The Bandit

A few weeks ago Steve went to make himself a peanut butter sandwich and couldn't find the bread.

"It should be right here," I said, looking on the middle shelf of the stainless steel wire shelves, but it was not there. We both looked all over for it. Zippo. Then I remembered having seen something out of place in the yard.

The masons had started work on our chimney. They came with a huge (special-built) fifth wheel trailer bearing scaffolding, wheelbarrows, the brick, of course, about a million five-gallon buckets, and many assorted tools. It was in the midst of all that working-mess that I had seen something that didn't quite belong.

I went outside and looked, and sure enough, it was the plastic bag that used to house the bread we were looking for. It was torn (as well as empty) and we suspected a stray dog. We figured this was why both cats had crowded into bed with me the night before.

We have made it a point since we've been here to put any and all food trash in the big dumpster anyway, an idea reinforced when the bread disappeared. After that happened we took to setting anything we thought might be attractive in that way to a foraging critter way up high.

Next thing was I couldn't find was a bag of home-grown vine-ripened tomatoes that I had harvested, which I had set up on a shelf about waist high. We figured that must've been an omniverous raccoon. Grrr.

Then one night we'd been some-I-don't-remember-where and got home after dark. When we came in I noticed that a stack of paper plates and the plastic forks and spoons on the floor. These had been on top of the water cooler, about six feet up. The loaf of bread that had been with them was gone, along with a banana. With all that had also been a plastic clamshell box of oatmeal raisin cookies, which was laying on the floor. Hmph. Had to be a raccoon. Only thing we couldn't figure out was why the little booger didn't take the cookies. Maybe our return home interrupted the burglary?

I took me a flashlight right out to the toolshed right then and got the havahart trap. Our dilema in setting that trap is making it attractive to our intinded "prey," yet it be something that our own cats will leave alone. We decided to set this one with rest of the cookies.

We didn't miss the coffee canister until the next morning.

Yes, whatever climbed up, knocked our paper plates and plastic ware off the top of the water cooler and took another loaf of bread and a banana had carried off our coffee canister!

Certain this must be a raccoon (and trying to imagine what in heaven's name a raccoon wants with a canister of coffee) I searched the brush behind the house. Sure enough, there was our red plastic Folgers coffee canister at the base of a sweetgum tree. I surveyed the setting pretty thoroughly for any presence of poison ivy and made my way through the brush and retrieved the coffee. The only damage was a small series of pinhole tooth marks in the lid. Either he couldn't get the lid off, or maybe after he poked the holes in it decided it didn't smell as good as he thought it would. We got our coffee back though.

I checked the trap and something got the cookies without springing the trap. Just a few little crumbs left that had fallen through the cage bars was all that was left. I left the trap where it was because I planned to bait it again.

Night before last a noise awoke me. I cicn't know what noise it was that woke me, but upon awakening I heard a rythmic metalic tapping sound, like someone was fiddling with something downstairs. I grabbed a flashlight and went downstairs, cats at my heels.

Couldn't see anything untowards, and tried to triangulate in on where the sound was coming from, but sound carries differently in this A-frame. I intuitioned that perhaps something was fooling with the havahart trap. I shone the flashlight over that way, and guess what? There he was, the masked bandit raccoon. He had gone in there to try to dig those cookie crumbs out from under and between the cage grid and got himself good and trapped. I slept very well the rest of the night!

Next morning Steve moved him across the yard where he would be out of the way and in the shade, and I called Animal Control. Our New Hero and Favorite Animal Control Officer Kim came out and said, "Yes, we do have a relocation program," and took the raccoon away. When she brought our cage back she said, "I opened that door and he ran like a bandit!"

...Like the bandit he is! ..Steal my coffee... I don't think so!

August Already!

I cannot believe it's been a month and a half since I last posted! We have been busy, busy, busy, though. The house is coming along, the garden is coming along, complications arise and are ironed out, dealt with, or worked around.

Grandmother accused me (probably more than once) of telling everything I know, but some things I will wait to report to the Whole Wide World until the fat lady sings, as they say. In some cases, for similar reasons a pitcher doesn't talk about a no-hitter-in-progress, in other cases - ah - more along the lines of the fifth amendment.

Here's what I can tell you.

It's August and, Baby, it's HOT. I checked the weather earlier this week and the five day forecast said Sunny and Hundred degree high temps for each day of the forecast.

The masons, Tom and his son Tommy, have built us a beautiful chimney (pictures later).

