The Crystal Coast, Salt water on my feet

The Pool is Empty

Most people think little about the weather but I long ago confessed to being a weather junkie so when it is hot, I think about how to share my experiences with the heat.  If nothing else, writing about the heat keeps me out of the heat.

It is the beginning of the second week in July and at the middle of the day, the neighborhood swimming pool is empty.  First let me say that the pool picture comes from the spring because it is too hot to walk over and take a new picture.  I could have taken a picture if I had thought of it during my early morning walk but I was busy with other thoughts.

Today's outside air temperature is almost identical to yesterday's but I can speculate on why there are no children at the pool today when there were several there yesterday.  My first guess would be that there is no air moving today.  Yesterday we had winds of 10-15 MPH.  At noon today with no breeze and with the temperature in the low to mid-nineties, congregating around the pool is a recipe for being cooked.  Unlike the morning hours when I took the picture in the post there is no shade from the trees so the heat can be brutal.  Also probably one afternoon of being cooked at the pool was enough to convince parents that maybe a movie in the heat of the days is okay once in a while.

I am reminded of winter when we get a hot spell on the Crystal Coast. The feeling of being trapped in the house by heat is reminiscent of being trapped during the cold weather that sometimes visits us.  Both the heat and cold rarely last for more than a few days except sometimes in August and in February respectively. I love the out of doors, but I will admit to both cold and heat draining my energy so I try to avoid both.

If you live along the southern coast of North Carolina, you will be no stranger to temperatures in the low-nineties and to humidity to match, but when the mid to upper nineties arrive, you either surrender some of your outdoor time or  you get very hot.  Our area will be back to normal by early next week and I already have a list of things that need to be done.  Fortunately mowing the yard is not one of them.  While I still mow some of our yard, I have happily retired from our big front yard which someone mows and trims for twenty dollars.  I mowed it far too many times during the heat of the day.  Sometimes a dry thread was hard to find on me.

My wife and I garden a lot and we actually plant part of our garden in the shade so that it will survive hot spells like this.  We have had tomatoes that would almost cook on the vine in the heat.  Still any garden requires some almost daily work.  This week our work has been done very early or almost at dark.  We have managed to take out our green beans which have finished their summer growth.  We will plant some more in about six weeks.  Not many places get to enjoy November green beans but we do.  The tomatoes and cucumbers will continue on for a while.

Even routine chores lose their fun when the heat gets in the mid-nineties.  I enjoy grilling out all year round and it is not unusual for me to cook something on the grill for lunch.  This week I grilled some turkey burgers for lunch.  I felt like I was partially cooked myself after I came inside after my time at the grill.  The slices of cheese were melting before I even got them to the burger. There are other challenges from the heat.  This time of year I have to remember to leave my camera in our garage.  If I do not, I end up spending the first five minutes wiping the fog off the lens. One of our cars is parked outside, so we try to put the windows down in the morning and put them up before bed.  When it rains, we have to be on our toes and put the windows up before the storm.

Cleaning your glasses or sunglasses after they fog up is another high-heat, high humidity ritual of the South.  We long ago switched to Tervis tumblers so we would not need coasters on every table. Another warm weather quirk is that usually on an extra hot day, we finish the day with slightly muted colors.  Even in the mornings on high heat days, we usually have stunning blue skies. 

As the evening is finishing today, a few children are gathering around the pool. It will not be long and I will try to get in thirty minutes of yard work before the sun sets.

The last two bits of trivia about hot days on the Crystal Coast both relate to water.  The first is getting a glass of water to drink.  In the summer when I get up in the night and have a drink of water from the tap in the bathroom, the water is warm.  By the same token when I get in the shower, I can turn the water to full cold and have no problems standing under the water.  Our water pipes are buried six to twelve inches deep.  The water we drink is freezing cold in the winter and warm in the summer.  Our pipes are not down far enough to keep them from the changes in the weather.  It is part of living on the coast.

My weather trivia if nothing else is a good way to learn about the Crystal Coast and its quirks.

 

 

Part of the Crystal Coast Magic

Morehead City Waterfront

I have written in our book, A Week At The Beach - The Emerald Isle Travel Guide, that Swansboro just ten minutes by boat or fifteen by car from our house is a well-loved adopted child of the Crystal Coast.  No adoption papers need to be filed for Morehead City which is actually the working heart of the Crystal Coast.  We live a little farther away, about twenty miles west, from Morehead City, but a trip down to the city by the water with the heart of a fisherman is a regular occurrence for us.  It is easy to say that MHC as it is know locally is a big part of the magic that is the Southern Outer Banks.

