what do you guys think about shredded office paper as mulch?

I think, it would blow away, unless you use it under other mulch. Also, depending on you... do you think it would look ok? It might be considered ugly.

What soil test do you use?

I haven't had it tested here, since I moved here. But I had soil tested at the OSU extension center before.

I am wanting to install a cattle panel arch, do you thing the open ends should face east/west or north/south?

Does it go over a path? Or is it just free standing?

I think, south north would be good, considering the winds we have here in Oklahoma.

how do you make your breading stick to the sides of the okra? also, how do you bread your okra?

I used to fry okra (don't do fried anything anymore, cause of high cholesterol) and I used to dip the okra in beaten egg, before the cornmeal.

Moni

Random questions are fun, so here goes....

I'd put shredded paper in the compost pile or use it only as mulch on non-edible crops unless you know for sure the inks used on that paper are safe.

For a soil test, use the OSU Extension or the Texas-based soil lab I've linked below.

I'd make decisions on the cattle panel arch based on the prevailing winds in the area, and whether you have wind breaks near the place where it would be. I don't necessarily choose the direction an arch faces based on prevailing winds because we have windbreaks on 3 sides of the house, so the open ends of my arbors face east and west.

For fried okra, I do it as simply as possible. I slice up the okra, place it in a bowl of cold water and let it sit in the fridge for about an hour. (I can't explain why...this is how my old southern aunts did it, so it is how I do it....LOL). After an hour, I take it out of the fridge and remove it from the bowl of water and dredge it through cornmeal to which I've added a little salt and pepper....maybe 1/2 T. of salt to 3/4 C. of cornmeal and just a sprinkling of black pepper. I then fry it in vegetable oil. (To make it the way my aunts did, I'd fry it in bacon grease in a frying pan, but I don't...I fry it in canola oil in the deep fryer.)

If you want to bread it and then freeze it, just bread it as described above and freeze it in a single layer on a cookie sheet. Once frozen, take it from the cookie sheet and put it in freezer containers and place it into the freezer. By freezing it first, the individual pieces aren't as likely to freeze to one another. And, when I intend to freeze okra, I dry blanch it first before breading it.

Some people dredge it through a flour/corn meal mixture and moisten it with milk or egg but that and, in particular, the egg, gives it a heavier breading than I like.

Here is a link that might be useful: Texas Plant and Soil Lab

I put my shredded paper in a paper grocery sack, toss of bucket of scraps in there, smoosh it down and bury it in my compost pile. The fresh scraps not only add extra nitrogen, but moisture in them packs down the shreds.

Lisa

I'll bite on the cattle panel trellis question. Nothing in my neighborhood is north/south or east/west including my trellis. The streets kind of run along the water, and then a block over from the water, loop here and there, etc.

I tried taking several pictures but it was really hard to see what I actually wanted you to see in them, because the trellis just kind of seems to disappear and you see the vine, which is exactly what I want, but not what I wanted to show you. This is not a great picture, but you will get the idea. Mine is not simply arched, but goes to a point at the top which I think gives it a little better shape. You kind of have to look into the tree foliage to see it. As I recall, I stood on a board and my DH bent up one side. It was not easy to bend and I think he dumped me a couple of times.

The cattle panel is very rigid and will hold it's own against the wind so I don't even think wind is a factor. What I think is most important is that one crop doesn't shade out the crop on the other side. I would place it more based on the available sun rather than wind. Ours has two three foot t-post woven thru it on each side and hammered into the ground. My garden ground is very soft and I have never had a problem with the trellis moving. It was once meant to be the entryway to that end of my garden, but I keep changing my garden.

