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In memory plus a wet gopher

Eloine

Miss GrayYet again another tree in honor of one of my longtime pets. This was a stray cat that was just always there. I have no idea how old she was since I was a little kid when she was a kitten. I planted this olive for her today. Unfortunately the name tag of the olive fell off so I don’t know what kind it is. I had planted another one earlier this year in memory of my dog that was a much more of an upright olive. This one has more scraggly branches. Seemed appropriate for a straggly old cat.

A funny thing happened though while digging the hole. We used a bobcat with an auger to dig the whole but the ground was hard clay. So we had to soak it. The water backed up into a gopher hole and as we pulled the auger up the water spilled out from the gopher hole on the side and out poured a wet gopher – a bit confused. Don’t worry – we rescued it and relocated it in a field well away from the garden.

No animals were harmed in the making of this video šŸ˜‰

Senoritas!

Eloine

Time to start chopping and frying!

This is a harvest of seƱorita jalepenos. They are the mildest kind of jalepeno there is. I like them because you can eat them straight without them being too hot. Because they are not so hot you can actually taste the jalepeno flavor. It’s hard to taste it when you are over powered by the heat as with the more popular in store variety.

I will chop all these up and they willĀ  be fried in a pan with some butter and then stored in the freezer for later use in a variety of dishes.

Recipe

My very talented co-worker who decided to leave us and go on to more great and wonderful things left me a recipe the other day I thought I would share. I’ll miss you Amanda!

  • Dice & saute your red peppers
  • add diced onions & caramelize them if you like
  • Add: honey, fresh chopped & diced garlic, fresh thyme, cinnamon & ground clove (all to taste)
  • Serve as a sauce for chicken or pork – could also use as a glaze for a pork roast.

Along came a spider

Eloine

For some reason this year I have seen a lot of garden orb spiders. They make some of the coolest webs but they are not much fun to walk trough at night. They’ve been spinning their webs every day and they can spin a 4 to 6 foot circle in little under an hour which amazes me. We also see to have an explosion of black widows as well whose webs are quite the opposite in beauty. They are tough tangled messes that just give me the creeps. The garden orbs on the other hand do not – still I freak out if one falls on me. This one was hanging above my head against a dark wall so I couldn’t resist trying to get a shot. I used a Nikon D200 with a hand held flash off camera triggered by the built-in flash of the camera.

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My Calendula

Eloine

Calendula
Calendula

I noticed my calendula was in bloom. So naturally I checked th Internet to see what I could do with it. I ran accross this really cute story:

Miss McGlaughlin was supervising the playground on a summer afternoon when one of the first grade boys suddenly began shrieking and running around in circles. She quickly determined that he had been stung by a yellow jacket on the upper arm. Casting wildly about for help, her eyes fell on the calendula flowering against the south wall of the school. She pulled the boy over to the flower bed and picked a large blossom, popping it in her mouth. Having heard that masticated calendula quickly relieves the pain of bee stings, she was ready to give it a try. But the flower tasted funny. As she spit it in her palm and applied the soothing mash directly to the sting, she realized that she had chewed up a fat, black ā€œcalendula bugā€ along with the flower. The injured boy had quit crying and was observing her with rapt curiosity. Heā€™d never seen anyone eat a bug before . . .

Read more here: http://www.horizonherbs.com/pilot.asp?pg=calendula