Best Gardening Journal Ever!

I've had my eye on this journal for over a year, but I just couldn't see spending over $40 with shipping for a garden journal, especially when I wasn't sure what was going to work for me. So, I bought one for half that for last year that is nice, but not quite the thing for me. So, I splurged and took the plunge. Wow, I gotta tell you all, it is the finest garden journal ever! I got it from Lee Valley.




It is pretty thick at almost 500 pages and very well bound in sealed fabric to make it more weather proof. Very nice paper that is going to stand up to the repeated shuffling through that a gardener will do over time.

Probably the best thing about it is the logic of it. Each page is dated, but has divisions for 10 years of that date per page. This makes it so much easier to compare the status of things from year to year. Each entry has the place for the year, the predominant weather, temps and plenty of room for almost any days entry.



But like they say; that ain't all folks! It has loads of stuff for garden layouts, harvests, planting dates, seeds, major purchases, projects and even references. Basically, it is good stuff!

Colonial Williamsburg with Mom

Mom in Governor's Palace

My mother, J, came down for a lovely visit a few weeks ago. She stayed with my sister but we got to do plenty together. A super fun day for Mom and me, but perhaps less so for my sister J the Younger, who wasn't feeling great, was our trip to Colonial Williamsburg. My sister was a trooper though and seemed to have a good time anyway and it was nice to spend time with her.

I've been there before, but never in the first flush of spring and it was wonderful! I think the highlight for my Mom was the tour of the Governor's Palace. For me, the kitchens and kitchen garden were by far the focus.

Kitchen Gardens at the Governor's Palace

The food made daily in the kitchen outbuilding is taken from foods grown there in the gardens and heritage breeds of stock, some now quite rare, raised and slaughtered there. Some of their animals are simply amazing and wonderful. Luckily, they have a book of their breeds for sale in their book shop. :) Next time I'll get it. This time I focused on garden books outlining the evolution of the garden design in America, Pleasure gardens and other wonderful garden-y things.

But back to the food for a second; the cooks in that outdoor kitchen use authentic implements and everything just as it was and cook real food, all day long, which they lay out on a table in between their cooking area and the visitors. Not to eat, of course, but anything you might want to ask or have explained, they do. It really is amazing.

The Hedge Maze at the Palace

The hedge maze was looking a bit worse for wear with so many people pushing through rather than find their way out. Since it is still early, they will thicken up, but it is a shame to see people destroying something so old and beautiful. This photo was taken from atop the ice house which is about 16 feet tall and still perfectly operable. The Palace runs along the canal, with truly spectacular terraced lawn and gardens, and the ice used to be cut right from that canal. It hasn't actually frozen in years, but the stone and earthen ice house provided cold storage and ice throughout our sweltering Virginia summer and fall for all the people that lived there.

We ended our evening there by enjoying a wonderful dinner at Shield's Tavern, where we were very lucky to get an early reservation. It is superb food and very stout fortified beverages are served :: grin::. I knew enough to get a Pimm's Cup, which is just fine to have early in the dinner and be able to drive a few hours later. My Mom, on the other hand, got a Rummer. Those are basically a glass full of delcious, but rather potent, alcohol. She was a trooper though. The portions were huge and we took home doggie bags. I highly recommend it.

Mumsy is coming back this month and we plan on going again to see the growth. We're going for King's Tavern reservations and carriage rides. I'm focused on trying that Colonial Game Pye, which I've heard a great deal of good about, before I try the recipe (which I have) with my limited supply of venison.

Blogalyser

I recently saw this analysis on another blog, (sorry that I can't remember who, it isn't one I follow but one I linked to somehow), and favorited the base site for later. I've now run the analysis on my blog. The link for the site is at the bottom so you can do it to your blog too. I'd be interested to see how all my blog friends out there roll out doing this.

My feeling is that a lot of us garden bloggers and sustainable living bloggers might wind up similarly. My purposeful and, at times, difficult avoidance of talking politics and sullying gardening with that tends to skew these stats some, I think.

I also ran the Gender Genie linked at that site to see the results for individual posts. Every single post I tried, and I tried a lot, came up more male than female (how depressing is that!) but there was a definite difference depending on topic. When rambling on about Sustainability or reviewing a book, I came up less overwhelmingly male in my writing. When giving facts and status on gardening then I come up with a much higher percentage, up to 80%. Argh...is that just my alpha personality and 23 years in the military?

Enjoy! What would you suggest I do to improve my communications with all of you?

The Blogalyser reveals...

Your blog/web page text has an overall readability index of 11.

This suggests that your writing style is conventional
(to communicate well you should aim for a figure between 10 and 20).Your blog has 34 sentences per entry, which suggests your general message is distinguished by verbosity
(writing for the web should be concise).

CHARACTER MATRIX

male		female
self		world
past		future

Your text shows characteristics which are 56% male and 44% female
(for more information see the Gender Genie).
Looking at pronoun indicators, you write mainly about yourself, then the world in general and finally your social circle. Also, your writing focuses primarily on the present, next the past and lastly the future.

Find out what your blogging style is like!

Ginger Beer Results...Delicious!

Delicious, Ice-Cold Ginger Beer

My first batch of Ginger beer didn't really trip my trigger much. It was just a tad too blah for me. So, I spiced things up a bit and added more lemon this time and used a lot more fresh ginger.

