Sweat Potatoes.

When we noticed our uneaten sweet potatoes had sprouted eyes we decided we would try to grow them for our up coming garden. Only thing is, we have no idea how and instead of using the wonderful Internet to find out, we decided to do experiments.

Experiment one:

We sliced the potato in half and placed it in this old plastic container full of water. As you  can see it has sprouted these vine like things. No roots on the bottom as of yet.

Experiment #2:

We place the other half in a plastic baggie. and we've got lots of roots. So now we have to plant it, I think, and we shall see if we get any spuds. Regular potatoes you have to add dirt to as they grow I wonder if that is true for the sweet ones. Maybe, I will have to read up on it after all.

Mean while we still have not planted our hot house plants for fear of more cold weather and  look.........

Look closer.........

It's our first orange! Oh it's tiny, smaller than a dime, but that's a baby orange. Mom says it will fall off because the tree is just too small to suport it. So we will see.

And the blue berries are still green. They are getting a little pink but I think that's a sun burn.

I'm dieing to try one!! I'd like to plant about five or six bushes but I guess we are going to wait for warmer days to plant them. So we are also going to wait to buy more plants. Then it will be blue berry pan cakes, muffins, fresh berries on my cereal, ew..... and syrup for ice cream. I can't wait!

A nice warm weekend

We finally got a nice weekend. Weather wise. The high was about 78. So we headed over to Mom's to do some much needed clean up in her yard. She wanted part of her peach tree dug up but we convinced her to keep it and just let us trim it a little. It has the most beautiful flowers every year and some nice peaches too. It sits on the edge of her yard, right on the property line and gets its fair share of neglect. It looks more like a bush than a tree. We saved some of the clippings and made a beautiful oriental looking decoration.

We also took a whack at her orange tree. Which was still loaded with oranges even though she did her best to pick them all before the cold weather. Despite the cold the oranges were yummy. Not frozen at all.

We picked them all except for four or five green ones. Then Chris trimmed the bush down so she can reach the oranges.

Now she just has to get to squeezing and shipping them to relatives that don't have access to fresh oranges.

We trimmed some of her azalea bushes even though it is a bad time (spring buds were lost) because they were in the way of her path to the back yard. We also trimmed down a major oak tree branch for the same reason. And squared up her grapefruit tree, which by the way had two inch long thorns. I feel sorry for her garbage man who has to pick that up (hopefully he has good gloves). After digging up two oak trees and replanting two gardenias that got dug by mistake and trimming bushes and trees and dead limbs Chris sat down for a break. All in all, it was a beautiful day and came with a free meal made by Mom. What could be better.

The Ice Patch

The Ice Patch

We survived the cold so far. Saturday we woke up early in hopes of seeing snow. But sadly there was just a bit of sleet on the car. But according to the TV the snow was just down the road. So... road trip! We drove all over looking for snow. We finally found snow on the roof tops in Ocala. And on our way back we did get to see some falling out of the sky in Ocklawaha. I didn't get any good pictures of it though, so Chris left the sprinkler on last night and made a great circular patch of ice in the front yard. All the neighbors drove by and looked at it and the kids had fun running through it and the dog tried to eat it.
Up Date on Chris

Chris's hand is healing pretty good from falling in the fire on New Years Eve. I took a picture of it cause it's so gross. It looks like leprosy. Hopefully it will be gone soon.

Pork Fajitas

And on that note... We figured out some thing really good to do with left over pork. We made fajitas. All we did was cut up some onions and a red and green pepper. Than we sauteed them and set them aside. Heated the pork in the same pan then added the onions and peppers back to the pan. We put some fajita seasoning in it and added some water then put it on tortillas. It was really good. We could taste the lime in the seasoning. It was very diffrent and good. You could probably do this with any left over pork. We used left over smoked pork butt.

Cold

The Cold!

It has been cold here in Florida. You can tell because unlike up north where snow blankets the trees and bushes we have blankets on our trees and bushes in hopes they don't all freeze. The picture above is not our house but is a good example of covers. some are white and some are black but I think this guy got every bush he could reach.

We chose to wait to plant our blue berries and it's a good thing that we did. We still don't have much of anything in the yard so we didn't cover anything. We had some small palms but we decided if they freeze so be it.

It is almost a crisis situation here in Central Florida. We are not use to more than two or three days of temps that fall below 32 degrees. Some schools, down in Orlando, had no heat this morning for the kids because of power outages. Most of our kids had to search for cloths that would keep them warm enough. Almost no one owns a down coat and thermals, what's that? And then once warm cloths were found, threats of death had to be used to get the kids to where them.

We have several homeless people who live in the national forest, a place called tent city, I prey all of them found better shelter. I saw one who must have wondered into town to escape the cold. I hope he found a better place than the empty gas station he was planing to stay at.

Also there are fish dropping dead left and right at the beaches and inter coastal water way. I worry about our more exotic creatures. I did see a pair of sand hill cranes today. I wonder if they have enough since to fly further south. The creatures in the springs will do well because the water stays a balmy 72 degrees year round. I bet they are packed with manatees.

There is rain predicted for Friday night and more cold weather. Hopefully it's not going to be snow or freezing rain I don't think anyone would know what to do. And the roads....don't get me started.

Lou's big New Years Eve party.

We arrived around 4:00. No tent to set up this year. Since we didn't have the kids with us we decided to sleep in the mini van. We removed the back seats and put in a blow up mattress. We were excited to meat Lou's new girl, Robin. She was very nice and ready to party, and even though she wasn't a very outdoorsy type I think she had a good time. Except for when this weird bug was attacking her.

Lou had the pit for the fire all dug before we showed up. It was around 8 to10 feet across. The bigger the better.

Shortly after we arrived we enjoyed some hors devours. Kim made brunshager or something like that. It's a dip made out of liverwurst. Chris really liked it. Bonnie and Charlie brought rum balls and mince meat pie. We had some chips. It was all good. The best thing was the 15lbs of smoked pulled pork that Lou cooked up for dinner. Kim also made his famous chili. And Lou had his black eye peas in the slow cooker. No one can ever wait for New Years day for them and they get sampled all night.

Soon the Christmas trees were dressed in women's underwear with beer box hats. Then with a big kaboom the fire is lit by dowsing the trees in gasoline and shooting them with roman candles.

Chris was king of the fire till he fell in. Which is a after school special about being intoxicated and making redneck hot air balloons in a fire big enough to cook a man as big as Chris in.

Don't worry. He pushed himself out right away and escaped with only a small burn in the palm of his hand. Which is a good experiment of the effects of adrenaline on intoxicated people. Everyone suddenly wasn't.

This is some of the fireworks that we had that night. They were amazing.

All in all we had a great time and survived into the year 2010. Although the next day we woke up in a van. One of my teachers way back in high school use to love to say. "Your going to end up in a van down by the river."

Happy New Year 2010!!!

Click here to see a video of the fire being started.

http://s372.photobucket.com/albums/oo165/maimom01/?action=view&current=NewYear09057.flv