Morehead City was actually my first introduction to the Crystal Coast that I can remember in detail. The earlier memories of beach trips here are a little fuzzy, but I can well remember one of my first trips on my own in the summer of 1969.  My uncle Austin rode with me down for a fishing trip in my strange green Bronco which always had a can of stop-leak and a coat hanger for repairs.  We crossed the bridge at Morehead City and four wheeled down the sandy beach and fished the Point at Emerald Isle.  We did not have a lot of luck but it was a wonderful trip and we brought back a cooler full of shrimp from the Sanitary fish market.

That was my only visit that summer as I gravitated to Ocracoke and made a few trips there to camp and even watch Neil Armstrong step on the moon from the Pony Island Motel.  Many years later when we were trying to figure out where to stick our feet in the sand, we made a trip to Ocracoke and quickly decided that as beautiful as the beaches were there that Ocracoke was not the home where we wanted to write the next chapter of our lives.

Now that I look back on it, Morehead City was a big part of the reason that we decided to move to Carteret County.  Moving to the Crystal Coast gave us a chance to sample small town living once again but this time we could do it without having having to give up a lot services like we would have if we have gone to some of the other more remote places we visited.  We did our stint of living away from almost everything in the seventies and early eighties.

While looking for a new spot, we went as far north as Chincoteague and as far south as Oak Island and Southport, but Carteret County just seemed to feel like home and offered everything we wanted including reasonably-priced water access.  A number of years ago I wrote down the ten reasons why we chose Carteret County.  While the real estate investment portion of the equation has not turned out like we thought yet, you can say the same thing about most properties that were bought in 2006.  Long term, no one is making any more waterfront property so I suspect our home just twenty-five from the water will do fine.

Many of those services that we desired like a hospital, a few big box stores, and additional restaurants happened to be located in Morehead City which is the commercial center of Carteret County.  In spite of being the heart of area's business world, there are some beautiful waterfront homes in Morehead City.  Just swing off Highway 70 East at around 30th Street and take a left on Evans Street for a few blocks to appreciate just one small neighborhood.

Then there is the wonderful waterfront area where I took the picture at the top of the post.  It a great place to walk off lunch and enjoy the buzzing activity that always seems to take place on the water in Morehead City.   We had driven down to have lunch at Banks Grill which was packed on that recent Sunday afternoon.  I enjoyed my shrimp burger there and the walk afterwards along the water was a good chance to stretch our legs.

As we drove back home by way of Arendell Street, we passed El's Drive-in which was still packed at 3PM in the afternoon. How many places do you know where they still come to your car and take your order?  Even Odell's in Mount Airy has speaker ordering.  We stopped at the Harris-Teeter which is one of a couple places in the county that I can find my favorite  breakfast spread, Marmite, and then headed home to our peaceful spot in country on Raymond's Gut just off the White Oak River.

Our trip to the city always makes the arrival at our home even more special.  Morehead City is a big part of the reason why we can live so close to nature without sacrificing any services.  It is an essentail part of the Crystal Coast's magic.  I am happy that the good memories about Morehead City are continuing.

 

We were ready for the rain

Gardening is tricky stuff no matter where you live if you depend on mother nature for your moisture and heat.  Gardening also takes constant work.  You cannot plant and just leave it.  I had one of those the summer that I got married in 1973.  Between traveling up and down the up coast to get married, weeding got pushed down the list.  By the time my bride and I got home in August which is peak harvest month in Nova Scotia, I had to run a lawn mower between the rows of the garden at our Saint Croix Cove home before I worked them with the tiller. It was still a great garden (see these pictures) but it was a lesson that I never forgot.  It is better to do a little gardening each day instead of depending on getting to it someday.

As you can see from the post picture at the top taken on May 22, 2016, our little round bed has changed a lot in the nearly two months since I first wrote about it.  My intentions were good and I hoped to write a post in April but trying to finish up my year as treasurer of our HOA nearly swamped me.  This picture of the Romaine lettuce in the bed was taken on April 9.  The lettuce started small but grew quickly.  We enjoyed a bounty of lettuce totaling thirty-one heads when you include our buttercrunch bed. We did give away nearly one half to friends.   We have been amply rewarded for our generosity.  We got red leaf and lettuce and cabbage collards back in return.

