October 21st was the 26 week anniversary of our 100lb challenge. Although I've not been blogging I have been weighing and recording what we have thrown out so here goes......
Weigh in #13 - 16oz
Weigh in #14 - 24oz
Weigh in #15 - 26oz
Weigh in #16 - 23oz
So our grand total for 27 weeks is now at 359oz or 22lb and 7oz.
At this stage we should have been at 54lb so we are running at 50%!!! I personally think this is awesome!
Okay, onto more exciting things news from the garden.
Late September, early October our Washington Navel orange tree started to bloom, and grow like crazy!
I think these two tiny little buds might be oranges forming! Exciting times ahead I hope. The tree is only maybe two years old so we're not expecting a bumper harvest from it.
About the same time the apples on the tree, well the ones left by the bloody squirrels, were ready for harvesting.
Although our landlord said it was a Fuji apple tree they look and taste more like Gala apples. Anyone care to comment?
With Ananda's and Gay help we harvested all of the apples from the tree. The two smaller boxes are the apples that had not been attacked by the codling apple moth, about 9lbs worth, and the apples in the bigger box are ones that had worm holes in them.
Not wanting to waste the latter ones I peeled them, cored them, got rid of the wormy bits and then made a delicious apple pie.... and yes I even made the pastry from scratch!
Since it was a rainy night I made some Bird's custard and introduced Gay to the delights of apple pie and custard! Yummy! She said that when she was growing up they served cheese with their apple pie. Turns out to be a tradition from Yorkshire in England. Who'd have thunk it?
The apples that we saved for eating are so juicy and delicious. Very happy with how they turned out. Next year I will be more vigilant in dealing with the codling apple moth - I have a recipe for making a home made pheromone trap, and I read somewhere that by irrigating the tree from above, so the fruit and leaves get wet, cuts the moth down by about 50%.
The summer this year in the Bay area was very weird and most of the crops I had in my garden at home seemed to be not producing anything, and then everything took off like nuts. Last weekend I picked over 4lb of cherry tomatoes from my 8ft tall cherry tomato plant, and that's on top of about 4lbs I picked a few weeks earlier. And that's only about 1/3 of them. A lot of them are going rotten because I can't pick them fast enough and cold nights have set in. Friends at work have been getting lots of them.
So this picture below is some of the results from my garden at home and at work......
The pumpkins are from the garden at work, there were three of them but one has already been turned in to a Thai red curry. Too tasty to carve. The egg plant is from work too. We need to find a way to grow more egg plant as they are delicious but not very abundant.
The big tomatoes are a mixture of "mortgage lifter" and "German Strawberry" varieties. The brown thing on top of the cherry tomatoes is a "chocolate beauty" bell pepper. These things taste amazing, but again this summer was so poor it's the only one I got. :-(
Peppers definitely need heat. Missing from the picture are the hot peppers. Nice red hot ones from work and serrano and jalpeno ones from home. I think I see some salsa being made today.
So all of this food is organic and pesticide free which brings up neatly to McDonalds. In a recent discussion with some of my friends on Facebook I offered to repeat the experiment performed by the Manhattan Artist Sally Davies. You can read about it here.
My good friend Bruce suggested that the experiment had not been done properly, which is true since they did not use any control experiment. So I suggested to Bruce that I would repeat the experiment with a happy meal or whatever it was, versus a 100% grass fed burger and organic sprouted whole wheat bread and I might even be persuaded to make some chips (fries) as well. Then we'd just leave them out on my kitchen table and see what happens to them. So, since this involves a bit of preparation on my behalf, I'm only willing to do it if enough people say they want to see it, so leave comments for me if you want to see it. Some comments encouraging Ananda to allow me to do this would be useful too. Maybe that should read encouraging Ananda to not eat the 100% grass fed burger!
Okay, finally a couple pictures from my parents and sisters recent trip to California. It was so amazingly wonderful to have them all at our wedding, it really helped make a perfect day more perfect. The first picture is the front of their vacation rental and the second one is proof that Mam and Dad did truly make it to San Francisco. Much Love to them all!
Final pictures are myself and my beautiful wife at the terminal in San Francisco, taken at the point where we shared our first kiss.
From there to here......
:-)
