Our Labradors always pull on the leash, so I bought the Gentle Leader dog collar for both Henry and Charlie Pup. The pulling on leash has stopped.
I used to be able to handle it when one of the dogs pulled on the leash, but after a recent back injury, I couldn’t manage the dogs and walk. I’ve seen several dogs in our neighborhood and in the park with the Gentle Leader dog collar, so I went to our dog supply store and the manager Chris said they work.
You might think this harness hurts the dog, but it doesn’t. What it does do is get the dog’s attention, and they walk with you, rather than pulling against you. I can’t stand seeing dogs on a choke collar, and watching them pull against it and choking. This collar works much better.
You do have to adjust the collar properly, and there is a huge instruction sheet that comes with the collar, plus a DVD to walk you through the process. It took me 5 minutes. It isn’t obvious how the snap under the snout part of the collar works, I tried it a few times before I put it on the dog for fitting. The part that fits around the dog’s neck needs to be tighter than a regular dog collar.
Watch the DVD that comes with the collar, it gives important tips for acclimating your dog to the collar.
The collar comes in several sizes and colors, so double check you are purchasing the correct one for your pups.
Our Brooklyn neighborhood has some food debris on the sidewalk, plus Charlie Pup eats napkins and paper towels, so steering the Labs clear of all that stuff was a constant battle. Walking to the park today was much easier. The Labs tried to get the collar off, by rolling in the dirt, but it stays on. They’ll get used to it and I’ll be able to walk them without re-injuring my back. Money well spent.
I mentioned in a recent GF Viewer Mail Video that I had had surgery on my foot, and while some may not be interested in that, I thought some might, and some have already asked, so here’s what’s up.
I don’t know the exact medical term, but the joint of the large toe is arthritic and has a large bone spur on top of it. This makes walking, and home improvement work, very painful. I have had this condition for years, but it finally got to the point that I didn’t want to go on walks with my wife and the pups, so it was time to get the surgery done.
I should have taken a picture of the x-ray of my foot, but here’s one that shows a normal foot with my notes:
The surgeon cut back the bone spur and then cut the bone that connects to the to joint to change the angle of the joint to give the joint more flexibility. He then screwed the bone back together.
The surgery experience was fine, a very nice outpatient surgical facility with super nice people. I was able to walk out using a cane and a friend drove us home.
The post operative care you give yourself is key to any recovery, I think. And I followed the directions I was given. Its good they wrote them all down. Ice packs are key here, they reduce the swelling and that promotes faster healing. Keeping the foot elevated is important as well, keeps blood from pooling in your foot.
I’m good at doing what I’m told, so I’ve been on the couch more than I want to be, foot up on 3 pillows, trying to work on the laptop. The pain has not been much of an issue, except in the middle of the night. I think the pain being worse at night is more a function of your mind than biology. Its dark, quiet, and your mind doesn’t have much else to focus on. I’ve found that when the pain hits, I make myself relax the muscles in my leg and foot that naturally want to tighten, and do my best at what might be best called meditative focused breathing. And then I put on another ice pack.
Post surgery foot looks good.
What is the ‘AG’ on my foot? That’s the surgeon marking the foot so we both agree this is the foot we’re going to operate on. Blood pools in the toes from the cutting the bone, this will clear up soon.
Next time I go to the surgeon I’ll try to get a photo of the x-ray showing the screw in my foot. And I’ll post a few more updates on progress here.
I was walking with my neighbor on some land he owns near my house. He was having the woods opened up by the local sawmill. They were taking oak, beech, ash and pine out of the woods. We came across two deer stands, built probably 10 years ago, and he said I could use the deer stands.
This afternoon, a few days into the deer season, I was up in the better looking of the two hand built deer stands. Made of scrap lumber, they have this backyard tree house look to them. They would not pass any building code inspection. But they work for what they were built for. Seating consisted of a milk crate, the sides of the stand had carpet tacked to it, with some pine boughs whose needles had dropped attached to the sides of the stand.
In other words, a perfect DIY tree stand.
You see many deer stands for sale by the sporting stores, with ladders and steps and soft chairs, but this one works for me. Plus the fact that it was already in the woods. I didn’t have to carry a stand into the woods, assemble it, and hope that no one stole it. ( happens rarely, but one never knows )
I am not the most accomplished deer hunter, I don’t have all the bells and whistles, just a deer rifle and insulated coveralls. One can go crazy with gear, much like other endeavors – glad I don’t own a boat…
What I like most about deer season is I make myself go into the woods in the early morning or late afternoon, despite my aversion to cold weather, and just sit. You do a lot of staying in one place with hunting, it forces you to pay attention to subtle changes and sounds. Eventually your mind clears, and all the noise of the modern world is turned off.
