the run by posting

 

 

I planted nasturtiums today.  I had planted some in the other garden weeks ago and there was no sign that any of them came up, that seed was older, but unopened.  The strawberries are working on being in full swing, except that it is forecasted to be raining a lot the next few days.  I'm picking and eating what I get, which has been two to four berries a day.  Waiting for other things to come up. 

 We went shopping after I got home from work today, the family got snacks and we replenished the things that we needed to.  Completely forgot the potatoes.  We had cannelini beans, tomato, yellow summer squash, onions and a chopped up porkchop as a dinner tonight alongside Italian bread with butter.  Mark had just a porkchop and the bread.  

 Yesterday I made a fruit thing to go beside dinner and it was five strawberries from the garden chopped up into some pre-chopped and frozen apple I had put in the freezer months ago, then with a few brazil nuts chopped fine into some sugar in the food processor and a little butter cut up and scattered into it - put aluminum foil on it and put it in beside our porkchops to bake.  It was a miniscule flourless crumble type thing, and the brazil nuts were Mark's idea and they really did go well with it.   It was a bit moist - because I didn't use any flour, but it tasted wonderful for 'finding something to do with what we have'.  I had constantly pushed that container with the apple to the side in the freezer, almost had forgotten what it was - and I didn't want it to go to waste.  The tomato in tonight's dish was the same, I had chopped and frozen it before it went bad in the fridge - and was trying to get myself to use it in a recipe.

 I put one of my colored pencil tin kits by the bed headboard with the notebook that is there and have drawn a page two nights in a row.  I can tell my hands don't have the endurance they had built up before when I would draw for 25 minutes straight and not feel it.  Now I feel it.  Eight thirty is very late for me now, and I am ready to fall into bed.  And then I stayed up until 9:15 drawing that house we saw on the way to the store - the one with the 'magnificent' tree in the back, that Mark pointed out to Esme.

 We've finished the discs of Red Dwarf that we had.  I read online while rec. it to someone else there were more seasons that we don't have.  Did French-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-French today.  Bounced around just one area of my little Minetest world and gathered four more locations that I had made previously, and built two tiny houses (just 4 square floors inside each) to house some supplies on two more that I added in between a point A and point B (and I saw lots of orange calcite there).

 

 

bits

 Bits of real life stuff, got some eggplant, mizuna and basil seeds in the mail, and have planted the basil in the garden along with lettuce, amaranth spinach (new, trying it) and two types of beans.  Started cucumber and the eggplant in a few cups inside - hope they will germinate.  Very likely going to buy a tomato plant or two or three.  I haven't seen any movement on the cucumber, turnip greens or carrots that I planted outside, although I have watered them here and there.  I have to figure out where to put the green mizuna - I bought red mizuna a few months ago and it is already planted and coming up, along with kale and arugula. 

 I harvested strawberries, kale and dandelion (a variety of the dandelion that I had planted last year from an Italian variety packet).  I also accidentally pulled up one of the Hamburg Parsley, and processed that and put it in with my arugula that was left because it is so spicy.  That parsley has been growing out there year after year for three or four years now from the first time I planted it.

Something bit me on the shoulder while I was out there and it puffed up quite a bit - but it has gone down now with some anti-itch stuff put on it.  

I hope that we can get the semi trucks to show up at work - so many of them are just bailing on their appointments it is terrible.  It might just because they have chosen not to work Mondays but I really wish they would tell me that on Friday instead of saying 'sure we'll be there' and then cancelling at 9 am on Monday.  This is the second Monday in a row that multiple companies have bailed - I thought it was about Easter, and now I'm thinking it is just that over the weekend they get time to either find a better bid to go on or they just don't want to get up and do anything yet until Tuesday.

 Charlotte had found herself something in the woods and rolled in it - got herself the second bath in as many weeks.  My sense of smell is oversensitive after being out in the garden and digging things up.  I dislodged a large frog and a large more-sluggish-than-usual skink type salamander.  I saw some morning glory coming up there, and maybe some of last year's packet of zinnia that I had scattered.  There is a blackberry cane in the middle of the garden - in a place I don't till up anymore, and it is covered in flowers - I think I'll let it go to fruit.  But I'll have to trim it out and a few small trees that are started as well.  I couldn't find the red-veined sorrel at all, where it had been coming up for a few years in a row.

