Quilt Show - Our 30th Year

One of the many quilts on display at vendor's booths

We've been busy all week at work setting up for the Warren County Historical Society's 30th edition of its Lebanon Quilt & Fabric Arts Show & Sale.  Quilt show week is always stressful because it is held inside the museum's conference facilities and galleries so we have been busy transforming the place into booths and special exhibits.  The show is Friday and Saturday, March 1, & 2 from 10 to 5 and Sunday from 11 to 4. Admission is just $5.00 and all proceeds go to the operation of the museum.

Quilt show is always wonderful fun. The entire show is a gorgeous display of some of the most beautiful new made quilts you will see anywhere. Each vendor's booth is hung with an amazing array of quilts and wall art and we can't get enough of the colors and patterns while we ooohh and aaaww over the intricate stitching. 

Betty Sue O'Dell's needle work 2012.

But its not all quilts. Each year the vendors bring new and exciting fabric arts ideas which they offer for sale either ready made or in kits.  Last year's hit was Rose Cheap Reynold's punch needle kits. Rose is back this year with some great new ideas.  Other favorite trends are wool felted items of all kinds, a variety of kits for everything from rugs to dolls and much more.

This year Julie Dawson, a fan of quilt barn art, has a collection of bird houses she hand made and hand painted with quilt patterns as if they were miniature barns displaying quilt barn art. They each have a tin roof as well. What a great idea.

A perennial favorite is the button jewelry booth. We always budget a bit of our quilt show spending money for a new button jewelry pendant or ear rings or bracelet.  This company comes up from Texas every year and has some wonderful jewelry all made from antique buttons.

Special exhibits include spinning and weaving demonstrations by Stringtopia of Lebanon and a vendor selling alpaca fleece and products. Also on display are examples of quilts from the Ohio Quilts of Valor chapter and the Lebanon Methodist Church's Ronald McDonald House quilters.

There is so much to see and do!  Come early and plan to stay all day.

Baby Chicks on the Move

I moved the chicks in their brooder out into the main part of the basement last night.  I'd put them in the furnace room first for two reasons. One, I wanted to lock them away from the cats and two, none of the wall plugs in the basement worked.  Larry from Current Solutions came yesterday afternoon and replaced the GFI for the wall plugs and now everything is working again, so I moved the chicks into the basement. 

Bee Hive Painted and ready for bees, I think.

Baby chicks give off a fine, greasy dust that would not be good for the furnace so I was glad to get them out of the furnace room. Their brooder box is sitting on a long wooden table. The cats don't know what to make of the chicks. The listen, they creep up on the box - which is a heavy wooden frame covered in small gage hardware cloth, and peer inside. What a great way to entertain the kitties!

The beehive, now freshly painted is sitting on the other end of the table. I've picked out a site for the hive near the garden and in a little grove of locust trees.  I am also collecting cement blocks to provide a platform for the box so it won't rest on the wet ground.  Somehow, I've not yet ordered the bees - that's this weekend for sure!

Spring Chicks at Rural King

Our old vacant Wal Mart building south of town has finally found a tenant. Yesterday Rural King opened a brand new store and I couldn't wait to visit.  Rural King is like a Tractor Supply only bigger, I guess, because this is a really big store with all kinds of things for farm and garden.



Baby chicks on red heat lamp

On its first day the store was manned by a lot of young kids and a few adults all very helpful but not sure of all the details - which is OK on their first day. They will learn quickly or move on I hope.

Most of the front is clothes and snacks and junk like that. I moved quickly toward the garden section my mission to buy a bag of 12% sweet feed to have on hand when Bramble calves next month.  As I rounded the corner of the isle headed for the feed racks I ran smack dab into baby chicks for sale. 

Red New Hampshire and Black Jersey Giant

They were nicely displayed in six different pens with heat lamps and signs proclaiming their breed. Since this is their first day open I figured the chicks were in pretty good shape. They looked to be about five days old.

You could buy straight run (girls and boys mixed) or just pullets (girls). There was one pen of mixed Bantam chicks.  The pullets cost $1.99 each which is competitive with the catalogs.

They looked healthy so I went looking for a sales person and picked out three New Hampshire's and three black Jersey Giants. They are now at home in my chicken brooder in the furnace room with a red heat lamp on them which is why the pictures are red. The cats are shut out of the furnace room and they are totally bamfoozled! The chicks have made it through their first night so I am hoping to raise all six with no problems. 