What was that click of a branch over there?
Next you notice the sun changing. A cloud has moved, and the sun shines clear on the trees, but its getting near the ridge line. I know when the sun sets below the ridge, its time to go home.
Today there were no deer, but it was good to be out anyway, thanks to my neighbor.
While mushroom foraging, we came across a giant crop of oyster mushrooms right near our house. I think these oyster mushrooms were on a dead maple. I have to get better at tree bark identification ( there are some links to books below) . As always with edible plant identification – be sure to double check the identity to be sure what you are mushroom foraging is an edible mushroom, OK?
Oysters, once you see them several times, become easy to identify, though they do come in different colors. These oysters were just off the road surrounded by poison ivy, so again, be careful. I used a ladder to get to these.
Of course we made a video about the mushroom harvest, which we will post later. Our producer Sarah was talking about the oysters we brought back to Brooklyn for her, so i wanted to share photos of the harvest. These oysters popped out of the dead maple after several days of heat followed by an afternoon shower every day. It was like clockwork, every day at 4 pm it would rain. I was wondering if we had moved to Seattle or somewhere in the Northwest.
To find mushrooms, pay attention after it rains, often times I find mushrooms have popped up after a storm. When you do run across them, use your identification books to check the identity. I suggest two mushroom books here.
Here are some of our mushroom foraging and how to cook mushroom videos for you:
Cross check the mushrooms you find with several sources, books are best, I think. I use several books for identifying mushrooms , below are the mushroom identification books I recommend:
The guys at iTunes Podcasts had a poll on their Facebook Page, asking people who their favorite cooking podcast was, and GardenFork got the most votes! They then featured GardenFork on the main podcast page of iTunes. How cool is that?
A big thank you to the iTunes crew. Really appreciate that!
Henry adds perspective, a huge oak tree in Prospect Park
We rode out Hurricane Sandy in Brooklyn and came out unscathed. Many of our neighbors weren’t so lucky. Those in lower lying areas near the bay got flooded. Here are a few photos from Park Slope Brooklyn
Tree crushes cars on President St
Brooklyn’s version of Hurricane Sandy PreparationThe Labs after a walk
Living each day to its fullest is hard. I think a better way of looking at this is one put forward by John Sexton in an interview with Bill Moyers, the idea to make each day as transcendent as possible.
You have to make sure that you live every day as a transcendent day to the fullest of your ability, because you never know when you’re going to have a chance to live it again.
This is kinda related to ‘being in the moment’ of everyday life. When i walk the Labs in the park or the woods, I sometimes have to stop my brain from thinking too much and just realize how neat it is to be on a walk with the pups.
This somehow works better as operating instructions for daily life. Living life to is fullest can be exhausting, always running around to all sorts of stuff for the sake of doing it.
But even today, I ran out of time before I ran out of stuff I need to do. I looked at the clock and it was 4:30 already, and I barely got done what I wanted to.
Is that OK? It has to be or you’ll be cranky all the time.
What do you do? How to live in the moment? Share with us below:
I was walking down the avenue to the hardware store when I saw the black plume of smoke and heard the fire engines coming. There was that burning tar smell of a roof on fire. Like half the neighborhood, I walked a few blocks closer to watch.
What stuck with me was the orchestration of the FDNY’s response to the fire. Obviously, they practice for this all the time, but to watch it unfold is amazing.
The first engine on the scene has its crew out of the truck before it even stops. The driver hooks the pumper up to the fire hydrant and lines are run. Firemen are climbing up the back fire escape, others are inside the building getting people out. Two ladder trucks arrive and they are on their way to the roof.
Then the Rescue truck arrives and 4 guys pile out with their oxygen tanks and are immediately inside the building. Several chainsaws with roof cutting discs are with them.
The EMTs arrive and stand by with their fire gear on.
Then in a matter of minutes the black smoke turns white, and they have extinguished the fire. Its just one of those things that I find amazing.
When we’re hiking, we often come across trees that have piles of fresh woodchips at the base of the tree, and farther up the trunk is a large hole. I didn’t know what this was, so I did some research.
Turns out this is the work of the Pileated Woodpecker, a fairly large bird who makes these large holes in tree trunks looking for carpenter ants to eat.
The Pileated Woodpecker is about the size of a crow, but is instantly recognizable by its bright red head. The male has a red line across its cheek, the female has a black one. According to The Audubon Society, it is the 2nd largest woodpecker in the U.S., after the Ivory Billed Woodpecker. The Pileated Woodpecker lives mainly in forested areas, but has adapted somewhat to being near urban areas.
