Finally finished the fence. What a job. If I had known it would be so labor intensive, I’d have just popped the rabbits with my pellet gun and chalked it up to balancing nature. I’m also probably 75% of the way towards redoing the rows to align them with the new gate positions and new dimensions. The pic’s shows the new area of the garden all fenced, filled, and ready for planting. Nothing will go there for about a month. All that’s left of the job is building and hanging the gates. Probably won’t be able to judge the effectiveness of the fence, in terms of keeping out the rabbits, until the planned green bean crop germinates. That sends out a call to action but even then, I may not know for sure since the plan is to use an insect cover over the row until ready for pollination, well into October or early November. One thing for sure, no more armadillo problems and from time to time, they play hell with plants digging for ants, grubs or worms.

I frequently mention palmettos and palmetto fronds. We basically live in a jungle of palmettos and they are tough, tough plants. As tough as they are, it’s no surprise that they are hard to kill but it is a surprise that it’s just as hard to start new ones. If you have a spot where you’d like to have palmettos growing, forget it. You can’t buy them at nurseries, you can’t dig them out from one spot and transplant to another; you’re just out of luck. But this season, for whatever reason, baby palmettos are popping up in the garden with a fairly high frequency. So if anyone wants to some palmetto starts, just let me know.

Ever eat mashed sweet potatoes? We almost always bake them. When I harvested the latest batch a month or so back, there were lots of smallish ones – just too small to bake or slice – so Nancy decided to try mashing them. Best ever. I’m nominally ok with sweet potatoes but don’t do back flips when they’re on the menu. I’m back flippin’. You peel and boil them exactly as you do white potatoes then whip with butter and milk, again the way you would with whites. Then you mix in maple syrup and sprinkle with cinnamon – those are the key, new ingredients. Nancy did roughly a pound or so of potatoes and used 1/4 cup of maple syrup. I’ll pay just a little more attention to the sweet potato crop in the future. Another good thing about mashed sweet potatoes is, according to one of Nancy’s quilting buddies, you can freeze them. That’s a good thing because even though the potatoes do keep quite a while in the fridge, they will eventually go bad and since you pick them all at the same time, you go from no potatoes to a fridge full – way more than you can eat in a month.

Starting to think seriously about a fall garden. The rabbit fence project is all but finished and there’s plenty of open spaces in the garden. I have about a dozen tomato plants started in the house and those would be ready to transfer to the garden in early September. I could also plant some green beans and perhaps zucchini in mid September. If I want to try butternuts, that has to happen in the next week or so. A fall crop is the trickiest to manage because it has to start in the hot, buggy, and perhaps most humid season. I did pick up several light weight insect protecting row covers and I’m thinking that may let me protect the young seedlings and germinating seeds through all of September. Then in October, I start adding the late fall/winter crops – for sure cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower. Hypothetically this gives me a smooth transition so that we’re never without something fresh coming out of the garden. Easier said than done!

We’re picking up enough rain to keep things nice and green but not to really put a dent in the lake level. There’s a fair amount of activity in the tropics so maybe a couple of these disturbances could throw some storm action this way.

I just heard a factoid about Paul Ryan, Romney’s VP pick, that cements the deal for me. Turns out he likes to “noodle” for catfish. Noodlin’ is where the fisherman actually puts his hand into the lair of a catfish, maybe a hollowed out submerged log, tickles the fish into opening his mouth, then reaches in and grabs it. This can be a dangerous sport because some of these fish can reach a hundred pounds. He’s also a bow hunter who tromps around in the woods in Wisconsin in the winter. How tough is this guy!! He lives in his office – literally. I’d really like to get a look at his bass tackle, especially his reel and the top shelf of his tackle box but that probably won’t happen unless the election really gets close and they pull out all the stops. I’ve also decided to vote for Connie Mack for the Senate. His opponent, current senator Bill Nelson, is running an ad that cements this choice for me. It’s a negative ad that comes out claiming that Mack is a “promoter for Hooters”. What more do I need to hear? How can you vote against a promoter for Hooters? The claim is being made that the Republicans have lost touch with women. They sure haven’t lost touch with real men.