The picture at the top of the post shows our Umberto tomato bed after this weekend's welcome rain. After they were planted, they were pruned twice, weeded and given liquid fertilizer three times. As the lettuce matured, it was cut and the lettuce roots were chopped a little and put in our compost bins. Other than being watered a couple of times and having cages added for support, that is all that we needed to do to our tomatoes to get them ready for this week's rain and next week's heat.  Our tomatoes are stretched out over four additional beds so it does take some work.

We now have a pepper in the ground, a cantaloupe already blooming, tiny beans filling out quickly, and more snow peas than we can eat.  So far this has been a good gardening season.  We just harvested the last of our spinach this week and will be eating off what my wife cut for another week.  We have lots of small and medium sized green tomatoes so we are anxiously awaiting the first ripe tomatoes.

There still are challenges.  We could get too much rain or it could get too hot too fast.  Right now if we could get a couple of weeks of serious sunshine and warmth, then we will likely have some ripe tomatoes at a time close to when we used to put  our tomato plants in the ground on our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick.  In the next week, I will plant some additional tomato seeds.  I fell behind on that also, but a handful of new plants to put in the ground around the first of August will insure that we have some late season tomatoes.  Last year we had tomatoes well into the new year.

 

Crystal Coast Tomatoes

I would like to say that the secret to great tomatoes is eating more Chinese food but there is a little more to it than saving your chopsticks during the year because they are helpful when growing tomatoes.  I have been growing tomatoes for 44 years.  I have grown them in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Virginia, and most recently in North Carolina which is where I learned how to grow tomatoes long ago by watching my mother and my wife's father.

I have been writing about growing tomatoes for at almost eleven years with my first article being, The Spring Tomato Ritual.  While tomatoes are one of the three things I have said Southerners should grow, gardening especially for tomatoes can be challenging here on the coast.  The rhythm of gardening is different here on the coast.  As hard as it is to believe, we picked our last full sized ripe tomato on December 27, this year.  We got our last ripe cherry tomatoes on January 14, which was the same day we cleaned the green ones off the plant. We were still eating ripe homegrown full sized tomatoes in January.  We finished the last of our ripe cherry tomatoes the third week in February.  We have had some great tomato seasons on the coast with some beautiful crops and once picked over 100 tomatoes in one day.  We drove some of them to relatives in the Piedmont area of the state where tomatoes are not usually ripe until early July.  We often get our first ripe homegrown tomatoes the last week in May.

Since I love early (and late) tomatoes, growing tomatoes is something that I take seriously.  You might not have as much tomato love as I do, but some of my tips might help you be successful in what can be a challenging gardening climate along the Crystal Coast of North Carolina.  The difficulties that you face on our NC coast are far different from the climatic challenge that can make tomatoes something of a gardener's annual victory in eastern Canada.

Our coastal climate is very dependent on where you live.  Our home and garden area is on the water or Raymond's Gut just off the White Oak River about three miles up river from Swansboro, NC and the Intracoastal Waterway.  Our climate is tempered by the water but we have had frost as late as March 29.  In fact just last year on that date I lost half of my tomatoes to frost even though they were covered with plastic pails.

I am getting head of myself.  For me tomatoes start with seed.  I usually order my seed by the end of the first week of January.  The year I planted my seeds on January 30.  As you can see from this picture of my tomato seed incubator, it is something of cobbled together outfit.  I use the standard plastic four pack planting pots and square plastic trays that I found at Dollar General for $1 each.  I fill each tray with four four packs. I use one of the trays on the top and bottom to start.  I use potting mix that I buy from Redfearn's Nursery in Cedar Point.  It is the same potting mix he uses to grow his own plants.  I fill each hole with potting soil, wet it a couple of times, and then pour off the excess water that has collected on the tray.  I make a couple of small indentations with a chopstick and try to get just one seed in each hole.  I put the plastic tray top on the cubes, put them on a table that gets sunshine in my office and wait.  In a week to ten days I have a good crop of tiny tomato seedlings.

As you can see from the picture, there are often two or three seedlings in each hole.  When the plants have gotten their second set of leaves, I take the plastic tray that I used for the top and put four more four packs on it.  Again I fill them with potting soil, wet, and drain.  Then I use a plastic knife and spoon to divide the cubes with more than one plant. I carefully place the plants that I separate in a new hole.  Remember to add soil where you took out soil and to carefully add soil around the moved plants. I water the transplants and survivors after adding more planting mix.  It is not unusual for the seedlings to get leggy at this time and need a little support.  I cut chopsticks in half and position them as needed to keep the plants going straight. Sometimes I change the sticks as I rotate the trays three or four times each day as the plants turn towards the sun.

