Grilled Wild Spring Onions

Wild onions grow everywhere here, and I mean everywhere.  In the pastures, in the lawn, along the roads, in fallow plowed ground especially.  They are a real treat to pull, clean and grill as an accompaniment to any meat cooked on the grill.  These onions are very mild and delicious.  Very young ones can be minced well up their thin green stalks and used raw like chives or scallions in salads, soups, baked potatoes and so forth.  As they grow larger the stalks grow tougher, but the small bulb and white part of the stem can still be tender.

Wild onions just pulled and washed with a strong blast from the hose to remove all the mud

Roots and upper stalks trimmed off and washed well at the kitchen sink.

 A couple of the tougher layers have been pulled off the stem and bulb so the onion is more tender.

Coat the onions lightly with olive oil and season with just salt and pepper.

Place them directly on the hot grill and use the stalks as handles to turn them frequently.

Ready to enjoy!  Just eat the bulb.  Mild and delicious.  If you didn't pull off enough tough outer layers, be a little more aggressive with your trimming next time and/or use younger smaller onions.  In the meantime, if the onions are a bit tough on the outer layer, strip the tender inner bulb out of the stalk by running it through your teeth or popping it out of the stalk with your thumb and index finger.

Remembering Paul

My dad, Paul Emile, passed away in 2006 at the age of 89.  Today would have been his 97th birthday - not an impossible milestone in his family.  His mother lived to be 106, his oldest sister, Juliet is still with us at 103 and his youngest sister, Germaine, is now, umm..... 94, I think.

I learned my love of nature, the outdoors and conservation from my dad.  He always dreamed of having a place in the countryside, a family retreat, where all could come for fun, relaxation, and as a permanent touchstone where family could gather, where we could be together.  He called it - the family compound.  I think he may have been dreaming of something more Hyannis and Kennedy-esque, but he did talk a lot about Alaska and researched log cabins and such.  He never did get to travel the length of the Alaska Highway.

I have never forgotten those philosophies of my dad.  They are part of me too.  This place - Reedy Branch Road - is in part, a fulfillment of my father's dream with some slant toward my vision of a country place.  But the essence is the same - a place to gather, to relax, to revel in the peace and companionship and embrace of friends and family.

Happy birthday, dad.

So that's an invitation.  Come.  The door is always open.

1985 - Meme's 100th birthday!  All the cousins of the next generation called the aunts & uncles "The Magnificent 7".  Pictured with Meme are her 6 surviving children at the time.  Front left - Roger.  Front right - Raymond.  Back row, left to right - Lillian, Juliet, Germaine, and my dad Paul.  Clare had passed away many years before.

Rocking Chairs

A month or so ago I needed to get a bent flange from my rototiller straightened at a machine shop.  A neighbor volunteered to take me to a fellow he knew who did such things in his machine shop on his farm.  Being much easier to show someone where something is located out in the country, rather than try to describe which country lane your supposed to turn down after crossing the "crick" past where the tobacco barn burned down back in '68 - we drove on over to James Prichette's place.  It turns out that Mr. James, who is in his 70's doesn't just dabble in his farm machine shop, he runs his shop as a business with a helper, Leroy,also in his 70's, doing quite an array of repair and modification on farm implements and fabrication of all sorts of widgets for all manner of things.  After straightening the flange in his arbor press while I waited and charging the absurdly trivial amount of $5.00 to do so, I mentioned that I grew up in and eventually worked in machine shops and loved the smell of machine oil and metal.  He asked if I like the smell of sawdust too and showed me his woodworking shop located in the other half of the machine shop building.  It reminded me of my Aunt Claire's cabinet making shop, full of large professional size woodworking equipment.  Mr Prichette had it all.

He showed me an unfinished rocking chair he had just completed but not stained or varnished yet and invited me to sit in it while he explained how most rocking chairs were not balanced properly.  They tipped too far forward and not backward far enough and you had to stop your forward motion with your feet and push off too much to rock backward.  This rocking chair was amazing!  At first it seemed like you might want to tip over backwards as the chair easily rocked back, but was actually no where near it's tipping point with plenty of rocker left to go before touching down on the floor.  The chair smoothly rocked forward naturally and all you had to do was barely exert a little push and back you rocked once again.  The curved seat bottom and the rounded arms were so comfortable.  SOLD!!
Mr. Prichette made me two matching rocking chairs and a matching porch swing from quarter sawn oak for our front porch.  These chairs are fabulous beyond words and we finish our day, every day, rocking on the front porch as the sun begins to set.  I don't know how the end of a day working on our little bit of paradise could be any better.  Oh yeah - a cold beer or glass of cold sweet tea does nicely.

Purple Bearded Irises

Irises, or Irisi, or Iris - whatever you call more than one Iris!  There is a bed of them about 16 feet in diameter in the front yard near the porch.

