Last full day at Welcome Station

Friday was our last full day at Welcome Station.

Carl and I moved one of Nancy's compost bin's contents (essentially turning it over and getting it well wet-down.

I helped harvest cherry tomatoes...

Some views of Nancy's garden -- she uses raised beds as she can control what the soil content is. In this picture there were berry bushes toward the back, and dill and lettuces in the bed in the foreground.

Some garden peas in the back left, and snow peas in the front (with the red lettuce).

We also dumped the soil out of the canvas growing sacks onto Nancy's gardening soil pile ready to be used for next year's gardening. She grows a number of things in the canvas sacks so the plants can be moved to different areas of the garden if they aren't thriving where she initially placed them.

Nancy has quite the green thumb. She is able to get two plantings out of her garden -- one early, and the other going in mid-July. They are at about 5700' elevation, and in desert -- so we are quite impressed with all she has been able to raise. The one thing that she was not able to get to produce well this summer was green beans (Casey particularly requested those) -- Nancy got enough for one serving of green beans, which she gave to Casey. Nancy is determined that she will get green beans next year!

Although it was quite warm while we were there, it is time for the first freeze, so the garden will soon be done for the year. But as long as it is producing, she is still harvesting! Nancy gave us carrots, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce to take along with us when we left!

We borrowed Steve's ladder and took our last Fantasy RV Tour sticker off of Gracie.

Steve really likes using Pappy's seasoning when he is smoking or barbeque'ing meats. They have been having difficulty finding it in stores - Nancy asked me to look for it as we traveled, and we did not find it in Washington or Oregon (they have checked Twin Falls, Idaho, and the towns near them in Nevada). Nancy was looking into ordering it, but also said that another friend had suggested a "copycat" recipe. We looked up the copycat recipe, and made it Friday evening...

This was the recipe -- we made an alteration (1/2t less of cumin -- so I changed the recipe).

I had Steve do a blind taste test between original Pappy's and our copycat recipe. He knew the Pappy's, because it was saltier (we used Himalayan Sea Salt - maybe that isn't as salty as regular sea salt), but he actually said that he liked our copycat recipe better. He recommended that we use coarse ground pepper in the future, so I made that note on the recipe. Now there's an option in case Pappy's is not easy to find! And, he can customize it to have less salt, or more garlic powder, or whatever he wants to have his own "Steve's Blend"!!!