Preserving Floyd: The Highland Maple Festival - Road Trip!

Every year in March for two weekends Highland County welcomes visitors to help them celebrate the tapping of the local sugarbush and all things Maple Syrupy - The Highland Maple Festival!

We went this past weekend to lay in our yearly supply of syrup, eat a stack of buckwheat hotcakes loaded with butter and this year's "vintage", tour the sugar camps, and finish it all off with a fine trout dinner served up by the McDowell Volunteer Fire Department and some maple doughnuts.

There's still next weekend to get your fix, March 17 & 18!  If you decide to go and you're from the Floyd/Blacksburg/Christiansburg/Roanoke area, take Rt 220.  It's far more scenic and pleasant a drive than Interstate 81, just as fast, and will drop you right in Monterey, VA, the center of all things maple in Highland county.

Gardening Floyd: Newspaper Pots and Transplanting

Two and a half weeks after planting the cole crops they have their first real leaves and it's time to transplant them into larger pots.  These seedlings are going into newspaper pots which, in a couple of weeks, will be planted directly in the garden without disturbing the roots again.

Cooking Floyd: Dark Days Challenge: March, Week 15

This week is a double Dark Days Challenge: The Vegetarian Challenge.

I was able to score some really nice baby bok choy at the Oasis Market in Blacksburg last week.  That along with some NC potatoes and not local or organic, but sustainable and ethical chick peas and black beans were the players in our vegetarian meal.

Gardening Floyd: What Were They Thinking?

Obviously they weren't thinking.  Probably they were lazy as well.  Because they knew this would be somebody else's problem eventually and now it is.  My problem.  And I'm pissed.

All around the edges of the lower property we bought last year runs a lively little branch.  That's what a tiny streamlet is called.  We knew when we bought the property that the previous owners (and the previous owners before them) had been dumping their trash around the edges but until I started trying to clean up a couple of weeks ago I had no idea to what extent they had trashed it.

I thought I'd start with the most obvious problem: the tires that were lying along the southwest edge of the property.  I didn't think there were that many and I was going to recycle them into towers for growing potatoes.  So far I've pulled approximately 40 tires out of there in varying states of decay.  Far, far more than I need for potato towers.  What the hell were these people doing?

Husbanding Floyd: The Girls are Alright!

It's our laying hens first birthday!

You might remember these adorable balls of fluff:

Now they're all grown up, responsible, reliable egg layers.

Gardening Floyd: Indoor Seed Starting Continues

Last week I seeded our cole crops.  I also set up the sweet potatoes in jars to start growing slips.  You may remember doing this in elementary school.  Or maybe not - I don't believe our kids ever did this.  But when I was a kid in kindergarten we grew lots of things in paper cups: beans, tomatoes, marigolds, and sweet potatoes in jars on a sunny window ledge.

It takes a good bit of time for the slips to start so you have to be patient.  Especially if you start the slips from grocery store sweets because they've likely been treated to discourage sprouting.  But sprout they will!  Once you have a good sized slip started you clip it from the mother tater and put it in a jar of its own to develop roots.  Each potato will develop multiple slips so keep snipping and rooting them until you have as many as you want.  Once the slips have good roots and the weather's warmed enough, into the garden they'll go!

Cooking Floyd: Dark Days Challenge: March, Week 14

This week's meal consists of some traditional Southern comfort foods.  I'm a transplanted (damn) Yankee but tasty comfort is universal on a cold damp day.

Take two plump sweet potatoes, white or orange, scrub well and set aside.