Backyard Garden

So it's a bit of a gamble, but it shouldn't be. The weather has been great this past week, hovering in the mid-60s. We hit 80+ degrees one of those days. It's Memorial Day weekend and should be a perfect time to transplant the seedlings Jen has been growing and raising for the past month. Maybe more than a month. We spent the day planting the seedlings and sowing the seeds in the garden, then watering the little beasts in the hope that they take and grow. Looks good, though. It is a gamble because last night, around 11:00 just before heading up to bed, I decided to check the weather. I never check the weather at night because I'm going to bed and I don't care. It's going to be colder than it was when the sun was out. Maybe it will rain, maybe it won't. I don't care because I'll be sleeping. But I checked it, and it said it was going to get down to 38 degrees. Not quite a frost, but along with that temp, the app gave a frost warning. I

Every year on our birthdays, we get to pick dinner or where to go for dinner. This year, however, we were not going anywhere. We are not big fans of take-out, and due to the stay at home orders, there was not any place to go. Not that we would want to sit around in a mask being waited on by people in gloves and masks. Honestly, I'm not sure we'll be going out to eat for a long time. Luckily we have food, cookbooks, the internet, and a desire to eat things we can't just buy. We decided on noodles, like a ramen bowl or something like that. That turned into Udon, and then we found out that we can make our Udon noodles, and that is something people do all the time. Not people I know, but people somewhere do it. So we did it. The ingredients were: 2 cups or 300 grams of all-purpose flour (we threw in a little gluten flour as well) 1 tablespoon of salt added to 3/4 cups of water (mix well) That's it for the ingredients, and the rest is work. Pour the water around the

The garden is doing what gardens do in early May. The lettuce, spinach, and peas Jen planted are trying to bust through the soil while we work to remove any little grass bits that are trying to make a go of the nutrient-dense soil we've tilled into the back yard. She is also tending to the seedlings growing on the front porch, and we are letting them grow for a couple more weeks out there before we even think of transplanting to the garden. Last weekend we hauled a giant oak bourbon barrel up from the basement. Jen's brother James had brought it to the house five or six years ago when I was still brewing beer. The intent was to make a few batches of strong ale, fill the barrel, and let it age in the charred oak barrel for a few months before bottling and enjoying whatever came out of it. I brewed beer in batches of five gallons, so this barrel would have taken ten batches to fill. At around $45-$50 a batch, this experiment would have cost close to $500. Not worth the risk. I