Studying French-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-French.  Made kale, yellow summer squash, cabbage and onions for a vegetable side-dish tonight, with olive oil and Tuscan seasoning in it.  Before I went to sleep yesterday I had recorded coordinates on sixty named/marked points in the Minetest Luanti Asuna world - and there are quite a few more I hadn't gotten around to yet.  I've already gotten quite tired tonight, though, and am headed off to bed.

bits of notes

 Just bits of notes (to be updated later)

 

I found a very large savannah today, on the edge of jungle, mesa, desert and dominion biomes.  So I've found a lot of new things, as I've had bits of these biomes show up here and there but not a savannah as large as this.

Rye seed comes from the savannah grass, where there are also pumpkins, sunflowers, corn, cotton (and probably more) naturally spawning.  I found that out the other day.  I broke a lot of grass though and only ever got rye seed there.  In the plains and sakura environments, the grass breaks to wheat and oat seed, randomly.  In the jungle environments, the jungle grass specifically breaks to rice or cotton seed, randomly.  AND I finally did find the barley growing wild in the Savannah, much like a corn plant.  In the savannah, the dirt can be tilled with a hoe without needing to be replaced (which you must do in dominion and marsh environments before the hoe will work).  The tree saplings that would grow in regular jungle and grasslands do grow here.  A single piece of coal, in a furnace, will toast 4 quantity of sunflower seeds, and there are 5 seeds from every head.

 

 You know how long I've looked for that?  But this is only the third time I've been through a savannah, and this one is a bit larger than the others.  So, it must not be a high spawn rate in them.

I did finally find some cocoa beans in a wayfarer chest (the hampers) and am trying to grow that on a jungle tree.  I keep looking for the new biomes, I know by the achievement list that I haven't found them all.  I haven't even seen a tundra biome yet, or seen the Giant's Causeway basalt flats that I've seen pictures of.

 

 

 

An interesting 'dungeon' brick formation in the Savannah, and some pinkish-red stone called 'Sconia' that I was impelled to go mine

 

 

On Slimes : I'm gonna tell you, in the Savannah environment the slimes are VERY hard to see, compared to the grass ones the color of the slimes here are almost exactly the same as the grass - and in the dark, it's almost impossible to see them.  That could be because my color vision sees more greens and blues - but I've noticed it again and again.  You CAN eat the savannah slime, as you can the grass slime - but not the purple ones.  Also, while I'm on the subject, the purple slimes can climb trees, which in a jungle environment, is pretty far up - I've been way up in a tree not even thinking about that - the noise in other biomes is usually that they are near, but down on the ground and can't get you.  Nope - purple slime come right behind me through the leaves and start attacking.  Purple slimes leave a purple poison trail as well - and if you touch it before it dries it also gives you a hit.  There are also Dark slimes, which I'm not sure if you can eat that - but they aren't much worse than the others.  Mineral slimes are red, and deep underground.  They aren't aggressive (that I've seen, Dark slimes are, they are gray and also tough to see where they live), which is good, because they are TOUGH compared to the others.  You can eat mineral slime.  Anything that was that tough to kill I took that to a house with some food and tried it out in case it was poison.

 

The Sconia rock apparently produces red dye, as well.  I mined all of it.  I went into the brick cave and saw this.  The dunegon was a bust, as the only chest in it had dirt and a stick.  However, the whole dungeon is made of travertine brick - which I may come back and get some if I can remember that.

 

Magenta dye comes from thistles, lilacs and a 'Chiana' purple celosia-looking flower that is actually purple.  Irises give blue dye.  Plantago gives brown dye.  There is a 'Savannah Flowergrass' that also gives a brown dye.  Some of the other magenta-colored flowers come out to pink dye.  Magenta glazed / fired clay is interesting looking, but not so much that I will want a lot of it.  I prefer the orange, white and blue clays.  I am wondering if I should go back and find the dark gray dye (basalt, and slate, I think?) and see if that makes a glazed clay. 

