Turkey Leftovers

Along with lots of you (including @grumpyoldrick) we're into Day 4 of Turkey Leftovers. So here's a recipe idea...

Finely dice a medium Onion into a cast-iron pan with a glug of hot Olive Oil. Add some chopped Chiles and Sweet Peppers. I leave quantities and proportions to your discretion, since your heat tolerance, Chile preferences and Turkey Leftover volumes will vary, and this sort of figuring things out for yourself is at the heart of self-sufficiency.

Fry the Onion and Chile mix until soft, then add your leftover Turkey, removed from the bones and chopped into centimetre-sized chunks. Fry until browned, and serve on top of Refried Beans, perhaps on a bed of Nachos, or maybe wrapped in a Tortilla with a dollop of Yoghurt (or Sour Cream, if your weight/cholesterol level can stand it).

Enjoy, and pause to give thanks to the ancient Mesoamerican gardeners and plant- breeders who made it all possible. Well, aside from the Onions. And the frying...

New Addition

A very small addition to the menagerie...

Just 6 weeks old, and we're still searching for a good name for her. Looking at the pedigree certificates we discovered that this little one's Dad and Keira are brother and sister - probably from the same litter!

Spring

A beautiful, warm Spring day. Just the sort that irresistibly invites you into the garden. Bees droning all about in the sunshine. The Flock of Chickens clucking and scratching somewhere distant under trees. Dog joyously hunting rats in the tall grass.

Just the day for digging beds, getting ready for Spring sowing and planting.
Carrots, Beets and Swiss Chard are already in, sown some weeks ago, the Beets just beginning to show themselves. Carrots will be along in another week or two. Pole beans¹ planted along the edges of the same bed are slow, but I was being pretty optimistic with the timing; the ground is only now really warming up enough for legumes. The beans will tent up over the root veggies, and not really create enough shade to interfere too much with their growth.

Next up is clearing a bed for Bush beans - Hopi Black, my stock drying bean, and the least possible trouble of any vegetable you could wish to encounter - and the large, white, and totally delicious Greek bean I know simply as Big Beans. Because that's what I was told the Greeks call them. Perhaps they'd be better off growing more Big Beans rather than relying EU handouts.

Another high priority is the Salad Bed. The few stray lettuces that made it through Winter won't keep us in green stuff for long, and I have a huge craving for salads lately.

Meanwhile the first Tomatoes are up in their seed trays. Eggplant and Chiles are predictably taking a little longer. Beds for these can be a little lower priority, since they'll be in the trays a little while yet. Those beds will need a good composting, though.

I've managed to be a little more restrained this year in choosing varieties... last year was a bit of a mad dash to try and get at least a few plants of many, many varieties grown in an attempt to refresh my seed stocks after the drought years. This year I can afford to relax a little and focus on those that have a proven track record.

Spring has sprung, the grass is  riz... la, la, la.²

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[1] Rattlesnake and Purple Podded.
[2] I'll stop singing as soon as someone pays me to stop!

Stuck Pickup

Bakkie (local term for a pickup) stuck solidly in the mudbath that was once a lawn. No tractor handy to pull it out. No team of oxen. No bunch of strong friends to help push. Just the two of us. How to get it out of the mud?

It Never Rains, But It Pours

After a particularly wet July the ground is saturated and dams are happily full. And now this...

A small river through the front garden...

...and out back, where beer-bottle cleaning has been brought to a temporary halt...

And Bakkie is stuck, the muddy ground too slippery for it to get moving. We'll have to wait for things to dry out a bit to move it, or get a tractor to pull it out.

And yet memories of drought still haunt us, so we bless the rain (if not so much the cold) and hope that the wonderful rains persist through Summer.

First sowings are already in trays - Chiles, Tomatoes and Eggplants, Cabbages and Lettuce. It's a bit early yet for direct-sown Beans, but they'll come soon enough, and there's plenty to do in preparing beds.

Preparations for Leaving the Grid

We always planned on a solar-power setup. It's a natural and obvious part of our attempt to live a more sustainable, eco-resilient lifestyle without forsaking all the perks of technology. When we designed the house we knew we would be unable to afford a solar-power installation off the bat, but we planned for it anyway. The design of the house reflects these plans -- the roof is pitched at exactly the right angle to optimally support solar panels at our latitude, key parts of the roof, eaves and walls are easily accessible for trunking additional wiring, the electricity distribution board is positioned close to the anticipated charge controllers and associated hardware to make upgrades relatively painless.


It's a pure application of what we software designers call the "Open Closed Principle" -- a design should be "open" for extension, despite being "closed" to internal changes.

The Joy of (Willards) Snacks: GMOs in Big Korn Bites

Not that I'm planning to turn this blog into a GMO-activism sort of thing, but, consonant with the notion that self-sufficiency is inherently anti-corporate (and possibly a bit subversive) here's more follow-up on my comments about the fraud being perpetuated by the pro-GMO lobby.