Miscellany

Our vegetables (and fruits) in the root cellar are staying in good shape.

We're going to run out of orange carrots (still have way more than enough of the purple ones) so I may skip planting any of the purple ones this coming gardening season and stick with the old tried and true orange ones.  The purple carrots are super-colorful and look great on a raw vegetable platter, but as I've mentioned before, I don't like to cook with them (in soups or stews) because they "bleed" and turn everything else in the near vicinity a purplish-gray.  Ugh.

This is the first year we've left the roots attached to the heads of cabbages and hung the whole works by heavy string from the ceiling of the root cellar.  (But kept the heads low, about 18-24" from the gravel covered ground.  The heads show a little shrinkage (loss of moisture, I'm sure) but have been fine and tasty for eating, even when made into coleslaw.  At any rate, they're keeping better this way than with any other method we've tried.

Chicken Mama regularly prints up return address labels for me to use on envelopes sent via snail mail.  This year for Christmas she made this one with "Mama Pea" instead of my given name over the address lines to the right.  (Cut off for this picture.)  She took a caricature of Grant Wood's "American Gothic," turned it into Papa Pea (added the beard) and me, duplicating the profile pic of me with the pot over my head.

My dear still slightly lame duck husband has been giving a good go at doing poultry chores.  Here he is going out for morning chores.  Thanks to caring friend Karen in Wisconsin (who has dealt with like injuries for too long a time) for sending us all kinds of tricks of the trade that she uses that enable her to do farm work alongside her husband and take care of her flock of sheep while suffering sciatica pain.  Today was the first day he did ALL of the poultry chores by himself.  No help from me whatsoever.  We'll be starting our fifth week of recuperation tomorrow and he's frustrated as all heck that he's not back to 100% yet.  At the same time, I have to give him daily gold stars for being very sensible and not pushing himself too fast, too far.  It's been a fine line he's had to gahlump walk between keeping all the muscles (injured and not) in workable order and yet not stress anything.  It's hard, but slow and steady wins the race.  So they say.  Sigh.