Best Thanksgiving Day Turkey Ever!

I just wanted to share a great way to cook a turkey.  I bought a Murray's Turkey from Ira over on 20th street; brought that bitch home and deboned it.  Deboned it?  That's right.  I got me one motherfucking sharp ass knife...any sharper and I could have turned it on at the handle and cut off Luke Skywalker's arm with it.  I cut down the center of the breast and pulled the meat away from the keel like opening up a dinner jacket.  When I got to the leg, I made a cut running from where the thigh socket inserts into the pelvis, all the way to the little bird's foot.  Again, I peeled the meat away, this time as though it's pants had been sliced down the front and then opened up the meat like curtains to a show.

I skipped doing the wings similarly to the legs because it was too much work for two little return.  I just ripped them out of the socket and saved them for stock.  Finally, I cut the meat away from the spine and Voila! (as Julia Child might say), I had deboned the turkey.

Because of the turkey's size, I chose to cut the 'dinner jacket' in two  from top to bottom so that each side was comprised of a breast and and a leg all attached together with the skin.  Then I beat the living daylights out of the breast with a meat tenderizing hammer to flatten it out, sprinkled the inside of the 'jacket' with salt and pepper, then lathered the whole inside of the turkey with a stuffing mixture.  I froze the other portion for later use.

Next I rolled that bitch up and tied her together with string, buttered the skin, salt and peppered the whole thing and threw her in the oven till the thermometer registered 170.

Fantastic.  Once the bird comes out, you just slice it down.  It looks like a perfect rollatine.  Roasted potatoes on the side with a nice pumpkin/squash puree and some gravy...delish!

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

Daffodils, blue moons and balls.

I put in another 260 daffodil bulbs this fall.  A hundred last week and another 160 today.  Two varieties, Juanita and King Alfred, the bulbs of which are as big as a Cuban’s balls. I have a hillside sloping down from the house and I figure if I put in about 200 or so every fall, one day, I’ll have a whole mountain of spring flowers leading up to the house.

Here’s a story for you:

I grew up in a small town in Pa…real blue collar…coal town, railroads…like that.  I didn’t know WHAT I was going to do with myself.  I knew, as best I could have known at the time, that I was queer, but what to do?

There was a program at the time that got kids out of high school early so they could go to college.  This was during the Reagan years, and those of us that could get out of high school  and enroll in college by the start of the next year, could maintain their social security benefits (my father was a veteran and killed so me and my brother received a check).  Any way, I applied, and then next thing I knew, I got to spend my senior year of high school as a freshman at Penn State University.

What fun!  I was young, hot, full of cum and off I went.  Still I didn’t really know anything about the gay world and I was intensely ashamed of being a homo.  Aside from a couple of hot dalliances, I floundered. 

Not in school though.  Free of the tight scrutiny of high school, my GPA soared.  I was on the dean’s list every semester.  During exams, in all the huge 101 courses, me and my friend Leah were surrounded by 6 or so students desperate to cheat off our papers.

Leah and I made a pact.  We were going to take this new found momentum and apply to Ivy League schools, get out of the Pa sticks, and find ourselves the Brave New World everyone talks about…   Actually, I wanted to find a place far enough from home that I could get laid and not feel like I was going to get caught.  I didn’t give a fuck about attending a University (since I already thought I knew it all), I just wanted to be free.

I never made it into an Ivy League (and Leah got pregnant so that put the cabash on her college goals) but I DID make it into William and Mary.  The day I opened that envelope was one of the happiest days of my life.  I had that hot summer to think about moving to Virginia and everything I was going to do.  By August, I packed up my car and drove south to Williamsburg.  I remember a big fight with my family a day or so before I left.  Nothing extraordinary, more of the usual bullshit and now of course when I look back on it I think to myself, could I have been any more of an asshole?  Anyway, the departure was one of those ripping-up-the-gravel-driveway departures.  Me and my four cylinder Ford EXP…a real tough guy all right (!)

Once at William and Mary, I made a lot of friends.  I was cocky and loved to party.  I could hit the bars with the best of them (the legal age to drink was 18) and since my floor thumped with one weekend frat party after the next, there was no shortage of mischief I could get into.  That’s where I met Joe.