The garden is exploding, along with the population of cowpea aphids (accursed vermin!) and some creepy black bugs with pointed butts and orange or red markings that make them look scary that are eating my tomato leaves, beet greens and swiss chard leaves down to the ribs. I thought they were blister bugs, but they might be something else. I despise the ugly things, though, and smash them every chance I get.

Progress continues on our house. Steve has accomplished an unbelievable amount of work almost entirely by himself, but we are far from done. Plans are in the works to get him some help so we can get enclosed before cold weather arrives in Central Oklahoma. Yes, all my northern friends, I know - after having lived seven years in central New York, "cold" is a relative term, but something resembling winter will visit us in a few months and we need to be ready, so we are working on getting some help and a way to pay them.

My online venues' hearts are still beating, but their pulses are a little weaker than I prefer. The host for my main store, EightSusquehanna.com, migrated to a new server, which will be great once I learn all the new tricks. I think everyone can find it okay, but some things behind the scenes have changed, so I have more things to learn. My eBay store sells well enough that my inventory there is getting pretty skinny. I hope to make a couple days in the near future to evaluate and restock both inventories.

We brought the cats, Muffin and Cookie, out here a couple weeks ago and both their countenances improved immediately. Seems like they remember the place and are happy to be here. They spend their days who-knows-where and materialize at the sound of my voice in conversation or at the far end of the garden where the Catnip grows, or at dusk when we feed and retire for the night. The Mighty Muffin has become our Brave Protector, warding off would-be trespassers of the feline persuasion. What a guy, that Muffin!

Unfortunately, before he came out here we were graced by the darting presence of a painfully skinny, pregnant, half-grown kitty. Believing her to be the last of the strays the former tenant left behind, I attempted to seduce her into captivity with the idea of turning her over to Animal Control. A smart one, she was, and would not be tricked into any box or cage. She finally allowed herself to be petted if one had food and I took the opportunity to pick her up. Big mistake. She turned into a little tornado of a cat, all claws and teeth. She had her teeth in the heel of my left hand when I dropped her into a pet carrier, much less graciously than I had intended. Now we await the results of rabies testing. Kids, when your parents and teachers say, "Never touch a wild animal or any animal you don't know," they are not kidding, so pay attention.

What else? I go into town about every other day and wash the laundry and bring it back out here to the place and hang it on the line. In this heat it dries almost before I'm done hanging it! It's a practical and somewhat romantic throwback to my youth when it was common to see clothes hanging on a line to dry. I'm having the time of my life.

I'm learning about the plants that grow here, and about the symbiosis and pattern of life here. For instance, we have many plants here whose presence is indicative of acid soil. We had blossom end rot in some (but not all) of our tomatoes, which is indicative of low calcium in the soil, which is another symptom of acid soil. But we have "high" levels of calcium in our well water - so what happens is that the acid soil causes the calcium to wash out of the soil and into the water table. I figured that out all by myself.

Some mornings before light we can look outside and see deer in the yard. In the dark of dawn or dusk we are likely to see rabbits, who are probably the little dickenses who are eating my tomatoes before I get to them.

Priorities have not yet lent themselves to figuring out how to get television out here since all the stations have now gone digital, but we sure do get that Sirius Radio signal! We like the Deep Tracks station (Sirius 16) quite a bit. Jethro Tull, Little Feat, Leon Russell, to name only three of hundreds. It's great!

This has been something of a stream-of-consciousness post. The longer I sit at the keyboard, the more things I think of to tell you, but we'll leave some for next time. This post is long enough. Thanks for reading!

Tino's Cold Cheese Pizza

When we lived in Cooperstown there was a little pizzaria, Tino's, on Chestnut Street. Tino had a fairly typical menu for such a restaurant and would do slices for lunch. One of his menu items was Cold Cheese Pizza and all his menus bore the phrase, "Home of the Cold Cheese." Best I could determine, he was talking about cold cheese on a pizza.

Cold cheese on a pizza? Why? I didn't get it. It sounded gross.

My friends, co-workers, husband and I, as well as most visitors we entertained, enjoyed Tino's slices for lunch and whole pizzas for dinner and other occasions. We came to be such regulars that when Tino would see our shadow cross the door, he would himself call out our order, and it would be ready by the time we got to the counter. We ate a lot of Tino's.