Whoooyaaaa...can I even begin to describe the delicousness? I think not.

The taste is sweet, spicy, a bit citrus-y, a bit bubbly like champagne and utterly refreshing.

I used plastic water bottles, which I rarely have but did after my Mom came to visit. You can use bigger bottles however the bubbliness of it will go away if not used within a day or so. Smaller bottles mean you get fizz the whole way.

As for alcohol content, I do think I might have a little in mine. I'm a notorious lightweight and my lips get numb after the first sip of wine or spirits. When drinking this, I don't necessarily feel anything but my lips get numb after a glass for a little while. So...maybe a little.

Mine got very fizzy. Perhaps that had something to do with the alcohol content.

A word of caution though. Please don't be tempted (like I was) to use all glass bottles. If you can't stomach plastic, which I normally detest also, be sure to have at least one bottle of your batch in plastic to act as a tell-tale bottle! Mine seemed to not be making pressure at all, so I relaxed about it. I came down the next morning to all my bottles bulging and unable to stand up from the pressure in them. While I hurredly put them in the frig and stopped the process safely, glass would have been a huge mess all over the counter

If anyone else does this, let me know how it goes for you, please.

Watching the Flash Flood Happen

I was only able to get one decent photo of the deluge last week and I thought you might be interested in seeing how exactly, I managed to have a flash flood event localized to my very own yard. Well.....


...here it is! The lot behind me where a new house is going up has an increasingly tall mound of dirt. The plastic barrier meant to keep an 8 foot tall pile from blowing around via a 3 foot tall bit of plastic had, unfortunately, gotten it's lower edge buried by the ever growing pile. Which means over a foot of water built up like a little dam in 25 minutes and then, whoosh, it all came down the incline where I was standing.
Yours truly, after taking this picture, decided to be really intelligent and go see for herself how high that water was going to get. LOL...oh, yes, I was trudging across the mud when it came rolling down.
No worries. I'm fine, of course and my garden is clearly recovered since I posted the pics just yesterday. It was a moment of pure rush though. And I've reaffirmed my undying love of rubber boots :)

Rooms We Wished We Had

Since I'm still (and will be for the foreseeable future) trying to figure out the details of my future home in the country, I read a lot about the subject. Recently, I read an article that only indirectly related to my quest, but was very interesting so I thought I'd share.

Apparently, someone has finally figured out that the people that bought all those McMansions don't actually use all that room. (Insert laugh here.)

Honestly, how long should it take to figure out that 2 people who work away from home all day aren't really using a house that has 5 bathrooms, 6 bedrooms and more than half a dozen other rooms with labels like media, conversation, grand dining or library? I'm equally sure that this only comes up as the economy contracts and these same homeowners are no longer capable of keeping their maids or cleaning services. Houses can certainly seem bigger when one is suddenly required to be the one taking care of it.

But it brought up a thought. Some of the quotes in there reflect where purchasers were coming from when they bought it really well. One commented that she had always wanted a butler's pantry like in the old house she grew up in, and it was only in this large house that she had found it. Personally, I wouldn't buy a 5,000 square foot house in order to get a pantry, but that is just me.

It further wrote that studies show that people will buy a home based on a single room, even if they don't know they are doing it. Sort of backs up that above example a bit.

So, what room would you most like to have in your house? Assume you have the right number of regular rooms for your uses, such as bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, etc. All the normal stuff is there we'll say. What would you add if you could?

I did a bit of a real world poll by asking everyone around me for the last couple of days and these are the answers I got:
Harvest Kitchen
Butler's Pantry (or walk-through/walk-in pantry) - lots of this answer
Media Room
Library
Game Room - lots of guys answered this one :)
Conservatory
Arboretum/Attached Greenhouse - Loved that one

My choice, if I could only have one, would be a ginormous butler's pantry now that I've been able to think about it. Second choice attached greenhouse. What about you?

Blast From Our Soda Past

Recently, I read a really great recipe for Ginger Beer on a blog and decided to try it out. It isn't done yet, but it did bring up the idea behind trying it. Namely, that I do like the fizzy soda-ness of soda, but just can't tolerate how very bad it is for you. Even though I do admit that I will partake now and then at work, I wish that I wouldn't!

By chance, during a clean out of my frig, I found this. Now, when is the last time you saw a Diet Coke with a pull tab? Sometime in the 70's I'd imagine, yes? Are you now imagining that maybe I've actually had a coke in my frig for more than 30 years? ::laughs:: Not quite, but it has been in there a while. Now take a look....

...at the other side of the can.


Surprise! Yes, this is from the Middle East. We bought several cases while on the ship since soda became as rare as hen's teeth for quite a while and anything made with ship created water tasted horribly of bromine. A good bit of it made it home as items of curiosity for friends and family and 2 lonely little cans were hidden very well (fell behind the bins on a hidden shelf I didn't know was there).

For those who might ask: Bromine is added to water made from sea water on our ships to kill germs. Our situation was such that we were making water fairly close to a country you wouldn't even want to get in the waters off of, so we were super-brominating the water. Aside from the taste, that much has other, completely unmentionable effects on the body. At that point, even soda is less of a hazard :)