I also have three panels which are placed lengthwise in the garden, and another we cut in half and mounted both halves vertically. If I were doing it again, I would not cut one, but instead would make another arch. I can't reach the top of the cut ones to pick beans or cukes, but I can pick from the top of the arch. By the looks of the blooms on the cukes, I will be picking a lot soon. LOL

Here is a link that might be useful:

On the shredded paper:

When I worked at a recycling center there was a man who came by and wanted to buy the bags of shredded paper that we had in the bin. We didn't sell because there is the issue of confidentiality -- while shredded paper is certainly harder to read and once tumbled into a bale is nearly impossible to reassemble, that which is in a garbage bag is a little more risky. He told me that he and his grandson did a science experiment where for some plants, they incorporated shredded paper and for some they didn't, and he said the plants with shredded paper far outgrew the ones without. I questioned the presence of the ink and he said that he was an engineer and that ink is "just carbon" and therefore not harmful. However, I do know that color printers make black by mixing all their colors, and you get print from the black ink cartridge only when you specify "black ink cartridge only" in your printer's properties window. Some of the older color printers will feed ink out of the black ink cartridge if there is absolutely NO color on any of the pages. Underline something in red and all the ink for the document is made by mixing all the colors together. If you get your page wet after printing and you get a smear with several colors in it, that's why. In this case, I question the safety of the ink when shredded paper is used in the vegetable garden.

My cattle panel arches are positioned so that, when you walk under the arch, you are walking north and south. They've been up for over two years now, I don't take them down in the winter, and I've never had a problem. But I don't think it matters because the wind will blow through them unless they are absolutely covered with vegetation and mine, while they have grown lots of beans, have never been that thoroughly covered.

When you bread okra, wet it first in egg or milk or a combination of the two. I use half and half cornmeal, or some of my home-made cornbread mix in a bag. You could use part of a package of Jiffy, for instance. Drain the okra slices, then drop them in the bag and give the bag a few good shakes. Pour it all out into a colander and let the extra cornmeal mixture fall through the holes into a bowl. Spread the okra pieces out on a cookie sheet and let them sit a little bit to dry. When you cook them, use oil that has heated up some before you put them in, and don't smush them around any more than you have to.

Your local County Extension Agency will test your soil. Call them, they'll tell you what to do. Atwood's has some "home testers" but I don't know how accurate they are.

I meant "half and half cornmeal and flour" -- for the breading part.

For okra:

I go with the simplest breading possible. I cut up my okra and then I shake them with plain flour and toss into the skillet with some hot oil. Stir occasionally to brown all sides. Drain on paper towels or a paper grocery bag. Salt heavily. Pour into a bowl and eat.

I've tried egg and milk and cornmeal in various combinations and although they taste fine, I didn't think they were an improvement worth the hassle. Now for fried squash I usually use a mix of egg and milk and follow that up by dredging in flour. But squash has a lot less flavor, by itself, than okra does. YMMV.

Dawn...
I think the reason your Southern aunties would put cut okra in water and then in the fridge is to draw out the mucilaginous element of the okra, so that the breading would stick more easily. Then one wouldn't need egg or the like as an adherent. Makes sense to me. You gotta love those Southern aunties. Sometimes the old way is the best way :) Oh, and God bless em, they didn't have canola oil and deep fat fryers back then. The fridges were a new fangled thang.

Barbara

Barbara,

That's probably why they did it...good thinking! You get the gold star.

I had the most amazing aunts n terms of cooking and gardening on my dad's side of the family because his parents died during the Great Depression, and all the children's homes were full...so my dad and his 8 brothers and sisters were allowed to stay on the farm and "raise themselves". How they did that during the Grear Depression I'll never know, but they sure knew how to squeeze a meal out of absolutely nothing at all. Dad said they raised absolutely all their own food....hogs, a cow for milk and butter, chickens, etc. and got the most consistent crops from pinto beans and corn. My Aunt Osa and Aunt Vaun could make a meal out of anything at all....and it was great food too. My dad said his sisters raised the younger kids on beans and corn prepared 100 different ways....and generally for 3 meals a day except on holidays.

After I was grown up, I went to work for a guy who worked for a guy who, it turned out, was my dad's cousin. His name was Red. Red's wife taught me how to make a Spanish Fort(TX) Pecan Cream Pie, which included browning my own granulated sugar to brown it instead of buying brown sugar. (They grew up in Spanish Fort, which is just across the Red River from the western end of Love County, OK, where we now live.) The first time I took the Pecan Cream Pie to my Aunt Osa's house for a family holiday party and she found out the recipe was from Wanda and that I'd browned the sugar myself....well, she was the happiest I'd ever seen her! All she could talk about that night was that I'd made a Pecan Cream Pie the same way she'd always made it. I guess it was part nostalgia and partly just her joy that at least one of us "young 'uns" would continue to make the pecan cream pie 'the right way'. LOL

My old southern aunts taught me the right way to cook. Of course, being southern, it's all about sugar and lard and bacon grease. LOL They all lived into their 80s and 90s though, so that southern cooking can't be all bad for you.