Then came Jason. Jason Schiellack, then Manager of Membership (now promoted to Director of Membership) at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, hails from Wisconsin. Everyone liked to rib him about being a "cheesehead" but he really is himself one cheese lovin' dude. It didn't take Jason long at all to sample that cold cheese pizza. Jason is the one who successfully introduced me to it. I must say I was hesitant to try this strange arrangement of cold cheese on a pizza, but from the "The First One is Free, Kid," Department, I was hooked from the first time I tried it.

The next time I went in, I asked Tino, "What's the story on that cold cheese pizza?"

Tino explained that when they had a pizza shop in Oneonta (a college town) they'd get these big rushes of diners, say, at lunch time or when classes or an entertainment event would let out. They'd be overrun with a shop full of hungry college age kids ordering slices! Slices! Slices! and they'd be back there slingin' pizzas as fast as they could. They'd pull those bubbling hot pizzas out of the oven and slice 'em up, but they were way too hot to eat - loosen the skin right off the roof of your mouth (Ouch!) - until someone had the ingenious idea of throwing a handful of cold shredded mozzarella cheese on top of those extraordinarily hot slices to keep from injuring thier avid, loyal, ravenous and impatient customers. Soon people began asking for slices that way. A cult of pizza was born.

When my sister, who has never been to Cooperstown or Oneonta, learned that I love cold cheese pizza, her response was same as mine had been in the beginning - "Cold cheese on a pizza? Why? I don't get it. Sounds gross!"

Unfortunately, any explanation I can offer in black words on white ground can not possibly come anywhere near doing it justice, but try to think of the most excellent thin crust cheese pizza you can imagine, piping hot - the way the crust bends down when you try to pick it up, so hot the topping almost slides off, melting - with a handful of shredded Mozzarella cheese thrown on top as it goes on the plate. Be assured, the juxtaposition of cold cheese on hot pizza is a delightful surprise. If you ever have the chance, try one. It'll change your life. Trust me.

We still get the weekly Cooperstown newspaper, The Freeman's Journal. Comes in the mail every week, right as rain. It's fun to keep up with the goings on in the village where we spent the last seven years of our lives. We always liked to say the village is so small, everyone takes turns being on the front page of The Freeman's Journal. It's real home towny. I saw in the FJ recently that someone bought Tino's.

That is happy and sad news to me. Happy if it was what Tino wanted, happy for him and his if he came out well on the sale. Sad to think Tino's won't be there any more. The new guys might even still call it Tino's if they paid him enough for such a priviledge, but it sure won't really be Tino's if Tino isn't there.

I am familiar with the other restaurant owned and operated by the people who bought Tino's. I certainly wish them the best, but I have to say, they're no Tino by a long shot. Not even close. So I guess we'll see. On the other hand I don't suppose I really need to trouble my pretty little head about it because I don't live there anymore!

Tino, wherever you're going and whatever you do, I bid you a fond farewell and wish you Health, Happiness and Prosperity. I thank you for having opened up a shop in Cooperstown, for your friendship, and for the exquisite experience of Cold Cheese Pizza. Cheers, buddy.

Garden Update and Field Pea Lore

I am sorry to say that I have slacked way off blog entries since I got Facebook, so to try to make up for it a little bit, I'm posting this entry with an updated photo of my garden, which is fairly exploding out of the ground.

We have already enjoyed a jalapeno pepper bigger than my whole thumb, a Roma tomato bigger than any I've ever seen in a grocery store (and way tastier), a few little golf-ball sized onions (because I just couldn't wait), several yellow squash, which are surprisingly sweet, and two hefty servings of green beans, yum! But wait, there's more - today I saw a bright yellow spot in one of the rows and wondered how a dandelion grew there so quickly, but it was my first Marigold blossom of the season. Good Morning Merry Sunshine!

In this photo, on the left is the tomato row; in the middle, there, is a row of Georgia Sweet onions, and that row on the right, toward the front are the yellow squash, and behind them you can see some neat trellises I made for cucumbers, cantaloupe (also known as muskmelon), and watermelon. On the crossways rows in the foreground, the little sprouts you see marching across the image from right to left are pink-eye purple-hulls, a variety of what are commonly called field peas. The Pink-eye purple-hulls are close cousins to black-eyed peas, which you may have heard of.

Black eyed peas are significantly involved in a particular southern tradition of eating black eyed peas on January first for good luck and prosperity in the coming year. Grandma Susie introduced this tradition to me many years ago. You can have 'em any way you wish - with or without greens, cornbread, any variety of pork - the black-eyed peas themselves are the thing.

