Work (and Play) Weekend

Saturday was all play. It was gorgeous weather, sunny with clouds and not too hot, maybe low 70s. We got up early for us on a weekend and met our friend Angie for breakfast and catching up at the French bistro in Gettysburg. Crepes with strawberries and cream, crepes with bananas and nutella. Brioche French toast with breakfast potatoes. Oh, my, theirs are the best breakfast potatoes I’ve ever had.

After, we walked around the farmers market on the square. Purchases were made, including 2 pepper plants, some rhubarb and strawberries (both destined for jam this week), a few celery plants, and a bar of great soap.

Then, Matt and I drove around a bit of the battlefield before heading home the back way, over hill and dale and avoiding the main interstate.

I can’t remember what all we did for the rest of the morning and the early part of the afternoon.

Around 3 we collected Matt’s parents and headed down to Baltimore for an early dinner. It was a celebratory dinner for my FIL’s retirement, his birthday, both Matt & my birthdays, our anniversary, their anniversary, etc. We went to Fogo de Chao, which is an Brazilian steakhouse. Matt and I have been there once before. It is by far hands down the best cooked and seasoned beef I have ever had. I can’t rave about it enough. I would happily go there more often, but at $50/head you kinda need a really GOOD reason.

I wrote about Fogo here, go read about it. The only thing I can add to that is 1) I had a cocktail this time, the Brazilian national drink Caipirinha. Very strong, quite good. I don’t think I’d make one at home, but it was nice. 2) I also had a dessert, I had the crème brule. I’ve made crème brule, but it was never like this. SO creamy. JoAnn ordered a slice of cheesecake. It was mislabeled on the menu, it should have said ‘A Slice of Cheesecake the Size of the Rock of Gibraltar.’ Ray laughed really hard when they brought it out.

Then we went home and lay around like bloated whales. Eventually we slept.

Sunday was a work day. We went out for a quick breakfast, then hit Lowes and got some garden-related hardware that we needed: big plastic tubs, smaller tubs, a couple hanging baskets, potting soil, some stone.

When we got home, Matt spent a few hours on lawn care and lawn mowing.

I planted 19 tomatoes: 12 Super Marzano paste, 1 Principe Borghese drying, and one each of Sungold, Brandywine, Japanese Black Trifele, Henderson’s Ponderosa Pink, Kellogg’s Breakfast, and Cherokee Purple. I still have some others to plant.

Last year, I used a technique I’d read about for tomato planting and that was putting them in horizontally, as in parallel to the ground, with only the top greenery above the ground. The thinking behind this was that as the roots grow along the planted stem you will have a root system that is close to the surface, therefore close to the water when you water it. The downside to this is the plant will also dry out that much faster, and when it does rain/you do water the plant, the dirt will tend to wash away and the plant will pop out of the ground. So, this year I’m planting them the normal way again. We’ll see.

I also put in the 3 celery plants (never grown celery before), and 4 peppers. Haven’t planted beans yet, way behind there. But the ground is mud. MUD! I was worried about the tomatoes drowning, and now they’re saying 3 more days of rain on top of all that MUD!! If I put in beans now they’d just rot anyway. So. Waiting. But I can get the poles in the ground now while it’s wet. MUD. Ugh.

After a lunch break, Matt was back at it with the lawn, and I started in on some self-watering tubs for large plants. I took the plans from the Frugal Life blog on these, I thought they were great. I made three, one for my fig and two for Matt’s parents, who weren’t going to do a garden this year. I also made last year’s hanging tomato baskets into potato pots. We gave three of those to Matt’s parents, too, and kept 4 for us.

Making the pots, mixing the soil, etc, was hard work! My back was killing me. Matt said I was walking like an old lady. I need to figure out some exercises to help strengthen my back a bit, this just won’t do.

After we got cleaned up, we wound up doing some much-needed grocery shopping and getting a Papa John’s pizza with accompanying garlic sauces, which makes 4 meals out in 2 days. Not good, and we’ll try to do better this week.

Treats Sweet & Sauer

I'm not a big soda drinker. I got out of the miniscule habit I did have last year, when I was trying to lose weight. However, I sometimes have a hankering for a Sarsaparilla from Kutztown Soda Works and last week it was really bad.
So bad, in fact, that I bought two bottles of Sarsaparilla and a tub of vanilla ice cream and after dinner made a float. And the next day, I made another float. And the day after that....well, you get the picture.

Kutztown makes great sodas. They also do root beer, birch beer, red cream, black cherry, and a few others I can't remember right now. They are not caffinated, and they only use cane sugar as a sweetener. And their descriptions always have some bit of interesting Pennsylvania Dutch lingo, as seen above. Kutztown sodas aren't carried many places, but the grocery store in the town where I work has most of them. Thank god. (You can buy online, too!*)

(*I just noticed something I must have: they have a tshirt that has the logo on the front and on the back says "Got Sass?" That is so going to be mine.)

Continuing on with the Pennsylvania Dutch theme, I recently tried my hand at making good, old fashioned sauerkraut. It seemed easy, right?

This is a picture of the first batch, which looks infinitly better in this picture than it did when I pitched it in the compost bin a week or so later. It had gotten a milky look to it and had started to brown and dry at the top. Not enough water, it was grocery store cabbage and was very dry.
I started a second batch with 2 farmer market cabbages and 2-weeks in it looks and smells much better, and tastes great. I hope to do this with my own cabbage eventually.

A Tale of Two Farmers Markets

So, being as how we’re trying to start up a farmette, I decided to check out a couple of the local farmers markets to find out what their requirements and policies were.

Gettysburg Farmers Market: Saturday mornings from 7 until noon. Period. If you are not there and set up, you get a warning. You are required to be there every weekend from the middle of April until October (I think). If you skip a weekend, you get a warning. If you run out of goods before noon you are expected to stay there set up until noon; if you leave early you get a warning. If you get more than 2 warnings you can be kicked out, and forfeit your fee ($150, I think). You are not allowed to sell things that cannot normally be grown in the area (like lemons), but you can bring in strawberries or corn that were grown in North Carolina.

Emmitsburg Farmers Market: Friday from 3-6:30pm. Free. All they ask is that you bring only things you’ve grown or made yourself. I don’t know yet if they require you to be there a certain number of weeks, etc, but somehow I don’t think so.

Gee, which one do you think we’ll choose if/when we decide to do this?