Winter Vegis and a Christmas present

The last time I actually walked into my garden was to pick the last head of Cheddar cauliflower and some broccoli. It was the first week of November and I noticed the brussel sprouts were not up to size and the white cauliflower was about 2 inches across and tightly wrapped in their green leaves. Guess I shouldn't have expected anything else. After all I had bought a variety that said "overwintering" as opposed to "fall harvesting".  Now I know what those tags meant. Unlike the cheddar cauliflower and the broccoli that had tags with fall harvest boldly printed on them my sprouts and the variety of cauliflower aren't suppose to mature until early spring. Today, (two months later) I went down to the garden to collect the potato tower frames and just have a look around to see how much of a mess I had. Surprise! I had beautiful white heads of cauliflower poking out of dark green leaves and the brussel sprouts are actually getting to be eating size. Next year I will plant more of those and stagger the plant dates a couple weeks apart so I can have fresh vegis over a longer period of time. I only planted 4 of these cauliflower as an experiment. If only I had known!

The Man has been building a closet for me in the bedroom which is what I had asked for as a gift for Christmas. A wonderful beautiful closet for Christmas that isn't in the steamy, icky, hated bathroom.  I hate that bathroom. It is small and ugly and only has a shower, toilet, and one sink in it. In addition the previous owners installed 12 inch floor tiles over the top of linoleum then painted the walls a god awful puce color. All I can figure out is that they had left over paint and mixed it all together and painted the walls. They also painted right over wall paper glue that once was sticking a border up along the ceiling. This bathroom is so ugly that I didn't even want to buy this house. I actually had to revisit this place about 4 times before I was convinced the rest of the house was worth it.  So once the clothes are out of the old closet and in the new I will start demolishing the bathroom. Now THAT will be fun. The new closet is almost done so I will be painting it soon. Little does The Man know that the reason I wanted the bedroom closet in the first place was so I could rip apart the bathroom and make it look bigger. Then we (meaning he) can start remodeling it. The remodel doesn't even have to start right away just as long as I get to rip that room a new one. I will live with exposed studs and plywood floor. Now I am  looking for a claw foot tub in really good condition. The people at the re-store already know me because I go in there every other day looking for a tub.

Now part of my last post was about mother nature and her fickle attitude. The weather has been decent here and I knocked on wood. So wouldn't you know even though it wasn't predicted I woke up the next morning to a light dusting of something that looked awfully similar to snow. It was probably hail but it sure did look like snow and to top it off it froze that night and my beautiful white cauliflower are a little frost bit on the edges. So just because I really love closing the barn door after the horse gets out, I went down the next evening and covered the rest of them with a light garden cloth. Didn't seem to hurt the taste of the cauliflower though. We had one with our New Years Eve dinner of Ham and potato pancakes and home made apple sauce. New years days I made the black eyed peas for good luck, home made sourdough bread and baked a rustic apple pie. (recipe for the pie is on previous post November 14, 2010) I love that pie.


 Happy New Year!.