April, 2012 Issue #131

TROUTS
LATEST PHOTOS

April, 2012 Issue #131

THE PATH
FINDER

Bob demonstrates
the use of a Solar Path Finder to determine the optimal placement of a
hypothetical new
garden for his class at Central Carolina Community College.

ASPARAGUS
SEASON

One good Itey Nite
deserves another. Obviously, we don’t mind eating the same meal repeatedly.
Especially one
involving garden-picked asparagus, angel hair pasta, home made sauce and pan
fried home made seitan. We enjoyed the two meals pictured within six days of
each other.

CAMILLE’S
FRIENDS

Mingo, Sonny and
Pete look forward to breakfast every day and Camille was happy to bring it to
them while Sharon was out of town. When we ride together, Sharon rides Mingo and
Camille rides Sonny, Pete or Peg’s mare, Hailey. As you can see, they’ve already begun to
slick out which is horse person verbiage for lose their winter coats.

FUNGI 101

Bob taught his
mushroom log plugging workshop on April 14th at Company Shops Market in
Burlington. The three steps to a home made mushroom garden are drill, plug and wax. Bob is checking the wax as
it heats up on a hot plate. One of the participants uses a drill with a 5/16 bit to drill
holes in a sweet gum log from a tree Bob cut down a couple of months back.

Grand daughter and
grand mother teamed up as did our friends Jenny and Alex.

UNSOLVED
MYSTERY

Since Alex rode up
with us and Bob had a meeting to attend after the workshop, Alex and Camille
decided to go Thrift Store hunting in Burlington to kill some time. They drove
around for awhile, distracted by heady conversation about memorable films,
finally realized they’d missed the alleged thrift store district and turned
around. Jenny had told us about another shop so we went in search of Overman’s
Mystery Thrift Shop and found it only to find it had apparently gone out of business.
We got out of the car anyway to poke around the detritus in hopes of
finding a treasure. Alex was rewarded by a paperback about how to remember
names.

IRONY

We peeked inside
the shattered glass door and saw this wistful plaque on the wall. It tickled our
sense of irony to be peering into our forbidden destination, a locked and empty
building, to find a cheery welcome note on the wall.

ALEX AND
SHANNON

After spending a
fine day with Alex, we introduced him to Spot who took to him right away. A week
later, Spot enthusiastically welcomed Shannon to Trouts Farm. Amy and Shannon
drove from Asheville to enjoy the Spring Grassroots Music Festival at Shakori
Hills.

COTTON
CANDY PLANT

Haruka and Camille
were tickled to find a Wool Sower Gall on the branch of a white oak while on a
walk in the woods. Haruka thought it looked like cotton candy with little red spots
while to Camille it rather resembled a cotton ball after a shaving accident. A wasp (Callirhytis
seminator) induces the
oak to produce a gall in which they lay their eggs and ultimately becomes habitat for their offspring.
Ingenious!

TINY
TURTLE

On a Monday
afternoon at work,
Camille came across the tiniest turtle she’d ever seen and brought it into the
office for Jenny to admire. Minutes after returning the turtle to its original
location, Camille found a baby bunny, so small it  fit in the palm of our
hands.

AERIAL YOGA

Shannon levitates
Amy in an exercise designed to give both parties a good stretch. It was great to
see Amy and meet Shannon when they were in town for Shakori.  They are both
enjoying their studies at the Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine.

THIS MONTH’S QUOTES:

"No one in the American
media is paying attention to the unfolding tragedy of Japan – and by this I
refer not only to the unfinished Fukushima saga, but the parallel story of Japan
closing down virtually its entire nuclear power industry necessitating gigantic
additional imports of oil and gas to generate electric power – all of which
points to the likelihood that Japan will become the first advanced industrial
nation to bid sayonara to modernity and return to a neo-medieval socio-economic
model of daily life." – James Howard Kunstler from his April 22nd blog
entry As
If Nothing Matters

 “There are thousands and
thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation,
where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy
things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.” — Nigel
Marsh

"There’s zero correlation
between being the best talker and having the best ideas.” — Susan Cain