About five to six weeks after I have planted the seeds (around the middle of March this year), I re-pot all my tomato plants into standard peat pots.  Each peat pot get about two tablespoons of potting soil in the bottom, a tablespoon of composted manure, a sprinkle of bone meal, and a few Osomocote long-lasting fertilizer beads.  On top of that goes another tablespoon of potting soil.  I then use my plastic knife to loosen the plant from the edges of the cube and lift it out with a plastic spoon.  I like to make certain all the cubes are wet before I start this.  Once the tomato with its cube of soil is in peat pot I press it down firmly and fill around the plant with more potting soil.  Then I water again and transfer to our wagon and wheelbarrow that are used for hardening off the tomatoes.

At this point the tomatoes are living in the garage and going outside when it is nice and coming back in at night.  You might notice that many of the plants now require a full size chopstick to keep growing straight.  If you look closely, you will see green Velcro planting tape collars on particularly tall plants.  This year the plants stayed in the garage roughly ten days to two weeks.  Wind can really beat plants up at the coast.  That is one of the reasons we use the wagon and wheelbarrow.  If it gets very windy or rainy, we put the plants in the garage.  They also have to be watered at least once each day.

After getting used to living outside, the first fourteen plants went in the ground on March 24 and I planted another 15 plants on March 26.  Before I start putting them into the ground I make sure each peat pot is soaked.  Because of our deep, rock free soil, I am able to plant our tomatoes with a bulb planter. I push it into the ground as far as possible and bring out a core a dirt as cleanly as I can.  I turn the bulb planter upside down over a bucket and tap the bottom of the bucket with the handle. The dirt and sand falls into the bucket without much work. Once again I add bonemeal and Osomocote to the bottom of the hole.  This time I put a trowel full of our homemade compost over that and then I remove the tomato plant from the peat pot, pinch any lower leaves off and carefully place into the hole.  I put the dirt/sand back into the hole in such a way to get the plant straight in the hole. Then once again I water the plant.  After that I put a couple of trowels of Daddy Pete's Raised bed mix around the plant.  Daddy Pete's has a little mulch in it and it helps keeps the plants moist.

By soaking the roots and soil around the tomato plant and then burying it and watering again, you remove most of the risk of the tomato plant dying from being too dry.  In general once tomato plants are in the ground, I try not to water more than once every three days.  That promotes deep root growth.  By burying the tomato several inches, it will have deep roots.  If you compare this picture of the planted Umberto to the Umberto in its peat pot before it was planted, you get an idea of how much of the plant is underground.

So far I have 29 plants in the ground and have given away 23 plants.  I have another 24 left for my daughters. After they pick what they want, I will be giving away a few more to neighbors.

I will be posting further information on tomato pests and even how to prune your tomatoes for maximum yield.  I will also be planting a few more tomato seeds on April 15 and June 1.  I find that having fresh plants makes it easier for the tomatoes to keep producing in the fall and even into early winter.

 

 

Signatures of Spring

Three things define spring by the water along the Crystal Coast, low water, cold water, and whipped up water chased from every direction by the wind.  The picture above is of Bogue Sound on a day when boating water would have been challenging to find in many places outside the main channels.

It is hard to say which month, March or April, might be the cruelest month of spring.  I think many boaters along the Southern Outer Banks would agree that both can be challenging.  The air temperature often feels like we should be out on the water. The beautiful blues of the water are tempting but experience teaches us that those lovely shades of blue are hiding very cold water.

Also the water seems to stay calm only for brief moments. Then sometimes, as it has done in the last few days, the water just disappears, and you wonder what happened to all those predictions of rising sea levels.  High tide looks a lot like low tide.  About the time my thoughts wander to my kayak which could easily handle the low water levels, the wind starts blowing and reminds of how cold the water actually is.

Boating on the coast is often a grab the moment kind of endeavor, and it is very hard to do that in March or  April.  I have enjoyed trips in March that erase some memories of the cold boat rides that we usually face in spring but they are rare. What I really want is to go out and just enjoy the warm Carolina sun on my back and maybe try a little early fishing even if I do not catch anything.  Life has taught me that fish are optional even during the best fall fishing months.

I would love to catch a fish or two while soaking up the sun, but I am reconciled to taking this spring one step at a time.  In 2009 we waited until April 24 before we got a real day on the water.  The weather was even cooler in 2010, and it was June 1 before we got a really nice day on the water. Spring of 2013 had its own challenges.  However in 2015, we managed to get on the water on April 12.

March can tease us with an hour or so on the water and even some great mid-March weather, but we have seen a frost and lots of wind including even some small waves driven into our very protected cove.

