Sugar Sprint Peas

During the winter months I grow Sugar Snap peas in the growing dome because they like cool weather and unless it gets below freezing inside, they do well in there. Around May, though, it begins to get too hot inside and I must pull out the vines.

This year I decided to take my chances growing Sugar Snaps outdoors. I figured the moderate temps would be kind to them, so why the heck not. Because our weather is so "iffy," with snow, hail or rain likely any month of the year, I tried a variety called Sugar Sprint. The peas can be harvested at around 58 days, which is a plus in this high altitude growing region.

On May 9 I planted the seeds and placed a few tomato cages in the 4 by 4 bed, even though the envelope said 2 feet tall. I didn't want them drooping over the edges, tempting any passing critters into a snack. They might like that plant too much and that would be all she wrote. Then it rained and rained and I didn't even have to water.

I did a little weeding in that bed, but pretty much forgot those peas until July 4th, when I realized there were a zillion mature pods busting out on there! Talk about a forgetful gardener!

I've picked peas three times so far and each time I get about a pound of peas, enough to fill this strawberry clamshell.

My friends from around here get excited this time of year when roadside venders sell bags of traditional peas that you take out of the pod, but I am too lazy to shell them and just like eating the whole thing. It's the only way I can get Tom to eat peas.

Here are some links for snap pea recipes that I really like.

This is a copycat recipe for PF Chang's Garlic Snap Peas. The secret is to add the garlic at the end and very quickly get everything out of the pan and onto a plate. Otherwise you burn the garlic and it gets bitter when it's burned. Experience.

This recipe is easy! Ina Garten's Sauteed Sugar Snap Peas

Honey Glazed Pea Pods and Carrots is also an easy way to cook snap peas. I don't use the cornstarch and they still come out yum.

Last, because it's summer, here is Guy Fieri's Black Bean and Corn Salad recipe. I sub snap peas for the snow peas and it's just fine.

Miss Bonnie says hello to you all and wants you to know that rodent hunting is going well this year. She looks skinny, but eats all she wants. Last time Bonnie visited the vet, she (the vet) called her assistants (we are Bonnie's assistants) to have a good look at a cat at a healthy weight. I guess it's a rare sighting, a non-fat cat.

Bonnie is now 15 years old.

Cold Weather Opportunists

It's a cold day here today: 9 degrees F when I woke up this morning. So before I even had a chance to make the bed, the odd couple decided to take it over.

This is the backside of the Dashes and Patches quilt I finished recently. I decided to flip it over for a little change-up.

I didn't have the heart to kick them off.

Trude, Don't Look! It's a Snake!

I was puttering about in the yard when Tom and Ms. Pearl burst through the door from the garage and beelined their way to the house.

He was carrying a pistol on his way back out of the house and said, "Come see what's in the garage."

I kind of knew what I'd see. There were clues: the hurrying, the pistol.

Yep. 

So Tom dispatched the rattler while I kept saying, "Oh. Oh. Ew. Ew." Or as they say in Albuquerque, "Eeeeeee!"

Sorry Mr. Snakey. I know you were just looking for a cool place to rest out of the hot sun, but we walk through the garage many times a day. And you rattled at Ms. Pearl.

I allowed your buddy Black Snakeyboy to stay in the garage after I saw his skinny black tail disappear under the work bench a couple weeks ago because he eats mice and he won't kill Miss Bonnie like you would. She's only 6 and a half pounds, too small to withstand a poisonous bite.

And we have little dog relatives, like Cousin Murphy and Lexilulu, who we must protect.

Cousin Murphy (I lost my Lexi pics on the other computer!)

So rest in peace, Mr. Rattlesnake. May your heaven be full of rodents and cool garage floors.

Good Kitty: Stone Cold Killer

Sweet little Miss Bonnie has been on a killing spree. In the past two weeks she has dispatched two gophers and one large rat.

When she pops through the cat door and makes that otherworldly predatory feline yowl announcing that yes, indeedy, she has been a busy catty, I always blanch a bit. Will it be alive? Will she let it loose in the house? Will there be blood?

Luckily these three victims have been dead with no blood. So I say, "Good kitty!", encase my hands in old Wal Mart bags, and gather up the body for a fast fling over the fence.

Want to read more about Miss Bonnie? Click this link.

