Sleep: up at about 7:30am, to sleep for night before at about 9pm (was sleepy) to sleep for night tonight at about 8pm (will get up at 3am tomorrow)
Food: breakfast: bananas lunch: bananas dinner: tahini-lemon-tomato juice dip for tomatoes, celery, cuke rounds
Exercise: before breakfast: ~ 18 minutes of barefoot running on treadmill, including warm-up/cool-down walking - ran about 1.1 miles this time (still training my skin for barefoot running) and it's going well! :) Only slight hint of possible blister forming, but didn't. I stopped before it got questionable 'cause I'd already gone farther than I had planned. Nice.
I also did 20 minutes of the almost bounce sort of thing on the rebounder after that. I watched the guinea pigs and rabbit the whole time walking, running, walking and bouncing. So cute! :)
before lunch: a little over an hour of beginner Ashtanga yoga with a Richard Freedman video I have: Introduction to Ashtanga, Complete Practice Session. It worked out well 'cause we didn't do any of the headstands and stuff that we're not supposed to do when menstrating. I figured that I could skip stretching out after the running and such since I was gonna' do the yoga later. That worked out well. :)
before dinner: I did the daily calestenics I've been trying to keep up with (but haven't done every day quite yet, just some days so far). I did all of 'em except the handstands 'cause that's inverted and since you're not supposed to do them in yoga I figure I could skip 'em a few days otherwise too, just in case. So I did 60 reps on the Leg Magic, 20 pushups (full), 5 chin-ups (assisting myself - getting closer on the first one to not needing assistance though - yay!), 20 jump lunges, 20 knee-ups, and 20 jump squats.
Detox: I had some chives the other night, think it was Friday - and had a little gas with chive smell... yep, that's part of what happens with 'em... also makes my underarms a little smelly at times too.
Female: didn't take my temperature today, day 2 of my cycle, green day, no kid icons
The Rest: We were going to take a break from the farm today 'cause it was raining & my hubby needed a break, so it was a good time since the rain would water things for us. But we couldn't stay away. LOL We ended up going to water things later in the day ('cause it had stopped raining in the late morning) and I transplanted about 50 or so tomato seedlings into larger pots. We'll be able to plant 'em out not too long from now. Gotta' get that bed ready...
It was a good thing we went out 'cause we also discovered that there was a pinhole leak in one of the radiator hoses and were able to get another hose for it while out. Sooo many things going on with our car for the last several months or so. It's not all that old either... oh well, this one's not too bad, except now that we're back home it's raining again & my poor hubby has to mess with it in the rain and dark 'cause I have to use it in the morning to go to my shift at the gym...
ANYway... yesterday I had such a surprise when I was watching the guinea pigs and rabbits all of a sudden a baby pops out of the tube they like to hang out in! No wonder it's mom has been so hungry lately. LOL We knew it might happen sometime but I've been away and didn't notice she was pregnant somehow. I've never let a companion animal have babies before - always had them spayed/neutered or only same sex or only one, etc. Was doing population control and all. I had trouble finding any guinea pigs for a few years though, and they're still hard to come by here, so I figure it's okay to let them have babies a bit... they are heard animals after all...
I love to look at them while I'm running on the treadmill when I run on the treadmill at the house. So it was extra special to do my barefoot run on the treadmill this morning while watching them AND the new baby just born yesterday! :) Soooo cute! :)
Guinea pigs and rabbits make great companions for 80-10-10 people IMO. They like to eat the same sorts of things, but often different parts (especially the guinea pigs). They are small and furry and cute. Bunnies are quiet and litter trainable, but need more room than guinea pigs. Guinea pigs are sometimes litter trainable, not quiet though. LOL Cute bizarre sounds though. Both guinea pigs and bunnies like to have cages and places to hide in their cages, so it's not like keeping a bird in a cage or anything. They feel more secure in there and are happier with a cage, as long as they have enough room to move around and get out for exploring every once in a while (with access to their cage if they get frightened while out that is).
When we are able to stay at the farm we're gonna' move the guinea pigs and rabbit there with us. We're gonna' have a big fenced in compound for them with the hutches (cages) all around the outside and then we can open up the doors to their hutches most of the day and let them come and go as they please. We'll only have about 1/4 of the compound accessible at a time though, so that we can let the grass, carrots and whatnot that I grow for them in there grow up and recover from their trompling and grazing. :)
I posted some pics of them on my "30 Bananas A Day" and "Give It To Me Raw" pages. I'll have two video's up in "Facebook" once the last one finishes uploading. It's about 3 minutes long and is taking quite some time uploading... hope it makes it before I need to go to sleep!