This tradition evolved, as Grandma Susie explained to me, from the point that black eyed peas and all their little cousins are humble food, inexpensive and easy to prepare and, as you can see, one can even grow them in the home garden. As a bonus to all that, they're also quite tasty. It follows that if one were to start the new year with such humble fare, things could only get better. Steve and I have become almost superstitious in our observance of this tradition - January first must not pass without our having some black-eyed peas, even if we have to get them out of a can from the grocery store!

I could grow black eyed peas, and probably will, but I so love the pink-eye purple-hulls. I was introduced to pink-eye purple-hulls by a woman named Mildred Wallace, mother of my dear friend Sue Mitchell. My children and I went to visit Sue at Mildred's house in Arkansas one summer back in the eighties. Mildred was a pip! She nearly always had a "chaw of terbacky" in her cheek. Mildred grew a thick stand of pink-eye purple-hulls every summer. She ate many of them fresh and home-canned the rest, had enough to keep herself well stocked and send home with her loved ones. They weren't quite ready to harvest when we were there that summer, so we had some of the last of the home-canned from the season before - delicious. I also learned from Mildred that summer how to make biscuits. Yeah, biscuits! Tender, flaky biscuits, the kind you love with breakfast. I'll tell you about Mildred's biscuits in another post because this one is about "eye beans."

Black eyed peas are a pristine creamy white with a distinct black eye. They cook up from dried relatively quickly and are tasty. You can embellish the flavor with various seasonings, maybe a joint of ham if you're so inclined, or just enjoy them pretty much the way they come. They are definitely black and white. Once I've actually grown some, I can tell you more about their habit, their pods, and so forth.

Pink-eye purple-hulls are exactly that. One of the fun things about shelling them is that the pods will stain your fingers purple. One of the not-so-fun things about shelling them is the same thing - they will stain your fingers, and it is persistent. Doesn't wash out easily. The beans or peas, whichever one might wish to call them, are a little more pale mauvish in color, with a deeper, sort of a dusty plum colored eye. As I mentioned before, they are tasty prepared from fresh, they home-can well, or cook up from dried relatively quickly, like their black-eyed cousins. My affection for this legume interferes with any objectivity I might have, so I can't really say between black eyes and pink eyes which one has the better flavor. They're just tasty.

Time marches on and both Sue and her mother Mildred have gone on to the Big Acreage in the Sky. I have no doubt whatsoever that Mildred is in charge of a thick stand of the Heavenly equivalent of Pink-eye Purple-hulls, and that Sue is pointing out to newly arrived angels, "Well, there's a real good example of a pair of wings, right there on your shoulders." I learned a lot from those two women, individually and collectively, miss them both, and think of them often. My old friend Pappy Hines would say "They're not dead as long as we're alive to remember them," and to that I offer Cheers to Sue, Mildred and Pappy.

Y'all go grow yourselves some pink-eye purple-hulls!

Poison Ivy

I learned something new and interesting today!

Someone on one of my gardening groups posted that Poison Ivy is a sign that the soil is acid, and recommended I test and lime as needed. She also pointed out that Poison Ivy grows slowly and recommended planting something faster growing in its place to displace it, and made a couple of specific suggestions that speak directly to our need.

We have quite a bit of Poison Ivy on our place, more in the woods and under trees, but it has pretty severely encroached "our" space while we were away these seven years. I have become quite expert at recognizing it and knew you really just had to pull it out, but hadn't given much thought to planting other things in its place.

Here in Oklahoma and points south grows a grass we call Bermuda grass. It prefers long hours of sunlight and propagates readily by seed and eagerly by rhizomes. Bermuda grass is tolerant of difficult conditions and is beautiful and green, making it very popular for lawns. It is also invasive and persistent, should you ever happen to want to clear a piece of ground and plant anything else where Bermuda grass is or has been. If you run a tiller through it, any little quarter inch piece of rhizome left in or on the ground will sprout into - you guessed it - MORE Bermuda grass! Till a piece of Bermuda grass up into a hundred little pieces and you'll get a hundred new plants.

This has also been my experience with Poison Ivy.

So, yep, I put on my makeshift, hillbilly hazmat suit and layers of disposable gloves up to here, pull every strand of hair back slick and tight under a hat or in a bandanna so it won't waft about to tickle and and make me want to touch my face, and set to work, pulling up endless networks of ropes and cables of Poison Ivy vines and roots. Quite a sight, I'm sure. Fortunately it comes up fairly easily.