Nippy and Sunny

This post's title sounds like a comedy duo I might have seen on the Ed Sullivan Show when I was a kid, but really, it's about the weather. Warmer than usual here like much of the country, we have our cold mornings, around 15-20 degrees F or so, and if the sun stays out, temps rise into the 40's or 50's.

For you folks born to cold weather, 40 or 50 probably sounds incredibly balmy, and we, too, are beginning to appreciate how "warm" it is. Hell, that's sweater weather!

Last night it snowed Dippin' Dots and when I forced gently carried Miss Bonnie outside so she would have her morning cat excursion, the round pellets on our wooden deck crunched.

Here's what it looks like from the deck, just before the sun peeks over the rim rock.

 Looks frigid, doesn't it? And it is, around 16 F this morning.

This is looking toward the Buddha tree circle. Buddha, way at the top of the path, doesn't seem worried about the cold.

Have you been watching Lillyhammer on Netflix? I just saw the first episode and watching it made me realize cold is relative. Norway is freaking cold. If you are from Norway, let me know if I'm right about this one.

I know two buddies who aren't inconvenienced by the weather, as long as they are inside. Let's name them Nippy and Sunny.

That quilt is a shredded mess. I should make a new one. Yeah. Put it on the list.

Decorating the Nickel and Dime Ranch-Part 2

I recently chatted with a person who had been decorating their new home in French country style. Since I get the Williams-Sonoma catalogue like every week in the mail,  I knew what she was talking about and nodded sagely. "It must look gorgeous," I said.

"How is your home decorated?" she wanted to know.

Geez, I really couldn't put my finger on it and my answer of "a little bit of this and that" really wasn't descriptive.

 Later I thought more and decided we are kind of like Mary Emmerling's American Country Style, West.  But I suspect we do our decorating even more thriftily than she does.

We  bought those rugs in the photo below years ago at the Hubbell Trading Post and I know they should be displayed better, but that is as far as we have gone so far. The animal skin was a bobcat Tom caught carrying away one of our chickens. The red blanket is a Hudson's Bay we bought on a car trip to Alaska more than 30 years ago.

Hanging from the post on the landing is a punched tin candle lantern we found while traveling. The wooden signs are found items: Home Made was found in Alberhill, Ca. A garage was going to be demolished and the sign had been used as a shelf. It matches some boards we found in the ceiling of our old house which was on the site of the Concordia Ranch Store. The Irvine Asparagus sign was the end of a box we found at the old ranch house we lived in during the 1970's in El Toro, CA.  The tin sign is a reproduction we found at a swap meet.

Can you see that bottle of Harvey's Bristol Creme sherry? Tom keeps it handy for when I drive him to drink.

When Tom goes out for walks, he brings stuff home: feathers, rocks, old nails and bottles, whatever he happens to see is picked up and toted back to the house. In September when we were traveling in Michigan, Tom found a treasure trove: an abandoned, down on the ground power pole in the middle of the woods chock full of porcelain insulators. We already have quite a few, so I wondered what we would do with these new ones.

Tom bought a pair of lamp chimneys from Ace Hardware and now we have emergency lighting in case of a power outage.

He was really excited about the gigantic insulator pictured below which weighs over 6 pounds. I had no clue what we would do with it, but leave it to Tom

It is our dinner table centerpiece/holder of weird stuff. Last night we had a candle-lit taco dinner. Now, that's class!

Miss Bonnie and Ms. Pearl don't care how the place is decorated (note the shabby chic quilt) as long as they have a place for rest and relaxation.

Hope you enjoyed checking out the decor. This is one of a series of posts about decorating The Nickel and Dime Ranch. Stay tuned for even more!

Solar Heating the Cabin

Most of our winter days don't look like this. Snow, if we get it,  melts in a couple hours or a couple days. We let Angel Fire and Sipapu, our local ski areas have all the snow because they need it for business. Which reminds me to tell you that on my list for this season is ski biking. But that's for another day.

We are pretty lucky because the previous owners who built this cabin spent considerable time planning how to site it. They tracked the sun's path during different seasons to determine how to manage the sun's heat, so in the winter the sun comes through those three windows and warms the living room and in the summer when the sun is higher in the sky. we stay cool.

Since this area gets about 310 days of sunshine a year, using solar is a no-brainer, and the cabin, with its passive solar design, was a smart move.  Once the sun is up, we usually don't even need to use the wood stove or the propane for heat.

