Smartie's Bar & Grill #72

Finished my wife's cabinet. Now she wants one for the other side of our big mirror. think It needs a mirror background. I use Tiger Balm for aches and pains. That and generic Aleive.

 

Yes I have a doctor friend who can't handle lemon or lime, but handles oranges, especially mandarin oranges, and pineapple with no problems. But we all are wise to pay attention to what our body tells us. I don't handle a lot of heavy spices well and eat them only rarely and in moderation.

 

You need to try -* Relief Factor -. An all natural pain relief formula
that Guys like Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager and Mike Gallagher
virtually swear by.A 2-3 week order for $ 19.95 is all you have to lose.
The packets taken once daily and are easy to swallow take up to 2 weeks
to work.That sounds dopey but it's not.When I had very painful knees
about 20 years ago from years of jogging and playing street basketball
plus being a manager in a McDonalds standing on my feet for 8 hrs
I lucked on to a non-prescription formula { Glucosamine + Chondroitin }
by Schiff called - Move Free -. It has since gotten better with the addition
of MSM & Vitamin D3. However it takes a couple weeks to load into the body
and work.You have to take double the dose in the first month.Then just
a tab a day { in the morn w/Breakfast } and yer good.Wal*mart carries it.
I swear by it.Every year I manage to forget to take a tablet or am busy
and forget breakfast.I usually feel it a couple days later.Somewere in my
body.It works on the entire body.Ankles,wrists,any joints and ever bones
in the shoulders and hands.
I am not ready for - Relief Factor - by when Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager
swear by it ... then it's got by recommendation.BTW ... Talk Radio Dennis Prager
only started using Relief factor when his Wife complained about pains and started
using it.She eventually swore by the stuff.It's all natural.

As Promoted by Pat Boone { if you can't trust him then you in more
trouble than you think }
The 3 week Quickstart program is $ 19.95 .
To order call 1-800- 500-8384

 

When drinking a good beer from a glass and there are several rings around the glass at each level after each swig, that’s from protein. It’s called lacing.
This concludes this lesson in borracho 101.

 

This is my garden this year .... Just goat pasture. It had a foot of mulch on it last year and it should be pretty rich ground. Further up the hill I got my best corn crop ever... And best watermelon crop. Decided to give myself a rest this year but this is a good time of year for Cole crops and green peas later.

 

Beautiful cabinet! Good job!

 

Thanx... It was pretty easy... I already had the door and the other stuff was lying around. I don't use metal in the finished job except hinges and hardware. I remove the screws and drill dowel holes. The dowel rods are cheaper than screws.... And I can re-use the screws.

 

That's funny - when you first look at the goat picture, it looks like one goat is standing on top of the other one!

 

PLus tilt the glass when pouring and no need for a chilled
mug.The more well-knit and tiny the bubbles of beer foam the
better the beer.Large bubbles are a dead giveaway for a cruddy
cheap beer.Plus with some homebrews there is sediment at
the bottom of the bottle.No Homebrewer makes beer and puts
into a can.Just bottles which need to be sanitized and properly capped.
Drop off yeast cells and sediment may result in a white cloudy formation
at the bottom of a homebrew.So suggest it contains valuable nutrition.
I'm not sure as to how long a Homebrew can be stored and still safe to
consume.DO NOT BUY OR DRINK Vintage Beer's.
Ones stored for decades or even one decade.Beer is NOT Wine.
It ages only so much.

 

Bottling is a drag, kegs are far superior.
I keep a couple of cases of bottles on hand for when I get a hankerin’ For some Hefeweizen, but other than that, into the keg she goes.

 

Nice work.

I see I'm not the only man who married a woman who's into chicken decor. I wonder if she's trying to tell me something...

 

I see you've got a nice little spread there.

Our beds are pretty similar, although I haven't fenced in our garden yet and I've got four long ornamental beds running perpendicular to the veggie beds that essentially enclose the east and west ends of the garden. In between each bed we've got an arch where I planted some Don Juan climbing roses that I bought my wife for Valentine's Day. This is a picture of the east bed where I planted a bunch of red Celosia/Cockscomb:



You're actually looking at both beds and the rose arch which is barely visible between them, but the depth of field in the photo is so compressed it looks like one bed. I really like this Celosia - not only are the blooms deep red but so are the stems and foliage, and they're in full bloom now when most of the summer ornamentals are through flowering. I shot this pic recently and as you can see the tall Texas Star hibiscuses are already fading. About a month ago they were covered in blooms.



Speaking of those Texas Stars, they are one of the toughest plants in the world. Years ago when they were younger I thought one of them had died so I dug it up and threw the root ball in the woods and months later I found it was still alive! Those plants can take the harshest summer conditions you can throw at them and they just eat it up, and I love the tropical-looking blooms. Unfortunately, we live too far north to grow the tropical varieties but this is the biggest and showiest cold-hardy hibiscus we can grow. The only thing I don't particularly care about them is that their leaves look exactly like pot leaves, so it looks like I'm growing weed in my front yard until the blooms show up and you can tell it's a hibiscus. After I heard clueless thrill-seekers down in Georgia raided somebody's house when they mistook his okra for marijuana I've gotten a little nervous about it:

Marijuana Police Accidentally Raid Man's Okra Garden
https://time.com/3479728/marijuana-okra-police/

Just what everybody needs - helicopters and cops swarming your house to arrest you for growing okra.

And to make matters worse my wife has a flower bed full of poppies growing nearby. My front yard looks like a freakin' drug plantation in the Spring.

 

I also have the Texas star hibiscus and several swamp hibiscus started from seed gathered near the river. My stuff is out of control. I have Iris.... different kinds... Day Lilly.... different kinds.... Roses.... different kinds... wild phlox... different colors... creeping Phlox.... different colors... Red hot Poker... and Strawberries. And other stuff.

