All I Want for Christmas

Is what I received. I opened a huge box to see something that's been on my Deeply Wanted but Top Secret list for many years- a violin. It is a rented student violin, but if all goes well we'll upgrade. I always wanted to play a stringed instrument, mostly because I had ancestors and relatives on both sides of the family who were/are musically talented. If you come from the Nashville area, it comes with the territory. Before the days of radio, from mansions with grand pianos or organs to shacks with home-made banjos, everybody had a family member who played some musical instrument. Singing was a common way to spend an evening or make the workload lighter. Music was in our blood, from the Scotch-Irish ballads to bluegrass to Negro spirituals and hymns. I have wanted this for a long, long time. I'm figuring out the notes for the octaves the instrument covers now. What fun!

Staying Alive

They're still out there! We're still getting tomatoes, too, from the shelves indoors. Life is good.

Still amazed by the lack of response to the whole "Climate-gate" thing in official circles. It is as if the political ball is already rolling too hard to stop for the mere TRUTH- the researchers fudged the data to get and keep funding, and will continue to do so. A co-worker convinced of global warming responded to my comment that the globe has been cooling in the past 10 years, and it is hard to convince people of global warming when they are freezing in this manner:

"The uneducated will believe what they see. You have to be educated to see the truth of global warming." Yup. Cold is really hot, you can warm your home without a fire and drive your car on magic electricity, and there really is no absolute truth after all (umm, how could we have bank accounts, court cases, speeding tickets, or any science requiring measurements or calculation without absolute truth? Just wondering...). Hope I never get THAT educated.

Winter Gardening

I planted several cool-weather vegetables out back in mid-September. I wanted to get them out in August, but weather and time did not coincide to let that happen. Las week we had 2 nights in the low 20s. The chard looks gone. The tomatoes and limas are long gone.

But I have been pleasantly surprised by the lettuces and broccoli. I saw the frost on their leaves. I saw them looking frozen solid. And look! They live! No protection! I may or may not get any more than the 127 pounds I harvested this year, but it is interesting to watch and experiment.

"Climategate", Cash, and Scientific Integrity

It has been an interesting week in the scientific community, reading about the hacked emails from CRU, to say the least. As a Christian and a graduate student, I am interested in how the affected parties respond, and if any scientific revision will take place. The answer to the latter, at least so far, seems to be "no". I've seen interesting posts from programmers indicating that the code in the hacked documents is not good, and was designed to generate the results it did.

I've seen stories in top journals defending the investigators, for doing things that would get me hanged (or at least kicked out) as a grad student. Subverting peer review is a huge one. Sure there are some people in every field who produce suspect work sometimes, but you subject their papers to appropriate public scrutiny; you do not block their publication. Avoiding releasing raw data is another. If I told my boss I had lost YEARS of raw data in a move and tried to shrug it off, I would be toast. If I refused to show him my notebooks, or altered them before he could view them, again a very hot seat (or a cold kick out the door) would be mine. People paid with taxpayer money are employees of the taxpayer. Their data should be (and by law is) public property. Yet these guys, and the ones in the US, have avoided FOIA requests for years.

The "adjustment" of the raw data is another issue. According to surfacestations.org, most of the North American temperature stations do not meet standards in terms of siting. A lot of pavement has been laid down in the last 50 years, some of it close to these stations. My own backyard did not get hit by frost this year until November 30; the heat island effect of cities is very real. Let's face it- people would naturally put a station where they could get to it easily for maintenance, and way out in the boonies an hour from any road is not an accessible place. Next to a parking lot-much better. And if the parking lot gets paved and the numbers shoot up after 1970, so much better for you!

What about the satellite data from NASA and NOAA? Reading through layers of the atmosphere, in which the temperature rises and falls for each layer until you reach bottom, and even there the read temperature would depend on the surface over which it is read, and the time of day, etc.? It would be a lot like trying to read the back page of a newspaper section through the upper ones, if the pages were transparent, but not the ink. Tricky, and controversial. That the satellite data agrees with "adjusted" ground data does not make either one right. Precise but inaccurate leaves the hunter very hungry, even if all the arrows fall in the same place.