I guess until our water returns and the winds slack off, thinking about some past great beach walks will just have to do with help from the occasional trip out into the river with the skiff until the water warms enough for some kayaking.

We are on the spring roller coaster and while this year's winter has not been as bad as some past winters, I will still anxiously await any warmth and a break in the winds.  Our weather is variable but generally nice. However, it can change very quickly especially once the water starts warming. That can be good if it warms up just enough to open the windows. Sometimes I have waded in the surf at the end of March.  If the weather warms too fast, we miss that great part of spring after all the pollen is gone when we can sleep with our windows open.

Until the changeable weather settles down, I will dream of glassy waters and you can find more to read about this unique area at our Crystal Coast Life homepage.

The Hesitation Between Seasons

Today the sunshine on the Crystal Coast is so bright that taking a picture of Raymond's Gut, our inlet, is challenge. Winter brings us intense colors but not a lot of cold or snow.  I like to think that is one of the reasons our great egret friend, Frank 29X, pictured here visits us each year.

A lot of folks besides Frank 29X come to the coast of North Carolina to get away from winter.  However, we make no claims to being immune to a taste of real winter.  Once some folks get here they decide they never want to feel even a touch of winter.  They end up moving further south, usually to Florida.

Then there those of us who have seen plenty of winter in our lives and appreciate a little reminder of what we are missing.  Winter is not harsh in coastal North Carolina except we tend to think it is tough because we have so much really nice weather.  Some years winter finds us by the end of December but not this year.  I am writing this in mid-January and I had to open the windows in my office because it had gotten too warm.  Today, January 16, we once again got into the mid-sixties but our version of winter is knocking on the door.

This has not been our mildest winter. The crown for that goes to the winter of 2006-2007 when we only had nineteen hours of below freezing temperatures the whole winter.  I doubt that we had what I call a winter day all that winter.  My winter day is any day when the temperature does not rise about fifty degrees Fahrenheit.  We have already had two or three of those this year and perhaps eight or ten hours below freezing.  Still, we have been able to enjoy a cherry tomato plant that remains growing in a protected corner just outside our garage.

However, as you can see from this forecast for the third week in January, we are going to have some cold days this upcoming week.  We will pick the remaining cherry tomatoes on the plant this Sunday. We picked a nice batch of them today. Then we will only have a few rutabaga growing in our garden until we start planting things once again in February.  That means not much will be going on outside.

Beyond the lack of a garden to take care of, the water is now too cold for kayaking or to go flying down the river in an open skiff. That leaves about a month to enjoy walks along the marsh and through the woods.  Even with the walks, it is a time when I struggle a little because my mind is on the water and my body is mostly stuck on land.  I need more than my job to keep me busy or I will end up baking too many biscuits.

Fall is such a wonderful time on the coast and our stretched-out spring is just as good. Life on the Crystal Coast offers us so much choice of what to do most of the time, that our short winter leaves me hoping for more of something.  It is too early for the spring festivals which start in March.  I have often found that  a trip to Beaufort or one of the local museums like the Maritime Museum or the NC Aquarium can get me through this period.

Visitors often help shorten the season. We usually get a good dose of ones from the natural world. Our Canadian great egret, Frank 29X, returned for his fourth straight winter visit to Raymond's Gut on December 29 this year.  The five otters that frequent our gut have been visible several times including the time when I caught this otter enjoying a snack.  We have also had a pair of great blue herons stalking the marsh.  Our normal cast of characters, the kingfisher, the grebes, and the rotating cormorants have been around most of the winter.  I have only seen one pelican, but they usually wait until the serious cold weather before holing up in the marsh.  The smaller birds must still be up north since we just have a few chickadees.

It is a good time of year to work on an update to our Emerald Isle Travel guide.  The update I am working on will be free if you buy the current Kindle version of the book.  Our month of winter is also a great time to get prepared for spring.  I have ordered some tomato seeds and will be planting some next weekend.  My skiff still needs some work and it is time to sharpen some hooks for spring fishing.

Our month of winter is just about the right amount of downtime for our garden and me.  Of course the yard mowing downtime lasts a lot longer here than it does in some places.  We stop mowing in early October and rarely do any mowing until late April. That's fine with me because by then the garden is already in full swing and we are usually out on the water.

Our great weather, like most things in life, is hard to appreciate without a taste of something not so nice. So I will proudly stand up take my month of winter weather. I can only hope that a month of it is all that I have to endure.  After all this is North Carolina and when we get to February 15, spring is just around the corner and from there we can often see the summer beach season.

