Overheard at the NC Zoo - Asheboro, NC

Today April and I took a little "field trip" to the NC Zoo. We got free tickets from her mom and were both really excited to see the animals; it has been over 10 years since either of us had been to any zoo. The zoo in SF is pretty depressing because all the animals are in small concrete enclosures and have resorted to mauling zoo visitors in the case of the tigers or flinging their poop at them like the chimps. The NC Zoo in Asheboro is really nice, most of the animals are housed in spacious areas that resemble their natural habitat like African grasslands for the giraffes and elephants and swamps for the otters and gators. No cages or bars anywhere which was really cool and way better for seeing our animal cousins up close and personal.

Anyways, turned out April and I enjoyed hearing what the human visitors to the zoo were saying almost as much as we liked seeing the animals. It's time for another episode of "Overheard in NC"...

Little Girl: Daddy, what we gonna see next?
Tattooed Dad: Ummm...(looks at map)We're gonna go to the Streamside area to see the otters, snakes & bobcats
Little Girl: Daddy, what's a bobcat?
Tattooed Dad: It's like our cat, but wilder!

Chubby Vacation Bible School Camper: (excitedly) Brad just gave me one of his nachos!
Vacation Bible School Counselor: (smirking) Just one, huh?

Large Older Woman: (half sitting, half hanging out of helicopter exhibit) Lord, I just couldn't stand being in no helicopter!
Skinny Friend: Why not?
Large Older Woman: There just ain't no room!

I have no idea what the story behind the next thing we overheard was, but we both agree it was the best one of the day...

Little black kid to other summer campers: Ben doo-doo-ed on the GROUND!

nothing

Keaton's Original Barbecue: "Real Goood"

Mecca for spicy fried chicken

Another thing we both love is BBQ. So when the new issue of Our State Magazine arrived this weekend with a cover story on the best dish from each county in North Carolina, we figured it was time for a road trip. Our first destination by flip of a coin, was Rowan County's Keaton's Original Barbecue.

The main attraction for us was the spicy fried chicken with signature sauce, we packed up the dogs and drove a little over an hour to try some of this:

Half Chicken, hot vinegar slaw and baked beans

It gave our mouths an afterglow and we spent the drive home licking our fingers for another taste of the goodness

summer time

“Half our life is spent trying to find something to do
with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.”

Will Rogers

Brewing your own

I love beer. April says I mention it in every blog post, giving the impression that I sit around here all day getting my buzz on and posing for pictures on tractors. I have a rule that I can't crack a cold one until April gets home, it keeps me more productive than if I was stumbling around with a Yuengling can in one hand and pitchfork in the other menacing the mean yellow hens that are always pecking me. So while I love my lager, I try not to be one of those guys who starts early in the afternoon like some people here in the hollow who shall remain unnamed.

A couple Christmases ago, in a galaxy far, far away called San Francisco; April gave me the best gift ever: a Coopers home brewing kit. For some reason, I never busted it out and whipped up some craft brew in the city. It seemed like we always had something else to do and the brewing beer needed to be kept at a temperature above 60 degrees which is tougher than you might think in the foggy, cool Richmond district. One of my first goals here on the farm was to break out the kit and brew up some tasty man soda. I realized April's scientific knowledge was far superior to my own and enlisted her to be my chemical reaction & enzyme consultant. So, as soon as the winter weather was past, we got down to the business of making beer in our dining room.

adding the malt

According to my calender, the first batch we made has been secondary fermenting for two months today so we must have begun brewing it sometime in the early part of April. The kit she got me allows you to mix and match different sugars and yeasts with the various cans of malt extract to make any kind of beer you can dream of from your light Corona style all the way to down to your Guinness thickness. The first batch we brewed was a simple ale and the hardest part was getting enough water filtered to fill up our 30 liter fermenter ( I only use liters because the kit is from Australia, I think it's about 6 gallons roughly.) We added malt extract, brewing sugar and yeast and left the wort alone for a little over a week before bottling it and adding sugar drops for secondary fermentation. It was pretty idiot proof which is always a good thing when I am involved.

...and some yeast

Back in college when I was courting April, I decided to make her a delicious dinner of spaghetti with meat sauce. I had reduced the recipe down to adding raw hamburger to some canned tomato sauce but I neglected to actually cook the hamburger before adding it to the pan of sauce on the stove. April was hovering around the kitchen, probably to make sure I didn't do something like adding raw meat to the sauce and gently asked if I had bothered to brown the hamburger. "Brown the meat? Isn't it going to cook in the sauce?!?" was my reply and since then I have been relegated to assistant status in April's kitchen.

Back to the beer, I was really anxious to taste the fruits of our labor and the directions said that you could sample the stuff only a week or two after bottling BUT that the brew would not reach full carbonation and maximum flavor for 3 months! I marked down the dates on the calender and decided to give one bottle a try in about two weeks. Boy was that a mistake. It tasted like a plastic cup of Budweiser you got at a baseball game on a hot summer day that has lost all carbonation and been irradiated by sun rays until it was a few degrees short of boiling. I was a little disappointed to say the least but I resolved to give it the full 2 months before I tried it again. So, once I saw that red circled day on the calender was drawing near this week; I took a bottle and left it in the fridge for a few days to achieve optimum coldness. When I finally poured the beer into my beer stein shaped like a boot, the head was thick and creamy and the effervescence was like a JV cheer squad. As I took long sip of the first batch of homebrew, I was amazed to taste something very similar to my favorite brew of all time, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Hoppy, crisp and totally refreshing after a hot day of hard labor. The happy satisfaction of creating something and then enjoying it washed over me like...well like only a good cold beer can. Now, if I could just get these damn bent corn stalks to stand back up straight....