Modern science is funded by the acquisition of government grants from committees of scientists evaluating and rating the grants, then administrators doing their thing. For decades (at least in the biological sciences, according to multiple scientists I have met in various places), grants have had to include certain key words (cyclic AMP, siRNA, high-throughput screening, tumorigenesis, etc.) to get funding. If you d0 not have the "right" keywords, it has become increasingly difficult over the past several years to get grants, unless you are at the top of the field and are GENERATING the key words. In which case you shape the future of the field for years to come. If you are right or if you are wrong, everyone else will be too.

The scientists implicated at East Anglia were some of the top ones in their field. They and a few others at NASA and NOAA and in a center in Japan were generating the key words. It will be interesting to see how these investigations unfold (or not) and what they mean for climate science.

Semi-Local Dinner

There's a good probability of frost tonight, so I went out and collected tomatoes (2 lb 9 oz worth!), lettuce, radishes, and lima beans tonight by the light of the full moon, and the neighbor's motion sensors.

We had a completely backyard salad of radishes, lettuce, and a window-sill-ripened tomato. The grocery-store baked potato was topped with onion, mushrooms, and greens from the radishes sauteed in butter. The sweet-potato-pear salad contained our sweet potatoes and home-canned pears from a neighbor's yard, and pecans from the farmer's market (recipe: Peel and cube a few cups of sweet potatoes. Microwave in the sugar syrup from the canned pears until soft. Add the pears (cubed) and cook 2 more minutes. Add chopped pecans and dried cranberries or golden raisins. Pour off the syrup and sauce with unsweetened plain yogurt. MMM). The catfish was American, and probably from Mississippi, where much of it is grown in ponds near the river. The corn was from a grocery-store frozen bag. So dinner was as semi-local as I could make it.

It is fun to try and figure out how much you can do with what you have. I'm really glad I do not have to live on what I can grow, but it is fun to grow it.

Hypercompe scribonia

While I was digging up the sweet potatoes I found this little wooly caterpillar in the leaves and carefully set it aside for further study. It will hopefully grow up into a Giant Leopard Moth!

God had fun making insects, undeniably. The larva has long, fur-like shiny bristles and red rings on its skin. The adult is white with black leopard spots, iridescent blue, white, and black legs, and an orange, blue, and black body. What a magnificent creature! It is worth the loss of a few marigolds to find one of these.

Sweet Potatoes, Baby!

Here is last year's crop of sweet potatoes. I was pleased to find that planting the slips sprouting from a store-bought sweet potato gone too long in the pantry actually produced potatoes in our clay soil!

Here is this year's crop (plus a few more dug this afternoon). It is now

drying/curing in the attic. This is a little over 10 pounds of sweet potatoes. Why so many more? I dug 2 or 3 bags of store-bought "garden soil" into the main bed this year, along with compost and lots of leaves. Also and more critically, I buried the roots of each slip in a large clump of potting soil, so the roots could push through. Even so, I found some larger narrow ones growing in the clay, so the soil is gradually improving. It would take years of patient soil amendment to really get this right. I planted these in the shade, in the wettest part of the bed in a very wet year, and it has been quite cool, so I did not expect much. I only dug up 2 rotten ones! God blesses us in many ways.

Quiet Days

We've had our first frost, but it was light here in the city and hit very few of my plants. It seemed to knock back the cabbage worms a little, though. We actually had a full week of sun this past week for the first time in ages! Gorgeous weather. I've only harvested a few ounces of tomatoes so far this month. I wanted to bring in the sweet potatoes today, but it probably will not happen.

Husband and I are both sick. No, it is not the over-hyped swine flu, though I'm sure every sniffle at the doctors' offices is being reported as swine flu. This is a sinus infection, without fever or GI involvement. We're sleeping it off, and using lots of tissues, and hoping to get back out in the sun soon.

Kids These Days

Imagine! November first, and the jack o'lanterns escaped unscathed! Gorgeous day. We went to the park again to watch happy dogs chase balls and humans chase frisbees. People were reading and napping in the warm sunshine. Costumed percussionists grooved up at the edge of the war memorial. A fire breather was there, spitting fire for the masses. The ice cream truck was available in case of emergency. What fun!

Clearing Brush

This is the first time I have ever lived in a place with alleys. In some of the wealthier neighborhoods, the driveways face the alleys, so they are kept clear. In other places they are only for running utilities, so it is easy to let them fill with weeds and young trees. Our alley is becoming overgrown, so Husband and I went out and did some rather cathartic tree whacking this afternoon. It was a beautiful crisp fall day, great for such activities, but cool in the shade if you slowed down. When husband got out the power equipment and chips were flying, I came on in to Technu myself and start dinner. It was a good day.