While you may not like the idea of a woodpecker making these holes in trees in your forest, they are looking for carpenter ants, and its likely they are excavating trees that are rotten or hollow on the inside, in other words, unhealthy trees to start with. The pileated also eats the berries of poison ivy, btw.
Having had carpenter ants in my house, I’m not a big fan of them, so I’m glad the Pileated does eat them.
Female Pileated Woodpecker
Pileated Woodpeckers hollow out a new nest in a different tree, so they are beneficial to other cavity nesting birds. When we make birdhouses, we are basically making a space for a cavity nesting bird. ( You can learn now to make birdhouses in our how-to make a birdhouse video here. )
I think the best field guide to birds I have is the one by Audobon, below are links to buy the book.
Do you have Pileated Woodpeckers near you? or other woodpeckers? let us know below:
Growing mushrooms in my yard, instead of having to go foraging for mushrooms, is a goal of mine. Mushroom growing is not rocket science, but for mushrooms to grow, the environment must be perfect for that particular kind of mushroom. On our hike yesterday, I came across a dead oak tree full of oyster mushrooms, but the mushrooms were way past their prime, they were falling apart.
I cut off about a third of the mushrooms and put them in a paper bag. Today, I went in the back yard-woods, and all while constantly tossing two tennis balls for the Labradors, I looked for a dead or dying deciduous tree.
Oyster Mushrooms from a dead oak tree
I have a number of mature birch trees in my yard, a few of which are dying, they have large woodpecker holes in them. I leave dead trees standing, to allow cavity nesting birds to have homes. Woodpeckers peck out nests in dead trees, then other birds use those nests after the woodpeckers have left.
So today I had the paper bag of oyster mushrooms with me and I tried my hand at inoculating a dead birch tree with mushroom spore. My method was not very exacting, I didn’t drill holes in the tree and put spore in the holes, I placed pieces of oyster mushroom in between the bark and the wood of the tree where the bark had split open.
Wedged the mushrooms between the bark and dead wood
What was really cool was inside the paper bag the oyster mushrooms has released a bunch of spores, so I took apart the paper bag and rubbed the spore on the wood of the trunk.
white powdery mushroom spore in the bag i had been keeping the mushrooms in
It will take a few years to see if our mushroom spore inoculation project is a success. If you are interested in learning more about mushroom identification, I have posted photos of mushrooms I have identified in our Mushroom Identification series here on the GardenFork.TV site.
Do you have some mushroom growing or mushroom spore inoculation suggestions? Please let us know below:
Charlie Pup waits for me to throw her tennis ball again.
I love the name, and while on the road in the midwest, we needed breakfast, so I used my super-computer / smartphone to find one.
The waffles are not like those giant thick waffles that are ubiquitous at diners, the belgian style waffle; these waffles were thinner, which I like. The menu offers you an order of 1 or 2. I had one, but I saw lots of people have 2. They were good, but not wow. I wasn’t expecting wow, though. This wasn’t an artisanal local food waffle made from scratch, its a chain restaurant waffle.
Waffle House Waffles
What was really good were the eggs. So many times scrambled eggs, be they at a local diner or chain, are awful. Not sure how one can not cook scramble eggs badly, but many do.
Each egg order at the Waffle House are cooked individually in small cast iron pans with cheese. The eggs puff up nicely, I’m betting the cheese adds moisture to the eggs much like adding a small bit of milk to scrambled eggs does.
Scrambled Eggs with Cheese
Very nice people behind the couter, it takes a certain kind of patience to deal with the public, and these people had that. I think you should treat everyone equally, especially people in the food service world – they are, after all, touching the food you’re going to eat. And I see people who treat food service people with what ranges from impoliteness to down right rudeness, which I have zero tolerance for. Karma is boomerang, you know.
Coffee was a bottomless cup, AND when we were leaving, we were offered a to-go cup of coffee for free. Interesting.
What is your best waffle experience? Is there a special waffle restaurant in your town? Do you make waffles at home, if so, what is the secret to good waffles? Please tell us below:
Yesterday after the giant storm of 20 inches at the end of October was really a great day it was super puffy clouds out there blue sky about 50° and I said hey let’s take out the canoe. So we put the canoe in the Ford F150 and drove down to one of our local ponds.
Were we went canoeing isn’t really a pond, though it’s called a pond, not sure why, it’s 145 acres. This area was originally a little beaver pond, the beavers had dammed up a small creek, and it became a very large marshy area. The state came in and made the dam into a spilway and created this really great lake perfect for canoeing. There are a lot of tree stumps and dead trees in the lake and this keeps powerboats out.