If you want to hear even more about the Crystal Coast, sign up for my occasional email newsletter.

 

 

The Peace of the Season

One of the true benefits of living along the Crystal Coast is that we can choose to not be swept along with the holiday rush.

There are people who can rush themselves to death anywhere but it is harder to do here in our mostly natural world.  I often clarify that by saying that we have 158,000 acres of Croatan National at our back and we are bordered on the west by the White Oak River which has a mile or two of water that can get very quiet this time of year (see picture in post). To the south is the Atlantic Ocean and to the east you will find the marshes of Down East and the 56 miles of Cape Lookout National Seashore.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending our your outlook on life, you can count the area's big box stores on your fingers and not run out of fingers.  It you want to go to Target, you need to go to Jacksonville or New Bern.  I have been known to do my Christmas shopping at Ace Hardware or even Reel Outdoors.  To get into a festive shopping mood, I might have to drive an hour to Neuse Sporting Goods and look at the decorated trees in their cleverly attached gift shop that entertains the ladies not interested in fishing tackle.

I like it this way and the peacefulness of the holiday season is one of the things that attracted me to the Crystal Coast.  It is a totally different world than Northern Virginia where I used to work and sometimes try to shop during the holidays. Even in those days ten years ago, you will see that I have never been properly wired for Christmas shopping in malls.  My first year down on the coast I did head off to Wilmington, our big city, but even then I avoided the crowds.

I always manage to come up with a few presents for loved ones, but Christmas is not about presents anyway.  In addition to the religious significance that should define the season, it is also a time to be with family and friends.

That leads me to ask.  What better place could there be to spend time with family and friends than the peaceful beaches of the Crystal Coast and our beautiful and still warm waters?  I went kayaking on December 11, 2015, and the water temperature is still over 60F in the river.  It was virtually the same temperature last year in December.

Our area has a number of nice trails that are a lot more fun to walk and certainly easier on your feet than a mall.  You can hike our woods and marshes and Nature's peace will flow into you.  Certainly if you take the time to walk some of our beaches like the Point at the western most end of Emerald Isle, you will find serenity that is hard to find anywhere. Even if you just sit a spell with some of your friends in our quiet surroundings, you might find that the holidays look a little different.

While you can never guarantee middle of December temperatures like this year's five straight days of seventy degrees Fahrenheit or better, we generally have more warmth than the interior of North Carolina this time of year and life on the White Oak River in December is pretty nice most years.

We look forward to Thanksgiving and the Christmas season because we long ago figured out how to escape the madness.  Plenty of our family traditions like Rook and peanut brittle have followed us to the coast but little of the madness.  There have been many magnificent Christmas trees over the years but this are just lighthouses for the memories.

One of the things that we have always told our children is that home should be a place where you are always welcome no matter what. I think that will remain true no matter what kind of home we have for the holidays.  We have been blessed to have some wonderful homes over the years but even the humblest one was filled with love for family and friends.  Our coastal home might only have room for a crab pot tree instead of a big balsam fir but it is accessible by boat and we will be in good shape if the North Pole melts and Santa has to take to a watercraft.

As usual we are looking forward to having some family at our sides over this Christmas holiday and even if they all cannot make it, they will be here in spirit and that includes those all important family members whose influence shaped our lives before their spirits left their bodies.

It has been over eleven years since we had a Christmas with my mother who was the last of our parents.  Her footprints are still with us even though she never walked in this house.  We will never forget that one Christmas when all of our parents laughed with us and gave the grandchildren their first taste of Rook in the family room in our Roanoke home. That magic memory will never leave us.

Three Weeks of Unbeatable Weather

It is often a challenge for some folks to separate reality from perception.  So many have lives that are completely insulated from the environment and hardly step foot in the real world.  The most some spend outside is going from their home to their car and from the car to a store.

One of the reasons that we moved to the Crystal Coast is that the weather here offers you the opportunity to spend more of your time outside. Other than a short time in August and September when we go through some hot, humid weather, it is pretty easy to love the outside world here in Carteret County.

We had a little over seven inches of rain in early October.  Since then we have not seen even a single drop of rain. Seven inches of rain over three or four days is not a huge amount for a coastal region but it did come after a great but very damp summer and early fall.

Since those first days of October, the Crystal Coast has enjoyed great drying weather and three weeks of rain-free weather. Even the very wet spots in the yard of our home adjacent to the marsh have dried out as much as they ever do.  It has been a stellar October up until October 27 when some light showers moved into the area.  We were almost happy to see a little rain since we started watering our fall garden a few days ago.

