Egg Bites and Farm Stuff

I thought I loved egg bites when I got them at Starbucks, but I love mine even more. I did two batches yesterday, one with bacon and cheddar and one with pesto and parmesan:

(I ate one before I remembered to take a picture.)

I need more molds. I have an 8-quart IP, so I am pretty sure I can get three layers of molds in it at one time. These will be great to have in the fridge, especially on the weekends. I get up so much earlier than the husband that I either end up cooking breakfast twice or I default to string cheese and tortilla chips (I know) with my coffee. Now I can have a healthy breakfast right off the bat.

The husband was home yesterday, so when I finished messing around making egg bites, he helped me get the recycled billboard tarps put out in the garden.

I ordered these from BillboardTarps.com. Unfortunately, they have been sold out of most of the sizes for the past month. I thought that 20’ x 60’ would be perfect for the strawberry bed—and the husband confirmed that—but I ended up having to get two 14’ x 48’ tarps instead. Also, the freight is not cheap, so it’s better to order as many as possible at one time.

That whole strawberry bed needs to be redone. If the husband tills it, the weeds will just pop up again. These tarps are thick and heavy and nothing is going to survive underneath them. They won’t blow around in the wind, either. When the 20’ x 60’ tarps are back in stock, I’ll order one and we’ll move these two to a different part of the garden for the winter. These will be used solely for killing weeds. I’ll keep the lighter black plastic for planting because it already has holes cut into it.

I mowed the grass edgings in the garden one last time and then plunged into the tomato forest. It is so thick in there that I had to put some effort into finding tomatoes. Some of them were hiding in the middle of the tomato cages. I found the first Dirty Girl:

This is the open-pollinated version of Early Girl, a popular variety around here. Monsanto held the patent on Early Girl, though, so I refused to grow them. (I think that has since expired.) Susan got Dirty Girl seeds from California last spring and shared them with several of us in the neighborhood. Only one of my seeds germinated, but the plant is big and gorgeous. We are going to save seeds from our plants and share them around again next spring.

I’ve also got Cherokee Purple, Oregon Star (paste), and Indian Stripe tomatoes. I grow Cherokee Purples every year, but this year, they are really outdoing themselves. I picked a dozen yesterday that were bigger than the palm of my hand. The Oregon Star tomatoes aren’t far behind—I’ve already picked a few of those, too. Everything is getting washed and thrown into gallon zip bags and put in the freezer until I have time to make sauce in November. We are able to keep our tomatoes going until the end of September—even though we usually get a frost by the middle of the month—because we cover them with old concrete blankets when frost is in the forecast.

The husband picked the first watermelon:

I am awful at determining when they are ripe and usually get them too early. I grow them, but he’s in charge of harvesting. This one looks like it could have used a few more days but it was actually really sweet. I had a few bites. I am not a big fruit eater, though. He eats most of the melons and cantaloupes.

And, as promised, a pig picture:

This is an interesting group of pigs. The husband says I have forgotten what pigs are like because we didn’t raise any last year, but I wonder if it’s because these are a different breed than what we usually get. These are Landrace/Duroc and York/Duroc crosses. We’ve always done Duroc/Berkshire crosses in the past. I am happy to see that they have all evened out in terms of size. As piglets, a couple of them were significantly bigger than the others.

I think it’s hilarious that they plow up the pasture and selectively leave the mullein plants standing. I can’t tell if they don’t like the taste or what.