Missing Willow Farm

We caught our intruder.  He’s pretty cute.  After much debate, we decided to take him for a ride to the farthest part of our property, down by our stream.  We really wanted to take him further but it’s illegal in Virginia to make your nuisance animal problem someone else’s.   He reached out through the cage at me when I moved him to the Mule, which kind of freaked me out.  We rigged the release mechanism with a rope and stood on the back of the Mule in case he came out hostile.  He started up a tree at first, thought better about it, then swam away.  Who knew raccoons were such good swimmers?  We’re going to put the chicken food in a metal can overnight, at least until the barn gets better sealed.  There is always some large annoying project to do on the farm.

Our beans literally went from about a foot high to this overnight.  We dedicated a raised bed and some tomato cages to them this year.  Beans are new for us, this should be a fun experiment.  Can you tell we don’t use chemical pesticides?

We’ve got another nocturnal intruder in the hen house.  Stupid intruder!

Sort of… Cut a watermelon in half, pour some tequila on it and squeeze a lime on top of that.  Sprinkle with salt and put it in the fridge to chill.  Slice and enjoy!

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  Fried alligator!  My parents are friends with a nuisance gator hunter in Florida.  When I was down there recently, he hooked me up with some gator meat.  After much research, I cut the meat into chunks and soaked it in a mixture of 2 cups of buttermilk and a tablespoon of Tabasco.  The breading was a mixture of flour, cornmeal, garlic powder, salt and pepper.  The marinated chunks got shaken in a paper bag then straight into the Fry Daddy for just 3 minutes.  I made a remoulade sauce and a lemon dill yogurt sauce.  AIEEE it was good!

Let’s hear it for the red, white and blue!  Happy fourth everyone.  🙂

Our two little hives are going gangbusters this year.  We’ve harvested twice and will need to harvest one or two more times this summer.  It’s an exhausting, sticky process.  We don’t have a honey house so we extract in our kitchen with newspapers on the counters and towels on the floor.  The trickiest part is getting the honey frames in the house without any bees tagging along.

Jack has been helping us harvest potatoes.  Sort of.  This batch got a REALLY good scrubbing when we were done.  He’s fascinated with sweet potatoes.  He ran off with one last fall on harvest day and made it his toy.

I received this gorgeous blue strawberry planter for Mother’s Day a few years ago.  I tried immediately to plant strawberries in it with very poor results.  All but one of the plants died.  It’s become my herb garden and is very accessible to the kitchen.  We got one strawberry this spring from the one plant that survived. We split it.  🙂

With the deck do-over this year we decided not to bring the 70 or so potted tomato plants to the back deck that we normally do.  Those are down by the raised beds.  We did, however, bring the cucumbers up.  I wish I’d planted more of them, dang it.