Now that I ended up picking up a very large bag of potting mix at Costco. I thought that I would plant up one of the cells of the salad table to get some greens growing.
So in one of the sections, I filling it up to the top with potting soil, then divided it into three smaller sections. I ended up using the follow seeds from Johnny’s in this first section:
In the back cell: Spicy Greens Mix
Center cell: Bordeaux
Front cell: Outredgeous
Now the true experiment begins!
A couple of you might know this, but the guy that lives next door to me, works on a CSA farm on the outskirts of town. Any questions that I have about agriculture/farming, I always shoot his way. Well now that the growing season is well under way, he let me know that he had a bunch of very old seeds from Johnny’s that they couldn’t use on the farm, since they were too old (expiration date of 2005.) So he let me know that if I wanted some, that I was more then welcome to poach however much I needed.
Since the packets that he had were 1/4 to 1/2lb in size and being how old the seeds were, I only ended up taking about a 100 seeds of the two different seeds that he had. I guess we shall see in the next week or so, if anything germinates out of these seeds. Since they both looked like two very interesting seed varieties for squashes.
Links to Johnny’s Select Seeds:
I was bored one evening a few months back, so with a pile of bagels in the fridge, I thought that I would make a quick bagel breakfast sandwich for dinner. I really didn’t have a recipe in mind per se, but I did kind of roughly base this sandwich on something that you might get at a Big Apple Bagel’s restaurant. Here is how the sandwich stacks up ingredients wise:
Making this salad table was kind of a spur of the moment thing. I was flipping through Martha Stewart’s web site, when they happened to have set-up a section of their web site just for spring gardening/planting. Well one of the things that they were showing on her site was a salad table. Personally I’d never heard of nor seen a salad table before, so it kind of piqued my interest. Continue reading
Turns out that my hunch from last night was right, and I basically lost an entire row of white cups in the salad table. But it turns out that I was a little bit lucky, in that I had tossed all the extra seedlings that I didn’t transplant onto a dirt pile in the basement. I really don’t know which is which among the seedlings in the pile. So I basically just dumped out the contents of the hail damaged crop cups, sifted out all the destroyed seedlings, and mixed the wet potting soil with some potting soil that was bone dry to equal out the moisture level of the potting mix. Continue reading
All I can say is: BORING. I will give Frito Lay the benefit of the doubt, in that they didn’t recycle one of their other flavors to make these chips. But their really wasn’t anything exciting about this flavor. More or less it tasted like tomato soup with a hint of basil, with the ironic part being that on the back of the bag is a recipe for making tomato basil soup.
For some reason I thought that these chips were going to taste more like a caprese salad, which is usually what I think of when I see tomatoes and basil put together. But instead I got a mouthful of crunchy tomato basil soup. Overall I’m indifferent to this favor. Would I get them again, maybe. But I can tell you that I won’t be going out of my way to get a bag of these chips.
After a number of years, I finally got to do a head to head comparison of Better Made’s Red Hot Barbeque verse their regular Barbeque chips. At first I liked the regular barbeque chips from Better Made more. But after trying the Red Hots, I can now say that I’m a Red Hot Barbeque convert.
The thing is, its not that the Red Hots are that much hotter than the regular BBQ chips from Better Made. But with the addition of paprika and smoke flavor in the Red Hot’s, it really adds something different to these chips that you don’t get with Better Made’s regular barbeque chips.
Though I wouldn’t necessarily have these chips all the time, since I can only take so much barbeque chips. But if I still lived in Michigan, every couple of months I’d place these chips into the rotation to mix things up. But since I’m not in Michigan anymore, I’ll just have to settle for picking up a bag whenever I’m back in the state.
OK, talk about a freak hailstorm. On Saturday night, I finished transplanting almost everything from flat #1 into 10 oz white plastic cups. The only things that I didn’t transplant from the flat into cups were the Aji and the El Jefe, and thank god that I didn’t. Because on Sunday afternoon around 1:30pm, the sky turned dark and hell was than unleashed for about 30 mins. And during that 30 minute downpour of marble sized hail, the hail basically destroyed all the seedlings that I had left outside on a salad table that I had built.
Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll have to go through all the cups to see what is salvageable from all the plants. But so far it looks like the only survivors are some of the cucumbers and zucchini. And maybe some of the bell peppers. Man this sucks!
After months and months of sitting in the secondary fermentor, I finally transferred the red rye ale to a keg for consumption. This beer was ready to go at least two months ago. And with a FG of 1.020, the extra months in the second really did nothing to drop the FG into the target range of 1.010 to 1.014.
I could only resist about 24 hours, before giving this beer a small taste. And I have to say; this has to be my best beer to date. It actually tasted pretty close to something I might have at a local brewpub, which is pretty amazing to me. Overall, I’m really digging on the hint of rye flavor that you taste in this beer. So the recipe for this beer is definitely a keeper in my book.
Alright I ended up only transplanting 18 of 27 cells of the cucumbers and the zucchini tonight, so you’ll see a couple of before and after pictures below. Also you can see that I’m going to give growing potatoes another shot this year (more details to come on the pallet growing bins) hence why those potatoes are under the grow lights.
