Flowery things

Flowers from Ijams...

Spiderwort:



For this one, I played around a little bit with some off-camera flash:



Chicory:



Unknown:

Words!

I apparently know roughly 31 kilowords.

Bugs!

Some butterflies and whatnot from Ijams.

Japanese beetle:


Grasshopper (zoom for detail on the leg):


Flying ant-like thing in a chicory blossom:




Butterfly or moth out drinking some nectar:






And continuing the feeding insect meme, here's a dragonfly eating another insect.


OM NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM!

Catching up

Meant to post these photos from Ijams yesterday.

Garden Coreopsis:

Dayflower with weird looking junk:

More Dayflower (Asiatic, I think, but won't swear to):

Dinner salad

• Weird lettuce from Kroger
• Orange cherry tomatoes (CSA)
• Yellow bell pepper (CSA)
• White onion (CSA)
• Sweet banana pepper (my "garden")

Today's pepper harvest

400th post

So, this seems to be post #400.  Neat.  Didn't really figure I'd keep it up this long, and semi-consistently. In honor of this occasion, I will now post flower pictures that I intended to post anyway.  Hah!

Ijams, Ijams, Ijams

First, a couple more dragonflies from around Ijams.







Flowers!

Garden coreopsis:



Spiderwort:

Garden update

Everything is bearing fruit now.  I seem to have the following plants:

• 2 tomato
• 3 jalapeno pepper
• 2 serrano pepper
• 4 bell pepper
• 2 or 3 as yet unidentified peppers (one of these looks suspiciously like a jalapeno/serrano cross!)

Pics (complete with bad off-camera flash experiment):

It might be hard to tell in those, but one of the serranos and one of the tomatoes are both 8-12" above the top of my railing!

Some more shots from Ijams

What's that back there...?



SNAKE!



That guy was probably 3-4 feet long.  I'm guessing he was an eastern water snake, but it's pretty hard to tell without a better view of the body and underside.  Here's a view of the little marsh/pond where I found him:




Also, dragonflies!

Dinner and dessert

I had some chicken I had already sliced earlier this week, so I decided to make some fajitas for dinner.

I based my seasoning on http://busycooks.about.com/od/homemademixes/r/fajitaseasonmix.htm .  I used ancho chile power instead of chili powder, and didn't bother with the cayenne or the bullion.  Everything was pretty much eyeballed.

Applied to chicken and put back into the fridge for 30 mins or so while I ran to the store to pick up a bell pepper and tortillas.

For veggies, I grabbed a nice big banana pepper from the "garden", half a CSA yellow onion, and half a bell pepper.  Sauteed them off at high temp for a few minutes after I'd done the chicken.  I also diced up half a CSA tomato for cold topping.  The result:



It ended up pretty tasty.  The seasoning was relatively mild, but definitely added some tastiness to the chicken.

But!  Dessert was even better.  We've been getting blackberries for weeks from the CSA, and I haven't been good about eating them.  I really don't like dealing with the seeds, and frankly they haven't been terribly sweet.  Today I decided they needed to stop going to waste, and tried to figure out what to do with them.  Blackberry sauces sound tempting, but end up being more work than I was willing to put in, and generally called for some ingredients I didn't have around the house.  Then I had a stroke of genius!  I'd been planning on making some watermelon ice in the near future - maybe there's an easy recipe out there for blackberry ice.

And yes, there was - http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/blackberry-ice-10000001634828/.  Again, I didn't follow it exactly; who has rosewater??  I also subbed in lime juice for the lemon, since it's what I had on hand.  It is extremely good, and I'm someone who buys a lot of Haagen-Das sorbets.

As an added bonus, once it starts to solidify after the first 45 minutes, you get to taste it every time you stir.  Because, like, you need to make sure it's ok, right??

Anyway, here's a crappy phone pic of the finished product:



That's it for my culinary adventures today.  Tomorrow maybe I'll tell you about the watermelon ice....

Ok, enough sad pictures

I have a few more of the squirrel from yesterday, but they are in the same vein.  So here's other stuff!

Birdhouse @ Ijams:



Dayflower @ Ijams


Unidentified yellow flower @ Ijams:


Unidentified white flower @ Ijams:


My ID-fu skills were weak :(

Sad Squirrel at Ijams

As I was walking along the River Boardwalk at Ijams last week, I was startled by a squirrel running out in front of me.  It was weird though, because it didn't make itself totally scare like they normally do.  Instead, it tried to climb up the climb, and couldn't, so it started wandering down the middle of the boardwalk in front of me.  It was obvious that it was away from me, so I was a bit weirded out that it was making more progress.  After a bit, I figured out why:



The poor thing had some major injuries to the entire right side of it's head, and was effectively blind on at least that side.  I felt pretty bad; I wasn't trying to chase it or anything, I was just trying to get to the other end of my walk.

WARNING: Next photo has a closeup of the poor thing's scars






Finally it managed to get back up on the railing and scamper off into a low-hanging tree.  Even then, as you can see, it was still pretty tentative about making the leap :(

CSA Week 11

This week we got:

• Tomatoes (normal, some sort of heirloom varieties, yellow, and yellow cherry)
• Zucchini (the light green kind, and a round one!)
• Eggplant
• Canteloupe
• Lots of peaches
• Onions
• Potatoes
• Corn on the cob
• Some sort of beanlike things
• Cucumbers

Pics!

I had an ear of corn with dinner, it was pretty sweet and tender.  I approve.

ATTACK!

Giant ladybug!



That is all.