Po Boy Filet

I tried a new recipe that I got from my care pastor - he's a REALLY good cook. Here's the recipe: Mix 1 lb. of ground beef with 1/4 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp of lemon pepper. Flatten this out to 1/4 " which should give you a 12x7 sheet of meat. Chop a 4 oz can of mushrooms, 2 tblsp onion, 2 tblsp green peppers, 3 tblsp green olives spread this mixture onto the meat. Roll it up and slice. Wrap each slice in bacon and fry.






The only thing I would add that you really need is toothpicks - I was out and I didn't have a way to hold the bacon in place.

January in the garden

We've had some nice days in January and it has given me garden fever - B-I-G time. I'm so ready to plant something - but I know we're in for more cold - so I'm holding off. I did go to the local greenhouse though and I got my onions and potatoes. I'm going to plant my potatoes in my tires and stack them - you plant the potato and then when the plant gets about 8" you put a tire on top of the bottom tire and put more soil around the plant and just leave the top 2" of the potato plant sticking up and then let it grow again and do the same thing again. I got the idea from here .

I'm storing my onions in the shop on a bed of damp soil where it's still nice and cold - I didn't even take them out of the bundle -- it's still too cold and way to wet to plant them yet. I don't want them wet, just a little damp - I'll probably spritz them with a spray bottle every now and again.

I'm storing the potatoes here in the house, I haven't cut them yet, but it won't matter if they're here in the warm house and sprout - hopefully it will dry out and warm up just enough to plant the potatoes and onions soon.

Tire Garden

Last year I did my garden in tires. I know, I know it sounds retarded ;- ). However, it worked wonderful and I am so doing it again this year and even expanding. I use old tires - what's an old tire you ask? Well, I get my tires from my neighbor who owns a trucking business so an old tire for me is one that has been driven for too many miles to be safe. If you're wondering about something leaching out of the tire, there have been studies done at colleges and garden centers and nothing leached in to the soil (again, when you used old tires). I did it for a few reasons - the main one being, bermuda grass is EVIL, and I mean EVIL, LOL. I could not keep up with the bermuda in the garden and I wanted to do raised bed gardens - but it was going to be pretty expensive the first year to get everything - then I thought, what could I use for free - maybe recycle something - then I thought, I have a couple of tires down in the creek bed - and so there you have it - that's how the tire garden came about. You can find free tires just about in any town, before my neighbor offered his old tires I had called a tire center and they told me they had all the free tires I wanted. Here's some pics of the tire garden.

Starting a new garden. . . things to do

If you want to start a new garden,

Do the soil jar test to determine your soil's composition in terms of how much of it is clay/sand/silt. That will help you know if it needs something added to it to improve its tilth.

You don't need to add peat because peat is "dead" and all it does is improve drainage.

Add compost because it is biologically alive. You can add manure, but the manure should be composted before it is tilled into the soil because composting at the right temperatures will kill bacteria (like E. coli) that's in the manure which is very important. Composting manure also should kill weed seeds which means less weeds to worry about during the growing season.

Also, you can almost never go wrong with adding any sort of organic matter like compost, manure, chopped-up or shredded leaves, grass clippings, etc. to the soil. In our climate it is hard to have too much organic matter because the summer heat causes all organic matter to break down pretty quickly. A common gardener's catch phrase that sums up that process is this: "Heat eats compost."


Most of the information that will be in the "garden" posts are from different books, blogs or forums that I read that I think will help "ME" in my garden - it is not "professional" advice just more or less notes that I would like compiled in one spot.