Here's the video with a picture at the end, so you don't have to look for 'em over there:
Here's the other picture I put up:
And here's the last one...
Has music 'cause all you could hear were the neighbors anyway on this one. Watch out - bunny comin' through! LOL I can leap 2 guinea pigs in one bound! :) Pesky fly! Leave 'em alone! It left after I finished the video...
Sleep: woke at 3am for temp., but didn't take it, up at ~7:45am to sleep for night at 10:30pm again... good thing I can sleep in again on Sunday - gotta' get to sleep earlier Sunday though 'cause there's no sleeping in on Monday...
Food: breakfast: 1 medium-large pineapple (no burn today, nice) lunch: small bag lychee (~20?), 4 smallish-medium dragon fruit before dinner/after run: 15 small-ish medium apple bananas dinner (1 1/2 hrs after bananas): shredded cabbage & carrots with tahini-lemon/lime dressing & 1/2 avocado
Yeah, a bit too much overt fats for 10% today, but I've been doing the overt fats light to none lately so it's okay I think - will find out Sunday I suppose...
Here's a video of lunch remnants and about dragonfruit I took at the farm. It might take a bit to load 'cause it's the limit of what size Blogger will take. I'll look into other video uploading options another time:
Exercise: Pedometer wasn't working quite right for part of the day - probably about 1/4-1/3 of the walking time I'd say... so I'm not quite sure how much regular walking I did. It says 5,548 steps, which is 2.189 miles, but I'd estimate it was more like 6,935-7,398 steps or 2.736-2.919 miles. Still, it's nowhere near as much as I walk when I work at the gym. I don't wear the pedometer when formally working out, so the other stuff is extra.
I was able to get back to my running schedule today, yay! :) My foot didn't hurt this time at all. Yay! Not exactly sure why it hurt the other day, but I'm not taking chances on getting hurt, listening to my body, and that day my foot didn't want me running. Good thing it was okay with me walking fast though. I held myself back to the scheduled increase, again, in order to take it easy. I've felt cardiovascularly like I could do 30 minutes or more straight through at the slower speed I'm running/jogging, but don't want to increase things too fast so my muscles, tendons, ligaments and such have time to adjust. But I couldn't help myself go a tad longer... I was supposed to do 25 minutes, but did 27 1/2 minutes instead. That way I can get to the 30 minute goal the next run, rather than taking two runs to get there.
I did a shorter warm-up walk too, but it felt right. Instead of the 3 miles I usually do in the process of warm-up, run & cool-down, I did a bit more: 3.36 miles instead, as I was almost to 3 miles when I was done with the run even though I'm still running slow in order to get to the 30-40 minutes solid running going solid. I walk at 3.5 - 4 mph for warm-up and cool-down, and run at 5.5 - 6.2 mph, mostly 5.5 right now. To run at an 8 minute mile pace I need to run at 7.4 mph-ish, so there's a bit to go in that department. All in due time, all in due time. ;) Oh, and I also do an extra cool-down of about 1/2 minute at 3mph, followed by ~ 1 min. @ 2mph & ~1 min. @ 1 mph, then off to ~ 1 min. easy bounch on the rebounder, just so that I don't get that trippy room rushing past me sensation when getting off the treadmill and walking. LOL I start rehydrating during the 3.5-4 mph walking cool-down and stick with it 'till after my shower or when I've taken in enough to weigh what I started. I follow the running sessions with some stretching, which lasts about 20-30 minutes. Then I'm off to the shower. Ahh... nice.
Hmm... I'm finishing this post on Sunday evening & I can't remember if I did other exercise or not... thought I'd remember for sure. Oh well. Gotta' write that stuff down.
Detox: The sty thing's going away, so I suppose things are evening out. Still sweating buckets when running, however it's also been super humid and muggy here lately so it makes sense.