Dissappearing hens, bent corn and tractor driving

We lost two chickens today, the only evidence was a small pile of feathers. I think it was a a fox or a coyote, the girls may be on coop arrest until I trap or shoot the culprit. We are down to 17 hens now which is a pretty poor record for protecting them since we started with 24. If anyone has any bright ideas to stop the chicken serial killer; I am all ears. Speaking of ears, we lost about half of our corn today during a heavy thunderstorm that dropped about 2 inches of rain in under an hour and brought wind gusts around 40 mph. I tried to tie some of the stalks back up to trellising with jute string but ended up snapping a couple of them, April did some research that said they can right themselves in about 5 days of sunny weather so we are going to try the patience strategy. Sometimes I wonder what the lesson I am supposed to be learning is, but I have faith God will help me to figure it out eventually.

On a brighter note, I got tractor driving lessons from April's Uncle Ron last Tuesday and then did my first solo mission ripping and tilling on the Ford 1720 yesterday putting in a patch behind April's folks house.

getting my till on

mr. plow

peach progress & my workshop

corn, beans & peas

almost ready to harvest

my magic kingdom

life is...

“Every man’s life is a fairy tale written by God’s fingers.”

Hans Christian Andersen

Kountry Komputer Repair & Cherry Picking

So word got around the hollow here that I knew a little bit about fixing computers. It's good to be known for something, especially something besides being the weird guy on the hill who doesn't talk to anyone. I ran into one of our neighbors, got to talking with him and heard his wife was having trouble with their computer, so I offered to come by and try and help out. I walked down the hill with a couple beers in my backpack and a thumbdrive loaded with Spybot, Ad-Aware and CrapCleaner. Even though I was about an hour later than I had told them to expect me, they welcomed me in and took me to the disobedient computer. She explained that the thing was crashing repeatedly and that she could not get any music or videos to play when she was on the internet. I ran my anti-spyware programs, found some malware and removed it then got down to figuring out the lack of audio and video. It was the first time I had ever messed around on a Windows 7 system, but I knew something wasn't right with the Flash plug-in. I reinstalled Flash a couple times and still couldn't get anything to play before I tried to go into the add-on modules and saw that Flash had been disabled. One click and everything was back in business, they were pretty impressed and I was happy I had been able to do something useful for them.


First question: Is your computer plugged in?

Anyways, a week later I got a call from her asking if my computer was having any trouble connecting to the internet. We had a power outage that morning for about 3 hours, so I assumed that her modem hadn't been reset. Then she mentioned that her monitor wasn't working either, just wouldn't turn on she said. I was embarrassed to ask, but I did anyways, "Did you make sure everything is plugged into the wall and the computer?" She assured me it was, so I said I would come by the next day and check it out. I brought a monitor with me so I could be sure it was a hardware issue, in which case I knew I wouldn't be able to do much for her. When I got down there and took a look, the monitor was plugged in alright but the power strip wasn't. It only took me a minute to look like a computer whiz this time. So now I've become the computer guy here in the hollow, I suppose there are worse things to be known for like the guy making meth in his trailer or the dude who wanders around late at night stealing stuff off people's porches.


In SF, Apple was a brand of computer I worked on
Here, it's something I spend my days working on thinning off our trees

When I'm not removing spyware or plugging in computers, I've been spending most of my time picking cherries and then washing, pitting, bagging and freezing em. April had the brilliant idea that instead of selling em fresh or even baking pies to sell, we could make jams and preserves that would keep much longer and eliminate the need to process and pit them immediately before they spoiled. The other big advantage with her idea is that since we are doing everything organically, not every cherry, apple or peach will look perfect; so putting them into jars allows us a little leeway with the bumped & misshaped fruits. There's no one we have been able to find around here selling organic jams and preserves, actually no one seems to even be trying to grow peaches or cherries organically period. So hopefully we can fill that niche and sell to all the neo-hippies and health conscious yuppies up in Blowing Rock and Boone. However, I'm pretty sure $5 organic jams aren't going to sell like hotcakes at the Jamestown Flea Market. April is already the queen of canning with her pressure cooker she has had since we were in SF, now she will have to show me the in and outs of pectin and preservation. I'm thinking the best thing about her jam idea is that we won't have to worry about the fruit going bad before we get it to market or sell it, we won't have to give it away at the end of a hot day sitting in a stall at the farmers market, we can just pack it up and bring back the jam next week or use it ourselves this winter. Who wouldn't want some fresh cherry jam on their hot buttered toast on a frigid December morning?

freshly picked sour pie cherries waiting for the deep freeze

One way I can tell time is passing faster than I can account for is that my Master Gardener class is finally over after 3 months. I learned enough to not need to do a google search for plant diseases every time I see a hole or spot on a tree leaf, enough to feel comfortable trying to grow fruit with just compost and neem oil but not quite enough to avoid saying dumb things to April's ma like, "Oh! That's one of those things you use to take the green stuff off the top of strawberries!" when she hands me a strawberry huller. Live and learn, hopefully I've got plenty of both left to do up here on Cardinal Ridge