Waiting for Calves

BTAP Thor, born Jan 2011, pic taken Sept 2011

There aren't any calves due to be born on the farm this year until about March 23. That is much later calving than I like, but that's the way things have worked out since loosing my herd bull in June of 2011.

I much prefer to calve in January and February, even though the weather can bring ice and snow.  The early calves will automatically be bigger and more marketable in the fall, and if they are being kept for breeding stock, will be ahead of other heifers and bulls when they reach their second birthday.



This isn't Tino, but shows how calves love to snuggle in the hay.

Cattle are hardy and like cold weather.  One of my fondest memories is of a calf named Valentino who was born on February 14 in -4 below zero degree weather. The cow chose to calve outside the barn on the leavings of a round bale. Mama was a sweet little red Limousin heifer and she did a great job of taking care of little Tino.  I found him huddled in the hay, covered with frost but happy and healthy with plenty of warm, rich cows milk to keep him going. Mama cow didn't take him to the barn until he was two days old.  He grew up to be one of the best bulls we every calved and the farmer who bought him has always loved him and the calves he produces. 


BTAP Thor was born on January 30, 2011 in an ice storm back in the woods. His mother wouldn't leave the woods so I took straw and hay and grain to her and she bedded him down under one of the wild cedar trees that grow all over southern Ohio.  It was rain or ice or snow every day for the first seven days of his life and I worried every evening when I went to check on him that he would be frozen to death. His mother Valentine, was 11 years old at the time and I worried she wouldn't be strong enough to take good care of him, plus she was alone among the coyotes.  Her daughter Violet and the bull, Tommy Boy stayed near by most of the time, so I shouldn't have worried. I named him Thor because some of the snow storms that first week included thunder.  Today Thor is a big, beautiful Limousin bull with calves of his own due to be born in May and June (he functioned as my clean up bull after the AI's this past summer).

BTAP Thor last fall after a summer of breeding cows as the "clean up" bull.

Parsnips

Raw Parsnips

I love parsnips roasted with a beef pot roast. If you've always added carrots and potatoes to your pot roaster pan, you should try adding a few parsnips as well.  Roasted in the beef dripping until they caramelize, parsnips will be sweet and buttery. And yes, they are also very good roasted along side a chicken or pork roast, but I like beef best.  The main thing is to roast them.

I've seen recipes for candied parsnips, similar to candied sweet potatoes and also recipes for roasted parsnips that are then drizzled with honey. To my taste buds parsnips are sweet enough on their own and do not need any extra sweetening.

In fact, I find they are too sweet when included in a beef stew. Roasted along side a beef roast brings out the rich flavor of the parsnips, but braised in a stew they don't caramalize enough.  Since I raise beef cattle for both breeding stock and beef for my table,  I usually keep things like ground beef,  stew beef and the ox tail and soup bones and sell most of the steaks and the roasts, so my beef and parsnips is more likely to be beef stew or vegetable beef soup.

roasted parsnips

I love to brown off a pound of stew beef and cook it low and slow until it is meltingly tender.  I usually braise the meat in chicken stock and water with a bay leaf, a good pinch of my home grown dried thyme, salt and pepper and a couple of shakes of Worcestershire sauce.  This make a great base for a lot of other dishes such as beef Stroganoff, Italian beef and tomatoes, what I call New England spiced beef and of course beef stew with carrots and parsnips. 

I always start by sauteing yellow onions in the fond left from browning the beef and I add chopped celery and some celery leaves as well but the carrots and especially the parsnips are just too sweet cooked in a braise or soup broth.  The solution is a splash of balsamic or red wine vinegar. The vinegar cuts the sweetness of the root vegetables but you don't taste the vinegar in the least.  Just adding red wine doesn't do the trick, it must be vinegar, preferably balsamic. The result is a rich, beefy very flavorful beef soup or stew full of healthy vegetables (no potatoes).  I serve it with a green salad and you could add some good bread to sop up the rich, thick stew gravy, but its not entirely necessary. This is an economical, healthy meal anyone but a vegetarian would love.

This year, for the first time, I ordered parsnips seeds so I can grow my own. I'm looking forward to lots of parsnips dishes next fall and winter.