If it's cloudy, like in the photo below, Tom uses some of his wood supply to warm up the place, and the Airlock logs with their hollow centers act as insulation to keep it toasty inside.

Ms. Pearl and Miss Bonnie love the sun, too, and have found the perfect place to enjoy it.

Free Miss Pearl!

My name is Miss Pearl, and I am seven years old. Every time my people take me on a trip, I get Anxiety Stress Syndrome, and can’t stop panting. This trip they made me eat “Ruthies” and I was sleepy the whole trip.

It wasn't 'till I got to my Granma’s house that I woke up. I am glad that my Granma gave me lots of granmacrackers. That made me feel better.

I don’t like staying in the city, though. Every morning and night I had to be taken to an undisclosed dog-poop park, because at the park on the other side of the street there were signs that said Not and Don’t to everything.

Besides that, there were all these yapping, snarling little Zero dogs, wanting to attack me as we walked to the park! I was scared! They all looked at me like this:

I didn’t get to play much Frisbee here.

I am glad that my dad got me more Frisbees at Petsmart,  because we were running out of them at home. They gave me more “Ruthies” on the way home.

I miss my Granma and Granpa, but am glad I am home with my new Frisbees.

 Thanks, Miss Bonnie, for writing down what I was saying.

Miss Bonnie the Cat - Portrait of a Survivor

Warning: There are two photos, one of a headless woodpecker and another of a dead gopher. No blood is involved. If you don't like dead things, stop here.
  
We are pretty sure that Bonnie, or “Miss Bonnie,” as Ms. Pearl calls her, is our twelfth cat. All the other cats who lived with us in California succumbed to the forces of nature, one by one, in terrible ways. We had Sylvester, a striking black and white kitty, for  several years until he was found in the back yard, strafed and eaten by either a barn owl or a hawk. Stryker, optimistically named after the John Wayne character in The Sands of Iwo Jima, died after two years, victim of the local coyote/bobcat gang.

At this point you're wondering why we didn't keep our cats inside. Well, I grew up in a home with two allergic asthmatics, so any cats we had were relegated to the outside. Cats were outside animals, and that was the way it was. I was born this way.

When we moved to the Southern California countryside and a stray cat showed up at our doorstep or people said, "Want a kitten?"  these kitties became country cats,  rodent eradicators who lounged on the deck and around the garden, showing up for a pat or two when we were outside doing chores. They were not decorative, but there to earn their keep.  Country living, though, can be fraught with peril and disappearing cats were the norm.

Thinking there might be safety in numbers, we tried two cats at a time. Dirk and Al were tabbies Tom named after some roughtough characters in Clyde Cussler's novels. We still feel guilty about Dirk and Al because while we ate dinner and watched them through the kitchen window, Dirk and Al looked nervously over their shoulders. "They seem a little jumpy," I observed. The next morning they were gone, presumably to coyotes. It seems macho names didn't offer any special protection.

For years the fate of our cats seemed preordained, as Bob, Skeleton and Cougar also became coyote fodder. Even Arnold, another macho sounding name, fell to the onslaught. We have no idea if he fathered any illegitimate children along the way like a California governor of the same name. Dixie, a Siamese with a loud meow, lived almost nine years, but was diagnosed with cancer. Her secret to longevity? She insisted on living on the roof and took all her meals up there as well. She came down only if my dad visited, climbing down when she heard the Honda car driving up the dirt driveway.

Bonnie and Clyde, two purebred tortoiseshell Manx cats, came from a neighbor who would have drowned them because of their flawed tails. It seems that Manx cats' tails can't be too long or they will be worthless and can't be bred.  We figured their camouflaged Tortie fur might save them, but our attempt using killer names as good luck talismans was only half-successful: Clyde disappeared, gunned down, again by local coyotes. Bonnie prevailed and Tom installed two cat doors, one for the outside porch door and an inner one to the living room. She was a keeper; guilt, our motivator.

Bonnie has been the longest lasting of all the kitties, going on her thirteenth year with us. Extremely watchful, she is a killer in her own right, having brought numerous gophers, squirrels, birds, and sadly, baby rabbits, into our house at night, announced with a coy "meow," or a terrified scream from her prey. It became a common chore to clean up a pile of guts from her kill each morning. Sometimes all she left in the hallway was a head. Her favorite meal is gopher.