Had a temporary crown put in today and it was much easier than I had anticipated. Took about an hour and I felt virtually nothing through the entire procedure. I go back in about 3 weeks to get the permanent one installed.

I’m hoping we finish the rabbit fence this week. The big job will be cutting out wire from an existing fence and attaching it to the new posts. That doesn’t sound like much but we need to come up with roughly 50′ currently covered with vines – grape and briar. If we get an early start on that tomorrow, chances are we can cut it, get it to the garden, and hang it on the posts on all but the road side. If that goes smoothly, probably even get the nursery cloth hung. Should be able to get the concrete cylinders placed the next day leaving only the stretch along the road to deal with. I have an issue there because I planted a couple of pepper plants too close to the edge, as it turns out, and those will have to be dealt with sooner or later. They are really mature plants and I’m fairly certain that trying to move them will prove disastrous.

Got a call earlier today from my next door neighbor, Harley – the chicken guy. He’s going bigger into the chicken game and building a much larger, more secure coop to house this flock of nine birds. The coop is wood and wire measuring 12′ x 8′ x 8′ tall and is really a well built structure. The call was for a rescue. He was working inside the coop and the door had swung closed and latched so he was locked inside the coop. I went right up and bailed him out. He luckily had a cell phone with him – one that could access the internet. He didn’t know my number so he looked it up on the internet. If that had happened to me I probably would have had to gnaw through the wood to escape.

Can there be more impressive engineering than landing the Mars explorer. If I were a Physics teacher, I know I could structure an entire year’s lesson plan built totally around the concepts used from lift off to landing.

If Obama wins I’m going to start a movement to repeal the 19th.

Got the nursery cloth up on one side of the garden and started the process of layering in organic material in the newly created garden area. Nursery/shade cloth is a woven polyester like material that is virtually indestructible. We’re stringing it along the bottom edge of the fence up 18” where it’s job is to hold back the topsoil in the garden which would otherwise erode. One picture shows the roll of nursery cloth stretched out on the lawn the other shows it installed on one side. The roll of cloth measures 120‘x10′ and has been living at George’s for about 25 years just waiting for this opportunity. This job will take less than half of it.

The space between the existing garden soil and the fence line will become new garden area. It’s only a few inches except on the one side shown in the pictures. I start with a nematode barrier – that would be a layer or two of newspaper and a layer or two of palmetto fronds. That separates the base soil level from the 12-18” of composted growing material. On top of that, a thickish layer of miscellaneous yard clippings – right now that means camphor and bay tree leaves and branches. I use those because lots of insects have an issue with camphor and I theorize that using those leaves would be better than just any old leaf. On top of that goes rough compost, material that is about half composted, in this case lots of corn stalks that were cut down about a month ago. Finally a 4-6” layer of finished compost. I’ll be able to plant this new area by October. The picture shows one area that’s ready for the first layer of compost.

Ate one of this year’s sweet potatoes and it was mmmmmmmm good. With sweets, you are supposed to dig them up and let them dry out for 10 days to 2 weeks before cleaning up and eating. These are right at 12 days and tasted good so I suspect we did it correctly.

The generator comes to the rescue again. We had storms later yesterday afternoon but by 5PM, all seemed fine. At 6:30, the power went out. The power company said it would be restored by 9pm – that normally means absolutely nothing – so while it was still light out, I pulled out the generator and cranked it up. Twenty minutes later, the power company restored power. When they gave us the 9 pm estimate, they forgot we had the generator so they faked us out this time by restoring it sooner than promised. They’re probably thinking next time I won’t rush out and replace them – wrong, I’m up to their trickery.