Female: 3am temp: ?? degrees Fahrenheit - didn't take it again but I know it was 96.something degrees 'cause of the time of month it is, day 4 of my cycle, green day, no kid icons
The Rest: I'm starting to add videos in here and there as I can. Let me know what ya' think. :)
Went to a guy's place to check out some fencing that we were going to remove and take for free - on both sides. It was on Craig's list. We thought it'd be no problem with the heavy duty jack we usually use as a post puller, but our jack had been jacked (pun intended - yeah, stolen in other words) from our farm a while back. We went to the place we got it from only to discover that not only did they not have 'em anymore, but the employees there didn't remember ever having them. LOL It was a year at most that we got it. How soon they forget... guess we're not gonna' get that free fencing. Don't wanna' use the tractor for it & don't have anywhere else to get a heavy duty jack like that here either. Oh well.
I wanted to go there anyway 'cause we're running low on the timothy hay I give to the guinea pig(s & rabbit now too!) as food and they use it for bedding too. Yes, we live with 4 guinea pigs and a bunny now. :) They're all so cute! The feed store apparently stopped carrying timothy hay recently as well, saying they didn't have enough sales to keep carrying it. Darn. Part of living on a small island and all I suppose. I don't know of anywhere else on island to get bales of timothy hay & the guinea pigs shouldn't have alfalfa. Guess that's another thing we'll hafta' grow ourselves - sooner than later it seems. I wanted to grow it eventually, but looks like we may have to push that up a bit. They eat all fresh food otherwise, but it seems they need a bit of dry stuff too, thus the timothy. I think we'll change the approach to the hutches and not use it for bedding so much anymore. We'll make hay dispenser dealies to go on the wall and let them use the fresh stuff for bedding if they want. We plan to move 'em out to the farm sometime in the nearish future too anyway and when we do we're going to have a compound for them to go out and eat the stuff growing directly.
We're thinking of setting up a worm composting system below their hutches so that the droppings and such go directly in there, and not having things in there for bedding. The bunny will have a shelf to hang out on to get away from the guinea pigs and mesh flooring if she wants and the guinea pigs have tubes they can go in for those purposes as well (but would be getting away from the bunny if they want instead of the guinea pigs). We can have the hay feeder on the side of the hutches and put their veggies and fruit in trays that clip there too. The compound would be fenced in and have 4 sections. There'd be a sort of entry hall of sorts at the base of their hutches where there'd be 4 doors, one to each section of the compound. We'd let them out into one section at a time, letting the other 3 grow back from all the grazing. I could plant carrots and other root crops in there too for the bunny to dig up and eat. She loves to dig. :) There'd be enough space for them to go in and run and munch around and visit with us if they like. I could go in there and knit, crochet and/or spin cotton while they explore and eat. :)
We'd open up the hutches and the door to the current section of the compound and let them decide when or if to come out. We'd shepherd them back in before the day's over. We were thinking that the compound wouldn't need a roof 'cause they'd only be out in the daytime when we're there too, but I might end up having a shade cloth or some other sort of moveable roof in order to let them hang out there when I'm not in there too (but still in the area). I'm fairly certain a bird wouldn't swoop down to get them when I'm sitting there with them, but it might if I leave the compound to do other farmwork... I planned to have some things for them to play in and on in the compound too, so they'll also have them to hide in if necessary. I'll be able to clean out the cages without having to grab 'em and take 'em out of there this way too. Less cleaning needed if we do it all this way too, so it'll be nicer for all of us. There are so many things to do for the farm though, I'm not sure when we'll get all of this done.
While we were at the feed store we got a hay fork, so nice to have an actual hay fork that works. Yay! We've been using our digging fork like one 'cause all we could find elsewhere were forks with way too many tines for hay. Nothing like having the right tool for the right job. Moving hay is sooo much easier now. Ahh... a pleasure actually.