February on the Farm

Monday is the day we put our garbage out for pick up about 4:00 am on Tuesday. It's always amazing to me how many Mondays are either raining and windy or just plain windy.  Today is another one of those very windy days and I refuse put out garbage cans and the recycle tub just to have the wind blow them all over the road. But the sun is shining and its a gorgeous day so I  walked to the end of the lane and took some pictures.

February 11, 2013

I think this is a pretty shot of the house and lane. If you look closely you will notice three of the shutters are missing.  The wind took them off and I have them stored flat on the back porch.

The lane doesn't look too bad here. you can see some ruts long the right edge where a truck has maneuvered into the gate opposite to load cattle. This part of the lane drains well but as you go towards the road and it dips and turns through low areas the pot holes begin to look like small lakes.

Cattle chute left, creep feeder right, house center.

Left is a shot of the lane with its current yard ornaments. On the right is a broken down calf creep feeder with a bum leg, but it still works for the purpose of sequestering calves away from the big cows so they can eat their grain in peace. I rarely use the creep feeder on going. I usually just use it as a means to train the calves to eat a little grain. As soon as they get a taste for corn they will push their way into any feed bunk regardless of how big the other cattle may be. 

To the right is my cattle handling chute. The chute is a good 12 years old and looking a little rugged. It needs a lot of rust removal and a good paint job, but it seems I never have time to do more than oil the mechanism just before I need to use it.  We purchased the chute as an all purpose cattle handling chute for calves, heifers and full grown cows, but it has never really been big enough for my full grown girls. I can't remember the last time we could fit a full grown Limousin bull through it. It's good for calves and heifers and we do manage to squeeze some of the smaller full grown cows in it if they aren't too pregnant. The chute and the creep feeder are out along the lane because I needed to move them out of the paddock soa trailer  could pull in there to load cows out of the barn.  Now its too wet and muddy to put them back.


Cattle chute and cattle barn.

CEH Infocus, aka Bobby Burns.  He's been wrestling with Thor.

Here's a picture of CEH Infocus, the bull I affectionately call Bobby Burns because he's a Black Angus bull and Angus come originally from Scotland and Bobby Burns was a famous 19th century poet from Scotland. He wrote such pithy sayings as:  O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us. 

Poor Bob is a mess, mud everywhere. He's licking a protein tub and I think if the mud gets any deeper the tub will disappear. Mud is a fact of life when you raise big, heavy animals. Even the gravel feeding pads are covered in 8 to 10 inches of mud. Poor Bob also has lice.  We treated the whole herd for lice in the fall, but every winter one or two animals get them anyway. I guess they come in on the deer.  As the weather warms up the lice will go away, but in the meantime many of the cows are showing hairless patches where they have scratched at the lice. Bob has a couple of places there on his shoulder. He doesn't seem to mind. Cattle don't rail against too much, but take life as it come.

Lazy cows didn't get out of bed until 9:30 am.

As you can see most of the cows are dirty. The pasture is wet, the barn yard is muddy, even the inside of the barn floor is wet and muddy from cows sleeping there all night.  Once a week or so I take pity on them and pop a round bale over the fence instead of putting it in the round bale feeder. The cows happily tear the bale apart, eat about 70% of it and spread the rest out for a bed.  This gives them, for a few days anyway, a dry place to rest.  Here's Bobby Burns, Jealousy, heifer calf Zooey and soon to be mama cow Bramble, just getting up from sleeping on a spread out round bale.

Buttercup will need a clean dry place to have her calf. Just look at that dirty udder!

Cattle are herd animals, and just like chickens, they have a pecking order. Valentine (who will be 13 years old on the 13th of February and was the first Limousin born on the farm) is the lead cow. Her daughter Violet is second, bringing up the rear is Buttercup. Buttercup is my pet. She was the first bovine I purchased back in 1999. She will be 14 years old this spring and has always been the last cow in the herd.  The second lowest is Sarah, a big white Shorthorn cow. I suspect that the herd politics favor black cows, though the red ones get along pretty well. But the majority of the cattle are black and black seems to dominate. Buttercup also has one of those grumpy, put upon personalities.  Since she is a pet I often single her out and give her a little treat - which I'm sure doesn't endear her to the rest of the herd. She has just spent the night on last week's round bale bed - which has basically been churned into mud. She is patiently waiting for everyone else to have a turn at the round bale feeder before she gets her breakfast.

Blogging About Cattle and Downton Abbey

My little blog has been active for over a year now. It's fascinating to me to see how many page views come through every day.  Generally I  log about 25 page views, half of which I hope are real people who enjoy reading about what I have to say.