We’re not quite to the halfway point on the rabbit fence. George and I put in about 3 hours a day – by then we’re totally worn out and it’s just too hot and drippy to do any more. Notice the concrete cylinders along the bottom edge – those guys are each about 30 pounds so it’s a workout pulling them up, relocating them- the vertical ones removed and placed horizontally between the posts and then lined up perfectly. George is a stickler about things being lined up and level. Notice that they fit exactly right between the fence posts. To do that, we actually cut a cylinder to the exact dimension necessary for a tight fit. The next step is to hang nursery cloth along the inside of the fence to hold back the soil at the planting row ends. We’ll do that along the side shown in the picture and across the back tomorrow and also put cylinders between the posts along the opposite side. We might also string the wire fencing along that same side, getting us to the 3/4 point by the weekend. That may be optomistic but we’ve got the procedure down pretty well now and should be able to make more progress than we have for the past two days – got the kinks worked out. Over the weekend I’ll start working inside the garden to layout new rows and adjust the soil levels to match the new fence. Notice in the picture that the fence line is out a bit from the garden. That’s only on that one side and shows the added garden space that results from squaring it up. If all goes well and the weather holds, the next picture I add should show this all filled in and ready for fall planting. I have a pretty good load of compost ready for fill. We’ll do the front/road side and fabricate 3 gates next week. For calibration, I’m down 2#’s which is right on target.

Nancy is in full quilt mode with 3 machines in place and running. She breaks out the Viking to machine quilt the Shands quilts. The new quilt cabinets really make a difference.

The garden fence is really starting to take shape. As of today, we have all the posts in and wire on one side. When George builds anything, he measures, levels and does all those things that mean it will end up looking professional and being super sturdy. That contrasts to my natural leanings to get something up that just barely does the job and looks like the it’s been in place for a hundred hard years. The only advantage to my technique is that when it comes to pulling it down, it’s much easier to do. I hope the rabbits appreciate just how much trouble we’re going to on their behalf.

We had an inch and a half of rain yesterday and the lake rose, accordingly, an inch and a half. It’s now up to the lower edge of the second rung (from the bottom) on the ladder. The long range weather radar is starting to show some action way out in the Atlantic so maybe the storms will start brewing. The forecasters start the season in May or something but I (officially) start it August 15. So far there’s been nothing even approaching a real storm but the namers are already up to “E”. What we need are about 3 storms on the order of the one they called Debbie. That one dumped as much as 20” in parts of north Florida with essentially no wind at all. In my mind that was a monsoon or at least what my understanding of a monsoon is.

Made an interesting purchase the other day as a direct result of my trip to the dentist. For a few years the dentist and his assistants have been pushing a water pick device that I have routinely resisted. They don’t actually sell it but promote how well it works to eliminate plaque buildup and the bag of tooth brushes and other goodies that you leave with includes a copy of a ad sheet. What’s different about this device is that it’s water powered and hooks up to the shower head so you can conveniently use it as part of showering. The reason I haven’t bought one in the past is that I’m always leary of anything involving messing around with the plumbing but this aging dental assistant told me that she installed hers in just a few minutes. They refer to the device as “mama gums plaque blaster” and swear they get nothing from pushing it but patients with nicer teeth. I called mama herself and she sealed the sale. It’s a one woman operation in San Diego and we chatted mostly about how much San Diego had changed since we lived there. Based on that, I went to the web site – http://www.mamagums.com and pulled the trigger, $35 including shipping.

The installation was as simple as advertised – just remove the shower head, screw the blaster on/off valve in line and then reattach the shower head. It works off water pressure, no pump, and is a simple wand and suction cup wand holder. It doesn’t have the pulsing action of a regular water pik and is going to take some getting used to so I’m not ready to put it on the “must have” list. With the valve barely open, it puts out a fairly high pressure stream – you definitely feel it. Think 2500 psi pressure cleaner. I can see someone opening the valve completely and blowing away the side of his head or blasting teeth out of his mouth. If it slips out of your hand, it’s a classic high pressure water hose on a flexible tubing – whipping around the shower uncontrollably.

I was sure surprised to learn that the Korean women won the 30 meter air rifle event at the Olympics.

