Ambergris

http://www.wvu.edu/~agexten/hortcult/treeshru/whipgrftg.htm http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/horticulture/dg0532.html The Japanese persimmons, kakis, are as big as apples, and some of them are not astringent--you can eat them before they're fully ripe without wanting to sandpaper your mouth afterward. You can spread out the season and be harvesting fresh simmons from mid-October through Christmas. Some of them can be dried, although I've not been happy with the result, and the Japanese ones are easier to pulp and freeze.

Vegetable soup, eaten hot with cornbread yesterday. Today I ate the soup cold, like gazpacho, with home-made cheese crackers. The kids, who aren't fond of soup, cooked hamburgers.

Hurray! I'm assuming what you found was the American? You can graft kaki on those Virginiana, you know.

Bean soup with cornbread.

French-cut green beans, angel-hair pasta with sauteed onions, chicken chunks baked with garlic and parmesan, and sliced tomatoes.

Pink kidney beans make really good burger patties. I like to mash at least half of them with a potato masher before forming a patty to quickly fry in bacon grease. Half-mashed the same way, pink beans are really, really good in meatloaf. Black eyed peas (canned, frozen, or fresh-picked) taste greener (less meaty, more vegetable-y) in a sandwich than pink beans do, but that might be because all my pink beans are dried and most of my black eyed peas (including the pinkeye purple hulls) aren't. Or it might be because I just mash leftover peas to a thick goop to spread over toasted bread, while with pink beans I like to make a patty and cook (or re-cook) it like a hamburger patty.

Thank you, Lau3Turtle. I rinsed it but perhaps not well enough. It had the same sort of tooth-scraping near-bitter taste I get from pecans. As sensitive as I am to bitter tastes, I think I need a lot more sauce or a lot less quinoa. For the soup, I chipped up chicken thighs, garlic, and onions, and browned them together. Deglazed the pan into a pot, and added a can of chopped baby corn and half a bag of frozen mixed vegetables, and while it thawed a little went out in the yard and picked up garlic chives to mince in, ginger to grate in, and two stalks of lemon grass. Mixed up enough white sauce from powdered milk to bring it together. I had planned to freeze the leftovers in cups for lunches, but even with the sandwiches there nothing was left over. Previously, I've made this with a can of cream of mushroom soup, a can of chopped baby corn, and some chopped leftover chicken, but I wanted something a touch racier because school's starting and we can use the immunity boost.

Thank you, LAU3Turtle. And welcome to Mrs. S!

Soup (cream of chicken with Chinese vegetables) and sandwiches.

Quinoa with stir-fried mushrooms, lentils, tomatoes, black olives, sliced garlic, scallions, and eggs, with feta and a bit of cider vinegar sprinkled over the top. Next time I'm going to try barley instead of quinoa. It's much cheaper, it tastes better, and I have a reasonable grasp of what "a serving" means.

lamb, sweet potatoes, and chick peas

Scrambled eggs with salsa and cheese.

I would love to have someone come remove all the Peruvian lily and tradescantia from my yard.

It's been a very long week. I was sitting here wondering why you'd be drying hash brownies.

Rats! I saw this and thought CookieJar was back.

If I lived in your climate and planted any now, I'd try to give them P and K fertilizer but no extra Nitrogen. If you put something in the ground now and gave it plenty of nitrogen to shoot out lots of new green, how much of that new green will still be soft and vulnerable when your winter freezes hit?

Wait, what?

Score! DH saw a leather couch sticking out of a dumpster. He climbed in with his knife and climbed out with six big (18-22" x 24-30") swatches of upholstery-grade leather, plus a lot of scraps. He said he'd have brought more if he had a car instead of a backpack (and arms) to carry it home in. What some people throw away!

I keep waiting to hear about noodlers catching water mocs. I guess they don't survive to tell the tale.

Hudson's is not printing a paper catalog this year. Here's a link to the list with two kinds of sorghum on it. http://www.jlhudsonseeds.net/Supplement%202011%20Vegetables.htm

I put water in the half-empty bottles in the shower. My bet is that nobody notices.

Most of these collections are ripoffs. Say you have room to plant eight of these kinds of seeds, and half fail utterly, while only a quarter do well. You're more likely to get a refund of only the percentage of the whole package that failed, rather than the percentage of planted seeds that failed. Meanwhile, what kind of time, space, effort, and soil amendment expenses have you run up, with no hope of refund? Say this collection has onions. Are they long-day onions (suited for northern latitudes where summer days are very long) or short day onions (suited to latitudes like most of the Deep South, close to the Equator)? Or do they include both, meaning hundreds or thousands of onion seeds that will be useless to you? There are day-neutral onions, but they don't do nearly as well as onions tailored to day-length. Also, consider whether the person meant highest yielding per plant, or per square foot/yard. A vine that rambles all over the place might produce twice as much as a bushy vine that doesn't take up but a third of that space. Which works better for your situation? "Highest yielding" normally means hybrid. I strongly recommend some hybrid seed for an emergency garden, simply because the chances of producing enough food to pay for the space and inputs (work, fertilizer) are much higher. I also recommend some open-pollinated (heirloom) seed for sustainability. You just don't plant your heirlooms to compete with your hybrids--if you plant hybrid cucumbers, no heirloom cucumbers but you can plant heirloom tomatoes. For high(er) yield without going the hybrid route, find a catalog that specializes in seeds for your climate, and choose what you will actually grow, store, and eat. Johnny's is the first go-to catalog for New England, while Southern Seed Savers is better suited to Georgia growers, and Native Seed Search for the Southwest. Another route is to find smaller seed collections tailored to your desires. I have been very happy with the Botanikka collections, some of which you can design yourself. http://stores.ebay.com/mnrsales For seeds specially packed for storage, look at Park's with its little foil inner envelopes. Parks sells heirloom and hybrid, but no GMO. This is the Park's seed site with "assortment" typed in. http://www.parkseed.com/gardening/store/TextSearch?storeId=10101&SearchUnion=Y&CustSearchText=assortment&x=0&y=0 For a first garden, or a first garden in a new climate, I would never suggest trying more than six kinds of crop. Fewer is better. When you get an eye for what those plants look like happy and unhappy, and how to cure the unhappiness, you can expand. In my area, for the summer, I'd suggest summer squash, okra, eggplant, cherry tomatoes, and peppers for a planting guaranteed to weather any gardening errors. In other areas, green beans and Irish potatoes might be better bets. Two to three ears per stalk is very high-yielding for ordinary corn. I've heard of six-shooter corn with six ears, but I've never actually seen it growing. Do you want feed corn, popcorn, baby corn, or sweet corn? Baby corn you get many ears per stalk, but of course they're only as big as a man's thumb. You might want to redefine the question from ears per stalk to ears per square yard. The smaller corn varieties, that only go 4-5 feet tall, have smaller ears but can crowd more stalks to the square yard than types with stalks twice as tall.

Jerky and onions today. I like to dry one bag of onions whenever they go B1G1. My sons toast the dried onion slices and then whizz them in the spice grinder for toasted onion powder. We use a lot of onion chips and onion powder, and that stuff mounts up.

http://lifehacker.com/#!5653113/seal-plastic-bags-with-old-bottle-caps How to seal plastic bags with old bottle caps.

TMC, my favorite slug control is to lay down a board. Pick it up a day later, and let the chickens eat the slugs clinging to the bottom side.