All in a days work - Blue Moon, Black Friday (NSFW!!!!!)

This is a not safe for work or kids blog post!

Today is "Black Friday, that crazy, turkey fueled, shopping extravaganza! I live across the street from a mall and several big box stores. We saw people lining up for a few days before the holiday, for the good deals.

I went in service, this morning, at around 5:45 A.M. As soon as I turn on my radio, I heard a call come out at the mall, involving two males running through the line, hitting the waiting shoppers.

I was on scene in seconds, and I saw people pointing to a large white truck pulling away. I did a traffic stop on the truck and this is what I saw after the driver and passenger exited the truck.

I call this photo "Blue Moon, Black Friday". 

Two young guys thought it would be funny to wear only thong underwear and run through the crowd. The joke was on them though, this morning was very cold for Florida. It was 39 degrees, which when you are used to temps of 95+, IT IS COLD! They had to wait while we spoke to everyone who got hit, if the wanted to press charges for unwanted touching (battery). No one did but we still had to ask. They were freezing.

All in a days work - Tourists!

How can you tell if some one lives in Florida or is just a tourist? A tourist will call the police about a massive gator in the ditch by their vacation rental.

I go out and see this little guy. He is maybe 3 feet long. I wish I had a picture of the guy from New York's face when I told him, we won't call a trapper or move a gator this small. Priceless!

The gator is where he is supposed to be, he is not in a yard or shopping center so he gets to stay! I think he is super cute!

The Worm Bin

After reading more about gardening and how it went hand in hand with recycling, I decided to try vermicompost. That's composting using kitchen waste, newspapers, paper towels, cardboard etc with the help of red wiggler worms also known as the Eisenia fetida.

I saw this great video about how to build a warm bin. You can buy already made bins but the cheapest I have seen is around $99.00 and "Super Hubby"built one like in the video for under $25.00. It took me about an hour to construct the bin. Then I set out looking for a place with-in driving distance for the red wigglers. You need this type because they can eat about one half of their weight in food per day. Earthworms and cold bait worms won't do that.

I found a place called Best Buy Worms, which strangely enough was located less then a mile from my Grandparent's place, in Masaryktown, Florida. It's a working farm, you can visit with an appointment but they also do mail order worms too. I bought a pound of worms for $12.50

So, last April, I put the worms in the bin and have been feeding them coffee grounds, egg shells, left over veggies, just about anything except no meat, oils or dairy. It reduced the garbage that I have to put out for landfill to take and my four year old loves to help feed the worms.

It's been almost a year and soon, I will separate the worms from the compost and start over, using the compost in my garden beds. I will be sure to post pictures because I have no doubt it will be messy!

As a Pagan, projects like this one make me happy.

The Gardening Bug Bites Hard!

After my Granddad died, I still had my two tomato plants. I added some green peppers, cucumbers, lettuce, pumpkins, water melon and potatoes! I was hooked. I read everything I could get my hands on, like Vegetable Gardening In Florida and watched gardening videos on YouTube. Check out The Produce Garden. Here are my two tomato plants on June 11th.

I really had no idea what I was doing. I tried to plant things that we like to eat and some that were fun too. I planted the potatoes in  buckets after seeing a great video on YouTube doing it. They grew and I covered them, and they grew some more and I covered them until they looked like this.

I learned that you had to wait for the green tops to die then you could pour out the buckets and get the potatoes. Thanks Brian! I grew lettuce, not having any idea that it is a cool weather crop and we were just at the start of a Florida summer. So lesson learned. I planted the pumpkin too late, it flowered and then died. Has some success with the watermelon.

By now, I had run out of room with the two planters I had from The Garden Patch so I got my "Super Hubby" to build me four wood garden beds, that we lined up by the fence in the back yard.

This is where I had the watermelon growing, three to be exact until my lovable, slightly less then intelligent puppy dog, Bailey, decided they looked fun to play with and snatched them off the vine! Again, lesson learned. This year, we will build a fence or raise the beds off the ground.

All in a days work - Hog Wild!

I get to see and do, all sorts of strange and interesting things while at work. So, I thought I would do a re-occurring post about some of those things.

Today at work was like every other day, it's all the same, until it's not the same. I work for a city of about 100,000 people, we have urban areas but we also have a lot of undeveloped land. This can cause some fun moments for us at work, because of animals.