Mesa and Savannah biomes meeting up, Eucalyptus trees and something I haven't yet experienced there on the left.

and yet another one - Eudalite?  It is very pretty.

The colored granites have been hard to find - just a smatter of blue and red so far in the entire world - but I found a whole hoard of green granite today.  I really like the 'lots of rocks' mod that is included with this Luanti Minetest package 'Asuna'.  There are so many things I'm poking around and say 'oo, what's that' and then go dig out the entire vein.  Amber, Amethyst, Vivianite, Covelite (blue), Lapis Lazuli, Sygilite (purple) and much more...  There is a bright pink stone that is scattered in ones and threes where I have found it - but I can't remember the name of it.  Then there are other just interesting things like the blue limestone, slate, shale, amazonite (bright blue-green), chysophase (bright green-blue), travertines and calcites.  I found some orange calcite the other day and although it wasn't enough to make anything big out of - it made a pretty and unique spire for the place. 

 

 Did I find Calcifer, or what?  I think it must be some sort of burning bush.  It went away when I hit it with a pickaxe.  The black block to the right of it is coal dust.  I hadn't found that before, either.  This was in a desert cavern.

 

My spire mapping technique is working exceptionally well.  And I've settled another large quadrant of the world.  I'm using the term 'vast' for when I have an area that is all homogeneous and no good reason to call the cross-point anything else - but I really don't want to build a lot there.  It isn't wasted space, but it is a vast open area that I just have a road through, where four or five cities could have been built, but I don't see any reason to.  

 

update : Oh my, I just found out that F5 brings up a debug window that shows you your coordinates - so now I'm going back to each spire and recording the coordinates there in a notebook.  It was a different key in the original Minecraft.  When I noted this to my daughter she said 'you didn't know about debug?'  Well, apparently not.  It will not replace getting around on the road network, but it will be interesting to see the actual distances.  The first seven coordinate locations that were all supposed to be on the same z were all within 30 paces of the same line - most of them within 10, but apparently that one had a big cliff-face I had to avoid and didn't get quite back to the same z.  I'll also have to go back to the place I called 'Kappa High Point' and record the y.

I've wondered if the fish are specific to the biomes or if they are just entirely luck.  I haven't found anything to suggest they are not just random.  I'd like to find out where the jellyfish are, or if it just a very very random lucky guess.  I got a stick of TNT fishing today - which was unexpected.

Jade pyramids, tree farming and spire mapping

 

This is basically because I found 1400 blocks of jade in an island near here - and well, what do you do with that much jade? The pyramid was built over a cavern entrance and still didn't use up even half of my new stash of jade.  So, I started seeing what else I could make with the blocks.

 They are sort of like ziggurats, more than pyramids - but the little house ones were an interesting puzzle to solve.  I had never had REASON to make glass stairs before, but having seen some in a loot chest a while back, I had a light bulb that they could work really well to put a window in each of these little houses.

 

   

The little pyramids are fully viable houses in their own right, with furnaces and chests in them, each having a window and a door.  The floor is sunken one block inside with a stair from the door - although it didn't have to be it made it feel more like the regular house size inside.  The regular house is in the background above.

  

the inside of the small jade pyramid houses

Aspen farming : when you don't have enough trees, similar to this that had been a treeless plain full of vegetable plants and animals - aspens are a great go to.   Each one will drop 2 to 6 saplings, more likely 4 to 6.  Acacias are pretty prolific, as well, but a bit harder to plant near each other as they spread out more.  Cherry (sakura) trees also have that sideways sprawl.  Aspens grow most always straight up, and only require about 4 to 6 spaces between them to drop full saplings when you cut them down. (no leaf overlap, which can cause problems with some trees).  Silver birch trees grow straight up, and quite tall, but the leaf overlap means you might have to cut down three or four of them before they begin to drop their leaves into saplings.  Juniper trees are a great wood type - and drop lots and lots of saplings, you'll have stacks and stacks of saplings, but the trees only have 3 to 4 blocks of wood in each one so you have to really want juniper wood as your material.  Lemon, orange and banana trees do not grow well in some biomes.  You can quickly turn an area into a forest if you work at it with the right kind of saplings, and have plenty of wood for any project that you might need, pick axe handles, torches, bean and grape supports etc etc.  Since there had been no wood in this location when I arrived - I made the house here with dirt, and a willow wood roof that I had left over blocks from the last place.  