 

Had a pleasant little surprise out in the North 40 yesterday - first pumpkin of the year:



And being that this is one of the culinary pumpkins, I guess you could say this is pumpkin pie on the hoof.

That or it's going to wind up as this:



(I add sage sausage to this recipe to make it a little more substantial and savory)

Either way, that little noob is going to grow into a 25 pound pumpkin. Looks like we're on schedule for Halloween...

 

Is that the Good 'out of control' or the Bad 'out of control'?

We're a long way from the good 'out of control' but when we moved to our place 6 years ago it was BAD 'out of control'. Here's a couple Before and After shots taken in 2013 and then 2016:





When we moved here the property was overrun with Sweet Gum saplings and a few scattered White Pines and Red Cedars. It took me 3 years of bush hogging, mowing and digging up stumps with an axe, limb lopper and a shovel to clear the fields. I finally got 10 acres under control and routine maintenance and I let a few acres stay semi-wild that I cut down once or twice a year. Most of that is full of Milkweed and Goldenrod that the butterflies, bees and other bugs love, and since that helps draw pollinators to our garden and orchard I decided not to clear it all (and that's one less thing to mow). I also had to cut down some dead and dying apple and cherry trees that looked like something out of a Tim Burton movie. Since then we've started working on getting good 'out of control' but we're still years away from reaching that point. While my wife is working on that I've been trying to focus on bigger stuff like planting the orchard, some hedges and what will eventually wind up being large hardwood trees. This Spring I planted a bunch of Autumn Blaze maples and Kwanzan cherry trees around the place to jazz things up in the Spring and Fall. Since my wife is from the Magnolia State I'm going to plant her a couple of the big Bracken's Brown Beauty Magnolias next year.

One thing I should get her to plant for me are those Red Hot Pokers you've got. That's a striking plant that I've been wanting for some time but I haven't gotten around to growing any yet.

 

I once tried that approach.Tried to finish my wife's cabinet.
Then realized I wasn't married.
Easy come,easy go.And then I hit the cognac.

 

I love the kwanzan cherry trees. We have a large Yoshino cherry but no kwanzan cherry trees. Had some when I lived in Indiana and they are nice. I started them from stem cuttings . I had three trees. My property was overrun with blackberries. .... Wisteria... Honeysuckle... Sawbrier... And privet. That's why the goats. We started the Red Hot Pocker from seed. In the spring we have people wanting to buy them right out of the ground. We have even had them stolen. I also have some water plants in my man made ponds... Flag Iris... Water Lilly and such.

 

Yoshino cherries are nice, too.

Beside the Sweet Gums the worst invasive plant I've had to deal with is poison ivy. When we moved out here it was all through the woods, and all I have to do is look at it to break out. We had massive vines growing up a bunch of trees, which I've cut, and it spread throughout the forest floor and out into the fields. I've knocked a lot of it back with Crossbow but I can only do so much at a time. In fact, that's one of the chores I have lined up for myself next week while I'm on vacation.

Speaking of invasives, maybe you can help me identify something that I noticed spreading through the neighboring woods last year. The foliage makes me think it's some sort of sumac but the stalks are full of thorns running all the way up the trunk. I've looked online to try and identify it but I haven't been able to do so. In the meantime I've been cutting it down and pulling it up by the roots so it doesn't spread into our woods (I'll probably be hitting that with some Crossbow next week, too). I guess it's no biggie if I can't identify it but it would be nice to know what I'm contending with. It's a nasty plant.

 

Locust?

 

Goats eat poison ivy like candy. I started with goats because chemicals are expensive and I get value back from goats. But fencing is also pricey. I have two girls expecting now. From as tall as the goat can reach down will get eaten. Mimosa trees get debarked and die. I also have a large Magnolia.... I hate it. Sheds all year round... With hard sticky leaves.... Blue Jays like the seeds.

 

Sweet gum is easy to cut, but you have to deal with it quick.

 

Hi, TC. It's not Locust - we've got a few of those in our woods. The thorns on this plant are pretty short -probably no longer than 1/4" - and they're kind of arranged in rings running up the entire length of the stalk. When you cut through it it's nothing like a hardwood or softwood tree. It doesn't have a dense inner core.

The craziest thing about this plant is that I've never seen it before, and I've been playing and working in our woods for over 50 years. Last year I was out cutting down some dead oak trees for firewood and I noticed that crap spreading through the woods. I hadn't noticed it before so it's an aggressive invasive.

During the summer the stalk, stems and leaves are all green and it looks like some sort of sumac plant. During the cold weather months it loses all its leaves and stems and dies down to the root, leaving only a brown thorny stalk sticking up out of the ground. Because I've never seen it before I'm not even sure it's a native plant, which might be why can't identify the darned thing.

This wouldn't be the first non-native invasive plant that has reared its ugly head in Virginia, either. Recently, a poisonous invasive that is native to the Caucasus Mountains started showing up in our state:

Giant Hogweed Detected in Virginia
http://www.vdacs.virginia.gov/press-releases-180619-hog-weed.shtml

Fortunately, I'm not contending with that plant (!), but I am totally stumped. I've spent a considerable amount of time online looking for it but all my search queries have come up empty.

 

Sounds like the Tree that Grows in Brooklyn.

 

I've heard about goats and poison ivy and I'd love to set a few loose in our woods. We don't have any fencing on our property so livestock isn't an option for us right now.

I hate using chemicals and while the Crossbow won't hurt grass it will kill just about every other broadleaf plant along with the poison ivy, which I don't like. The toxicity is obviously another negative factor.