We received a call that a feral hog was loose in a backyard. This is disturbing. We have a pig problem! There are an estimated 500,000 wild pigs loose in the Florida woods, they can grow up to 200 lbs, they eat anything and everything and the males can become very aggressive.

Several officers and myself went to the residence, quietly approached the backyard and spend an hour trying to wrangle this fearsome beast!

I don't know if this little piggy was super fast or we were laughing to hard to catch him but we finally did. Several people in the neighborhood came out to watch us look very silly. I saw lots of phones so I am sure there is a Youtube video somewhere! :-)

I put Mr. Piggy in my patrol car and brought him deeper into the woods away from the houses. I thanked him for the fun and that I was happy to have met him.  Hope he stays safe and away from people.

Why I Garden...

My Grandfather was an amazing man and an even better gardener. As a child, I would go to his home and help feed his horses and work in his veggie patch. We lived in New England but I felt like I was in a tropics. Tomato plants that were as tall as the sunflowers, created a perfect jungle to play in.

He made his own compost and fertilizer, using scraps from his restaurant and other "scraps"( i.e. manure) from his horses. He would put it all in a big bucket, add water, seal it up, and place it in the sun and make what he called "Spring Tea". Sounds disgusting, doesn't it? It was magic, cucumbers over a foot long, eggplant that weighed in at four pounds, it truly was amazing.

Fast forward 20 or so years, and I found myself living in Florida about 3 hours from where my Granddad had retired too. I would drive over every month or so to see him and enjoy his fantastic cooking. He was getting older but he still gardened and now in Florida he had fruit trees too. I would ask him over and over all the things he did to make his plants grow. I suffered from an extremely black thumb. I could not even keep houseplants alive.

 Last February, my Granddad told me he had cancer and it was terminal. The doctors could not tell him how long he had, so he left the hospital and went home. I began spending every day off I had with him. My youngest son, was three at the time and I wanted him to have memories of his great granddad, like I had from my childhood. They would get on the tractor and just drive around the yard, pick oranges off the trees in the back and sometimes just walk hand in hand.

Soon, he began showing signs of his illness and our visits focused more on indoor activities. I knew he missed being outside and growing things so I vowed I would grow a damn tomato plant if I had to sleep outside and watch it every minute!

I had managed to keep a houseplant, a golden pathos, alive for almost two years with my Granddad's advice so now I was going to venture out into my back yard and grow him some tomatoes.

I encounter my first hurdle almost right away. As I dug up some grass in my yard, I found sand. Interesting, So, I did what all nerds do, I went to the internet and began researching container gardening. This seemed to be the perfect plan as I needed to be with my Granddad on my days off. I found a nice one that is sold by The Garden Patch. It was self watering, which was great because I work twelve hour days, have three kids and have a 6 hour round trip car ride, three times a week to Granddad's place. I waited for it to come and when it did, I had it put together in minutes. I bought two tomato plants at Lowe's. Don't ask me what kind, just what was there on the shelf. I planted them and waited.

By March, I had several flowers but no fruit. Second hurdle. Back to the internet, ok, my problem was no bees. Being highly allergic to bees, this presented a problem. I found that certain flowers put near my tomatoes would bring in more bees, like Lavender and Mexican Heather. Soon, we had bees and I began carrying my epi-pen everywhere. But most importantly we had TOMATOES!

The third hurdle was the pests... the caterpillars were easy, my German Shephard/Shar Pei mix was another story. Bailey was fascinated with ever inch of those plants. He drank out of the container, he would chew the leaves, ate more then one green tomato, to be sure. He would get his paws in the dirt and try to dig out the plants. I used no chemicals to fight the bugs and caterpillars, I wanted the fruit to be as organic as possible because of my Granddad's bad health but I swear I wanted to use mustard gas on my pooch. Don't let that sad face fool you, he was a menace!

By the end of March, I brought my Granddad six ripe tomatoes and he laughed when I began to explain all my trials and tribulations, just to get those six. He told me several ways to kill bugs with out using chemicals and I tried to write down all he said.

We celebrated his 79th birthday on March 30 and a few days later,  on April 2nd, he passed away. The man who taught me how to make home-made soups, to fish and now how to grow things had left me, but he left me with a new found love of gardening, that I hope I can pass on to my sons. I love you, LRH, every time I am in my garden I feel you with me. Thank you.