Well Friday turned to be another gorgeous day here in the mountains of North Carolina. It was in the middle 50's to start the day with a few clouds, but by afternoon brilliant blue skies and a gentle breeze to keep the high in the low 80's quite pleasant. We started the day with a sleep-in as my tired body from pickle ball the night before needed the extra hour or so. After my usual routine(s) of a few quiet moments and the posting of this daily ramble so my grand kids will know what their grandparents did on a daily basis we made breakfast burritos to start the gastric juices flowing, Yeow where they ever good especially with a little jalapeno pepper on top and a splash of Chrystal hot sauce.
I ventured outside to check on the gardens for any damage from the local critters and so far the past couple of nights we have been left alone except for some critters that likes to dig around in the compost pile. We decided to not start any really big projects as we were heading out to Patrick and Kathryn around 4 PM with a stop at the library on the way. I hand watered the gardens and the grass seeds in the backwoods yard where I had removed the stumps. The grass in the yards have just about stopped growing due to the lack of rainfall. It's been over 2 weeks since I last mowed which is really unusual for this time of the year. We have been having some heavy dew overnight which has kept it green thus far. I picked about a quart of win berries for the Tracy's but we forgot to bring them with us when we headed out.
We took off on our daily hike to the top of the mountain and visited with Jetta and Zeke for a few before heading back to the cabin. I picked beet greens, kale and spinach to add to the store bought lettuces for a crisp salad to take with us later in the evening. I then filled up the bean sprayer with a little miracle grow solution and gave everything a little bit of nourishment and especially the lettuces. So far they are looking good and we hope to start picking the leaves in the next day or so and shy away from the grocery lettuces. For some reason the sandy soil in Florida is great for growing this vegetable but most difficult here in this clay packed ground.
I noticed I will have green beans to pick in a couple days and the tomato plants are loaded with green fruit and the cabbage is starting to head up. This is another vegetable that does well in my Florida garden. The hot pepper plants are finally blooming and the herbs are still doing wonderful as I use some just about every day. The Zinnias are beautiful with multiple heads on each plant and some are over 2 feet in height. That's about al the garden news except for the watermelon is now baseball size and I have the vine growing on a trellis to save space. Nancy thinks the melon will drop off before it ripens and she is probably right but these are miniature melons, so we will see.
We had an awesome dinner at the Tracy's with bowtie pasta and such tasty goodies along with shrimp, spinach, tomato, broccoli and cheeses as the entrée and local grown green beans and a salad with some homemade biscuits and then a strawberry short cake with whipped cream and ice cream for dessert. Well afterwards we taught them the card game Spades and they picked it up rather quickly. It was a fun evening and where did the time go as 10 PM quickly came upon us. We made plans to visit the festival in town on Saturday and start with a lunch at JB's pizza place. We haven't had one of their pizzas yet this year and for a small place it has always been one of our favorites.
It wasn't long after a hot shower and a few minutes with Sandra Brown the writer that I was ready for some horizontal lab, LATER
