Companion Gardening: Carrots with Tomatoes

My tomato plants are three feet apart so that leaves me with some space in-between.   Carrots are great companion plants of tomatoes and can to fill up space around your tomato plants - Just make sure you have enough depth for carrots long tap root.  And enough space in-between because tomatoes don't like to be crowded.

Carrots contribute to breaking up the soil and helping air, water and nutrients spread through the soil.   That's one reason it's said that tomatoes grow better with carrots, also because carrots attract hover flies -- which go after many tomato pests.  A drawback with planting tomatoes and carrots is tomatoes may stunt the carrots' growth. 

Carrots grow and are ready to harvest by the time the tomato plants start to take over the space.  Just avoid planting the carrots too close to the base of the tomato plants, or you may damage the tomato roots when harvesting.

In this next article I will show you how to plant carrots from bare root!

I bought a pack of carrots from a local nursery for $2.79 and it contained a lot of carrots.  The trick with buying them this way is to separate each individual carrot because if you plant them in clumps you will get twisted and deformed carrots:

Preparing the Garden Soil

Every year about a month before I plant my garden I do the backbreaking task of tiling the soil in my garden.  It’s not that difficult, but the position you do it from can wear on the ole back.  Tiling is very beneficial for the soil because it loosens and if needed, you work-in supplements like lime or compost.  Once I stop working in my garden for the year, around late September early October -- I don’t do anything to my garden.  But as soon as the snow clears and the ground is a little workable -- I test my soil to determine what I’ll need to add to get the pH I want.   I grow a lot of tomatoes and they like their soil pH around 6.0 to 6.8.  The pH for my garden in February was 6.2.  

In this article I will show you how to til and prepare a garden for planting.

After raking the leaves and picking up some sticks, I gas up the tiller get ready to go:

Get The Most Out of Dry-Fire

Dry-firing is a practice used by all serious shooters.  From people who own guns strictly for self-defense to serious competitive shooters. It is the fastest route to skill there is. It is probably as good as or better than actual firing of live ammo. Certainly it should be done more frequently and more times than live firing.

When I was in the Marine Corps I must have dry-fired thousands of rounds.   Every year before you spend a week on the range doing annual re-qualification, you spend the week prior dry-firing.  By the time you fire that first actual shot, you'll have dry-fired your rifle/pistol in every conceivable position thousands of times.  This is called snapping in and this is not optional.  It is the primary reasons why Marines are known to be the best marksman in the military.   Marines know marksmanship inside out.

Gun Porn: Long-Guns

Years ago when I bought my Remington PSS in .308 I had one of the premier off-the-shelf scoped long-guns out there.  Very few bolt action rifles setups could compete with that gun.  And the tack driving semi-auto's at that time were even fewer.  Today, while my PSS is still a tack driver –  the list of bolt action and semi auto long-guns out there for use by today’s sniper or precision rifle enthusiast is impressive – to say the least.  And the optics on today's guns are just plain awesome, but I'll get into them in another article.  

Here are a few of the best long-guns out there:

Florida Man Swallowed Alive by Sinkhole

12 hours later... a confused American man emerges from the ground in a Chinese home.

 A sinkhole that opened up late Thursday beneath a house near Tampa swallowed up one man sleeping in a bedroom

Hole-y crap! This story just sucks you in.  The hole is now over 110 feet wide and more than 50 feet deep and yes, still growing.  A lot of us have had those dreams we are falling and falling and here is the nightmare realized.  I hope they find him alive. But I do not believe there is any chance this poor man is alive. The amount of dirt that has been sucked in on top of him, hopefully he didn't suffer long.

Is there anything scarier than finding the ground under you collapsing?

Sinkholes never occur where society needs them.  If only this could happen to Boehner, Reid, McConnell, Pelosi, and McCain, and for good measure add in two other long term Democrats.  

Anyone got a sink hole we can send them?