Went to the doc this AM for a routine annual checkup. The only excitement was on the trip there. Between home and DeLeon Springs I spotted the blinking blue lights of a patrol car up ahead and dutifully slowed down. As we approached it was clear there had been an accident and the car involved was seriously banged up with front end damage but there was no sign of another vehicle or tree or anything that could have caused the damage. A couple hundred yards further up the road I could see more blue lights flashing so I assumed that was the other vehicle – although it seemed pretty far from the first car. When we got there we saw that it wasn’t another car but a dead bear. That marks the second car-bear happening I’ve seen on that stretch in the past year. You just know the bear wasn’t insured. It was probably too far from our house to be the marauder who goes after our trash cans.

Got the first 5 posts installed for the new garden fence. The first line of fence required digging up a 35′ x 2′ strip of grass so the job was more difficult than just digging the post holes – all in all, 2 hours of labor. Doesn’t sound like much when you say it that way but it’s super hot, super humid so two hours is all you want. I’m staying with my 5 pound estimate.

About 6 months back I broke a chip off a molar. It was bothersome for a few weeks but gradually I got used to it. I went to the dentist today and the advice was that I should have it capped with a crown. I said it wasn’t bothering me but he assured me that it would eventually just break all the way and then it would be a much bigger problem. From kidney stones to teeth – I just can’t catch a break here. Since this doc is the best dentist I can ever remember having, I guess I have to go with his judgement.

Pulled out the sweet potatoes. This batch was much nicer looking than last year’s. I had planted a 10′ row and it yielded something like 20-25lbs. That tells me for sure that the rabbits didn’t impact the growth of the tubers when they cleaned off all the foliage 3 months ago. It grew back profusely under the insect tenting. The instructions are to clean the dirt off and keep them dry for 1-2 weeks before eating. During that time I think the tubers are converting starches to sugars or something like that. Digging them is really a messy job and can only be done by hand. If you try poking any kind of shovel or fork into the soil, you run the risk of stabbing a potato. The tubers spread out and down in the soil so you really have to be thorough in sifting through to locate tubers. I’m virtually covered in dirt – wet dirt since I’m dripping with perspiration through the entire process. The nice thing is that the soil is basically 100% organic material so it’s very soft and easy to dig around with bare hands. I do have another row of sweets that should be ready for harvest in later October- mid November.

While I was at it, picked another load of eggplant. No doubt this is my most dependable crop. We’re going to a party at Tom’s and will distribute them to whoever wants them – but mostly to our niece Joanne. Also a handful or two of jalapenos for Tom. Tina makes lots of salsa so these will be used properly in that household.

George and I started the garden rabbit fence project by taking down a section of old fencing to recover the posts and wire. So far, that part of the job is much harder than anticipated because the fence is totally overgrown with briars and other vines and of course it’s very hot and very buggy. My guess is this will take us a full week, half taking down the old fence, half putting up the new one and I think it will be a 5 pound job. That means I will lose about 5 pounds in sweat by the time the project is completed. And I mean that literally. I staked it out and will take this opportunity to square the garden up a little. My rough calculation is that I’ll be adding about 50SF of useable space to the garden – not that I need it – just a product of the squaring process.

This should be a very telling election. I personally don’t care for either candidate but one thing for sure, this is a contest between Socialism and Capitalism. Very reminescent of the Carter-Reagan election. That worked out just fine but I’m not sure this time. I wasn’t all that enamoured with Reagan because of his California connection – much the same as I feel about Romney and Massachusetts. I was wrong then and hope I am now. In my mind, voting for the question mark is better than the socialist.

According to my garden charts, the sweet potatoes should be just about ready. It’s a 120 day crop which I planted March 27th. The plants give you no indication – white potatoes’ foliage dies off when the tubers are ready- so you just have to dig in. And that’s the plan for today. These are the same plants that were stripped of foliage by rabbits back in May so there is some question in my mind as to the quality of the crop.