Joe was like an alien from another world.  On my floor, I roomed with an Ambassador’s son, a nephew to the President of Chrysler Corporation and any number of Washington big wigs, but there were none that stood out like Joe.  He had been raised in Budapest, extensively traveled Europe, smoked Gitane cigarettes and had a mind like a cracking whip.  The boy completely swept me off my feet. 

Now I don’t know if you know this about William and Mary, but it is a HUGE dyke school.  Christ, step outside and all you smell is boxwood and progesterone.  Oh and clear off the sidewalk too, lest you’re overrun by a pack of brawny girls on their way to field hockey or softball or a game of cutthroat tennis.  But as far as faggots go, the only way you’re going to find a boy to sleep with is if you attend the closing night party for the theatre majors or get some poor fratboy drunk enough for him to pretend it all never happened.  So when I met Joe, it was like someone had slipped me the long lost brother I never had.  He took my hillbilly style and  rocketed me up to speed on fashion, discourse, behavior oh and the best part, he introduced me to the gay night life in Norfolk, Va.

Ever hear of it?  It’s a big US port.  Sailors and shipyards.  And if you dig deep enough into the dirtiest part of the wrong side of the tracks, you’ll find a couple of queer bars.  You know, I don’t think I can even remember their names, but that’s where Joe would take me and Jesus God did we have fun.

There were actual sailors in the joint.  Dressed up, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum, sailors.  I think the first time he took me in the place, I must have practically passed out from the anticipation of just being in the same room as them.  Now don’t get me wrong, at some of the bar tables it would have taken four men to make a full set of teeth.  I mean, most of these guys were not going to win a beauty contest anytime soon,  but peppered throughout the crowd, you’d find a handful of eyes-out-of-your-head, slobber-down-your-chin studs and it was fantastic.

Dancing at that place, seeing Joe across the floor working some trick, me working one that I found… God that was fun.  I met this one black guy there.  Six something, built like a superhero with two big ass cheeks.  Looked like the back of his acid washed jeans were stuffed with two loafs of pizza dough.  Anyway, we started dancing together, then making out.  The next thing I know, I was driving down regularly to fuck him.  Those were my very first truly gay encounters.  Everything up to that point had been boyscout stuff.  But this was full on, cock up his sweet ass, gay sex.  We would cum four or five times a night.  No joke.  And I was so high on the experience, I felt as though my feet were no longer touching the ground.  In class, driving, at work, where ever, my head was not where it should have been, but  back with that boy in his crappy apartment, lying on that mattress he kept on the floor, fucking and making out.

Then I got so sick.  I could barely walk.  Took me two weeks to get over the illness and ontop of that, I discovered I had a raging case of crabs. Turns out that black guy wasn’t just giving me booty, he threw in the cooty as well. Well  with enough chicken soup and RID, I recovered, but it wasn’t long after that Joe pulled me aside on the Duke of Gloucester Street, the main drag in the town,  to ask me if I had read about the new ‘gay cancer’. 

I had.  I remember the article buried deep in the Washington Post and I remember a growing anxiety in me that I had already become infected, an anxiety that would last me over 25 years. 

One year later, nearly to the day that Joe had told me about the ‘gay cancer’, he was dead.  It was the same hot, stifling day; the same still air; the same sound of cicadas sawing in the trees.  My dearest friend, a man to this day, I still see as a laser light of energy and ideas, dead of AIDS at 20.  His mother flew in from Budapest, an imperial woman, cold and emotionless.  I mentioned to her that Joe and I were very good friends.  She sized me up and dismissed me…maybe as a hick, maybe as a fag, I don’t know.  I don’t even know what became of Joe's remains, if he was buried or cremated.  I don’t know.

Anyway, I don’t want to end on a downer.  I just remembered Joe for whatever reason and how much fun he was and all the Joes that all of us meet in our formulative gay years.  Those that extend that hand to us and pull us in and crack us up and make us feel as though we are finally a part of something.

