Gardening...

I have a close friend who chuckles at me!
I tend to say whatever is on my mind.

She was looking for the fat free half and half, and I simply stated... I don't understand, the whole point of half and half is it is half heavy cream and half regular milk!  How can it be fat free?

While I choose not to use 1/2 & 1/2 I sure can't take regular milk in my coffee; and if you expect me to use skim you have got to be crazy!  I'll drink it black like my grandparents did (a left over from sugar rations during WWII)  Yes as a vegan I was trying to use almond milk but it truly aggravated my throat and made me burp too much for comfort!  I refuse to use soy, and coconut is just too sweet for my taste.  I do enjoy hemp milk but... as usual I digress~!

My point of bringing this up is low fat, non fat half and half is a bastardised product.  You think your drinking a better for you cream when in fact its so much worse for you it's ... well a crap storm of a product doing no telling what to your poor body!

I find it funny I can come to these conclusions myself about something as simple as half and half BUT never thought about it as applied to my garden!

YES my garden.

As of late I have had TWO books I can't seem to put down, leave alone and not refer to everyday.

The first being  Integrated Forest Gardening...

ONE of the best and greatest books on gardening I have ever come across.  It is helpful, insightful, and gives examples we all need when getting started with a newer, fresher, and different way of thinking of our gardens.

It is the simple, provoking, and common sense of each of these books I am stunned I have never thought in this manner when it come to ... DIRT and ALL it consist. 

Why it is I can say fat free half and half makes no sense but I expect a man made chemical fertilizer to make real food? 

FAKE fertilizer must give me fake food!  Meaning If I feed my veggies chemicals they are going to contain or consist of chemicals.  SO now I am building up my soil, dirt, and compost with nothing but bacteria, fungus, hummus, and mulches for compost or area needs.  

It is funny how you can read a book a hundred times but you take on something new each time because you are in a different place of your journey each time you open, close, or share a book with anyone.  

I can barely contain myself.

1st update on the barn... here is the latest picture from this morning...

now the part I can't sit still about.

While the picture of the barn up loaded I grabbed my lunch, fingers wet with juice, hurry to wipe them off and type this in.

One thing about SUMMER I can not live without.  TOMATOES.... get a load of this!

what glorious tomatoes and bread... the knife was as sharp as I could find and still ... it went everywhere!  but NEVER wasted!

call in the fat police... I love mayo on tomoatoes... a little pepper for bite.

Basil from the garden...

Lettuce and close it up...

It is officially summer in my house.... bring it on! I'm set for anything now!

Cool, sweet, soft, juicy... salads, sandwiches, grilling you name it my tomatoes will be on or in everything till they run out.

Hurry up Troy! You gotta come and get your tomatoes before I eat them all!

Copan Ruins... The City, not artifacts.

Copan the city, is a small town. While I could have walked the entire town in a morning’s hour, Jerry was not up and our agreement was I wasn’t to stray very far, to stay with in our radio distance. So with in a block of town central was my only morning playground. Thankfully market was within that area! I enjoy getting up and walking towns before the rest of the world gets up! Locals don’t expect someone on vacation to be out so early, so it works for me. I sat, listened and watched the locals greet each other, all of Central America seems to be such a friendly lot of people, you show respect, they give it back. 

I have no skills when it comes to the Spanish Language, but was lucky enough- generally I am-- to find someone who spoke English. And he just happen to be the town supplier of my favorite fruit! Laecha? I can not find this word in any dictionary to spell it correctly, but is sounds very close to leche which is milk. Walking the market here was not of my best interest, as it was small, dark and had too many hidden areas for trouble so I sat outside and waited for a large hotel to open so I could get a cappuccino. I sat with my coffee, ate my power bar, watched people clean the streets, picking up trash, sweeping, then wetting with what ever water they had. It is usually a dirty water with no other purpose left except to cut down on the daily dust from the streets.

My favorite foods of the entire trip were consumed in Copan! One more thing I didn’t expect but enjoyed. It took us an hour from the time we ordered to the time we got our food, but it was cooked in front of us on an open pit. It was not only enjoyable and relaxing to watch all the actions of the place it was frankly impressive! As our cook stoked the fire, our server served others while carrying things on her head from table to table, even up the stairs.

