This week in pictures

Number One Son participated in his very first Tae Kwon Do tournament last weekend. He was very excited. He won a fourth place trophy (out of four in his division). The tournaments, especially the ones for kids, are usually arranged so that everyone takes home something. Number Two Son has said that he wants to start Tae Kwon Do now, so next month I will have two little rugrats kicking and punching the air around my house.



The hens are giving me about eight or nine eggs a day. In cold weather like this, as long as the hens aren't eating their own I gather eggs and do chicken duties every other day. It takes about that long for them to clean out their feeder. Every four days they get fresh water. Some folks might object to this frequency, but I've been doing it for five winters now and my girls seem to do just fine.


I finally got around to rendering the tallow from our last quarter-beef. So now I've got two gallons of lovely white tallow. Back when I was making loads of soap for sale I would have used this up lickety-split. Now that I'm no longer in the soap-selling business I have a backlog of tallow in my freezer. Anybody cook with tallow? Anybody out there make tallow candles?


In root cellar news, we are finally reaching the end of our stored potatoes. It's quite sad, actually. They have stayed beautiful for so long. And have tasted so good. I cooked up the last of our winter squash a few weeks ago. Several of them had developed mushy spots and couldn't be used. I must keep a better eye on them next winter.


My apples are just starting to turn wrinkly and brown. I've got to do something with them, relatively soon. I've got six pecks left in the root cellar. So a few nights ago I made (yet another) batch of applesauce. Cortland apples add a nice pinkish color to the sauce.


I figure I've got about thirty quarts of applesauce in my basement. And twenty-five quarts of canned apples. That seems like a lot, but we go through it fairly frequently. Much more frequently than dried apple rings. Although a friend of mine suggested soaking the apples in a cinnamon syrup before drying. Maybe the kids would like the dried apples better that way. Something to think about for this week. But making sauce is a lot easier than making dried apple rings.


Hurrah! My onion seeds have sprouted! I have about a hundred of these little green onion fingers poking up through the soil. The 2010 growing season has officially begun! When the fingers get a little bigger I will carefully transplant them into bigger trays.


After reading so many positive reviews, I splurged and asked Hubby to order a book for me. "Gardening when it counts" by Steve Solomon. I've been reading it slowly over the past few days. Surprisingly, I really like it. I wasn't sure I would. Normally when I read a gardening book it tells me to do all these things that are next to impossible (for cost reasons, for time reasons, for lazy reasons) for me to do. A lot of the recommendations Mr. Solomon makes are actually pretty feasible. Even with my clay-loam soils. Although, I'm not about to give up the spring roto-tilling and do all of that digging by hand. Sorry, Steve.

Also, I have to admit that I am one of those idiots that never realized the importance of sharpening my tools. In fact, I've never sharpened them. I feel a little silly about it, now. This is what happens when you grow up without a gardening mentor--you don't learn all these important bits of wisdom. It's no wonder I hate weeding. I've been doing it by hand all these years, preferring to get down on the ground and pull rather than scrape them out with a dull hoe. Hubby bought me a file from the hardware store and we'll give this tool sharpening thing a whirl this spring. I hope it makes weeding a whole lot easier.