And don’t ask me to tell you WHAT on earth this has to do with a hillside of daffodils.  I’d try to tie it all together for you, but you’d just vomit because it would sound so forced...but how about this:

Last night we had a full moon the size of Hooker’s Hole.  It was the ‘blue moon’ you’ve heard tell about.  The odd ball moon that turns a cycle of three full moons per season on it’s end and slips one more in for good measure.  So maybe that’s why I’m thinking of Joe.  He was the one that the world needed to make room for.  The one that barged into the order of things, shoved them aside and made his way forth.  My friend Joe, a Blue Moon, and only that once.

If you don't like Chemistry, skip this one and jump to the sexy part

I don't know if you know this, but wood ash is supposed to be a great fertilizer for plants.  I got to thinking about this and couldn't figure out what the ingredients to wood ash would be.  I figured that wood is mostly cellulose (which is really a complicated sugar) containing Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen and that when combined with Oxygen in the burning process would most likely form Carbon Dioxide and Water (both given off as gas)...I mean what else could the combustion reaction create, right?

Well I did a little online research and turns out that all those other elements important to healthy cellular life, Potassium, Phosphorous, Sodium and Chloride (though search me what the hell Chloride does in plants) form carbonates in the burning process.  This is what wood ash is made and if you look at a bag of fertilizer, you'll see that it's comprised of three things, a Nitrogen, a Phosphorous and a Potassium portion.  Though we don't get any Nitrogen left over in the burning process (it's gotta be combined with Oxygen in the burning process and given off as NO2) wood ash is all that Potassium and Phosphorous in the plant combined with Carbon and Oxygen.  So, when we dump our wood ashes on our plants, we're really giving them a big boost of two out of three essential 'vitamins' important to plant health (Potassium and Phosphorous).  

A word of warning.  The chemical formula for Potash (the carbonate formed from the reaction of Potassium and Carbon Dioxide in the burning process) is
K2CO3.  When this shit dissolves in water, you get Potassium Hydroxide KOH, a strong base.  That's why you want to make sure you don't add wood ashes to acid loving plants (like blueberries) unless you add a sulfur component with it (the sulfur combines with oxygen and water to form sulfuric acid).

Jesus, it woulda been much better if I talked about sucking dick or something like that, right?

Raunchy at the Farm

Hey Men,

I get lots of interest in my naked barnshots.  I think it's a real fantasy for a lot of people.  Truth is, it turns me on too...that's why I do it.

                                             

There's something about being outside all day, working, feeling your muscles tighten and fatten...then all the solitude and distance around you.  Maybe I catch a whiff of my own body oder, maybe I just get hard for no reason, whatever the impetus, I find myself pulling my fat cock out in the middle of the forest or taking pictures of myself in the barn jerking off.

I have fantasies that one of you out there will read this and come over...sneak up on me while I'm up in the hemlock jerking off and pull out your cock as well or I turn around in the field and find that you've been spying on me playing with my cock.

I'd love to find you sitting next to the stream.  I walk up to you, pull out my fat dick and push it into your mouth, your face flattened against the hair on my balls and stomach.

                                                                             

I'm not like this all the time.  In my non horny moments, I'm your regular gay farmer.  I lay patio stone on the terrace of my new house, I mulch the blueberry row, chop wood, drive the truck to the butcher to buy a chicken to roast at night.  At the gym I talk shop with a cattle farmer named Dave.  Every Friday, I talk to Jess and get tips on how to better care for my orchards.

                             

Today was the first real hard frost of the season, but a bright sun quickly burned it off leaving dew drops where minutes before there were sharp crystals of ice.  I'm looking across the patio now to a few of those drops hanging from the black cherry tree.  Because the sun is refracting through them, they're like lasers that change in color from red to green, blue, then back to red in an instant depending on how the light breeze moves them.

I'm going to be working alone in the house today in my shorts and socks.  I wish you could come over.

Chopping wood for winter

I used to have a neighbor, George.  Lived about 3 football fields from the house...the trailer is still there.  Not lived, I guess, visited.  He came from somewhere in the Philly area.  He would pack up his car, his wife and sometimes a few of his teenage kids, drive up here and shoot guns.  I got to know him cause almost from the day I bought the place he would visit on his ATV and monologue me to death.  The man could talk.