God Keeps Me on a Short Leash

I wrote back last December about a hip bursitis problem I was having. Today, I was going down the stairs at work, when I noticed that my hip was not hurting- at all! Praise be to God, I was happy, and with only Hindus and atheists to share the joy. Aargh.

Anyway, it was wonderful. God really does keep me on a short leash. He knows that I know what needs to be done, and when, and often I do not do it. I had fallen out of the habit of certain exercises to help the muscles of the lower back, which in turn help support the hip structure. When these exercises were not done, and my overall activity level decreased, pain resulted. I must work, or I hurt. Sometimes I hurt anyway, but it is always a learning experience. God works.

Reducing Posts to Weekly

The garden is calming down and there isn't much to say, so I won't say it. I'll go down to a weekly post from one of the old gardening books for the winter. See you Saturday.

Blue-sky Sun

Beautiful Day! A cool fall day of sun is a gift from God. The trees are starting to blush with color, and soon the Great Dig Out will begin in earnest. Bags of leaves by the dozen pile up in front of houses in our neighborhood like sand bags in a flood zone. I piled several on the garden last year as a mulch, which helped with early weeding, but caused a drastic over-population of slugs. If slugs were a fine cuisine, we would have been in good shape. I captured over 8000 this past spring! I'll enjoy the beautiful fall while it lasts, before the grays and browns of winter take over. And the inner debate about throwing away all that good organic material vs spending my spring evenings out back picking up slimers will continue.

Lost and Gained

We lost the game of furnace chicken last night., but we gained 11 pints of green beans. A good bargain, in my estimation. There was light frost on the pumpkin this morning, but the back looks fine. Going out for a detailed look in a few minutes.

Furnace Chicken and Canning Green Beans

Furnace Chicken is not a new delicacy. It is the annual game my husband and I play as the night-time lows flirt with freezing outside and the indoor temperature coasts slowly downward. "I'm not cold. Are you cold?"

"I'm fine (putting on another layer), but you can turn it on if you are cold."

"Oh, no. I was just concerned about you."

And so it goes, with sly grins, until we both look at each other, no longer smiling, and say, "It's TIME."

I'm upping the ante (and the kitchen temperature) by canning several pounds of green beans from the farmer's market, and a mixture of sweet and hot peppers, hot pack of course. The pressure canner will be hot tonight- and so will the kitchen. Muuahaha.

Lessons Learned: Broccoli and Cauliflower

This picture is from a few weeks ago. The plants are a little bigger now, but very chewed. Cabbage worms. I do not like them.They are pernicious little beasts, attacking even when the plants are too small to feed them to maturity. I do not want to spray for them, and indeed cannot when it rains almost every day, as it has in the spring and fall this year.

That makes hand-picking the only option, and there again hand picking in the rain is not fun or very efficient. I probably will not grow any more broccoli or cauliflower for that reason. The stores and farmer's market can supply me with those. I'll go for chard and beets and carrots, with maybe some bok choy and kale, and snow peas, as my spring crops.

Blogger Action Day

OK this is a rant, plain and simple. IT IS MIGHTY DIFFICULT to convince me of the assertions of the global warming crowd when I'm freezing cold and we've had a record rainy year, as the two main assertions they hammer on are the following:

"The average temperature of the earth will get 4-6 degrees hotter unless we all stop emitting carbon immediately (what, stop breathing too? We're animals. We can't emit ZERO CARBON. It is physically impossible.)."

"We will run out of fresh water (three days of sun this month, soggy, saturated soil even during the summer, and you're telling me to believe your computer model rather than my eyes? Dream on. We have wet years and dry years.)."

An awful lot of local problems could be solved locally by replanting mangrove swamps to buffer against tsunamis and storms (and breed depleted wild fish stocks), replanting forests to buffer dry years so that the trees draw up water from the ground, actually helping the poor instead of watching them die to relieve "excess population", not drinking anything from a can( soda companies drain aquifers and pollute ground water to make their products), etc. Instead people blame those local effects on global warming as measured on thermometers mostly located in cities, which have been surrounded by concrete and steel over the past 150 years, and experienced increases in temperature like the bank thermometer over the parking lot, and do nothing to help local people solve local problems. It is easier to blame global warming, and the excessive Western lifestyle, and oil companies, and corporations and CEOs, than it is to say "But if we just did this simple thing, we could store our own purified water, and replant the forests to shade us and supply our food and heat, and..." Too simple. Not complex or expensive or sacrificial or technologically advanced. Not enough. Despair must rule the day. The earth must be drying out, even if we are knee-deep in mud. The earth must be warming, even if we are cold earlier this year, and last. Crazy.