I can cook in very healthy ways, and often do, but there are times I revert to my upbringing and 'cook southern'.

Dawn

nothing wrong with that

I agree. We tried to eat healthy in the 1980s and 1990s and what did we subsequently learn? That some of the 'fatty' things they told us to avoid, like avocados and nuts, actually have types of fat that we need for good health! That in attempting to eat low-fat, we were eating high-carb! So, now we try to eat a healthy mix of fresh fruit and veggies, lean meats, organic dairy, etc. and just ignore the government guidelines. We also use real butter quite often, especially in baking. I'd rather have my arteries clogged by butter than by trans fats. At least butter is natural, and the taste is superior.

On the okra. I cut it and rinse it in a collander. The water/slime mix holds cornmeal well.

Dawn
That was a touching and quite amazing story about your dad's family raising themselves. It really brought a lot of mental pictures to mind about survival in hard times. What would most folks do now in similar situations we wonder who've never been taught any gardening skills, and lived in apts in the cities, how in the world could they survive??

I think many of us here on the Okie garden web are becoming more aware all the time of not only how fickle the weather can be, but life as "we've known it", and maybe the good times aren't going to roll forever, as some, including myself, Carol, and others have mentioned.

It's good to notice the weather and seasonal patterns, but it's also very, very important to be watchful about the signs of the times. Some of this "putting up" that we've been doing may be instinctual as we sense a coming need, and not only the fact that's it's something we do during the harvest season. I have maybe a scant 1/4 acre, but I keep putting more and more of it into garden. I'm not interested in having a show place flower garden anymore, and most of my plants and flowers from now on are going to be geared to eco-system, and attracting beneficals, even though to me, it still looks pretty. I'm just glad that although I live in a semi-rural area, I can still garden the way I want without so-called "protective covenants". My DS just build me a new large compost pile I have in the back corner under the shade of a pecan tree, and I even think it looks good, lol!

I am very grateful to this forum and you Dawn for your work here, which is not only informative, but entertaining and very typically salt of the earth. Something I found very rare while living in the Denver sprawl. I appreciate the simple life, and it has brought me back to my own roots here in Oklahoma.

The folks here on GW remind me so much of the people I knew in my childhood. And the gardening that came so naturally to my own folks and their friends.

I can remember going to Missouri with my parents to visit my dad's brother and family on their farm, and all the wonderful foods that came out of the kitchen, homemade sausages, bacon or ham from the smokehouse, fresh country eggs, milk and butter from the dairy, homemade blackberry jam, hot biscuits with cream gravy. And that was just breakfast! After eating, my cousins and I would go play by the creek where the watercress grew prolifically, and then if we got hungry between meals would run in and get a salt shaker and head to the garden and pick tomatos off the vines, salt and eat them like they were candy, getting the juice all over our faces, of course.
My own mom was quite a gardener herself, but not all that much of a cook, because she always worked, and didn't really have the time. But that woman could fry a chicken like no one else in the world. I've never been able to duplicate her method even though I'd grown up watching her. The one thing I remember is that she would always choose the smallest, most tender chickens, and maybe that was part of her secret. Whatever, she had a magic touch, just like your aunt's. And her cherry pies were a family treasure, thick with cherries and not just sweet filling.

Well, I got waaaay off topic there, but I don't think the forum police are going to come after me.

Anyways, thanks for that post......it really brought back some wonderful memories, and lots of nostalgia for by gone days.

It was so sweet of you to make that special Spanish Fort Cream Pecan Pie in honor of your aunt. There has to be a special place in heaven for folks like that who've devoted themselves to raising their younger siblings and keeping the family pulled together during hard times.

As for you, you may have to pull out that recipe for your special Skillet browned sugar cream pecan pie come Thanksgiving time, (or sooner)for the rest of us here. You never know when that "old school" cooking may become a necessary luxury again.