Not more than 3 months after being here, he warned me that others were hunting on my property and in an effort to 'protect me', he posted my ground.  Big white ugly signs, all over the place that indicated this property was mine.  The reality was George was posting my land so that he could trespass on it all by himself.  I didn't really care. I was rarely here and if he wanted the land to hunt on all by his lonesome, so be it.

Then about 2 years ago I had a phone call from my other neighbor, Jason.  George's body was found on my land at the bottom of a steep cliff, with his ATV rolled over ontop of him.  It seems that George had decided to take a tour of my property in the winter when a slick ice patch had glazed over one of the steep logging trails.  Once George drove over it, his tires slipped on the ice and over the edge he went.  The death was instant.

The ice patch is part of a swift, seasonal stream that tumbles down this intense slope and when I saw that George's body was found at the bottom of it, I decided to call the stream George Falls.  Morbid, but memorable.

So yesterday, I'm sawing wood up in the same hills, got to by the same trails as those often walked by George.  I was thinking about the dangers of steep hillside and about George's death when I took a turn further up from George Falls and heard something break loose.

The 300 pound wagon that I was pulling with the ATV to collect the wood gave way and the carriage commenced to race down the summit.  The pin holding it had snapped and now the wagon was charging down the mountain on its own.  I was actually shocked to see it travel the distance it did on its own before, as though cued by George himself, it took a sharp left at George Falls and threw itself headlong into the abyss.  The remaining journey I could only chart with my ears.  Three loud, terrible bangs and then an agonizing silence.  When I peered over the edge of the cliff to look, I saw the wagon, badly dented, flipped on its back and wedged in a deep ravine.  After a few attempts to get it out, I left it for today when I could attack the situation with renewed vigor.  Three scotches and a good night's sleep later, I used the winch on the ATV and three long chains to pull that poor, bruised bastard of a wagon up.  And damn if the thing still wasn't in good working order.

On another note, I finished a THIRD garden row and see that there is room for a fourth.  I don't get to play outside today though, I have to spend the entire time inside working on my 'real work'.  As you can see, I'm gearing up for it now.

The old garden...and I'll post pictures so you can see, is four 100 foot rows.  One with asparagus, another for strawberries, the third for red, gold and black raspberries and the last for whatever I feet like growing (potatoes, arugula, spinach, etc).  I've decided to give a break to this last, over-used row and in preparation covered it with about 4 inches of raw manure.  Next spring, I'll turn the manure under (I read somewhere that it's best to turn the soil in the spring since the fungal hyphae systems you upturn release valuable nutrients.), then plant the row with early spring crops of spinach, peas, scallions and radishes before turning it under again in July.   After the strawberry row produces (also around July), I'll move the suckered strawberry plants to the newly turned row and dig up the old strawberry row to be the new misc vegetable row for 2012.

Oh brother, there goes the alarm.  Time to go work.  See you in the fields, friends!

  

The official end of the 2010 Growing Season

Well, it was bound to happen.  You could see your breath by 7pm and the sky had a space-ice kind of clarity.  When I woke up this morning, not only Jack, but Jill, June and Jennifer Frost, his wife, daughter and cousin on his father's side respectively, had all made an appearance.  They made short order of the fields, ran up and down the tomato patch, sat (?) on the blueberries, and took an ice cream dump on the red raspberries.  So long folks, we'll see you next year!

Spent all day yesterday working on a spreadsheet for one of my accounts.  Came out great, but it wasn't till 12 midnight, when my friend James called me, that I was able to figure out a little hiccough in it that was preventing the numbers working correctly.  God bless him for doing that.

Today, I'm committed to getting some outdoor chores done.  There is so much to do that it can be a little overwhelming, but I'm just going to dive in and get started, probably the most important thing I can do.

The good thing about the frost...now that I know those asparagus ferns are dead, I'm going to cut them back and cover the whole row with that beautiful manure.

Here comes the Fall

(Portentious title, no?)Some of you know that I started my own business.  There's good news and bad news.

