It’s such a great feeling when you finish a hard project. A garden in the US takes about a year to get up and running. Gardens improve every year you have one, but the first year is the hardest. Putting down winter mulch for Italian herbs for spring year two feels pretty good which is excellent because pumpkins and squash have been selling out like crazy at the local farmer’s market. Most of the heirloom stuff is gone a full month early (bummer), but you have to give all the happy farmers a high five for a year of successful hard work. It took 10+ tons of mulch, a bunch of fertilizer add-ons, oceans of cardboard, and a year of...
Time to play around with modifying celtic potato bread recipes for sweet potatoes. British, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh cooking really shines in fall where the simple ingredients and fresh food make the dishes at local festivals popular. Tryon Palace is famous for it’s fall pirate festivals and events thanks to Blackbeard, America’s most notorious master rebel on our high seas, lots of fun. North Carolina’s coastline is perfect for filming too. The seafood is great too. Keep expecting someone to reboot the Pirates of the Caribbean with a fantasy twist from the Jim Butcher air pirates series. If you’ve ever seen Stardust with Robert De Niro and the lightening pirates or Japanese anime which has plenty of airship themes, you...
Wow, after the NC State Fair knocked it out of the park 12/10 this year, trying to make a list of classic and new events to try this winter season. The Ren Faires are jamming. Oceans of white lights and decorations are going up for families to drive through neighborhoods in a few weeks for the Night of Lights at Dorthea Dix and other spots though WRAL normally doesn’t publish this year’s list until Dec. 1st. Most of them are free or $20/car. There was a lot to love at the State Fair last week with all the events, booths, food, and rides. Didn’t really know where to put this in the list, but the PR and word-of-mouth around the...
The NC state fair was JAMMED packed with happy people eating fried foods and meat. The longest line was doughnuts, shout out to Peachey’s. Sometimes it’s good to turn the internet off and just go enjoy life. Does anyone else find the real world moves faster than the electric? Kind of like all the fake celebrity pictures at events going around now that are AI generated? The no jewelry is always a dead giveaway. There’s all you can ride for $30 passes so families were running around eating their weight in tasty fudge dipped apples (another long line), giant turkey legs, and fried corn among MANY others between rides was a highlight. Fair food is the best. Everything was clean...
Fall festival season and state fairs have officially kicked off. There’s a lot of serious organic gardening stuff, but the vegetable judging contests are wild. Peppers are the theater king kids of the show. If you talk to a fair judge, they often point to peppers as a great beginner vegetable for both young boys and young at heart to successfully grow for 4-H and win. Someone with a sense of humor is going to have fun making a screenplay or low-budget romantic comedy around our Carolina Grim Reaper Pepper or personal favorite because of how pretty they are: the Brazilian Star Flower Pepper. Not really sure of the nutritional value of peppers, but they come in all kinds of...