We also found some clips they use for horse stuff which look like solid brass and are the right size for the homemade custom exercise resistance bands we want to make. So we got 'em. Now we have everything we need we think, except for the guava wood. We'll go hiking to an overgrown guava forest and get some sometime soon, possibly Wednesday. We would have gone this weekend, but my hubby's trying to finish a grant proposal so we'll do it another time. I think I'm really, really gonna' like these resistance bands when we finish 'em. So nifty and pretty too! :)
We're still setting up things at the farm in order to plant things. We've planted some bananas already and a mammey sapote in the rich soil in the rotted out center of an albezia tree stump, but that's all that's in the ground right now. Well, we do have some pineapples in the mud by the stream, but that's not their final place, it's just like a nursery for them 'till we can plant them along the fence. Here's a short video of our pineapple nursery area. My hubby made a nifty stepping stone path down to the stream with rocks that came out of the gardening area:
And here's the mammey sapote and bananas we have planted so far:
There were really tall albezia trees along the stream that the owners had cut down after they got the land. They're beautiful trees, but they're also quite dangerous since they grow so fast and are sort of leggy in that way, tending to break off in the wind and/or just fall down at times. One fell over on a neighbor's property when we were there a while back. It sounded like a bunch of firecrackers going off. Huge tree trunk and tree, just broke off in the middle and fell down - just beyond the property beyond the tilled area you see in the video. Didn't look dead or rotting on the outside and it wasn't even windy that day. We used the leaves in the compost and are using the logs for various things here and there - like how my hubby made the edges and steps down to the banana patch you can see in the video. The stumps will sprout back, but that's good 'cause we can coppice them and use the nitrogen rich leaves as mulch and/or compost Permaculture-style. :)
We've been planting some seeds from fruit we eat in flats and pots in the meantime too. We're expecting the rock dust and shell and other organic amendments we ordered to arrive sometime in the next week or two, so we'll work them into the soil and then will be ready to start planting. Yay! We did soil testing and analysis in order to find out the condition of the soil, what it needs to get back to what it should be from where it's been. That's why we're waiting for the amendments, so we can make sure the soil has everything it should in order to give the plants every chance to have everything they should, so that we have every chance to get everything we need from them. :) We'll probably maintain the fertility primarily with compost after this initial amending, lots and lots of compost. :)
We've been getting sprout discards from some friends of mine who run a commercial sprouting operation not far from our farm. It makes terrific compost along with the grass clippings from the land - and our own compost from eating of course. We'll probably get compost from other people as well once we start doing markets again. Compost is definitely the health food for soil and we plan to give it plenty. :) We get the sprouts in trash cans and sometimes they make castles like sand castles at the beach when we dump 'em. Nifty! :) Here's what I mean:
It's so nice to be planting fruit seeds, knowing that we'll be able to grow and take care of them through their fruiting years. :) I'm also gonna' be able to finally plant cotton there too, once we get things going on the edibles. I've got seeds not only from locally grown organic white cotton, but also heirloom cotton varieties from the Mainland that yeild naturally colored cotton: brown, rust & green are the colors I have right now. So I'm soooo looking forward to planting, harvesting, and spinning them in order to make clothes and things truly from scratch, naturally and organically. :)
We've been quite entertained by our pool-pond which is an above ground pool that we're using for ag water storage. It's got fish and plants and is basically a pond in a pool. The water gravity feeds into it from the stream, we have a filter on the intake so we don't suck up any fish from the stream. We have another filter on the intake for the pump so we don't suck up any fish from the pool-pond to water the farm as well. There are two filters in-between there to filter water before it goes through the pump as well. We don't have to use the pump for lots of things down lower as they work gravity fed. We'll be using the pump to run the sprinklers for the veggies and such at certain times of the day though. We gathered fish, clams, prawn and plants from the stream, nearby pond and local rivers to put in our pool-pond to help keep it healthy.
We also got some fish and plants from the pet store and put 'em in there for biodiversity. We weren't sure at first if we were doing the pet store fish a disservice by putting them in a pond after they've probably lived their lives (possibly generations of them have lived their lives) in sheltered aquariums. We weren't sure if they'd be able to adjust to a more natural and wild-ish sort of life. Now we're sure we made the right choice as they've all taken to it very well. We don't see them all of the time as the pool-pond is deeper than we can see and there are all the plants and things in there as well, but when we do see them they look very happy, natural and well-fed. It's fun to watch all the fish we can see and other things in the pond at the end of the day with my hubby. :)
Dragonflies like the pool pond too. I've been trying to film them for a while now. Finally I caught one just sitting on the end of a water hyacinth stem, a pretty red one. I took a few videos of it, but don't have time to upload them now, maybe I'll upload it another time. It's getting late. Here's a picture of it for now. It's wings are down: There's so many other things to tell y'all about to catch up, but I don't have time right now to tell you it all, so we'll have to catch up more later.