My list of ways I don't want to die from just got longer:

1) Being burned alive

2) Drowning

3) Throat being slit

4) Flying aboard a plane which is crashing

5) Kissing Hillary Clinton

6) And now waking up in a sink hole

How to Make Shrimp Scampi

Shrimp is my favorite seafood.  I can eat them raw or cooked - steamed, fried, grilled, or sautéed.   In this next article I will sauté them in some garlic and butter for a fabulous Shrimp Scampi.  Shrimp Scampi is very easy to make, and only requires a few items.  It’s also a very flexible dish in that you can modify or add to the ingredients to make your own special version. 

The first thing you must do is assemble your ingredients, for this dish I am using:

1 1/2 lbs of Large Raw Shrimp

A Cup of any White Wine -- for this I am using a left over Riesling

A Cup of Chicken Stock

2 Tablespoons of Garlic

½ stick of Butter

1 Lemon

1/2 Cup Parmesan Cheese

Las Vegas Strip Shooting: 3 Dead

Who the hell is Kenny Clutch? I just watched one of his songs on YouTube.  Does he have Down Syndrome?  This a hate crime on a special person?  I guess Vegas is where rappers go to die, and kill; so sick of the thug mentality; too bad the cops did not get a chance to shoot some of them.  I feel for the taxi occupants.  That's one of three ways I wouldn't want to die.

Live like a thug, die like a thug.  Vegas was safer when they let the mob run it.  More customer-friendly, too.

Police Find Massive Cache of Drugs, Cars, and Weapons

 Real-life 'pirate cave' of arms smuggler found in California packed with 100 guns, 117pounds of marijuana, $12,000 in cash and even STOLEN CARS!

IMAGINE THAT!  Criminals with guns???? Say it isn't so!!! Don't they know about the strict gun laws already in place????  When Feinstein finds out about this, she’s going to be pissed off.  She is going to seek legislation to seize caves and have stricter gun ownership laws in CA to keep those things out of people’s hands.

I wonder if the cops will return the stolen weapons to the rightful owners.

There is a difference between being a gun enthusiast and supporter of the 2nd Amendment and a narco-kingpin. The fact that someone owns guns -- even a lot of guns -- doesn't bother me one bit. There isn't anything wrong with having all of those weapons and/or ammo as long as you acquire & own them legally.  And if someone smokes pot, I really don't care.  

Unfortunately, this is what the anti-gun goons are trying to convince their followers all of us who legally own firearms are like!!

This was a family of criminals here we had meth and heroin, along with all manner of stolen property.  I bet if they really look into their past they will turn out to be a bunch who lived off of welfare and stole everything they could get their hands on and manufactured drugs to sell to other criminal elements... Hence they were typical losers who want everything for free and want the rest of us to pay for it!!!

This isn't a family of law-abiding gun owners. These were heavily-armed drug dealers. In short, good job to the cops for busting it up.

How to make a Ham, Sausage and Onion Calzone

 

Calzones are great for mixing it up – getting rid of leftovers in the fridge, and combining some different ingredients to see how it tastes.  Today, I’ll be showing you how to make a Ham, Sausage and Onion Calzone.

First step is to get all the ingredients together, in this case:

Spokesman for Heart Attack Grill Dies of a Heart Attack

Sometimes life is ironic -- they should partner with a funeral parlor.

John Alleman, 52, was waiting for a bus in front of the restaurant last week when he suffered cardiac arrest and was removed from life support Monday afternoon, the restaurant's owner Jon Basso told the Las Vegas Sun. 

Gotta give him credit for going "all in" to get the job.  He knew what he was doing. It's not like somebody held a bun to his head.  He weighed 180 pounds. That doesn't fit the obesity judgment call most people think of when they talk about this restaurant.

I guess its better than living to 85 and being bedridden and having some caretaker change your diapers for you.  I certainly don't want to die at 52, but if I'm 85 and losing my marbles, you'd better not get between me and a double cheeseburger because having your heart explode all at once sure beats the hell out of wandering off in the cold and dying in a ditch.