Prepping for Florida
Prepping for Florida
As I am writing this, I am sitting outside next to a in-ground pool under a screened in porch. So yes, we are already in Florida. And it is amazing! I will probably be making a post in the next couple days to show you what we've been up to here, buuut this post is going to focus on all the crazy things we did before we went to Florida. Which was a lot.
Sam and I finally broke down and bought a pop-up tent. After Sam stained the deck, we didn't want to be doing woodworking close to it for a few days so that we didn't get saw dust in the stain. This pop-up was truly worth the money. Here we are cutting the top rails to the correct sizes and shapes.
For the edge pieces, Sam wanted to round out the edges to make a smoother transition. He used a jig-saw to make a rough circle and then used the router to make the nice smooth edge.
The largest project that we worked on last week was harvesting the last bit of peppers from the garden. Just to give you an idea of how many (thousands) we had...here's a picture of one of the eight habanero pepper plants that Sam pulled up.
In total, we picked about 16 gallons of peppers (banana peppers, biquinho, cayenne, chili peppers, Tabasco, habanero, jalapeño, Aji Charapita, some sort of jalapeño variety, and scotch bonnets), or 39 pounds (excluding the 3 gallons of banana peppers that we froze). To mix the varieties the canned pepper mix, we poured all the peppers in a clean trash bag and rolled it around on the kitchen floor. Maybe not the official way to do things, but it worked.
If you've never heard of Aji Charapita's, they are a very tiny, yellow variety of peppers that are hotter than habaneros. Sam tells me they are one of the most expensive peppers in the world, and I'm guessing because of their tiny size and difficulty picking off the plant. We ended up picking a gallon or so.
It took us three days to cut up all the peppers (especially after having to spend four hours at the hospital one night because of some contractions that wouldn't go away:/ ). We had to take a drawer out of the fridge to store the already cut peppers in until we had time to can everything.
We ended up with a total of 79 pints of Sam's beautiful hot pepper mix. I would stuff the jars while Sam warmed up the vinegar and boiled the jar flats. Then we would pour the hot vinegar over the peppers and put the lids on.
Three days before we left I noticed that Pippin (my favorite kitty) hadn't been around the house in a while. I was really afraid something had happened to him, or rather that something had gotten ahold of him. Or there is a GIANT hole out in the neighbors woods that he might have fallen into and gotten stuck in. When Sam got off work, we investigated and found no Pippin in the giant hole. But off in the distance we could hear the faintest of meows (that could have also been a bird). After following the meow for about five minutes deeper into the neighbor's woods, we found Pippin stuck probably 80 feet high in a pine tree. With no way to climb the tree and no way for firemen to get their truck into the woods that deep, we resorted to just calling his name for ten minutes while we stood under the tree. He eventually got down all by himself, and man was he happy to see us. He glued himself to our sides for the rest of the night. And when we went back to the house he went straight to the food bowl! Poor baby had been stuck in that sticky pine tree for two days. (In the picture that you see below, he was in the top branches of the tree).
The night before Sam's parents arrived we stained the top rails in the basement. (We wanted to not have to worry about the boards getting rained on while the stain was drying). We were hoping to get them installed before we left, but they need a second coat of stain. All we have left for the deck is to do one more stain of the top rails, install the top rails, install the balusters on the stairs, and then our deck will FINALLY be done!
Pax Domini cum spirito tuo temper sit,
Torey & Sam
Do you or someone you know live near Colbert, Georgia?
Do you want to eat farm fresh eggs from happy, healthy hens?
Check out our shop!
Total, we ended up picking 6 gallons of habanero peppers.
Don't even get me started on the Tobasco plants. There had to be thousands of peppers.
In total, we picked about 16 gallons of peppers (banana peppers, biquinho, cayenne, chili peppers, Tabasco, habanero, jalapeño, Aji Charapita, some sort of jalapeño variety, and scotch bonnets), or 39 pounds (excluding the 3 gallons of banana peppers that we froze). To mix the varieties the canned pepper mix, we poured all the peppers in a clean trash bag and rolled it around on the kitchen floor. Maybe not the official way to do things, but it worked.
If you've never heard of Aji Charapita's, they are a very tiny, yellow variety of peppers that are hotter than habaneros. Sam tells me they are one of the most expensive peppers in the world, and I'm guessing because of their tiny size and difficulty picking off the plant. We ended up picking a gallon or so.
It took us three days to cut up all the peppers (especially after having to spend four hours at the hospital one night because of some contractions that wouldn't go away:/ ). We had to take a drawer out of the fridge to store the already cut peppers in until we had time to can everything.
We ended up with a total of 79 pints of Sam's beautiful hot pepper mix. I would stuff the jars while Sam warmed up the vinegar and boiled the jar flats. Then we would pour the hot vinegar over the peppers and put the lids on.
We also made about 12 pints of yummy pepper jelly!
Three days before we left I noticed that Pippin (my favorite kitty) hadn't been around the house in a while. I was really afraid something had happened to him, or rather that something had gotten ahold of him. Or there is a GIANT hole out in the neighbors woods that he might have fallen into and gotten stuck in. When Sam got off work, we investigated and found no Pippin in the giant hole. But off in the distance we could hear the faintest of meows (that could have also been a bird). After following the meow for about five minutes deeper into the neighbor's woods, we found Pippin stuck probably 80 feet high in a pine tree. With no way to climb the tree and no way for firemen to get their truck into the woods that deep, we resorted to just calling his name for ten minutes while we stood under the tree. He eventually got down all by himself, and man was he happy to see us. He glued himself to our sides for the rest of the night. And when we went back to the house he went straight to the food bowl! Poor baby had been stuck in that sticky pine tree for two days. (In the picture that you see below, he was in the top branches of the tree).
The night before Sam's parents arrived we stained the top rails in the basement. (We wanted to not have to worry about the boards getting rained on while the stain was drying). We were hoping to get them installed before we left, but they need a second coat of stain. All we have left for the deck is to do one more stain of the top rails, install the top rails, install the balusters on the stairs, and then our deck will FINALLY be done!
And one last bit of exciting news...Blue (our Easter Egger chicken) started laying green eggs!
Pax Domini cum spirito tuo temper sit,
Torey & Sam
Do you or someone you know live near Colbert, Georgia?
Do you want to eat farm fresh eggs from happy, healthy hens?
Check out our shop!
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