They've been painting things at the gym so my plan to escape the vog there hasn't been working out very well yet. The vog hasn't been quite as bad when it's been here lately, but it has kept me from being as productive as I'd like -and busy catching up when it's gone. LOL
Technical issues with my Internet connection at the farm have limited my time online too... oh well. Life happens and keeps going, thank goodness! ;)
I've been eating bananas for most of my daytime meals and things from our farm for dinners. I've been making cucumber noodles and various sauces with tomatoes and such as well as lots and lots of salads. Yum! The cucumbers are about pau (Hawaiian for done) and the next ones will not be ready for about a month, so will probably start having gazpacho or something. Mango season is starting up. Yay! Since we've still got some tomatoes going I might start doing some stuff with them together. Lennie made a great mango-tomato soup in Costa Rica that I just might try here too this time. Or maybe not... it's hard to not just eat the mangos straight instead, heh. The tomatoes are terrific straight too and I just forage on them for before dinner meals fairly often when I'm there. Nice. :)
We're looking for additional land to farm on and have several leads that we're exploring here and there as we can. Hopefully we'll find something long term enough that we can grow a variety of fruit trees, would be nice if it's either close to home or close to our current farm too. :)
For exercise it's been farming when the vog's not a problem, and the gym when the paint's not a problem, and light almost-bounce rebounding with my eyes closed during vog (so I don't breath in the vog too much and to protect my eyes from that burning), and pushups, etc. at night or when there's no vog as I can. Luckily the asthma I used to have still hasn't come back even with the vog, but then I've been careful 'cause of my eyes and haven't been exerting myself in the vog much if at all...
We're getting closer to finishing the new site for FoodnSport, so the switch-over will probably happen in June. Yay!
I've also been adding things to the products area on this site as I can for y'all. I wanted to start with the body care products 'cause I get so many questions about that but I couldn't find the products I use when I went to do it. I had found them in the past and made a file of where they are, but can't find that either. Doi. So I did a little in the camping area for now. I'm gonna' give the body care area a try again next time - have some ideas of how to find 'em better or maybe where the file is archived with their info.
I also need to fix up this blog so that when you read older blogs it doesn't tweak as much on the formatting. Sorry about that. I'll work on that soon too.
Oh, and my books... yeah. They're temporarily on hold, but I'm gonna' start back on them and just finish them this time. Part of the problem has been that I get close to finishing them, just need to format and edit, then I need to attend to other things, and then when I come back to it I want to change the approach and need to re-do it. LOL Not gonna' change my mind this time so I get them done and out to y'all. Some of you have been sooo patient, poor things. I'll get them done and if I want to do a different approach later, it will be a different book instead.
The videos are on hold too 'cause my hubby's the filmmaker and is quite busy with the farm for now. We may get someone else to take over to finish them too, but haven't focused on that since all the family emergencies we had not too long ago. I might do some simple single meal videos for download on here myself if we can get the camera set up in our kitchen well enough for me to do it on my own. It'd not be the same quality as what my hubby'd do, but the content would be there for sharing which is really what it's about, right?
I haven't had a chance to get back to spinning the cotton I'd picked or knitting the dress I'm designing... yet. I've been thinking of them more and more though so perhaps I'll be able to figure out a way to fit them in somewhere somehow soon. I wonder if I can spin cotton with my eyes closed during vog days I don't have access to air conditioning? Hmmm....
My guinea pig is one lucky pig indeedy. She gets gourmet baby lettuce, cucumbers and such from our garden daily in addition to the grasses and such I'd been giving her.
K, gotta' go and get back to catching up with everything. The vog's been here the last couple days or so and is just lightening up so I'm gonna' try to make it to the farmer's market in order to help my hubby. I've got a staff meeting at the gym later, and if it's over before dark I will transplant some of the edible flowers into our personal use beds from the flats I started a while ago... and other farm stuff. :)
Sleep: woke at 3am for temp., again at 5am and decided not to go in that early, again at 5:30am when hubby decided to get up and go in to the farm to get the harvest started, I decided to go in later on the bus... up at 7:30am to get ready to go in on the 8:30 bus
Food Summary: Coming Soon!
Exercise Summary: Coming Soon!
Detox: Coming Soon!
Female: 3am temp: 96.58 degrees Fahrenheit, day 13 of my cycle, red day, girl kid icon
General Things/AKA The Rest: I think I'll put what happens in general here and the specifics in their own areas... so here 'goes! :)
~8:40am did short errand at the store then walked over to farm from the bus stop changed clothes and started helping with harvest
~noon finished harvest in the field, then helped with washing, bagging, loading truck and such for market
~1pm left for market, doing errands first We needed to return the shade structure we got last week 'cause it turned out to be too big for markets and was too hard to put up. We're supposed to have 10' of space, so we got a 10'x10' thing but it turned out to be more like 8.5' so we decided to just get an umbrella after all. We'd thought it'd be too flimsy in the wind, and then saw wooden ones that seemed more sturdy. So we returned the shade thing and got a wooden umbrella for shade - just before market. It was a bit rushed 'cause we wanted to get to market by 2pm and had to go pay bills as well. We also had to get some more bags to put the salad mixes in 'cause our tomato harvest was much larger than expected and we used them up.