Some of the cast from the PBS Masterpiece Classic hit Downton Abbey

Blogger provides a whole list of statistics about who is reading each blog. This includes number of page views of each post, where the audience lives in the world, what URL was used and what key words were most popular.

In the beginning the most popular posts were about recipes and the cats.  Lately however, the posts about Downton Abbey and Limousin cattle head the number one and number two spots on the tally. They each get a dozen or more page views a day.



BTAP Thor on the alert for blog spam.

Fortunately many of those views come from Google or Facebook or directly from www.ohiobeef.com.

But many of them come from bad sites that are really Trojans or worse.  Every now and then I click on one just to see what it is about. The really bad ones get caught by my McAfee anti-virus software. Others seem harmless but pointless.  For example, today there are 17 page views from a URL called make money with your blog review. I clicked on it and it was a come on, asking you to click through to another site for a sure fired way to make money with your blog. No way will I click on that link. But still, I wonder why that site has viewed so many times. I guess I need to do a little more research about blogs.

Keeping those Christmas Poinsettias

February 9, 2013 It has lost a few leaves at the bottom.

We had four nice big red poinsettias at Glendower, the Warren County Historical Society's  historic mansion, as part of the Christmas decorations. Poinsettias were "discovered" in Mexico and brought back to this country in the late 1820's.  They are very historically correct for our circa 1845 museum house.

I brought them home, well protected from the cold, in a large cardboard box and set them in the south facing windows in my dining room.  Two of them promptly died - they were over watered while on display at Glendower - but two of them are doing very well.  I thought it might be nice to see if I could keep these two for next year's Christmas at Glendower and bring them back to "flower".  I talked to a couple of my garden club friends, reviewed a couple of my gardening books and read a bit on the Internet. And then I wrote this article for our local paper. I don't think they ever published it, so here's what I found:

February 9, 2013 On sunny days I check for water daily.

         Keep That Poinsettia for Next Year!

Don’t throw away that beautiful Christmas poinsettia plant. With a little bit of care maybe you can salvage it for next year. A couple of simple gardening practices will keep your poinsettia healthy and happy until next Christmas.  But be advised, Dr. Leonard Perry, Extension Professor from the University of Vermont says, “There's no guarantee that your poinsettia will bloom again next December, even with year-round care.” But if you hate throwing live plants away, salvaging that poinsettia is a good project for the whole family. Also, have the kids look up its history. The main who brought it to the US founded a famous institution. Can they name it?

This time of year poinsettias need at least six hours of direct light, so move your plant to a draft free sunny window with temperatures above 65 degrees.  If it still has the florist’s paper encasing the flower pot, remove the paper and place the pot on a pebble lined plant saucer or plate so it will drain when watered.  Water when the top layer of soil feels dry, with room temperature water, until water drains into the saucer. Don’t let the bottom of the pot sit in water as that will cause the roots of the plant to rot. Fertilize the plant with an all-purpose house plant food, then sit back and enjoy your poinsettia for the rest of the winter.

Your poinsettia will start to look leggy and maybe a little bedraggled near the end of February or beginning of March.  Cut it back to about five to seven inches tall and continue watering.  Give it a little fertilizer as well.   By late April or early May transplant your poinsettia into a pot one size bigger than its current home, trim back any leggy growth and give it another bit of fertilizer.  By mid-June you can send your plant outside for the summer.  Give it a sheltered spot with full sun and don’t forget to water.

By the first of September it is time to bring the plant back in doors for its dark night treatment. This is the tricky part of the process.  To bloom by Christmas time the plant needs at least 12 hours of darkness a day until Thanksgiving.   It also needs twelve hours of good direct light.  You can move the plant back and forth between a dark closet, basement and a sunny window or cover it with a cardboard box in the evening and uncover it in the morning.  Continue the process of your choice until Thanksgiving. Then keep your plant in its sunny location, rotating it a quarter of turn each day so that it colors evenly, and enjoy.

Local gardener Barbara Henn, a member of Lebanon’s Town & Country Garden Club and active in the Garden Club of Ohio, admits she keeps her poinsettia plants alive by cutting them back hard in the spring, then moving them outside for the summer. “Last year I cut them way back. They were pretty small still in September so I didn’t bother trying to get them to change color for this Christmas.  I’ll see if they fill out into nice big plants this summer and maybe try to get them to “bloom” next Christmas”.  In the meantime Henn admits her salvaged poinsettias make nice house plants even if they stayed green all year long.