In spite of the three weeks of nearly uninterrupted sunshine, someone mentioned to me the other day that they had not mowed their yard because of all the rain.  It made me wonder if they had been outside at all in the last three weeks.  Other than a few cool mornings the weather has been close to perfect.

The only problem that I have seen with all the great weather is that I have mostly been too busy to properly enjoy it.  I have managed a couple of kayak trips on the river and one boat ride but I have not gotten in a really long beach walk since September.  It is my own fault.  My priorities have gotten misaligned. This working every day obviously gets in the way of fishing and beach walks.

I have been out on the area's sand enough to know that the water is still up around 70F.  I have heard there have been some fish including a few trout showing up here and there.  The grocery stores are now uncrowded.  I actually ventured over to the Emerald Island Food Lion and got a parking spot almost beside the door.  It is back to being the laid back grocery store for locals.

While we might get a couple of days of showers sandwiched between all the great weather, fall is traditionally a wonderful time here on the coast.  While we only get a little color in our leaves, we make up for it with still warm waters, blue skies, and breathtaking sunsets along the water.

If you need a break before the holidays, the Crystal Coast is a great place to visit.  If you need a place where the holidays are not so tightly wound, the Crystal Coast can also fill the bill.

Fall Fishing on the Crystal Coast

Enticing Waters Near The Point, EI, NC

Depending on where you grew up, you might or might not know about the tradition of fall fishing on the southeast coast.  I was lucky to grow up in North Carolina and have some family members who made the annual pilgrimage to the coast and almost always came back with coolers full of fish.

Unfortunately I was not old enough to take part in the epic trips where they fished a week at a time from the Core Banks.  While the tradition might not be as strong as it once was, plenty of people still head to the coast for fishing as fall arrives.

The best reason is that fall is when the fish are biting.  People catch fish most of the year, but fish are much harder to catch in summer and your odds of catching a nice fish close to shore are much better in fall.

Another thing lost on many in the non-fishing world is that we fishermen are a very fragmented lot.  Some of us will fish just about any way if given the opportunity and then there are those of us who have grown to love fishing a certain way and typically stick to what we know and what is successful for us.

My personal history with fishing goes back over six decades to when my Uncle Henry put a catfish on a line without me knowing it and then handed me the rod and reel.  Even at three years old I was as hooked as the catfish. I have been fishing ever since whenever I could find the time.  I have plenty of fishing tales and even reliable witnesses to some stories so beware of long car rides with me.

I have been a serious fly fisherman, chased fish with my skiff in the ocean, and even fished in Alaska many years ago.  Now I prefer to stalk fish with my kayak in the big coastal river that is my neighbor.  I will still fish from the skiff a few times each year and even fish the surf , but if I can choose, I will be on the White Oak River oyster rocks in my kayak looking for a drum.

You could say that I am coastal river kayak fisherman, but you would have to qualify it by saying that I only fish using artificial baits.  There are others who fish the same river and use live bait. I like the challenge of artificial bait.  Fishing with artificial bait also suits my personality.

The only time I use bait and it usually is dead bait is when someone visits.  Usually they are really interested in catching something even if it is too small to keep or not edible.  Edible has a broad definition depending on how hungry you are for fish.  Usually a tiny chunk of shrimp on the right sized hook will catch something if you drag it across the bottom for awhile. Bringing a croaker to the boat makes some folks happy and I am pleased to help them achieve their dreams.

However, there are no croakers in my dreams.  I dream of drum, trout, and flounder.  Fortunately I have figured out where and how to catch them.  The problem is that there are times when they are either not around or are overly resistant to the charms of a stinky gulp. Also there are not as many fish in the water as there once were.  We are lucky that there are still enough to keep most of us dedicated fishermen going.

It should be no surprise that sometimes I like to fish even when I know that the chances of catching a fish are slim.  There are places where fish are optional being there is enough.  Then there are times when I catch fish with the knowledge that I will throw back everything that I catch.  I never catch more than my wife and i along with a fish-starved friend can eat.

At least once this fall you will find me knee deep in saltwater out on the Point at Emerald Isle.  If I am lucky I might catch a Spanish mackerel or a bluefish, but actually I fish in the surf to enjoy the moment not necessarily to catch something.  There is something magical about having your feet in still warm salt water and casting into the beautiful waters off the Point.  It is a popular spot but as the fall wears on, the crowds will dwindle.