We did some time saving tricks where I'd drop my hubby off and he'd look for the umbrella while I went to pay the electric bill and then I called him to find out if they had it when pulling into the parking lot. He told me what colors they had and we decided over the phone and he put it in the cart and we met at the cash register. While I waited in line to pay he went and got the car and had it right outside that door to load it up and go. On our last stop before market, we were about a half hour later than we wanted to be (but still early enough for market). It was funny to me to see my hubby running through the store to get the bags and back to the register to buy them. I had dropped him at the entrance and then found a parking spot where I could see inside enough to start up the truck again and pick him up as he came out. It worked though, we got everything done and got to market with enough time to set up.
We hadn't bagged the salad mixes yet 'cause we didn't have enough bags or time so we'd wanted to be there at 2 so that we could do it before market (which starts at 3). We didn't have enough time to bag it all before market, but we had enough so that we had some on the table in time. Market started up slowly today for some reason, which was perfect for us to catch up. Yay! We could both bag and then when people were buying, etc. one of us would bag while the other helped them and all. It picked up later and ended up being an average market overall. The umbrella worked great too! It has a 6' span and shaded our whole table well. There wasn't much wind today, which was also good for us 'cause we hadn't quite figured out how we were going to secure it for wind yet. We did a little bit of securing and that was enough for today. We'll have to figure out something better for the next market though 'cause it's more windy over there usually...
~4:30 or 5pm we left market and went home, picked up a hitchhiker on the way that we knew, he's actually an old friend of someone I know from the VegSource raw & sports nutrition board and the FoodnSport Health and Fitness Camp. Kinda' cool huh? Small world.
~5:30pm we got home and unloaded the truck from market. I had picked up my regular order of "cooking" bananas and "lady finger" bananas and some cocos. I used to have a regular $10 order of young coconuts but the guy I get them from is getting older and the trees are getting taller so he can't get them regularly anymore. I check in with him at market in case one of his sons has come over to help him and get what he has, if any.
Talk about small worlds... the guy I've been getting the bananas from for years now told me at the last market we did that his farm is actually quite near ours. What a coincidence! It turned out to be serendipitous too. We had some discussions about what we're growing, what he's growing there, etc. and where we are. Today he said that we could get baby apple banana shoots and sugar cane from him to plant over at our place if we wanted. I had mentioned that we wanted to plant them as a wind break but were having a hard time finding any that were on that side of the island. There's a virus that affects bananas here called "bunchy top" - it's spread by aphids I believe.
In attempts to stop the spread of it, people aren't allowed to bring banana plants or plant parts (except the fruits) between the North Shore and South Shore, basically. There's a spot on the highway that defines the line they cannot cross. All of the places we know of to get banana keiki (keiki means baby or child in Hawaiian and is the common name used for banana shoots) are on the North Shore or East Side, both of which are on the other side of the do not cross line from our farm. So it's exciting that we might be able to get banana keiki from him for our farm. He's had trouble with the bunchy top too but said that the tall apple banana type hasn't had trouble with it like the other types he's growing there. Cool! That's the kind my hubby likes, practically the only kind he'll eat, actually. Nice. Hope he doesn't charge too much for them...
Let's see what else did I get at market... I got some onion chives from a farmer a couple of spots down from us. It's hard to find that kind of chive here for some reason. Garlic chives grow here abundantly and easily so I guess a lot of people don't bother trying to grow the onion ones. I don't like the garlic ones though. Too bad 'cause they're pretty and would make a nice border to an edible flower patch or something. I try not to eat chives and herbs much 'cause they make me have B.O. and bad breath - well at least I notice it, I don't think anyone else notices much. I like the way I smell the most when I skip all herbs and spices, but I do like the taste of chives every once in a while, so... I got some. (I've planted some at the farm in flats to put in the personal area too).
I also got some grapefruits and lemons. I was looking for oranges, but couldn't find any. I guess the season's pau (Hawaiian for over) for now. I didn't go looking until we'd gotten enough bagged though, but it didn't look like anyone who usually has them had empty containers they usually have them in, so I think they didn't have any from the start. Bummer I was really getting into the OJ, so was my hubby. Good thing we got the grapefruits though.