Good News:  I'm able to work from home.
Bad News:  I'm too busy to do any of the fun work I wanted to do while I was home.

Good News:  Business is a hit
Bad News:  I'm constantly traveling, so I'm never at home to work from home.

I'm trying to build a patio.  Well, I'm not trying, I'm actually DOING.  I had Yoda come over and he said (Yoda voice),  "Try?!  Try not.  DO or do not.  There is no try."

So I'm building a patio.  I started out the way my Aunt Gertie would have started out. Grabbed some rocks and started putting em on the ground.

Oh I have all kinds of detractors (including some voices inside my own head), but I'm plowing forward.  The soil where I want to put the stone has been compacted hard from the construction around the house, so I'm only adding a layer of gravel and a big fucking flat rock on top and filling in the seams with some dirt and more rock.   It's slower going than you would expect because I'm using rocks from th farm that are all varying levels of thickness and some of them, I don't mind telling you, are heavier than Aunt Salome's ass, so you have to do a lot of struggling and maneuvering to make them fit.   Then I have a dog up my backside, bugging me to throw a ball every 15 seconds...throw in an urge to jerk off every 2 hours and you have one long drawn out process.

But this is about gay farming, so let's get out those pitchforks and get to work.

On today's docket (after I finish my MnFn' obligation to my 'business'), we're going...that's right WE are going...over to the fresh manure pile.  Oh. Yes. We. Are.  And you know what we're going to do over there?  We're going to load the ATV wagon full of that fresh shit and haul it down to the potato row.  And that's not all.  After that, we're going to hitch up the brush hog and mow through two big patches of weeds to clear the way for a sunflower garden, a corn patch and more general garden space.  If we're lucky, we'll take a second to get lost in the tall, dry goldenrod, make out and play with each other's cocks ;)

It's been two years since we've planted our current potato row and the soil there needs a break. I'm afraid we've accumulated disease in that area, friendly to the spud-men, and we're going to try leafy greens there next spring which is WHY we are going to create the new potato garden.  And it's going to be big. Cause daddy likes his taters.  Oh. Yes. He. Does.  You know what kind?  I like the red kind that have the red all the way through the potato.  Ever have those?  You can get them from Irish Eyes...the best potato catalogue company around.  You can also get those Kennebecs which are so delicious.  This year I planted the all blue kind which sort of tastes like you're eating some native American I-just-dug-this-crap-up-in-the-woods-cause-my-corn-failed tuber.  Not good.  I also planted a 'German Butterball' variety that I'll skip next year as well.  Not awful...just poor producer and no big deal on the dinner plate.

Anyway where was I...Oh yes, we're putting together a potato patch.  The soil in the area where we'll be working is fairly easy to dig, so the plan is, mow it, dig it and manure it.  By next spring, we should have ourselves some nice composed rows to put our potatoes in.

As for the corn-slash-sunflower-slash-whatever garden patch we're going to put in.  I'd like to try a variation on that 'Lasagna Garden' technique everybody always talks about.   I have a whole bunch of c ardboard in the barn that I plan to lay down in rows over the freshly mowed site and then cover them up with cow shit.  "Are you going to till the soil before you do that, Farmer Gay?" I hear someone asking in the back.  The answer is no, I'm not.  And the expanded answer is, I don't feel like it.  We're talking sunflowers and corn...they'll figure it out.  If I dig through the cardboard when planting the seeds ( or setting out the plants), the soil beneath should be suitable to new'ly forming roots of the starting plants.  That's the theory anyway and I'm sticking to it.

Now mind you, we still need to finish this patio (get rocks, get shale, set the stones, throw the ball for the dog), get wood for the upcoming winter (drive the ATV up the hill, cut  the logs, load the logs, split the logs, stack the logs) cut the grass again before winter, clean up around the orchard, mow the asparagus and cover it with fresh compost.  So you queens have a lot of work to do.  So pack up those pink waders and high tail it over here so you can help me out.

And so this is the Gay Farmer signing off for now.  Wishing you a sturdy Spade with a long, stiff handle.