Conserve resources? Learn to live without driving in cities, and only use indoor climate control as necessary? Absolutely. Despair over a computer model generated by someone who profits directly from driving you to give him money? Naah. Look it up in the real journals. Get a dictionary. Look up the statistical methods in Wikipedia or Wolfram's website. Stretch those brain cells. Relax when you realize that biased information from selected sources generated by people whose only career future is in generating fear might not be the most reliable in the world. If you look at the real journals, the fear mongering is strong in the news section at the front. If you go to the back, to the meaty articles, and dig into them, you'll find that the best of the models cannot match the past very well unless the real data is "smoothed" to match the model. Hmmm. And most historical temperatures were measured in cities. And accurate thermometers are only 150 years old. Relax. Grow your food and can and store it, turn the lights down and get out your snuggly blanket to save energy, but relax. If they can't predict the weather tomorrow, how will they predict the climate 50 years from now, eh? If you're totally confident that these models are correct, please move to TN (our climate has changed frequently for a long, long time) and observe reality. Thanks.

The Importance of Observation

The problems of the past few days are both symptomatic of the same disease: inattention. I have been too obsessed with other things, like work and the garden, to pay attention to how long that bowl was in the refrigerator or whether I put the plastic windows back in the bird feeder correctly. They were upside-down. There is a groove cut out of one long side so that the bird seed can flow out. I placed the groove up and flat side down when re-inserting the window, thus cutting off the bird seed supply, though the birds could see the seeds. Oh, the cruelty!

Same with the fridge. Husband says I am more sensitive to The Dreadful Odour than he, having sensed it earlier, and still sensing it now, though at a much lower level and only in the freezer. I bought a bunch of lemon-scented disinfectant wipes and wiped down the freezer as much as possible tonight, disposing of all the ice and beans and washing the rank plastic ice bin for the icemaker. Hope it works.

Smelly Fridge III: Revenge of the Smell

Tonight I reheated some green beans and was greeted by the ghastly smell I thought I had removed with several bottles of expired mustards and marinades, and a bad container of "refried" (not really fried, not really DONE, I am still learning beans from scratch) beans, earlier. Winds up that the LID of the refried bean container (glass container, plastic lid) had absorbed the odor, and the butter with which the beans were cooked had, too. Reheat, and WHAM! Nasty. Both were garbage. So were the beans. I went through the fridge and freezer afterward, sniffing all the grains (contaminated, including whole wheat flour, buckwheat flour for pancakes, yummy no more, brown rice, popcorn frozen to kill any surprise insects, muesli, and 12-grain cereal), and dairy products (butter and cream cheese gone- probably milk, too- I did not sniff it). Even some frozen beans were bad. I chucked an entire black lawn-sized garbage bag full of stuff, because I had just opened a new 5 pound bag of flour, and had a lot of cornmeal awaiting transfer to the freezer in the garage. It went to the garage, alright, different receptacle. Plastic containers were history, too, because once they absorb an odor like that, it can be impossible to get out.

Lessons learned:

1. Chalk board needed for fridge. Throw out leftovers after 5 days and everything else WHEN it expires, not 2 years later. Even if it is in a jar and looks fine. Buy what we can use up.

2. Check fridge regularly (like when putting away groceries weekly) for mystery bits at the back.

3. Really old refrigerators may need a Deep Cleaning (take everything out and scrub, maybe flush the drainage system somehow) once in a while.

Next Day

The glue seems to have worked, but a longer string seems to have discouraged the birds. They barely ate any seeds. Maybe the glue has some kind of smell to them that I cannot detect. Maybe it had a chance to dry fully today, and they'll eat tomorrow. Maybe they've found better digs elsewhere, or decided to migrate because the temperatures are a few degrees below normal, and the rain a few inches above normal. Who knows the mind of a sparrow? God does, and maybe someday he'll explain.