My hubby got some apple bananas for himself at market too. Oh, and I got 2 bags of garbanzo sprouts from some friends who grow them. I have helped them problem solve some of their sprout things 'cause I used to do organic ones commercially back when we were farmers before - about 11 years ago. I had brought them a bag of tomatoes as a present at the end of market and they gave me the garbanzos 'cause that's the kind I like the most. I eat them occasionally as they gift them to me. They're another thing I try not to eat much of 'cause they can give me gas. Sometimes I don't get the gas when I eat them apart from other things, so that's how I eat them. I often eat them right away 'cause I haven't had a cooler in the past, but since we're selling our salad at market now we have a cooler so I took them home and put them in the fridge for tomorrow or the next day. I was eating a small bag of rambutan that I got. It was quite expensive, but they were excellent rambutans and it's the very beginning of the season - they're the first of the season to actually be ripe actually, so I splurged... they were yummy and worth it to me! :)
~6pm I gave my guinea pig some of the extra lettuce from market and the carrot tops I get from some organic farmers I know at market and noticed that most of the mountain apple tree's flower buds were blossoming. So pretty! It's soooo loaded with flowers too - hope they end up being fruit. I love that fruit!!! And that tree makes the best ones I've ever had too! It's sort of rare for us to be home when it's still light these days so I took the opportunity to look at the rest of the fruit growing in our yard. The two apple banana stalks are still ripening and not ready for harvest. There were some papayas that could be harvested and my hubby came out and got them while I went to see if any of the yellow lilikoi (passion fruit) that was growing on our avocado tree had ripened and dropped yet. Nope. Not yet. The avocados are getting larger, but are still tiny.
I was able to forage a nice snack of Surinam cherries from our bush of them on the way to check on the lemon tree, which is having a slight gap in ripe fruits. It's such an amazing tree. It's a Meyer lemon, which makes some really large, juicy and sweet-for-a-lemon fruits.. and has been doing so almost non-stop since it started fruiting. It deserves a bit of a break. There are lots of green ones on there and one close to ripening, and that's a break for it. I want to put some of our primo compost from our compost pile under both the mountain apple tree and the lemon tree for sure when I get a chance. If there's enough and enough time I'll do the avocado tree too. We've been using the compost to help plant things at the farm, and trying to move our composting to over there so I'm not sure if there's enough right now for all those trees. The Jamacian lilikoi has a few flowers, but isn't fruiting yet either.
So after that yummy cherry snack I went in and prepared my dinner. My hubby had made his dinner too and started watching the movie "Remember the Titans" which we watched together when eating. It was a good movie, we hadn't seen it yet. It was live TV so when I was done eating I took out my laptop and started to do computer stuff during the commercials. One of the things I'd discovered in the computer stuff I was doing is that guinea pigs eat tomatoes. I thought they didn't so had never tried them out with my pigs. I excitedly got one of our sweet tomatoes and decided to do an experiment with my guinea pig. LOL I like to refer to finding out if my guinea pig likes something or not an experiment.. little joke, yeah a bit 'off', but then my humor can be that way sometimes, heh. It was dark by then so I took my flashlight to see what she thought of it. My hubby came too and the dog was interested to see what was going on as well so came along.
LOL I don't think it was a very scientific experiment 'cause this guinea pig hasn't had a flashlight pointed down into her hutch before and seemed distracted by it. So funny. Also, the three of us (hubby, dog and I) standing outside her hutch to see what would happen probably threw her off too. I do have to admit that I bet our dog was probably wanting to find out if we were finally gonna' eat the guinea pig rather than if she'd eat the tomato. LOL She didn't eat it, but did seem interested in smelling it at first. She sort of acted like when I put orange or other citrus in there. She stiffs them and walks away from them, won't eat them at first, but eats them all up when I'm not looking. It's an acid fruit too, so perhaps there's something about it in that way. I guess I'll have to wait 'till tomorrow to find out if she liked it or not.
I started blogging after a while too. After the movie ended my hubby went to do some computer stuff himself and I'm finishing the blog and going to sleep. I've gotta' get up at 3 again tomorrow... That takes us to now, and it's 10pm so I'm gonna' skip the rest of this 'till tomorrow. I will come back and fill in the summaries tomorrow or the next day when I have a chance.