Funny thing is - there are only blooms around the very outside edge - none in the middle. 

Being the flower amateur that I am, once I figured out what they were I did some research on Irises.  It turns out that they are probably now planted too deep from all the leaf much that has been accumulating over the years or decades. They are probably too wet from all the mulch too, and as they have multiplied over time they are now too close together.  All these things diminish the blooms.  So the ones out at the edge are not crowded, are drier with little or no mulch right at the edge of the bed, and therefor are not too deep as they haven't been buried more and more each year under a carpet of fallen oak leaves.  In September I will need to dig them all out, divide up the rhizomes and replant them at the surface about 18-24" apart with no mulch in the bed.  Spreading them out like that I'll have extras to plant in a new bed somewhere else.  Local folks tell me this property was a showplace many years ago.  It's easy to see the remnants of that former glory all around.  It will be nice to bring some of that back.

Raccoon

Well - not really, but that is what I call this calf in the neighbor's pasture next door.  With her large black patches around her eyes she reminds me of a raccoon.  If the two black patches were joined together into a mask she would look more like a raccoon, but I would probably be calling her 'lone ranger'.  She is the only 'white face' calf among a herd of Angus cattle and is a bit ostracized by the other calves.  Like Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer - they don't always let her play in calf games.

Mowing

Coming out of winter the weather has been cool and wet, which means the lawn has been growing like, well - what it's mostly made of - weeds!  But it's not all bad.  The lawn behind the house erupted into a sea of violets.  Purple ones and white with purple centers.

I't hard to tell just how many tiny violets are in the grass, but there is about a 1/4 acre patch of clover, violets and lawn grass between the back of the house and the garden.  The chairs under the pecan tree are where we rest when working in the garden and enjoy looking over our little bit of heaven.

There - a close up of a couple of square feet of lawn.  Now that's a lot of violets!  But mow we must to keep control over the property or it will become a jungle and a spa resort for bugs which we don't want - especially ticks.

So we have a new toy.  A 24 horsepower 50"cut Cub Cadet lawn "tractor".  It's big enough and stout enough to mow the 2 1/2 acres we have, but is not really heavy enough or strong enough to be called a garden tractor or subcompact utility tractor.  It's really a very large riding lawn mower.  It should work nicely for us for mowing and hauling around anything with wheels, like a fertilizer spreader or large garden cart and the like.  For digging in the ground we have the BCS tiller.  In the background next to the pick up is the other new toy - a 5'x8' utility trailer for hauling equipment, hay, and building materials.  The flower bed behind me is getting ready to bloom.  I thought the plants were Gladiolus, but now I'm beginning to think they are Iris.  I'm not sure yet.  Time will tell.

Compost!!

Because the soil here has lots of clay in it, although it's much better than the brick red heavy clay in many parts of the South, there is very little organic content in it from years of farming with deep tillage and industrial synthetic fertilizer.  What I'm saying is - there is NO topsoil.  The answer is COMPOST!  Lots and lots of compost.  I can make enough compost from the abundance of fallen leaves plus grass clippings, veggie trimmings, and a future supply of chicken manure, but I can't make enough to give the garden plot a good dose to amend and improve the soil initially.

I attempted to have 70 cubic yards of compost delivered from an outfit about an hour north of here, but despite long and involved phone conversation about our narrow country road, long narrow driveway and so forth they sent an 18 wheeler with an extended wheel base cab hauling a 53 foot open gondola used to haul sawdust from the saw mills.  There was no way he could make the turn off the road and onto the property.  Back he went up the road without delivering the compost.

I found a much better supplier, very professional, who delivered 60 cubic yards of beautiful black compost in 3 loads of 20 cubic yards each using a quad axle dump truck that could make the turn onto the property and dumped the loads right at the edge of the garden behind the house.

60 yards of compost!

Now 60 cubic yards of compost is a pile 10 feet wide, 30 feet long and 5 1/2 feet high.  It seems like an impossibly huge amount to till into the garden, but actually is only a layer 2 inches thick over the entire plot when you scatter it all out.

As always - my very helpful and generous neighbor came by the next day with his son and two tractors to disk harrow the previous deep plowed ground, load the compost into a manure spreader, scatter the compost over the entire garden plot, and very lightly disk harrow the compost into the top few inches of native soil.

Now I can finish the seed bed preparation and maintain and improve the soil over time with my rototiller by adding adding more homemade compost and tilling in cover crops of clover, buckwheat and winter peas. Hopefully in a few days we will be ready to plant the cabbage and broccoli seedlings, plant the onion plants and seed potatoes and plant some spinach, peas and lettuce.  With the exceptionally cold winter and wet spring we are about 10 days to 2 weeks behind schedule with planting.