Someone recently told me their daughter was studying the Depression in school, and had to make a "Depression Cake" using the most bare bones ingredients.

We really have been both blessed and spoiled at times in the abundance of things, but we should never forget the lessons learned by those who went before us who learned survival skills and it would be good if we could learn these same skills ourselves in order to pass them on to our own children and the next generation. Not everything comes out of a carton, can, box or wrapper,..... or should!

Barbara

Ah, nothing like hard times for teaching one how to live well.

Dawn, you are going to have to post that recipe!

Okiefamily, I guess I'm just different. But I use shredded paper whenever I can lay hands on it. I've been reading arguments, for and and against, since the late 70s. But I haven't really seen any hard data. Anyway it works well for me, and really... I don't give a hoot what it looks like!

When I need a soil test I use the county extension agent's office. They send off my sample and get me the results.

I don't pay much attention to which way the open ends of a cattle panel arch face. My tendency would be to make them face North and South. But does it really matter? I don't know. Personally I prefer to use the cattle panels by wiring them up, about a foot off the ground, on three T posts. This makes "a fence" upon which to let things climb. I find this more efficient than an arch. Still, I have a friend who connects two cattle panel arches and makes a really BIG arch, each year. It's impressive.

Jerreth and I saute our okra without egg or flour. We simply cut it up and brown it in olive oil. Jerreth adds a little rosemary. I don't bother with rosemary. It's all good!

George
Tahlequah, OK

Y'all,

I'll dig up the pecan cream pie recipe and post it in a day or two. I don't think I can rely on writing it from memory any more because I might leave something out.

Barbara, Since I got more serious about raising a lot of food this year, I've grown fewer flowers and herbs, but sure have been busy filling up the freezer, pantry and cellar, so I can't complain. I'd like to think that if something happened to disrupt our food supply, we could 'tough it out' on what we raise. I wonder how many people could do that though? And, Daddy and them grew their crops 'dryland' because their well barely pumped enough water for drinking/washing/bathing (one bath a week, on Saturday night!). How well would we do if we had to garden dryland?

I've had Depression Cake before, and it is nothing to get excited about, although I am sure it was the best they could do at that time.

My aunts could can anything and make it taste like whatever they wanted. If they wanted to turn cucumbers into apple rings, for example, they knew how to spice them and do that. They also made apple pie with no apples (and no cucumbers either!) and the secret, I belive, was Ritz Crackers.

Your memories of the farm in Missouri are so wonderful. I think every child should have some family members with a farm to go visit when they are little. My grandparents on my mom's side had a farm until I was about 5 or 6, and then still had a rural home after that with a big garden until I was in my mid-teens. Even after they moved to the big city of Euless, Texas, in the 1970s, they always had a veggie garden, fruit trees and grew dewberries. On my dad's side, one uncle had a huge garden...must have been at least a couple of acres although at the time it seemed to me that it went on forever, and he raised animals too. It wasn't really a farm, but was semi-rural and farm-like.

In the late 1980s or so, I bought a book about "Ghost Towns of Texas" or something similar, and one of the towns it listed as a ghost town was Spanish Fort. My dad really was offended by that! The last time we all were there together for a Spanish Fort Homecoming/Cemetary Work Day was probably in the early 1990s and my aunt and uncle flew in from California for that. (By then, my dad and uncle both had Alzheimer's Disease that had advanced quite a bit, and even though they seemed happy to see everyone, they had no clue who a single person was!!) At that point in time, all that was left of Spanish Fort was the cemetary, the falling-down-building that used to be the store (where the Spanish Fort Coon Hunters Association used to meet too), a few houses....and the school, which had been turned into a community center. So, it was close to a ghost town. One thing I remember vividly from being there in the early 1990s was that everyone had a garden and every garden had black-eyed peas and okra!

George, I feel like hard times are coming again so I am grateful for all the knowledge we share about how to do things that make us more self-reliant.

