Teresa & Mike CHS - Our journal

Mike CHS said:

He doesn't have a tool set of his own so we decided that would be a good birthday present for him.

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Very nice present! I hope he can keep on the good path. Having a career plan will help with that.

The pork shoulder was a pain in the rear today with the weather not helping. I thought I had a big enough window to get it mostly done before the heavy winds got here but I misjudged. I had the shoulders almost ready to foil but they hit a plateau just under the right temp and the thunder was going in the not to distant south. I went ahead and foiled the shoulders and brought them in to put in the oven. They wouldn't be getting any more smoke at that point so it didn't make sense to fight the rain to keep the smoker at the right temps. They turned out perfectly and once they cool a bit we will go ahead and pull them for tomorrow. There is a good 3/4" of smoke ring and it tastes divine.

That's a heck of a smoke ring - they look delicious!

That looks delicious!!!

Teresa made some low carb buns to take with us when we deliver the pulled pork for Jay's Birthday party and some breakfast muffins for later on. When I wrapped the shoulders in foil to finish cooking I added a mixture of apple juice and saved juices from the smoker and some of my rub and Worcestershire sauce. When the meat hit the right temp and all of the fat had cooked out of the meat, I poured all of the juice in a jar and put in the fridge so the fat would be congealed on top so I could remove it this morning. I poured the remaining juice on the meat that we pulled this morning to reheat. It is awesome tasting!

Good thing you cooked 2 so there would be some left for Jay's party

We got almost a flat of straight neck squash planted. We had 4 large plants left from the flat but we will give them to Jay's Grandma. Teresa worked up another raised bed and planted some zucchini, Butternut and Spaghetti Squash and weeded her Snow Pea bed. We should be getting our first Snow Peas in another week or so. The chickens were destroying my Bell Pepper plants but we had not seen them pulling the leaves off until today. I thought we were getting hit by grass hoppers but just not seeing them. We took some short chicken wire around that bed and the bed Teresa planted today. They are attached to step-in posts so it didn't take but a few minutes to set up the fence and we didn't want to stop them from free ranging.

Our biggest raised bed is going to be all Crimson Sweet Watermelons and Hale's Best Cantaloupe which will get planted tomorrow.

Our tomatoes already have some fruit on them so we need to get chicken wire around them fairly soon.

Some random garden pictures. The step in posts work great with the short chicken wire and hopefully they don't try to fly over it but we shall see. We were going to run electric netting around the garden but it would make maintaining a bit of a pain.

The cherry trees are covered in cherries. We don't use netting so I have to pick them as soon as they ripen or the birds will get them.

The peach trees are mostly full of fruit and for the first time we have plums, nectarines, apples and pears. This is also the first year we haven't had a late frost. The far bed is our Asparagus that has been giving us a couple of pounds a week for almost a month. We will probably stop picking before too long since we are getting burned out on it. The asparagus crowns in that bed are close to 10 years old that we had transplanted from our garden in South Carolina. Even then the crowns were huge and looked like some kind of space aliens.

You can't really tell it from the picture but the 2nd one is our bell peppers that the chickens did their best to kill. They weren't eating the vegetation, they were just pecking the leaves and taking big chunks out of them. They they would just drop them on the ground. Like I said before, the step in posts work great since you can hook the wire directly to them without needed any other means of securing them.

The last square bed will get chicken wire around it after I weed eat the grass around it and then kill the grass to make it easier to maintain.

It all looks great! I can't even imagine having so much asparagus. I've never had any luck growing asparagus...

Mike CHS said:

The far bed is our Asparagus that has been giving us a couple of pounds a week for almost a month.

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That is terrific production in a small space!

Do you use PT for the raised beds or just replace the untreated wood every 'X' years as it rots?