 

Bees This Year?

I've ordered phalcia flowers (also known as scorpion flowers) because they are purported to be great honey flowers for the bees. Other good sources of pollen and nectar for bees are open faced daisy like plants such as Black Eyed Susans (rudbekia), pot marigolds (calendula) and cone flowers.  They also love tall spiky flowers like anise hyssop, lavender and mint.

I've located paint and paint brush to paint the hive and I've contacted my friend Patty who is a naturalist and a good bee keeper about buying a "package" of bees. The bees will come from Georgia and the queen will be Italian.  I'll order the bees before April from a local man who will drive to Georgia to collect them and immediately drive back home. I'll meet him in Blue Ash to take delivery of my package of bees.  Patty said one time he didn't get in until 3:00 in the morning. Presumably he will fill many local orders with this one trip.  Now all I have to do is "pull the trigger" and actually order the bees - and pay for them. A two or three pound package of bees costs about $85.00. I wouldn't spend $85.00 on honey for my own consumption in 5 years worth of buying honey, so my economic gain will come, I hope, from better pollination of my garden.


Last year with the mild winter, my pastures were over run with clover. Hopefully we have a good stand of clover this year as well.  The locust trees seem to be in pretty good shape. They bloom with big bunches of white flowers which bees love. Locust honey is suppose to be one of the best.

If all goes well I'll also have two apple, two pear and a plum tree blooming this spring, plus all the wild cherries and plum trees.  I just need to research a few more good honey flowers and I think I'll have plenty of food for the bees.

There is a pretty good video on how to set up a hive at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVaYD3e9KOA&feature=player_embedded

This cloud formation got away from me before I could get my camera and snap it, but it was originally radiating wisps of clouds seeming to be sprouting from the dark ridge of clouds on the horizon.  Blue skies may lure me outdoors to string electric fence around the bull pen rather than to the basement to paint the hive.

Superbowl Commercials Celebrate Farmers

I've seen three Superbowl commercials to date (no I don't watch football, I'm a farmer and who has time!), and all three have some element of farming, which was kind of heartening.

 The Dodge Ram truck one with Paul Harvey talking about what it means to be a farmer was wonderful - and so very true.  It is often very hard physical work, most especially if you raise animals of any kind. They take so much time and care and energy. But they also give us so much joy.

 Having raised goats I can tell you the goat commercial is not too far off the mark.  How perfect for the would be buyer; he eats Doritos and the goat also eats Doritos.  If he'd been paying attention he would have noticed the seller is wearing a neck brace! 

Goats can be very single minded and regardless of their small size, tend to believe they are king of the animal world.  They can wreak a large amount of havoc in a very short amount of time. Mine were great at lifting gates off their hinges and escaping to munch all my favorite garden plants.

But by far the best of the commercials was the one about the Clydesdale.  I watched it yesterday morning on line and cried and cried.  I never sell one of my bulls or cows without feeling sad. You spend so much time and effort producing the animal that you can't help but get attached.  When you have to let them go, no matter how good the sale may be,  its heart wrenching. 

After I'd had a good cry, remembering the four girls I'm missing that I just sold to a very nice man in Indiana, I suddenly realized that the young man in the commercial had reached one of the heights of Clydesdale breeding; he had sold a horse to Budweiser for the Budweiser Clydesdale team.! That is a huge accomplishment as the Budweiser Clydesdale team is a Superbowl level team and not just any Clydesdale makes the cut.

I had a neighbor years ago who raised Clydesdales. They trained them to jump and have fancy show steps, but they were never good enough for Budweiser. Even though I thought those horses were just plain huge, they were not big enough; Budweiser was always looking for an exceptionally large, well muscled animal with specific proportions. So, dry your eyes and remember that young man had the comfort of reaching the Superbowl of horse breeding.

Farming at Downton Abbey

In the latest espisode of Downton Abbey brothers-in-law Matthew Crawley and Tom Branson travel around the estate bemoaning Robert's neglect and poor management. In the below stairs world, assistant cook Daisy's father-in-law tells her he wants her to learn about his farm and how to manage it because the Downton Abbey's of the world may not survive into the future as great estates. Daisy could be assured of a good future when she inherits his tidy, well managed farm. His entrepreneurial spirit shows through when he suggests she could have a cottage food stuff industry with her cooking skills.  This all reminds me of the real life tale of author Beatrix Potter and her years as a farmer in the Lake District of England.

