You all about had a run away gardener this Morning!

Last Spring, I built a rock dam across a ravine to catch the leaf mold, top soil, worm castings, and rotting wood particles that get washed away by heavy rains each year.

It worked really well too, the debris that washed off the wooded hillside is about two feet deep!

This is a really “snakey place” I’ve killed lots of really big Copper Heads and Cotton Mouth-Water moccasins since we moved here. A Copper Head bigger around than your arm is nothing unusual. The creek behind our house brings them here after it floods. When the water settles, the snakes have a nice place to live.

This morning, I was re-potting tomatoes and needed more worm castings for my organic plant mix that I make from soil, worm castings, and leaf litter.

Since this is my first year to harvest the new debris pile, I was pretty leery about sticking my hand in there to rake out leaves. But I did it anyhow….

After raking back the top half foot or so, I started to gain confidence, and began taking out really healthy size, double handfuls of leaf litter and worm castings. (Keep in mind that it was about 45 degrees outside, so a cold snake is a really cold snake).

After filling my bucket about half full of this stuff, I really got up my confidence and dug in there to get a good, deep scoop!

What I grabbed a hold of wasn’t very leafy at all, but it was cold! And it did squirm! And it did jump! And so did I….

After screaming like a little girl, and throwing it back in the leaf pile, I laid there holding my heart for a while!

After I saw that it wasn’t going to eat me, I felt sorry for it… and put it back under the leaves until Spring really has Sprung!

(It was a foot long, really cold, Bullfrog)!

Happy gardening,

Through years of organic research, I have come up with a new strain of ‘Super’ okra that bares upwards of 300 pods per plant, having over 60 branches. This new strain of okra is called ‘Heavy Hitter’ and will be featured this coming weekend at the Moore Norman Technology Center in Oklahoma City. I will be working in conjunction with OSU during the 2012 season on seed increase of this new strain….

To see my progress, and to view my work, my background, and photos, type a GOOGLE SEARCH with the ‘key’ words.. Developing a new strain of food – crop plants. We are involved in some very exciting times here.

We are also in the final stage of completion of an on farm Certified Organic Farm Processing Kitchen.

Check it out.

I went out this morning to survey the damage from what has been our 3rd hail storm since April 22, not counting, the freezing rain we had on May 3rd, that killed our corn, the 12 inches of rain we had that same week, that drowned our lettuce, or the 78 days of drought we had previous, that prevented our turnips from germinating.

After last night’s 70-80 mph straight winds, our garden only has 19 out of 106 tomato cages still standing. (We weren’t finished staking them all, they were being held, temporarily by two strands of electric fence wire wrapped around Tee posts at each end of the rows when we were driven off by the rains. After we took shelter, the wind and rain took the Tee posts right out of the ground. We still had 20 cages to go. Now they are scattered across the field). It has rained all day today, preventing us from repairing the damage.

The good news is; it looks like the wire cages deflected most of the hail that came before the winds. Because of this, there wasn’t as much damage to the tomato leaves or blossoms as there might have been otherwise. Though, the cabbage and okra didn’t fare quite so well.

The start of this season is beginning to become reminiscent of the stories my Grandma used to tell me of her gardening experience, while trying to raise her family during the depression. She was 34 years old in 1932. She was raising eight kids under the age of twelve at the time, two of them born during the hardest of times, between 1927 and 1932. (She had 13 children all together, by September 1941). Compared to her life’s experience of living through two World Wars, and the Great Depression, we have NOTHING TO COMPLAIN ABOUT!!!

We still work the ground on our farm with mules, because we want to. We could borrow a tractor if we had to. We still home can our garden produce too, but we don’t have to depend on that for our sole source of nutrition. It wasn’t that way with the old folks who brought us up. My Grandpa would tell about making the Winter of ’32 on little more than Black-eyed peas.

When I watch the storms roll through Texas and Arkansas for the past few weeks, and hear about the tens of thousands of acres of farm land flooded along the Mississippi. I count my blessings. (We don’t have it nearly as bad as it seems). We can count our blessings that probably, no matter what comes next, we will still have more than we need to feed our own families. There is a lot of satisfaction in that.

Sometimes we get caught up in the Farmers’ Market World of having to grow so much surplus, that we can make a profit with the sales, and forget that all we really need, is just enough for our own family to get by.

We are truly blessed to have more than enough. Proof of that is found in the fact that the Farmers’ Market exists at all, no matter how sparse the selection. So if it seems that this season’s Market is getting off to a slow start, please bare with us, we are doing our best.

Tip of the week – (Don’t try new things on a green broke mule!) We’ve been breaking gardens and breaking mules for two months, now it’s time to plant! Bill had a pretty good run away with Earl Tuesday! Earl is our 4 year old, red mule; he apparently doesn’t like our horse drawn disc! We got the mule back, but the disc is still up in a tree! Maybe, this Fall, we’ll be cutting fire wood and get it back.



THE REAL REASON I WANTED TO WRITE TODAY, WAS TO SHARE THIS;  Yesterday was Valentines Day and I wanted to do something special for my sweetie, so I made truffles.  I used Farm Fresh eggs  just laid that morning, some Oklahoma native pecans that I traded okra for this Summer, fresh churned, local butter, and semi sweet chocolate chips from the store in town. 

 I’ve got to admit – I’m not much of a candy eater, to the best of  my knowlegde, I ‘ve never eaten a truffle before.  To tell you the truth, this country boy always thought truffles were just some kind of  mushroom over in France or somewhere.  Who knew they were chocolate candy?  But they were a sensation with my Wife!  Definitely, an “Atta boy” for me!  And easy to make too!

Three of the six ingredients grow right here on the farm, or over in the neighbor’s pasture (they own a dairy).   This Summer, I traded 20 pounds of okra to another neighbor for 8 pounds of pecans.  The eggs are laid by our chickens out back of the house.

The recipe is simple: 

2 cups semi sweet chocolate chips

1/2 cup butter, softened

2 egg yolks

3 Tablespoons cream cheese

1/3 cup Amareetto liqueur

1 – 1/2 cups finely chopped pecans (don’t skimp on the pecans)

Melt chocolate chips in the top of  a double boiler over low heat.  (I just made  my own double boiler, by placing a smaller pan inside a larger pan of boiling water).  

When chocolate melts, remove from heat, stir in softened butter one Tablespoon at a time.

Add egg yolks to the mixture, and beat well with a mixer.  (It will begin to thicken a little). 

Add cream cheese, and Amaretto, and mix until smooth.  Cover and chill until firm (about 2 hours).

Spoon out mixture, and shape into 3/4  inch balls (about the size of large marbles).  Roll in cookie tray of finely chopped pecans.  Set aside on waxed paper lined cookie tray.  Refrigerate for about 1 hour.  Makes about 40 or so truffles.

Serve in a good sized soup bowl, lined with decorative red wrapping paper. Cut paper in a circle a little larger than the bowl.  Sscallop the edge of paper with scissors.  Fold in half, quarters eighths, sixteens, and unfold, to create a cone shape, and place in the bottom of the bowl.   Fill with chilled truffles,  Scewer a pair of the chilled truffles with two red toothpicks, and set out a brandy or wine glass of Amaretto to use as dipping sauce.  Enjoy!

See you this Spring at the Tahlequah Farmers Market!

Remember: Dry Creek Farm, Moody’s, Oklahoma.