After moving from grow zone 9 to 8, I have had a lot to learn about what can be grown in my "quads" and squash has been left out of the loop, primarily due to the millions of ground squirrels that run rings around me all day long. We also have high winds that shred just about everything I try to grow, even the marigolds.
I miss these having been able to pick and eat up to a dozen a day this time of year:
Bone in, 4 hours at 135° F in sous vide water bath. I normally would have used my Neovide 100 bagless and waterless sous vide cooker for these, but I put them into the water bath that I was using to cook a couple pounds of bacon. I like to precook bacon for up to 12 hours and drain off the fat to use separately.
All of the meat I buy from Good Chops comes in sous vide ready packaging, which is very convenient.
After refrigerating the precooked lamb cops overnight I browned them for a few minutes on each side in the Crownful countertop air fryer. Tender and tasty.
Necessity forced me to invent a flexible and comfortable modular system for growing flowers and vegetables in areas where standard gardening is impractical and/or prohibited.
My system is based on stacking inexpensive waste bins from the dollar store.
More on my gardening blog.
Yellow Bird of Paradise Seedling
Probably my Nemesis 🐿️ JJ the rambunctious ground squirrel. We call him JJ because that is the code name for the macro's icon on my MessagEase keyboard. The reason he gets a name is because this particular squirrel has a lot of attitude. It is easy to tell him apart from all the others.
I am grateful for the telephoto lens on my phone.
I keep reading that Violas, which are cold-hardy, need to be brought indoors to overwinter. That is backwards in my mild climate where 104°F is not unusual in the summer and we seldom get hard freezes.
I plan to try growing them outdoors all winter, but they will need shelter from the blazing sun in July and August.
It is time for me to install roll-out drawers in yet another home, but this is not an ordinary home, it is my "Forever Home." Modest, but it has a view and a yard and a fence all the way around to keep the neighborhood dogs at bay.
I had not yet met some of the people I love today when I started this blog.
Nothing in my life is empty any more. Some of the things that fill my life with joy today had not been invented yet when I started this blog.
One such thing is the waterless and bagless sous vide cooker. It is such a life-changing invention that I (who like to eat, but had always loathed and detested cooking) cannot help blogging about it.
So I am changing the name of my gardening blog to Growing in Water and Cooking in Air.
Who would have thought It's chunk of rock could just fall off this huge monument. If you like to travel on bumpy dirt roads, going to see Giant Rock near Landers, California makes a nice day trip. For the less intrepid, however, the roads to the Integratron are paved.
MessagEase is a revolutionary keyboard that I am learning to love because it helps me multitask on my smartphones and tablets.
Here is a screengrab showing me using it to compose this post.
Please note typo on screen grab is not repeated in post. Correct spelling is MessagEase.
It is easier to see, easier to navigate, faster, flexible, can use my stylus (Note8, Note9, S7+, Bamboo?) and it has MACROS.
There is a steep learning curve, but for me very much worth it, and they have a seperate app with fun learning games to get new users up to speed and guage our progress.