When we moved to New Mexico I was determined to counter Tom's careless, "Leave her!" attitude by bringing Bonnie with us. In a cage lined with puppy piddle pads and old towels, she accompanied me in the cab of the GMC pickup while Ms. Pearl kept Tom company in the Toyota. Bonnie's incessant meowing and her refusal to poop, even though I regularly placed her litter box into her cage, is what I remember most about that three-day travel ordeal.

 Before we left I attempted to get Bonnie used to a harness for walks, but she had a fit and ran away for a day. So no harness. While traveling I was afraid to let her out for fear she would disappear. It wasn't until the end of the second travel day that she stopped yowling and Tom made sure to remind me at each rest stop that Ms. Pearl was docile and cuddly throughout their journey together.

On the third and last day, the weather freezing outside, Bonnie finally let go.  There was some preliminary frantic activity, plaintive meowing and energetic scrabbling in the cage next to me. Suddenly, the air  became toxic and I had to drive with the window down in freezing weather, breathing only through my mouth. "I'm stopping," I gasped into the two way radio we were using to communicate. At the gas station I leaped out of the car, not caring that it was below freezing,  disposed of the contents of the cage (except for the cat), swabbed the interior with Nature's Miracle cleaner, relined the cage, added new towels, and we were on our way again. I had prepared for the worst and it was over. I could (almost) breathe easily, now.

Bonnie adapted quickly to her new home when Tom reluctantly installed some cat doors, and she is once again back on the prowl. Several dead birds, like this headless woodpecker, have been found in our yard. Maybe Bonnie heard us yelling at this particular woodpecker as it was ratatattatting on our roof one morning.  Tom and Ms. Pearl didn't feel any sympathy for the dead  Woody. When she brought a dead gopher into the living room for our approval,  I knew she was back on the job.

When Ms. Pearl was a puppy she made a genuine attempt to kill Bonnie, but has learned that Bonnie is a family member. They often take afternoon naps together on the couch. Ms. P is okay with this arrangement as long as Bonnie doesn't get crazy and start biting her ear.

Bonnie just put down the book. Pearl has never learned how to read.

 On a cold morning we usually wake to find both pets on the bed competing for Tom's attention. I'm allergic to cat fur so Bonnie lobbies Tom for a morning scratch by perching on his chest, peering into his face.

 Bonnie almost had some competition last year when a young stray arrived on our doorstep, instantly named Hobocat by unimaginative Tom. Just as Hobocat was getting to know and trust us, we had to make a trip back to California to see my parents.

When we returned, Hobocat was gone, even though Ernest made sure he and Bonnie were fed and watered. Another victim of the coyotes, and more proof of what a survivor Ms. Bonnie is.

Or maybe Bonnie, jealous as she is, did away with him while we were gone......

Moving Thirty Years Worth of "Valuable" Stuff

Many moving companies were consulted and invited to bid for the opportunity of moving our "valuable" belongings.  Since neither T nor I wanted to heave large pieces of furniture and hernia inducing boxes into and out of trucks, we decided against the U-Haul-Penske-Ryder type of move .  This time we would relocate like adults: no pickup truck stuffed haphazardly with our belongings for us. We would leave with class, choosing a large, nationally recognized moving company, (Name omitted) Van Lines.

  Prior to signing the contract, T showed the saleswoman pictures of where we would be moving, pointing out details of the dirt road that a truck would have to navigate.  Discussions about the widths of the county road and of our almost half mile driveway ensued.  Kari, our saleswoman for (Name omitted) Systems, the local contractor with (Name omitted) Van Lines, agreed that the moving van would probably not be able to navigate the narrow county road.  A shuttle would be necessary, which meant that the large van would offload our goods into a Penske/Ryder/UHaul type truck for the final miles to our new home.  She carefully wrote on our contract: Probable shuttle at destination. No extra charge for shuttle.  That was okay with us. Sometimes moving requires flexibility, we naively thought.

 I traveled with Bonnie, who didn't poop until almost three days later, frantically scrabbling around in this cage, meowing insanely, "This is not how I am supposed to live my life! I do not shit where I live!"  The roads were icy, so I had to concentrate on driving without inhaling.

 T traveled in our other truck with the ever agreeable Ms. Pearl, who hopped into the car early on so we would not leave her behind.  She liked that Bonnie was in jail.

To be continued.......