I do not put the evil strands in my compost, because its poison is like alien space acid in its insidious persistence and I do not want to put it back in my garden in the form of compost on food I eat or feed to my loved ones, completely aside from the chance of moving orphaned pieces of Poison Ivy to a new, more fertile environment with its propagates-from-any-little-scrap-of-root ability.

Don't burn it either, because Poison Ivy's eternal molecules of poison attach themselves to particles of smoke and ash, and Heaven Forbid you should breathe any of it. Bad, bad, bad. No, when I pull Poison Ivy I put it in trash bags, tie 'em up tight, and place them in the trash can for the City of Mustang to carry off to do whatever it is they do with the garbage they pick up from us. Thank you City of Mustang!

So - I am extremely pleased to learn this about Poison Ivy, that it's an indicator of acidity in the soil, and am also grateful for the suggestions and tips on things to plant in its place.

My Chicken House

My dear husband built me a chicken house ten years ago. It's a wood-frame building set on a concrete curb-like footer.

We got some perfectly good surplus windows for little-a-nothing, and a couple of doors the same way.

We designed sort of a vestibule/storage area just inside the exterior door, where we keep the feed and whatnot. The second, inner door lets you into the Inner Sanctum where the chickens live. We did purchase a set of nesting boxes with hinged roosts with little sliding doors on the backs so we can gather eggs without having to go into the chicken house, and he built "low" (about a foot off the floor) and "high" (about waist high) roosts out of 2x2's, along three sides of the inside of the chicken house.

It has a wood floor, covered with a linoleum-type flooring (probably vinyl or whatever they're making that stuff out of these days), which we got as a remnant. When we have chickens, we layer the floor with four to six inches of wood chips for chicken litter. We have traditionally purchased said wood chips from a local farm supply outfit. Now that Steve is doing more carpentry, he makes plenty of sawdust but I'd want to sift the fine dusty stuff out of it if we were going to try to put any of that on the hen house floor. Nobody, including my chickens, needs to be inhaling wood dust.

There is a little slider door that you can open and close with a rope on a pulley, that opens out into a fenced, covered yard area so the chickens can go outside, see the sunshine and feel the wind, and still be in a protected environment. It's like a porch except that it's bare ground out there. We call it the chicken yard.

The fence around the chicken yard has a gate-like door that we can open to let the chickens out to free-range for the day, if we wish. Unfortunate experience has taught us to let them out when we are going to be around to monitor things. We used to let them out in the morning before we went to work in the city, but there's a lot can happen when you're gone eleven, twelve hours a day. We changed to leaving them penned up if we're going to be gone and only letting them out when we're there.

On the other side of the chicken house from the little yard door, is another little door that we use for clean out. This one is just a little door on hinges that locks with a bolt-latch. We like to do a thorough clean out about twice a year - all the old, used litter goes out, sweep the floor, maybe scrub any crusty places with a stiff bristle broom. That flooring could also be mopped and disinfected if it seemed necessary. We would then put the chicken litter in the compost heap.

I posted a current pic. It looks a bit overgrown right now, but we've been away these seven years and it's surrounded with chest-high weeds and poison ivy. Someone has had a dog or dogs in there, so there is a little chew damage, some dig-out places, and a couple of the roosts are broken, but it all appears to be relatively easy to repair. We just have to get the human house habitable before we can start on the chicken house.

I'll post again when there's some progress to show.

Gardening Notes

We pull our rows up in ridges so the plantings are raised. Not a raised bed, but raised rows. Here's a picture of this year's garden so far, with a picturesque backdrop of trees.

We have an assortment of tomatoes, peppers, a row each of Georgia sweet and Texas 1015 (sweet) onions, some cukes, a watermelon, a cantaloupe, some okra, green beans, beets and carrots in the raised rows in addition to the corn circles.

We also have some garlic (not shown in this photo). I'll relate The Legend of The Garlic (with picture!) in a separate post in the near future.

By the way, in case you're interested, the trees shown include Black Walnut, Pecan, Hackberry, Elm, Honey Locust, and an olive relative I call "Sweetbush" because of the way it smells when it blooms in the spring. Downright intoxicating, the Sweetbush.

Elsewhere on the acreage live Juniper, Cottonwood, Mulberry, Willow, Cypress, Sweetgum, Oak and Pine trees. Possibly also a Redbud, the Oklahoma State tree, which I planted over ten years ago, but have not yet found.