Saw an item on the news about the nationwide drought conditions and how it’s impacting the corn crop and how that, in turn, impacts all food prices. I have a solution – let’s quit drilling for oil and use a third of the corn crop to burn in our cars. Mixing ethanol/corn into gasoline is and alway has been, a stupid idea. It’s bad for engines, reduces mileage, and runs up the price of corn. I’ve even read that growing and processing the corn uses more energy than it provides. Bad for everybody but the farmers – and the politicians. I also learned that they use soybeans to make diesel fuel. I hadn’t heard that before. I’m just fine with growing the feedstock for fuel but would think by now that something more suitable for the fuel and less intrusive on the food supply would have emerged.

Saw another article on the same show about great white shark attacks in Australia and off the coast of the California and Cape Cod. The reporter said that no one has any idea why these attacks are on the increase – I do. Sharks are a protected population now, so guess what – lots more of them. Ditto bears, wolves, alligators. Same crowd that wants to use corn for fuel, is ok with sharks and gators. Of course most of them live in places like NYC where they neither fill gas tanks or interface directly with the great outdoors. I think we should make rats a protected species.

Still having trouble getting sympathetic about all the forest fires out west. The Forest Service or whoever makes such calls, decided years ago not to log the dead pines which were being killed by Pine Beetles. Guess what eventually happens to square miles of dead trees? Seems like maybe using these dead trees to fuel a power plant would be a good idea.

Joey and Mark came over yesterday on a mission of mercy. I had a dead bay tree hanging over the dock and I really wanted to get it out before the hurricane season heats up. I handle most of the smaller trees myself but this one required climbing up on the roof and me on a roof with a chain saw is a bad combination. And as long as they were here, Nancy wanted a new, taller toilet and had a few spots that could use caulking. So between the three of us we spent about 5 hours working outside and in. I usually putz around the property for a few hours each day, clipping and trimming and got that in before they came over, so by the time we were finished, I was pooped. Things like that are tougher this year because of the mosquitoes. It forces me to wear winter clothes in the middle of summer.

I had mentioned that my USB Broadband, internet, modem had crashed so I ordered a new one directly from Virgin Mobile. I bought the original one two years ago from WalMart. The principle reason for choosing the Virgin Mobile plan was we could get 30days/1 gb/ $20 no contract. Perfect for us. So when I put the new modem on I signed up for the same plan – tried to sign up for the same plan. Turns out that is a Walmart special and only applies if you buy the modem from Walmart. That tweaked me big time since the next alternative plan was 30/3gb/$35. We never use the 1GB so why do I want to buy 3? Nancy calmly, I wasn’t in a calmly mood, called several Walmarts until she found one in Ormond that still had the old model modem. I decided to sleep on it and start fresh in the morning, expecting to have to do battle again. No problem at all. The new one worked like a champ, old plan popped right up, and the icing on the cake was that Virgin threw in a free month for my troubles.

Nancy tried a new recipe – rollatini. It’s an eggplant recipe and with our long position, she’s always on the lookout for something new so when the cook on the Chew mentioned the word eggplant, she was all over it. In this recipe, the eggplants are sliced lengthwise then fried/sauteed in olive oil – no breading. This makes the slices soft and pliable. Then on to each slice you add dollop of ricotta cheese mixed with an egg and some herbs. Roll up the stuffed eggplant, kind of like a cannoli or a manicotti without the pasta. You place these rolllups into a casserole dish and overtop with spaghetti sauce – something else we’re loaded with. Pop into the oven and oila, rollatini. So, except for the cheese, this is a meal we handle 100% out of the garden. What’s funny is that the first year I grew eggplant, it was mostly to dress up the garden and we had trouble even giving it away. Now, both the Souza’s and us are gobbling it up and the waiting list from friends and family is fairly large. The good news is that new plants keep popping up from reseeding, they handle the heat and humidity just fine, and the rabbits and bugs don’t like them. What would be the frosting on the cake would be to find out that eggplant is a source of kidney stones!!

And as usual, after making the rollatini, there was ricotta left over and sauce left over. Not to worry, break out a box of ziti and twenty minutes later, baked ziti ready for the oven. Actually it goes into the fridge, and becomes a meal later this week. We sure eat well!!!