This lake is our favorite lake to go canoeing and the water shallow, is really clear, it’s really quiet and there’s almost never anyone else out on this lake where there.
parking the canoe to investigate the brook
We were on the far end of the lake and we heard this babbling stream that I had not heard before so we canoed over to the shore, which is full of brambles and Mountain Laurel and wild blueberries, and we hiked through the brush and found this really cool little brook. I think is called a vernal stream, it was really quite active because was all the snow melt from the 20 inches of snow we had in October. While checking out the broad we run across fresh signs of beavers harvesting trees and took some pictures. Beavers have front incisors that are constantly growing so they need to constantly eat wood.
There are a few beaver lodges in the lake and we always the check them out, and you never see the beavers, they can hear us coming, we’re pretty clunky with the canoe, banging the paddles against the side of the canoe. We came across one of the beaver lodges right in the middle of the lake and another that is against the shore of the lake.
I thought it interesting that beavers will actually build a beaver lodge on the side of the lake rather than the middle of it.
We learned a bunch about beavers on Wikipedia. What I thought was the really cool is that the preferred food for beavers in the summer are water lilies, and this lakeis full of water lilies, so there you go, the perfect place for beavers.
Canoeing is a great outdoor activity that doesn’t really cost that much money you can get a inexpensive used canoe, a few life preservers and you’re set to go.
Recently we were working on a paint job in Sunset Park Brooklyn, and we realized that Brooklyn’s Chinatown was just a few avenues away. Tony, ( who works with me in addition to writing recipes for GardenFork ) and I had previously visited Thanh Da II ( 5624 8th Avenue, Brooklyn NY ) in Brooklyn’s Chinatown after reading about this Banh Mi sandwich place in the NY Times.
Eric's Favorite Banh Mi Sandwich
There are now 4 Banh Mih sandwich places in our neighborhood in Brooklyn, the Ban Mih sandwich craze has reached the point where it was focus of a story on the NPR show This American Life.
According to Wikipedia:
Bánh mì or bánh mỳ (English pronunciation: /ˈbʌnmiː/, Vietnamese: [ɓǎːɲ mî]), literally biscuit or cake (Bánh) and flour or wheat (mì), is a Vietnamese baguette made with both wheat and rice flour, but more popularly known as a type of sandwich traditionally made with this type of baguette.[1] There are many global and regional variations of the sandwich, but the most common version features thinly sliced pickled carrots and daikon (known as đồ chua), cucumbers, cilantro, chili peppers, pâté, mayonnaise and various meat fillings or tofu. Popular bánh mì fillings include roasted or grilled pork, steamed or roasted pork belly, Vietnamese sausage, chicken, head cheese and ham.
The Banh Mi sandwich is a mash up of eastern and western cultures. The French brought their baguette sandwiches of vegetables to Vietnam, and the Vietnamese made it their own.
Thanh Da Banh Mih shop
We’ve tried a few of the place in our neighborhood, but the Banh Mi sandwiches at Than Da II win. They are really good. Especially the #4, a BBQ Pork Banh Mi sandwich that I order every time I go to Thanh Da.
dried mushrooms in brooklyn's chinatown
An added bonus to going to Thanh Da is getting to check out the asian grocery stores in Brooklyn’s Chinatown. I wish I had a tour guide when I walk the sidewalks and try to figure out what the merchants are selling. Some of the stores write out the items in English, but most don’t. Lots of mushrooms and dried items and tons of fresh fish.
Tony checks out the producewhat are these?
So if you are coming to New York, and want to get off the tourist track, come to Brooklyn’s Chinatown, and then walk over to Sunset Park for real mexican food.
How to identify mushrooms. I get a lot of requests for more information mushroom identification, so i’ve started with this post to show GardenFork readers different mushrooms I run across in the woods and in the city.
The Giant Puffball can be a common site in urban areas. You might see these large white balls that look like they are from another planet appearing on your lawn, or in a park or meadow. Puffballs like this are common on the East Coast, I’ve also seen them in the Midwest.
The Puffball Mushroom in the photo here is one I found in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York. It was growing on the edge of a meadow near some trees.
Puffballs such as this are generally edible, though double check with several references and experts before getting out your knife and fork. I have found them to taste underwhelming, kinda like tofu. So maybe you can use them in a stir fry or saute with other vegetables, or in a soup.
Homesteaders, Urban Homesteaders, Foragers: Let me know how you cook puffballs.
Giant Puffball Mushroom part of the GardenFork Mushroom Identification series
While you may not like the idea of a woodpecker making these holes in trees in your forest, they are looking for carpenter ants, and its likely they are excavating trees that are rotten or hollow on the inside, in other words, unhealthy trees to start with. The pileated also eats the berries of poison ivy, btw.