Beatrix Potter about 1920

You may remember that Beatrix Potter wrote the beautifully illustrated children's books about Peter Rabbit and his friends and family.  In the time before World War I she began buying up small farms in the Lake District and learning how to raise crops and animals.  Her success as an author gave her the money to buy several run down properties and she spent most of her later life turning them into productive farms, eventually giving up writing all together to devote her self to an agricultural life.


Hill Top Farm, one of Beatrix Potter's farm properties.

The industrial revolution of the late 19th century took its toll on agriculture all over Europe and America.  Family farms found it  increasingly difficult to find farm laborers since most young people began to prefer to move to the city and get good jobs that did not require such hard labor. 


When Beatrix Potter began buying land in the Lake District the area was already under pressure from development companies interested in providing vacation cottages for the increasingly wealthy urban middle class.  Ms. Potter was instrumental in founding England's National Trust whose mission it has been to save not only the stately homes of England, but its rural heritage in general.  I expect we will hear something about that as the tale of Downton Abbey progresses on towards the great crash of 1929.

Beatrix Potter's biography by Margaret Lane is a small book and gives a good review of her life. You can get a copy at Amazon.com. There are a couple of other biographies out there but this one was written in the 1940's and the author had good contact with her husband and family.


And if you loved the Peter Rabbit tales, try Susan Wittig Albert's "cottage tales" which incorporate the true life story of Beatrix Potter and her farm life with her "bunny" characters. Each book has a little mystery to solve and is a good light read. There are 8 titles in the series.

Ordering Garden Seeds

I placed my first garden seed order yesterday with R. H. Shumway.  Their website, www.rhshumway.com  has a garden planning tool that lets you design your garden layout and decide what to plant in each bed. It also gives you planting times and harvesting times, first and last frost dates and a lot of other good information. I chose R H Shumway because they offer some unusual plants. This phacelia flower is a case in point. The catalog description reads:

Surely these are very curiously shaped plants the flowers being borne in one-sided fascicles. Unsurpassed as a honey-producing plant, supplies bees with food. Azure blue flowers with a paler, almost white throat. Height 9-12 inches. Annual.

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A quick search on Bing.com and I found many images; there are over 200 species of phacelia.  One  web site touted the plants use as a green manure plant that is turned under before it starts flowering and praising its root's ability to  loosen heavy soils.  Most sites though, praised it as a bee plant.

R. H. Shumway presents its products as colored drawings rather than photographs (see above). I found hundreds of different pictures of phacelia on the web, most of them looking a lot like campanulas. From the drawing though I think the type I ordered will look like the picture on the left.

Besides being good bee plants, they also make good cut flowers. I like the  adventure of trying new plants. It is one of the reason I like to garden so I am looking forward to growing this "curiously shaped plant" this spring.

My R. H. Shumway order included Bloody Butcher sweet corn, sweet marjoram culinary herb, Brussels sprouts, celeriac, Red Russian kale, parsnips, rainbow colored broom corn, Buck Lunch sugar beets (to feed the cattle), Red Holland shallots, Early Frost green pea, Green Arrow green pea, Mr. Wrinkles pumpkin, Mrs. Wrinkles pumpkin and two collections of red raspberry plants (12 plants). They had a free shipping offer on and order of $50 or more and since this order totaled $51, I received the free shipping.

Now I'm trying to decide to purchase more seeds from the John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds, www.kitchengardenseeds.com.  I'd like to grow a variety of everlastings  ( flowers that air dry well) for fall and winter decorating. They also carry flax seeds and a mixture of hard shell gourds that include bird house and apple gourds.  I have it in mind to have a dried flower, ornamental gourd farmer's market booth in the fall. They also had some wonderful sounding lettuce varieties and a couple of French heirloom melons I'd love to try.   I've put my order together and its going to be another $50.00.  I still have a lot of hay to buy this winter and my car needs work (the heater isn't working well and something is wonky with the electrical which causes the horn to short out) , so I am hesitating to place that order.  Can I come up with some new and interesting ways to use those dried flowers, broom corn and gourds that will make folks want to buy them?  Maybe. It's only February 3. I guess I'll sleep on it.