October!

Fall is in the air finally. It's so nice almost perfect temperature wise but we haven't had rain in about 21 days so every one's grass is turning brown. If we don't get rain soon we will be under fire watches. Not that we are planing to have any fires.

PFC Erica

We celebrated Oktoberfest the beginning of the month at my Aunt Patty's the last night of Erica's visit. She brought two of her friends from the army with her. I don't think they slept the whole time they were here. Erica ran them all over showing them the sites. The springs, the beach, night clubs. I hope they had fun. The last night they were in town the whole family got together at Aunt Patty's even some family I hadn't seen since I was about five. Everyone brought a German dish to share. Lots of cabbage/sauerkraut was consumed. I think everyone had fun. We brought different German beers for everyone to sample. We even brought a pumpkin beer.


Sweet Potatoes



Sweet Potatoes





I harvested my sweet potatoes today. The vine had died back and with the dry weather, I figured it was time. I was so sad to find only four tiny potatoes. The vine had grown so lush and beautiful. And then to top it off they all had been bitten by a very fat, now dead, grub worm.  I hear in some countries people eat the grubs. Yuk! We have found quite a few grubs in our garden and they are all so disgusting. I plan on finding ways of getting rid of them.

I also have been growing a gator pear. For those of you not from Florida that would be a Florida avocado or slimcado depending on what store your shopping at. They are actually way more healthy than their southern cousins, the Hass, and you eat them when they are green not black. I got the seed a couple of months ago and kept it wet. I thought it had rotted when I noticed it had roots so I went ahead and put it in a pot and said "it will undoubtedly die there", but no, it lives. So now it is in it's much larger pot and I'm hoping for alligator pears for my salads in a year or two.  I was reading it could take 8 to 20 years. I'm going to have to read up on them to see if I can rush it along. I hope it's not like an orange and needs a graft to get fruit. We will see. It could be an interesting tree anyway.

Alligator Pear

Just hanging around the house.

I know I'm always saying I'm going to get the hang of this blog thing and someday have tons of readers and make loads of money but.... I just forget to post stuff. Well here is my latest post about what's going on:

 Recently my sister came down to Florida all the way from that far off land called Kansas. Which is a lot like Florida with out trees. It's flat and you can't trust the weather. But we have beaches! And forest and swamps to play in so it make it better here. She stayed with my Aunt who also lives in central Florida. So we were pretty busy running back and forth, shoping, swimming at my Aunts, we had a bar-b-q and in general had a great time

Brother in-law with sister at Aunts house.

I was at the grocery store the other day and needed some dry oregano but my usual brand (the cheeper one) wasn't there. So I looked in the "mexican isle" (that's what my uncle calls it) cause some times you can find good spices there for less, but no. Not there either. They did have the more expensive fancey brand so I bought that, then I started worrying that there was some sort of oragano shortage. Like a pest ate it all or there was a blight. I don't know. So I came home and harvested most of my fresh oragano. I did notice some bug had laid eggs in its leaves, so I picked those leaves off. I got quite a big harvest form my one little plant and now I'm drying it by hanging it over my stove. I don't know how I would cook with out oragano. It goes in just about everything I cook.

We finally got some figs off our tree. Yes, we got jumpy and harvested them early, not all of them, just a taste.  Mmmm.... figs. It's been so dry and the tree is young so it's been sucking up a lot of water. Chris didn't water it one day and the leaves started turning yellow. But... we gave it a little water and now it's making more figs. These figs are really big but so far they aren't all that sweet but that could be because we picked them a little early. I've heard fig jam is really good so if I get enough ripe at the same time I might try making some.

 

I was visited by a prince.

While at work the other day this guy showed up  to see what I was doing. This is hands down the largest tree frog I have ever seen. He must have been about four inches long. He hoped out at me but I quickly dodged him and he landed here. A few weeks ago one of my co-workers had one jump in her hair and pee. But it wasn't even close to this size.

He quickly retreated back to the rotary unit I was working at. But he kept peeking out and looking at me. You know like "give me a kiss" kind of look. You can see his suction cups on his feet pretty good here. If it weren't for that I would have thought it was some sort of toad because of his size.

 You can see by this letter I'm holding up that he really is large. You have to account for the fact that the letter is closer to the camera than the frog. Cause that thing wasn't getting close enough to me to pee in my hair. Also he was lighter than normal tree frogs but he still had green on him and brown age spots. I was at  a retirement community after all.

.Eventually he got tired of staring at me and trying to get a kiss so he made a giant leap toward the nearest bush.

Can't say I'll be missing him. And I'm not sorry for not breaking that witches spell that turned him into a frog either.

Yumm... Figs!

We haven't been expecting much out of the fig tree we planted the beginning of the year but I guess it has been loving all this hot weather because that tiny little spec of a tree is loaded with figs. It's no more than two feet tall. But we will probably get a whole bushel of figs from it.

Can't wait to taste them. If the pests don't get them first. We have been swamped with little snails the size of my pinky fingernail. They have munched and slimmed my little orange tree almost to death.  I also found a locus on our mini palm. I don't think they eat palm fronds but I definitely did not want him to find our fruit trees. Chris exterminated him for me. He looks so less creepy here than in real life.

While we were checking out the yard there was this beautiful double rainbow over head. It was so vivid. Every color was popping. It was almost like someone painted it there.

Here is both sides of it. You can't really see the one on top in the picture but it was spectacular.

Summer.

Veronica going for a swim.

It's been hot here in Florida so we've been trying to keep cool any way we can. It's probably only going to get hotter from here on out. I see a trip to the springs in the future. Hopefully soon. And hopefully I can take some pictures. I'm still shopping for that perfect little camera. You know the one takes nice pictures and can hold up to the camera killer. That would be me. Until then your going to have to settle for my phone pics. They aren't the best but they are better than nothing.