Dawn

This thread is dear to my heart. I should have been born in pioneer times or the 1860's. I love raising all our food including a family milk cow. She just calved so in a couple of days I will be have fresh milk again. It is just DH and I, but that's ok. I have two baby calves that can take all I don't need. I don't even milk her every day......just when I need milk. We have chickens. I meant to buy chickens to butcher but didn't get that accomplished; hope to next year. That is the secret of good-tasting chicken! We haven't had super fried chicken since I raised my own. We have our own beef, fruit trees and garden stuff. I am thinking of buying a grain mill to grind my own flour......I do make all our bread. I would make our butter, but my Shorthorn cow doesn't have high enough butterfat to do that......still thinking about a Jersey cow! I want to raise a couple of pigs, but my husband is fighting that one.....I may win though.

I raise okra, but don't do the peas because of the hulling process that I hate. Mom always did though. I have winter squash, pumpkins and turnips still coming on.

I bought a very interesting book called Real Food by Nina Planck. It is quite an eye opener. I try to never buy packaged foods or hydrogenated foods or partially hydrogenated food or soy bean products. I have started rendering my own lard from the when we buy a hog. I have the butcher grind the fat. It renders very quickly.

Like I said, I was born in the wrong era!

It is funny how different we all are, isn't it? I don't mind cows, and my parents had one while I was young. Later, I worked in my BILs dairy, and it didn't bother me to clean up the cow and put the milking machine on, but I NEVER learned to milk. I tried and tried, and I just couldn't do it. In the dairy barn the cows were right up there at eye level, but I still couldn't do it.

My children once had goats so I learned to make cheese, and I have canned a lot of things although I don't do it on a regular basis. I always did fruit when we lived in Colorado.....fish in Alaska...you get the picture, live like the natives.

BUT...I am pretty much a "foodie" and I grind my own wheat and make bread all of the time. I love cooking with fresh ingredients from the garden. I have never had lard in my kitchen, and I buy only about 2 cans of solid shortening per year. I make biscuits with it and occasionally use it in a cookie recipe. I make up a biscuit mix and keep it all of the time so it is quick to grab, but I make yeast breads more than I make biscuits. For everything else I use vegetable oil, even pie crust. I also use olive oil, sesame oil, walnut oil, etc. We never eat margarine, but I usually have a pound or two frozen for cookies, especially if my DIL, the cookie monster, is here. Now that they are in Africa, I rarely bake cookies.

Now butter is another story. If I were ever to have high colestrol there would be no question what I would have to give up. I eat meat, but not large quantities. I love buttered popcorn with REAL butter, or maybe I just love butter, and popcorn gives me an excuse to eat it. LOL

Tonight I made a huge pan of skinless chicken breasts. We had the first of them tonight, but will have them later in the week in other ways. We like salad topped with deviled eggs, mandarin oranges, and the sliced chicken breast. We usually put the salad on a bed of chinese noodles. Makes a great meal for us.

For the chicken breast, I dipped them in beaten egg, then tossed them in a bag with a mixture of flour, pepper, garlic powder, and ground crackers (lots of crackers). Do not add salt. I use a buttery cracker like Ritz to make the crumbs. I cook them in oil just until they are a beautiful golden brown, but not fully cooked. They brown quickly because of the crackers. Then I place them on a cookie sheet and put in a low oven of about 250 or 300 depending on how much time I have and let them finish cooking. Some of the oil they picked up in the frying will actually run off onto the cookie sheet.

Tonight our potatoes were baked in the microwave until almost cooked, then I quartered them and put them on a cookie sheet that had a little olive oil. I rubbed the cut potato quarters across the olive oil to coat them, then sprinkled on garlic salt, cumin, and chili powder. As soon as they came out of the oven, I topped them with a small amount of grated pepperjack cheese. We also had salad that included a lot of fresh things from the garden. For desert we had sliced strawberries slightly sweetened with Splenda, and spooned over angel food cake.

It is not unusual for me to cook more than we can eat in one meal. For most of my life, I had a house full of kids, and stressful full time job, and a lot of church duties, so I learned to do everything the easy way. One of my DILs was here a couple of weeks ago and she stood in the kitchen with pen and paper and wrote down things that I did while she was watching. She told me she had never made a pie curst and always used a graham cracker crust for everything. The next day she made pies, and I just sat in a chair and talked her through it. She did great.

When I start to have a "craving" for something a loaf of hot bread with butter, of course, will usually satisfy me.