Island life and the living is easy...

 I kept passing these three little islands grouped together, and the largest of the three had a lot of minerals showing all over the sides of it as I zoomed around it in my boat.  This was a mid-point between four other places, so eventually I gave it a name and a spire with the directions indicated just so I could remember that yes- this is the place.  Then I saw the minerals, and pulled the 1400 blocks of jade out of just one of the sides of the caverns - along with seven other minerals in different amounts, and there is even more in there.

I made a little 'island life and the living is easy - the sea is full of fish' base and decided it didn't even need a full house - just a roof and a small garden.

 

How the spire mapping system works :

When you get to a really interesting place it gets a spire, 4 to 12 blocks high, with a torch on top hopefully, and then a sign with a unique name on it.  The sign on the spire that faces the actual feature, where a house might be built, has the name of the place on it.. for example 'Shurl Island'.  The sign on the opposite side says both the name of the place and 'cross (Place)' with the name for the place that is exactly opposite.  IE: If you see the sign, turn around and go straight in the other direction - you end up in Place.  And of course, the other two sides of the spire are also 'cross (Place)' for where you would end up if you walked / boated in that direction.  

 

Building an actual road between the places is the best - but sometimes the terrain is such that you cannot easily build roads and bridges, or you do not have enough resources to build a road between two good points but still need a good way of navigating a long distance between them.  This spire system helps you not get completely and totally lost while exploring the known Universe - everything has some sort of constellation relation to each other like breadcrumbs, and you can track your way back or realize you've somehow gone in a circle.  Some spires have all directions marked with 'cross' as well as the location name - and it gets really useful when you do lose your way and have no idea where you are, but then pass a cliffside with a spire on it that was founded on the other side.   Ah, that is where I am - but how did I get here?  And then you can complete the circles and know how to get from one place to another easier.                                      

In this world, I came across blindly from three different established places and hit the same long narrow island with jungle trees.  I did not know that the Tidaris island was so large - and had started two different houses with small farms and mines.  But, because I had a spire with a torch on top in the second location - I saw it when I climbed up the roof on the other house and was able to realize that it was all the same place, and yet, still large enough for both locations to exist (one with a good mountain to mine and harbor straight across from the city, the other with resources of bamboo and clay and a flat inland route that led through to another biome).

Some places will also have signs with arrows that indicate a string of places that are in that direction, in the order of appearance.  This particular world has maybe seventy named places, not all of them with full towns and gardens in them.  This little island itself was a rarity in that it was a named place for a very long time, that I came through often, but had not seen any reason to settle it - until I saw inside one of the caves on the back island and saw a whole shelf of blue covelite (which looks like lapis lazuli).  Then I saw a jut of purple sygilite, and some silver sand (which makes lovely silver sandstone), and the jade, and blue limestone and a wall of coal and a wall of shale etc etc..

more bits

 

 I should do more productive things with my time off.  I keep thinking I should make some 'real art' in my studio area, instead of Minetest towns and gardens - but then I think what will I do with that - and I fall back into exploration mode and go off in another direction in the game.  Mark is playing his Old West game, and enjoying it.  A mountain lion tried to attack his character's horse last night and it was such a loud noise - then he said one of our cats sat there and watched him on the floor for a long time after that because it had been so loud.  On the other hand, the dogs barking in his game is not bothering our dogs one bit - it doesn't 'have anything to say' in dog language, it is the right sound but meaningless etc.  When I put up a video of a baby fox at a rescue telling the rescuer 'food now please' and he was saying not yet, but soon - both of my dogs sat right up and looked for the puppy.  What does that say about the sound engineers of the game?

There is a small turkey in the oven, and I've been trying out some new house construction types on Luanti Minetest.  I am a bit sad that the creator did include a tatami mat square, but did not include any recipe to make it. *what is with that?* while you can make sakura doors which are shoji screens, and bamboo doors and I've found a few other neat ones to make out of Alder wood and Willow wood.  I made a circular first story out of galena brick and then used Alder wood tree trunk to make stairs to make the rough roof texture.  I put the little beach houses on stilts along a long dock, and then used some white granite to make brick to add with the willow wood and make a little town out of it. 