The restaurant was not a full block from the Hotel, it was… Nia Lolas, where no one speaks English, but they do have menu’s in both languages, so you point to one and they point to the Spanish version. We ask if their water was pura/ purified and they said yes for ice etc… we still drank out of bottles except the alcohol we ordered; this was one of our few drink splurges.

Well Today I start a new venture

I am a person who loves her family dearly, sometimes too much for today’s society. I say this because I have a deep need to know what is going on. If the family gets together, I want to know who cooked? What did they prepare? What was the conversation; down to what everyone was wearing. I rarely get to see my family these days as I am a little farther away from the group than most. I believe this all comes from the fact by the time I was 5 my parents moved walking distance from my maternal grandparents. My mothers brother quickly moved in on one side and my mothers sister followed on the other. I was literally surrounded by family. Family that was allowed to mentor me, discipline me, or encourage me all my days on the family property. I often joke of how if I sneezed at school and my parents knew I had a cold before I got home. Which was almost truth to the letter, as most of my teachers taught my mother, Aunt, Uncle, and every cousin back 5 or 6 removed…

Life for me was a fish bowl, I was the only one of my generation for years and even after “the twins” came along for some reason I was a little more looked after than they as the family thought they had each other and I was somehow in the world alone. I have commented to the family how “the twins” didn’t change my world. My world fell apart when Aunt Sheri and Uncle Steve had Danny; there was no dress up next door. Not six months later Aunt Gale had Zach and my world was no longer mine. I was the spoiled one! The center of all for generations back, but this also kept me in that controlled environment. No matter what I did, a family member was there OR someone knew who my family was. They never realized even when I traveled to Martin TN as a teenager, how I couldn’t get away from the strong influence my family had on me. The first lady I met at Martin… OH I know your grandfather… Cecil Lain. I was mortified in front of peers I had only known for months…but home all the same.

We as a family did the old fashion things, we got together with immediate family at least one Sunday of the month but especially on Holidays of ANY sort. We got together with family back generations at least once a year; back to my great, great, great Aunts that to this day tickle my mind and inspire me because of their strength and devotion to learning, life existence, and beautiful expressions of being happy. My paternal grandparents were also a constant in my life, although the lived in another state my parents made every effort for us to travel once a month to see them if not every other weekend when afforded financially.

What started this little change in pace? Well as with everyone else money is a little tight, and my focus on developing the estate is on hold; I will do little by little; but my focus is making sure our business survives as do my thoughts to my family, friends, and influential people of my life. I don’t have a home made green Formica table to share coffee, biscuits/toast, jelly, with the café pouring sugar container, or my napkins tucked in the corner near the wall, the small plastic cup with just enough milk for the days talk over coffee. I am hundreds of miles away from the next generation, I am hundreds of miles away from the life I had. While I don’t want it back, I refuse to not learn from it and pass on the wisdom shared with me over that slick, speckled, Formica covered door made into the best table I ever sat at!

My day today started out as normal, except the night sweats didn’t go away. I moved down stairs to the sofa, heard Teallie scream so I napped as much as I could with her on my chest so she would not pick till she was bleeding. As funny as it sounds I dreamed of Nannie all night, it was the lingering smell of the beans and cornbread I made yesterday. As you can see above I cooked my beans more like my Pawpaw liked them, with lots of soup (for my cornbread, of course) So really I was up most of the night, but was determined to change this blog into something others would want to read instead of just a note or two. It is amazing what smells can do to you, I shall post about my Nannie tomorrow, as my dreams, thoughts, and breathing went to Potatoes, Clothes Lines, Talks, and Shoes. You will have to stay tuned!

So on my way to the barn grabbed the camera to take snap shots of my daily drive to the barn. There is so much in the short 4 miles to the barn I decided to document it and write on each as time passes.

My trip to the barn took well over an hour because of all the little things people could miss. My drive to the barn each morning starts from the back door. Rarely is there NOT fog rolling off the distant mountain, it rolls much like the wall of fog that blankets San Francisco each night, but here the spectacle is morning and often flanked by the sun rise. Something I will have to learn to photo, as I am not as good as Jerry with a camera, but I’m no grandmother Goins either. She would cut your head off no matter how simple the camera.