birding, photography and living with pet birds
Posted in conservation on Sep 19th, 2011
Now comes the best part of the season where we get to eat the spoils of our labor. Green bell peppers from the garden are better than any pepper you can buy in the store. They’re so flavorful that I’ve cut them up and eaten them without any seasoning. Jon made an omelet with tomatoes [...]
Posted in conservation on Aug 31st, 2011
The garden is doing really well. Too well actually. The tomatoes grew so large and so heavy that the cages started to topple over. Of course, this is one of the problems with planting in raised beds – the dirt isn’t solid enough for the cages to properly grip. So I had to put tent [...]
Posted in conservation on Aug 4th, 2011
The garden has exploded! Some of the plants are taller than me. Those three-level plastic cages are much better than the thin wire cages. The tomato plant on the right in the picture below is toppling over because the wire cage can’t support it. Forget those wire cages! I harvested the first tomato today. [...]
Posted in conservation on Jul 11th, 2011
The garden is doing very well this year. There are grapes on the trellis. Last year they didn’t grow large enough to produce fruit because I didn’t use enough water. I’m watering them more this year, but I think they’re more for the birds than me. The raised beds have plants that are exploding. The [...]
Posted in conservation on Jun 3rd, 2011
It’s that time again! I thought planting the garden would be incredibly easy this year because the beds were already setup and I wasn’t going to try and plant seeds inside. However! I did not anticipate that the beds were full of onions. I’m not kidding when I say that I filled half a barrel [...]
Posted in conservation on Oct 26th, 2010
Today marks the end of our Indian summer; today it snowed. It has not yet reached freezing temperatures, though, so I’ve been harvesting the last of the garden vegetables. The hybrid tomatoes wound up getting some kind of rot so they didn’t produce the way I was hoping. The other tomatoes were all holey because [...]
Posted in conservation on Oct 14th, 2010
Deseret Ranch makes its money from three sources: (1) ranching; (2) licenses for birders; and (3) hunting permits. The hunters shoot antelope and mule deer. Here is an antelope: Deseret Ranch has a lodge where the hunters stay. We had lunch there. After they kill the animals, they leave the skulls out to rot. This [...]
Posted in conservation on Sep 19th, 2010
I wasn’t always a vegetarian. In fact, I used to be one of those people that wanted to try exotic things like crocodile and quail. But I was never completely comfortable with meat that resembled the animal from which it came. I much preferred a chicken breast to a chicken wing because you could pretend [...]
Posted in conservation on Aug 23rd, 2010
The garden is productive! I’ve harvested lost of squash and tomatoes. Tonight I made a stir fry of summer squash, green pepper, black beans, corn and onions. I also made tabbouleh with bulgur. Super healthy food! I also used the squash to make a stir fry with feta, tomatoes and tempeh. Food tastes so much [...]
Posted in conservation on Aug 9th, 2010
The garden is going insane!!! The squash are encroaching on the tomatoes. The tomatoes are snaking through the squash and the peppers. Those seed packages are not kidding when they say to space out your squash. I had decided that the zucchini were never going to produce fruit, but then they exploded. They’re even flowering, [...]