we tried that were successful.  Things that we tried that failed miserably.  Things that we should have done, things not to do this go-round etc.  It was a seasons crash course in horticulture and it was fucking fantastic!  Sorry about the f-bomb, but there is a thing known as the first amendment, and I couldn’t hold back on how I felt.  Moving on…

Now that it’s January, we start over.  Turning compost, weeding, setting up our indoor grow room, just stuff….and I’m not ready.  It’ so much work, rewarding, but WORK.  Hard work.  I have to get over myself and just get in the zone.  It’s go time and I hope you’re all ready as well.  Some things that we’ve been thinking about for this year is setting up a stand in our driveway to sell some goods.   Last year we sold to restaurants, still part of the plan, but last year that was the plan.  We grew a lot of things that we knew restaurants would buy because we had a farm to pay for.  Now that our initial investment is paid off, we want to focus more on growing things for us and what ever we can’t eat, or process gets sold at the stand.  Last year we experimented with potatoes, it worked out ok, but this year we’re going to be potato growing fools.  Why?  Because we eat a lot of potatoes.  And what’s the point of having all of this growing space and still having to buy your potatoes and onions at the store?  That’s the angle we’re going for this year.  It’s 2009 baby!  YES WE CAN!

Brad Daniel, this is for you. Thank you for bringing my blog up at Christmas time, because if you didn’t, somebody else would have and I would have felt the same ache. I’ve needed to type the (insert verb) out of this for months now and no excuse in the world can cover up my laziness. Because that’s what it is really….laziness. I have other things to do like watch a movie and drink the finest of all malt liquors than to sit in my garage and chit chat about what my garden is not doing. So thank you Brad, you saved my blogs life.

Success!  Our chickens have finally started laying eggs!  Nothing really happening besides that right now.  I started school at the University of Arkansas and it’s been eating up a lot of my time.  Paul went to a class about organic gardening hosted by our neighbor Calvin Bey.  He said that it gave him a boost in moral about our garden.  I guess that’s good, I had no idea his moral was low.

I’m sorry, I said that I would do a better job of keeping up and I have failed you.  8-8-08!  I can’t believe that that was the last time I wrote something.  So here we go.  Paul went through all of my beds that I had just scatter-seeded basil and separated the plants and replanted them.  He planted three more rows of just basil!  It will be great in a couple more weeks when we have 30 pounds of it for sale.  I couldn’t believe that there were that many starts, 250 or so.  Now we have grasshoppers all over the place.  Hundreds, maybe thousands of baby grasshoppers that look up at you and move their antennae at you, as if to say “what do you want?”  Well, I want you to get off of my plants.  Today was the mass exodus of our rooster crop.  If you’re just tuning in, we started off the season with fifteen baby chicks, presumably all hens.  As our babies grew, eight of the fifteen turned into dudes, and seven of them had to go.  Today was their day.  Roy came from Jaspar Arkansas to take them off of our hands.  So he put on his rooster grabbing gear and went to town.  Thank you Roy for reading my mind and coming for the roosters today.  Sales of our produce have gone a little static.  We are still getting rid of a pound or two of this and that here and there.  Our peppers are still ripening, our tomatoes as I might have mentioned are being canned by us, our squash is toast and our basil is just waiting to be sold.  I did plant some spaghetti squash seeds and bush bean seeds.  They are so far doing well.  My ‘Big Max’ pumpkins were devoured by squash beetles, but I think I might have saved one plant.  My other pumpkin patch is being swallowed up by the grass right now.  I tried mowing it out yesterday, but our lawn mower doesn’t seem to want to cooperate.

The weather here today was so NICE!  It rained yesterday, my brain instantly thought it was going to be so humid that you couldn’t breathe today, but it wasn’t.  It made me reminiscent of Arcata.  Nice and cool and breezy.  Ok, I guess Arcata on a hot day, like 70 degrees.  It was nice.  I’m supposed to be mowing my lawn, but I thought I’d take some time and drop a line or two down for this all 8’s day, and I probably won’t mow my lawn.  I put on my tennis shoes and everything, but I guess it was just wishful thinking.  Have a good one.

I bet we picked about thirty pounds of tomatoes today!  Great, that will make us about 4 quarts of canned tomatoes.  Not really, maybe 5.  Other exciting news, it rained an inch and a half today, cooling the temperature by 10 degrees and watering our garden so we didn’t have to.  It hasn’t rained in these parts for about a month.  We were long overdue for some of that action.  This evening Paul and Oliver transplanted 109 basil plants from around our tomatoes.  I had scatter seeded that area and just let it go.  The basil was growing, just not very big.  Now that they all have the space they deserve they should thrive and continue making us some money!  Thank you for all of your nice comments, for reading this blog and for just being you!