Showing posts with label Offset Smoker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Offset Smoker. Show all posts

Saturday, November 4, 2023

Busy Lately Outside

It is the end of the outside gardening season.   We had hard freezes 2 night in a row.  I covered the tomato plants because the next 10 nights are forecast to stay above freezing and I was hoping to get a few more tomatoes to ripen.

But they all died.  Well, tomatoes are actually tropical vines.  So I picked all the green ones.  There are some recipes for using them.  Fried in batter is routine, but I saw one for Tomato Parmesan and will try that too.

The Coleus and Mum pots were safely in the house, so they can go back outside for another week.  I will be bringing them and all the salad trays indoors after that to limp them through Winter.  Any color inside and any salad cuttings are good.

I disassembled the tomato bed today.  Not the simplest thing.  Pull out thge cage support stakes, remove the cages, take up all the labels, pull the plants, pull up the black landscaping fabric that kept the weeds smothered.  The fabric is all trash.  It seems to fall apart in 6 months.  

But at least the grassy weeds are all dead this year.  I'll be planting most of the Pansies there next week (a few will go around the mailbox and some in the deck pots this year).  

Did some serious compost bin work the past week (there are 2 bins).  

I bought a self-propelled battery Ryobi mower a few years ago and it is wonderful.  I have it set for mulching, and I can still use the bagger attachment (easy to attach and remove).  I shredded/mowed leaves all over the yard.  

Filled the empty bin 6" deep.  Then filled 4 trash barrels and 2 trash bags with leaves for future use.  There are more leaves in the trees, but I will shred them in place on the lawn as free fertilizer for both grass and trees.

I had too much green stuff for proper composting, so the leaves were nice to add.  Yesterday, I started turning the existing greenish pile into the other bin and mixed it with more shredded leaves 6" at a shot (the layers compress).  Found I had some good worms in the existing pile.

I got half of the old piled moved but it gets tiresome.  So the rest will get moved tomorrow.  Between the existing green stuff (kitchen scraps) and the newly shredded browns (leaves) and watered a bit, the new pile should finally heat up nicely.

I overseeded the lawn a week ago.  The shredded leaves won't bother them when I do that next week.  They will have either germinated or not and they can grow up between the leaf-shreds without difficulty.

Blew all the leaves off the deck.  They don't bother me any, but the cats dislike walking on dry crunchy leaves.  It offends their sense of stealth.  I indulge The Mews.  And the leaves don't do any positive good sitting on the deck.

Put a marinated chicken on the smoker.  Not exactly my old model (fancier shelves), but close enough.

[VERKAUFT] Smoker aus USA: Brinkmann Pitmaster Deluxe | Grillforum und ...

I can never quite get it to fully-cooked in the smoker, but I've read that all the smokey flavor gets in after 2 hours, so I just finish them in the oven.  Sometimes I brush half with BBQ sauce for variety.  I pulled off a whole leg for dinner (with veggies).  It was delicious!

More to do the next few days...

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Even More Stuff

Well, as long as I'm in painting mode, why not paint the rusting BBQ smoker?   I had a can of Rustoleum high temperature black.  So I opened it and went to stir it up.

Bad!  It was like tar.  I ruined a shirt and jeans from the splashes.  The stuff CANNOT be cleaned off

Off to the DIY store...

Back with new stuff (and shaken in their machine) I went about painting the smoker.  Its not like a good paint job inside the house, but will serve.

And since I was trying to improve the smoker (I had cleaned it thoroughly of all grease and ashes), I thought why keep doing that?  Why not put some pans under the cooking rack to catch the fats that could be removed and cleaned separately?

Ahh, my friends, the world is designed to not provide pans that fit.  Every pan I could find was just too narrow or long or deep.  Well, "almost".  You know those cheap roasting pans that come with the oven?  They fit perfectly.

OK. so then I needed new roasting pans.  Those pans that come with the oven?  They don't sell them anywhere I can find.

Darn, now I need to buy fancy ones for actual oven use...

Saturday, September 12, 2015

Good and Bad Day

Discovered I could transact business with my far away credit union through a different local one.  They call it Credit-Union-Sharing (real original, right?).  But it beats driving an hour and back.

Picked 22 ripe cherry tomatoes and 3 large heirloom tomatoes in the garden. YUM!

Raked 10 piles of rocks out of the new leveled backyard.  Not sure what I will DO with the rocks yet.  But they have to go before I can plant anything there.  And I have a cool tool for raking rocks.  Get ready for the name - Rock Raker!  Maybe "Stoned Today, Gone Tomorrow"?


Actually, it works.  The front tines are curved slightly backwards, so it catches rocks and lets soil slide through.  I suspect some clam-digger adapted it to New England farming.

Fired up the charcoal offset smoker.  Cooked pork ribs and chicken.  The ribs are delicious; I'll have some chicken tomorrow.  And I have enough leftovers for 10 more meals.  Those hickory chunks make great smoke and flavor.

Watered the flowerbeds.  We aren't technically in a drought, but the recently-removed ridge soil was dry as dust 4' down and that's not good.  We we forecast "heavy rain" Thursday/Friday, but I got less than 1/4".  That doesn't even register on plants.  In fact, it's bad for them.  It encourages the roots upwards, where they dry out faster.

So I try to water deeply once a week.  We aren't low on water supply here (for the hoses), just not much rain  and lots of plants transpiring it from the soil even deep down.  Its the lack of water deep in the soil that worries me.

Watering is easy.  I have this thing I built...
 I bought 2 plants that I want more of.  One is a Knock-Off Rose and the other is a dwarf butterfly bush.  I hate buying plants that cost $25 in a 3" pot!  But I know how to take cuttings and root them.  So each of those plants will be 5 plants at least next Spring.

Call me cheap, but its the fun of doing the rootings I like...

And the cats are loving being outside.  Marley misses his mousies (destroyed when the ridge was leveled) but he accepts my promise that the new plantings will probably bring even more mousies around and he will have more hiding places.

I better deliver on that promise...

Looking Up

 While I was outside with The Mews, I laid back and looked up.  I thought the tree branches and the clouds were kind of nice. Nothing import...