Category Archives: crafting

What’s the Beef?

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Jack should just do a Thursday guest blog post – – –

Wendy and I bought half a cow recently.

This is NOT the cow!

Our friend Andy has an organic farm just outside town, where the cattle live the life of Reilly until their last second which is instantaneous. That’s how I’d like to go (well maybe not exactly).

We had a few weeks to prepare our two chest freezers and half of our fridge freezer – but still – –

The day our half cow meat arrived was the hottest day of the year (so far), and it arrived, frozen, in various assorted boxes onto our back porch. That started a mad rush to pack as much as possible into the freezers as quickly as possible, and we discovered that this had been a bigger cow than we’d imagined!

After stuffing the freezers there was still a fair amount and that went in the fridge. All that happened on Tuesday morning and later that day I made sixteen pounds of sausage filling from the ground beef in the fridge.

Over the next three days Wendy was the continuous canning queen – – –

She canned sausage patties, pasta sauce, beef bourguignon, beef curry and pot roast!

She’s still at it – – –

Some of you may be wondering about us eating beef, but as long as we’re happy that the cow was too, then we don’t have a problem. Actually if I ever die in a plane crash on top of a mountain and someone has to eat me to survive I wouldn’t mind. However, there would be much less meat on me than that half cow!

Mushroom Management – –

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Good heavens – this is the latest Jack has been with his Wednesday post – –

Wendy decided that, since I like mushrooms, we should grow them. Well – –

First we got a small pre-seeded pack and got a first harvest. We waited for the second promised harvest until we realized we’d wrongly removed the first lot. So no second or third harvest!

Then we got a larger pre-seeded pack and that’s doing its thing in a dark cupboard with daily spraying of water – we await in anticipation and will be more careful.

Then a friend, who has much more experience, brought us a large tub of sheep shit so we could establish a mushroom bed under a shady tree in our yard. That would need some actual mushroom spores so onto Dr Google. I settled on a company in Maine who seem reliable.

Following the Fedex delivery progress was hilarious –

Maine to Glasgow (that’s Glasgow, Virginia which is just up the interstate 81 from us), then to Charlotte North Carolina (a long way south of us), then to Concorde NC (probably Charlotte airport), from there to Dublin (yep – in Virginia and also north of us on I-81). It finally arrived this morning and is in the fridge until I can prepare its bed.

In case you’re interested I will be using the ‘lasagna’ method – a layer of cardboard, a layer of sheep shit and sawdust, first layer of mushroom spores. Another layer of sheep shit and sawdust, another layer of spores and a final layer of clean dirt.

The only problem I see is that I have to keep watering the bed every couple of days but won’t get any mushrooms until next year!

I used to teach management programs in my old college in Scotland and I was a manager too – there’s a famous style of management called ‘mushroom management’ – – – –

Keep them in the dark and feed them shit – – – –