Not too far from here I found 72 iron ingots in a chest and now they are stashed here.  In all the digging I've done in the game so far I have only unearthed the equivalent of 30 some iron ingots total.  But then, every time I get settled somewhere I pick a direction and say 'what's over there?'  I'd also like to find the right corals to make the breathing helmet and get underwater and explore the sunken ships.  There is so much in this Asuna Luanti Minetest to discover.

 

And yet, no recipe for the tatami mat.  And the fish soup recipe doesn't work.  And the salt used in the actual recipes is not the salt you can make with the water bucket - and they really should be the same. I don't know where to get the other salt or if it is even possible.  Same with the seaweed, and the olives.   Little things like that are broken.  But it is still a very fun game.

 It is Easter. I work tomorrow, and there is a lot going on.  I've done the laundry and we got the groceries, and there are bits of green plants coming up in my real garden outside.   Esme wanted a gift card for something online for Easter - and we were able to do that.  Besides that and the turkey (because it was already in the freezer) I made tonkatsu ramen last night with green onion, carrot slivers, orange pepper, green peas and boiled eggs.  That was pretty good.  Studying French-to-Spanish on one profile and Spanish-to-French on the other.  And they are sort of matching up.

the bits

 

 

 

the bits.  Moving along with that walled city - filling it in, transferring more crops from elsewhere to the newer gardens I'm making.  It is flowing pretty well - although I had to put names on signs on every house to remember where I was keeping certain things.

 

I have been working on the French-to-Spanish on one Duolingo account and the Spanish-to-French on the other.  And work is hopping and rolling along, getting things done - they are opening a new production line and it has been a good while coming getting things done one by one for it - my part is just ordering certain things and calling certain companies to come do tasks - the maintenance people are  doing everything they can that we don't need to call other companies for.  Hopefully it will be up and running in a few weeks - and then I have LOTS of paperwork to rewrite and reprint and redo my spreadsheets to accommodate the new daily information.

 

 

I like the little stone square houses - they are a different style.  One house has a second story room inside, but most of the rest are single rooms with a chest and a furnace.  I'm trying not to do the same thing all over the place - and use what I pull out of the ground most recently while I was digging out stone for furnaces and the roads and the wall etc...  I went to the other towns and picked up barley and onions, strawberries, green beans and peapods and cucumbers etc etc... I should go back and get pineapples and wild onions sometime soon.  

 

There is a little 'market' area in the corner there at the bottom with four extra chests in it, and a park beside it with a cherry tree, a bench and whatever flowers I had picked around there and didn't use as dye stuffs.  I planted blueberry bushes in a lot of places from the town next door.  That bare area on the left outside the little door should probably be a dock, but I need to work more on the other side as well where I did make a dock to go to the jungle island across the way.  The lagoon to the other side is contained with nowhere to go from there, so it doesn't need much - but maybe a few small houses could be outside the wall there on the beach.

 

 

Was out in my real garden planting a few things today, mustards, and mizuna (Japanese mustard) and cucumbers and morning glories etc etc...  I watered the carrots and saw that the arugula and kale are starting to come up.  I watered the strawberries, which are blooming.  It is almost as hot as summer out there - but that does mean storms.

 

And I did some cleaning, not much - organizing a few things and cleaning a few things.  And I told Mark that I must be quite old now because it is an unusual paid day off and I just want to plant a few things, clean a few things, cook an egg and wash my laundry.  He found a turkey in the freezer we put in there a few months ago and is thawing it for Easter dinner.  We also have been watching Red Dwarf reruns again - it has been years since I first showed him those.  The other day I saw a meme and asked him if we still had that - and he found it.