There are other ways of fishing.  Many people love fishing from the pier, some from a charter boat, a party boat, or even with a guide.  That is one of the great things about fishing.  There are plenty of ways to enjoy fishing and there are even some families who get to do it together. If you are lucky, someday you might get a cooler full of fish to keep the fishing dream alive.

If you cannot make it to the Crystal Coast and enjoy some Southern Outer Banks fishing, here is an album of pictures that will entice you to sample our waters and beaches.

More Gardening Headed Into The Fall

Our minister asked me for some thoughts on fall gardening. What I wrote for him is at the core of this post. 

We have enjoyed a very successful summer garden in spite of all the rain during June, July, and August when we recorded 24.8 inches of precipitation.

We got our first tomato June 4 and this morning, August 28, I picked another four.  We still have a counter full of tomatoes and likely will not run out for a while, but just like beach season is not over in August, tomato season has a few months yet to run.

This year I planted tomato seeds on January 15, April 15, and July 1.  In a normal year without so much rain and early heat, my current plants would still produce tomatoes until the end of September or early October. This year the early heat and buckets of rain shortened the producing season for my summer tomatoes.

However, some new tomato plants that I put into the ground on August 22, might give us some nice October, November and maybe even some December tomatoes.  We have done it before so it just depends on the weather.  A wet fall will make it very difficult for the plants to remain healthy.  A relatively dry fall would help us.

It is actually a little easier to garden here in the fall than the summer unless you are trying to grow tomatoes. Cooler temperatures and less humidity generally mean the plants stay healthier. We do not have a lot of gardening space but we take advantage of all of our ground and usually have a really successful fall garden.  Gardening is always a gamble and maybe fall gardening especially for tomatoes is a little more so. However, most vegetables plants do very well in the fall if they have enough time to mature.

You never know when the heat is going to stop and when the cooler weather will come so you have to hedge your bets.  We are right on the water so we have a little advantage.

We will probably plant some green beans by the end of August.  They like the heat and we still have plenty of that.  We had really good luck with them last year and harvested a nice crop around the first week of November.  We use white half runners- or what some would call mountain beans.  We grow them on a piece of plastic latticework.

Our green beans are the only crop that probably needs to get into the ground very soon.

The rest of our fall garden can be planted as things cool down.  About the middle of September, we will plant some sugar snap peas.  We once almost harvested regular peas that were planted Oct. 1.  The blooms got frozen in a hard freeze in the middle of January.  The sugar snap peas seem to mature a little quicker and they are not all ready at once which suits my needs since I like to use a handful or so every day when they are available.

Along with the peas we will probably put some onion sets in the ground.  Just to keep them from going to seed, I might put some of them in the shade.  They are easy to grow and if they look like they are going to seed, we will just go ahead and harvest them.

Early to middle October, I will be putting in some broccoli plants.  They are a gamble, if the weather is too hot, they will not get very big before bolting.  We never have much luck with cabbage or carrots but both should work.  Our soil just is not right for them. We have grown a few beets but we have a neighbor who can grow them better than us and shares them with us.

Late October to early November, we will plant lettuce seeds and plants.  We never know which will work the best.  It depends on the weather.  We have had the best luck with Romaine, both red and green, butter crunch, and red oak leaf lettuce.  Some years we have January and February lettuce.  Some years like this year we are overwhelmed with March and early April lettuce.  If we are lucky we might also get some November and December lettuce.  It is all weather dependent.

About the same time we plant broccoli, we also plant Swiss Chard which grows much better for us than just about anything including Kale.  We usually get the little individual plant plugs at S&H Feed and Seed in Swansboro.  The plugs are about 20 cents each.  The Swiss Chard works just as well as Kale in beans and soups and seems much more pest resistant.  The Swiss Chard will last into the early summer of next year.  You just keep cutting leaves and it keeps on growing.

We also get a few plugs of rutabaga.  We plant those in late Oct to early Nov. and usually harvest in mid-January after a freeze. 

We took some spare space last fall and planted garlic.  We harvested in June/July and are now using the dried cloves. Our gardens have been really good to us.  This year we have already enjoyed one volunteer cantaloupe and there is another one growing in our front flower beds.

We do make our own compost but I am not above putting some Miracle Grow on my tomatoes and the flowers.

If you are planning on moving to the coast and feel like a full fledged garden is too much, read my article Three Things You Need To Grow In The South.  Concentrate on growing some pansies this winter and work on your tomatoes next spring. When you feel comfortable with those, try a hydrangea bush.

Growing things is good for the soul and the body.  My tiny tomato seedling are always one of the first signs of spring.

Three things you need to grow in the South

Three things you need to grow in the South