Rain Rain Go AWAY, dammit!

We had ANOTHER 4 inches of rain last night. This is a total of around 12 inches in the past month. The potatoes we have in the lower part of the field aren’t coming up, and at this point I really don’t expect them to, I’m sure they’ve rotted. So. Well. At least the rest seem to be ok, but we still have 200lb to plant. Please check out other gardening-related news in my new gardening blog.

I also will be talking about this in my garden blog, but I went to an event this weekend and Hundredfold Farm in Cashtown, PA. It was really nice, I met Angie at my parent’s house in Gettysburg, then we drove over together. The event was fairly well attended, had house tours, a greenhouse/wastewater plant tour, and many vendors and speakers.

Hundredfold Farm refers to itself as an ‘Intentional Community.’ There was a Christmas tree farm for sale and a group of people bought it out from under a housing developer. They are keeping the Christmas tree farm going, while building sustainable housing (limit of 14 houses) on part of the property. The houses are modular (NOT mobile; one of the young men on my tour was really snotty and referred to it as a ‘glorified mobile home’ and the homeowner icily set him straight), they have solar arrays on the south-facing part of the roof, and all the wastewater from the houses goes to a greenhouse system where it gets broken down by an artificial marsh into usable water, which they then reuse to flush their toilets and they hope in the future to use it for irrigation as well.

I went to three speakers:

The first one was a Penn State professor who talked about the need for solar power, the state of the energy crisis we’re in the beginning of, and was very interesting. He made a good point: as much as we’re complaining about gas prices, we’ve been spoiled by cheap energy for way WAY too long, and he said that the majority of the country would find 30 miles of driving to be worth $6 (as opposed to the alternative, which is not going wherever it is you want/need to go). I also had a great time watching a 4-year-old playing in a mud bog.

The second speaker I went to was Thom Marti from Broad Valley Orchard, a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm north of Gettysburg. He talked on Food Security, which working where I do I immediately thought he was going to talk about the security of our massive food supply. But no, he talked about the security of our micro food supply, as in do you know where your lettuce comes from and how it’s grown? I will talk more about this in my garden blog; he was veeeery interesting.

The third speaker was my coworker’s husband Jim talking about electricity conservation. This was basic stuff I’ve heard before: turn off lights, buy EnergyStar appliances, etc.

My coworker also went to the Sustainable Eating workshop, which I wanted to go to but went to the last house/greenhouse tour of the day instead. I’ll probably get the Sustainable Eating scoop and write about it in the garden blog later. Stay tuned.

Angie and I went to dinner at the Appalachian Brewing Company in Gettysburg. We each had a nice beer (her: Stout, me: Maibock), and some good food. We gabbed a lot, tried to solve the world’s problems, talked about parents, and had a nice time.

I went home and tried to crash but wound up only getting 4 hours sleep.

And on to the Busiest Day of My Life So Far…ok, not really but it was the busiest day I’ve had recently...Mother’s Day.

I got up early (thanks a lot, Max) and drove over to New Oxford to visit Matt’s grandma Mary V. She’d ordered some tomato plants through me and I needed to drop them off. We visited, she’d made coffee cake (of course) and I had that with her wonderful coffee. She makes the best coffee on earth. Matt’s uncle Bobby came by with his two golden retrievers. Bobby is in the middle of a quiet divorce, so he was very scattered.

After a couple hours there, I drove back to Gettysburg to pick up my mom for our annual trip to Isabella’s in Frederick. We just barely made our reservations and had a nice lunch. They’ve taken a few things off the menu and added some new dishes (ATTENTION TIM!!!). The old standby’s we had were marinated eggplant salad, sautéed spinach with pine nuts and golden raisins, melon with prosciutto, French fried asparagus, (I’m starting to drool just writing this), meatballs in tomato sauce. New dishes included a really spicy shrimp with garlic and onions, and my personal new favorite stuffed dates wrapped in bacon then breaded with Panko bread crumbs and fried served with a goat cheese cream sauce. OMFG, they were really good. I think we had a couple others, but I can’t remember right now.

We drove back to my house so I could show mom the veggie garden and pick up Max, then headed back to Gettysburg. Mom did her online registration for our August cruise, Max and I went grocery shopping, then….finally….home. Matt called, I watched TV and had a baked potato for dinner, followed by some vanilla ice cream and a homemade strawberry-rhubarb sauce and a Tylenol PM. I had a good nights sleep last night, much needed.