 

Esme is off of school today as well, and playing a game.  Mark bought Red Dead Redemption? some cowboy old West game and we both tried out the controls on it.  I would just so much rather play Minecraft.  Esme did better than either of us at the story mode though, mostly because the controls are intuitive to her, but then she couldn't read the cursive script that is in the game and we had to translate.  I played a little more once Mark had unlocked it to more of a Skyrim type experience - but still my instincts immediately went to more Stardew Valley I want to build a house and a farm and go fishing and put up food for the winter, instead of travel around and gunsling, sell furs and game and avoid being robbed.  Mark says that could be available with some mods he saw.  These are reasons I really do like the Minecraft (or Luanti Minetest, which this is on Linux), it matches those instincts and there isn't any stress or pressure to do story quests.

 

 

 

 

 

rar (bits)

 Busy days, things getting done - started in the garden a bit over the weekend, planted carrots and turnip greens, kale and arugula, took some pictures.  I also bought a few new kitchen tools and will need to find a time to use them after they've been through the dishwasher.  It's going to be Easter soon.  Rar.

the snowball bush

 

 

bought some vegetables, and cut them up and cooked them

one of the new kitchen tools is a potato grater, and the other is an onigiri mold

 Beets :

cut up thin, olive oil drizzle, salt and pepper, put in ceramic pot with foil over it at 350 degrees for about an hour, ate some of it with rice and sausage, and put the rest in the freezer to try to use soon another way.  Cut up the beet stems and will see how that works in stir fry.

 

was visited by Grandma's dogs while gardening

Languages :

tried to get into learning Spanish again with SaySomethinginSpanish and learning backwards through the French side of Duolingo.  Fussed with new speakers and old headphones and the sound on my Linux machine. *growl*  I had good response from using SaySomethinginWelsh way back when, and I -CAN- remember much of what I am supposed to say in the lesson or two that I've taken in SSiSp...   There are a lot of truck drivers that come and try to tell me 'no English' where I work, and then they make me speak into their phone and translate for them. *sigh*  I told one today that I had more French than Spanish even after trying to learn Spanish and he thought that was painful/funny.  I can understand a lot of Spanish, but trying to produce it the French comes out instead.

 

 I've been working on a 'walled city' very near that other town of Barva, although I have not given this town a name.  It is a bit patterened after the idea of Monemvaias? the Greek city that means 'One Way In'... but of course, there are several ways into this.

I discovered a moonstone geode with gray calcite and white limestone down below it - cool, my first time seeing this in Luanti Minetest, Asuna   Basically a huge spherical room with glowing moonstone crystals inside, and three layers to it.

 

 

Luanti Minetest Asuna - farm stuff how to grow barley

 

One of the farms that I ended up making pretty large as I was trying to cook specific things and needed to collect the ingredients.  This farm has what, maybe twenty different things growing in it? I hardly ever plant it as 'field specific'.  I guess it would look neater that way but I'm scared of losing an entire area - even though there are no creepers to do that like in regular Minecraft.  There are also blueberry bushes all around the town, which are a good thing to have and carry around as 'walking food'.  Each little house has a chest or two and a furnace, and although I could do that with one big house it just felt more natural to bounce around.

 

the soybean is ripe - but the stevia is not until it shows really white flowers on top - don't waste it as you might not get back enough seed to try again.  You need four stevia to make the type of sugar that the baked goods below requires.  You can not use the sugar made from papyrus to make them, and I don't know why *sigh*

 

Making soy milk from soybeans is a process, too.  First, you have to make the glass bottles, then fill them with water, then use FIVE soybeans each with the bottle (soy soy soy/ soy soy waterbottle) to make raw soymilk, then put that in the furnace and it becomes soymilk.  And if you pick the soybeans before they look like the above picture they don't drop a replantable seed.  Soy milk is used to make a few things, and you can drink it.  Regular cow's milk can be gotten with a bucket from a cow, like in vanilla Minecraft, but it doesn't get used in any Asuna recipes.  You can still drink it as a food stuff but it ties up your bucket as you can't put it in other bottles etc.  As a note, I tried the cactus juice recipe that is in the game and it didn't work.  Bummer.

 

One of these is strawberry tart / strawberry pie and the other is pumpkin pie.  Both are very 'expensive' game wise, in the amount of resources to gather in order to make it.  The strange thing, is there is no way to even EAT a pumpkin until you do all of this to make it into pie.  I find that very strange.  But, it was also incentive to find these things.

The barley seed I have was found in a hamper - (unbreakable wayfarer chest that shows up on mountainsides etc. and looks like a wicker hamper) so I don't know where it comes from 'naturally' - for completeness, wheat and oats comes from regular grass, and cotton and rice comes from jungle grasses 'naturally'.  I'll come back and report if I ever get barley naturally.   Rye seed comes from savanna grass, in a savanna biome.

 

The intermediate stage of barley is shown here in the front by the path, forming the nodding heads, but still green.  It takes a very long time to get to this stage, and it still has another few stages to go through before it is ripe and will drop seed and grain.

The next stage after the above intermediate.  It is NOT ripe yet.

The picture below is also not ripe - but shown from another angle.

Barley is not easy to grow.  It takes 'forever', and if you try to grab it when it is NOT ripe, you just lose it entirely.  

 

Not ripe! (above picture)

This barley is standing up 'straight' and it is not yet RIPE.  I was wrong the first time I tried this - as it goes through a nodding stage and then it stands up.. and I thought 'for sure' that has to be it?  But no, very rarely will you get some grain from this but no seeds - and that means losing the crop.

 So, this is the ripe stage - it is dried up and olive looking on the stems, with yellow and brown nodding heads.  It will drop seed and grain. 

It should drop seed and grain both and be replanted.  It is quite rare for it to drop two seeds - it does happen, and you hope for it.  This is why barley is very hard to grow a 'field' of in survival mode - but it is worth it for the number of things you can make from it. 

 the pumpkin seeds were also in a hamper, and they grow slowly, then blossom with this yellow flower, much like watermelons.  Also, like watermelons, you have to leave some space around them for the separate pumpkin fruits to 'pop' into - or they will never fruit.  So, the picture above shows space left near every pumpkin vine with the yellow flowers to assure the pumpkin has somewhere to spawn when the plant is ready.  The pumpkins, like the watermelons, need to be hit with an axe.  However, the watermelons split into something edible (watermelon sections) and the pumpkins are not edible unless you make pumpkin pie recipe with them.  The seeds in both watermelons and pumpkins come only from the finished grown plant (which means no more fruits until one grows mature again) and you may or MAY NOT get a seed when it is broken, so be careful! 

Pumpkin that has spawned out into the open space left for it

a bamboo jungle biome that I found across the ocean, bordered by an apple tree/ mushroom forest (not shown), Asian biome and Japanese tree biome (Seen below)

 

Barva farm (the name of the Smurf village like one above with the four houses) because I couldn't bear to put 'Smurf village' on a road sign *ha* but Barva means 'colorful' so that works.

Cotton

Eggplant

Barley

Oats

Pumpkins

Wheat

Cabbage

Rice

Bell pepper

Stevia

Papyrus

Blueberry bushes

Strawberries

Grapes

Soybeans

Mint

Cabbage

Onion

Wild Onion

Vanilla (oddly, not used in any recipes) 

Ginger root

 Rhubarb

Garlic

Chicken eggs (sometimes)

Cactus (square type) 

Bamboo

Cherry Trees 

Silver Maple (Birch) trees 

-other things nearby I should go grab and transfer here are tomatoes, cucumber, coffee, sunflower seeds and pineapples are available but I didn't bring them with me from the nearby farms.  I have parsley nearby but I can't remember where the lettuce is.  I had one major fall in one of the Japanese forest biomes and lost all of my inventory - woke up in the last bed that I had made in a little desert house and sighed, then went on back to the Asian biome castle and started gathering things up and headed off in this direction for now... and have had lots of fun with making the new region.

In real life: There have been tornadoes and flooding around here the past week - it has been a bit stressful.  I've been rolling along.  We had power outages and one morning was rough as I was supposed to be in to work even earlier to get the coffee cart and breakfast ready for a meeting, and there had been tornado weather and heavy rain the night before, rain still falling, flooding conditions, and woke up to no power.  But, it seems that was the end of this storm system, we hope?  I'm still doing Japanese and Finnish lessons daily.  The Finnish is not too hard, but still second section in Duolingo, which is not beginner.  I've made a few really good 'real life!' cabbage recipes with cabbage from a local farm.