A Bird Feeder Catastrophe Averted

Our birdfeeder is normally suspended with some haying twine from the tree out back. I try to make the haying twine long enough to discourage the squirrels. I did not know they could hang upside-down by their toes and eat. They are talented.

The bird feeder spins on its rope, gradually wearing the rope through, so that periodically the feeder crashes to the ground. This morning, the birds were eating happily on their merry-go-round, though how they manage to land and eat on the feeder when it is spinning is beyond me. This afternoon I found the feeder on the ground, roof broken. Alas! How to fix it?

Husband to the rescue! He has wood glue and lots of clamps. We put it back together and left it to dry. Whew!

Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson

This is a book every new bride should be given (unless she is given a household staff). I got some spaghetti sauce on a white shirt last week. What woman can eat spaghetti in a white shirt without staining it? I'd like to meet her.

Anyway, I went straight to the bathroom and rinsed the area with cold water. Most of the stain came out. Then I hand-washed the garment with a mild detergent. Only a shadow of the stain remained. I hung the shirt to dry, then washed it today with the other laundry, and the stain is completely gone. In the meantime some rust from an aging bathroom fixture had gotten on the shoulder of the shirt as it was hanging to dry in the bathroom. What to do? Consult Home Comforts. Cheryl advised trying white vinegar. I had some from the summer's canning. Using it at full strength, the rust VANISHED! GONE! AMAZING! Not some high-tech stain removal product, but cheap white distilled vinegar. I rinsed the shirt and threw it in the wash. It will be ready for work next week. Woohoo!

Finally, A Useful Post Again

Here's another freebie for the frugal semi-employed among us to keep you in productive reading material as long as you have battery power for your computer. The USDA has put our tax dollars to good use creating the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education section of the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service. Go to http://www.sare.org/ and click on Publications, then Whole Catalog. It is geared toward farmers wanting to transition to organic or more sustainable methods of farming (like Integrated Pest Management), but it has good stuff for the gardener, too. That includes fact sheets, bulletins, and PDF files of entire books for the cost of your already-paid taxes. Want to grow veggies or do small scale dairy or pasture-raised beef for a profit? They have examples of farmers who do these things, with CONTACT INFORMATION! I'm starting on Building Soils for Better Crops by Fred Magdoff and Harold van Es now. It looks basic and good so far. It is out of print, but the magic of PDF makes it accessible. Cool stuff.

Heat, Rain, and Tiny Slugs

the past few weeks, I've been Slimer Hunting at night for slugs and predatory planarians. Mostly catching really huge ones, including a couple suspended from a string of slime, mating on the front steps a few nights ago (gross, man!).  My first thought was, "get the camera!" to capture their swirling bodies. I decided not to risk their getting away and killed them instead. Last night I saw the first itty, bitty slugs on a plant in some time. The eggs must be hatching. Oy. Hope my fall crops can make it.

Onward and Upward

I like the looks of baby bok choi plants. They are so very green, at a time when all the summer produce plants are starting to fade! That living green is a deeply cheering thing for me, especially on a hard or painful day. Today was a bit of both. I can grow stuff out back, but not at work. Oy.

100 pounds!

We just passed the hundred pound mark this evening with a small melon and a really nice red tomato! I was hoping to get a hundred pounds out back this year, and it happened. We'll see how much more we get.

Smelly Fridge II

Didn't work. The disgusting smell remains, and it is getting too cool to keep the windows open at night, so it builds in the kitchen. Husband says it smells like rotten onions, but there are no rotten onions in the house. AARGH!

Smelly Fridge

It is raining today, so all gardening except the nightly Slimer Hunt is suspended. We had an extended power outage a few months ago, and I think it is connected to a Rank Odor that has been emitting from the refrigerator for over a week now. I took out everything that was expired. I removed the veggie drawers and cleaned under them. I sniffed every package in the freezer. It is driving me NUTS! Very disgusting rotting-animal-on-the-riverbank smell. Tonight I will do the shelf-at-a-time, top-to-bottom clean with baking soda and water. Hope it helps. I fear some liquid may have gone down into the drainage system of the fridge when it melted down months ago, and has just reached this level of awful ripeness. I even cleaned the truly disgusting drain pan last night (brown, greasy, crusty-dust, anyone?). I know not what else to do. Oy!

Seeing Growth

When you transplant things, especially when you are not very good at it yet, you see variable results. Some plants (like carrots and other root plants) do not do well. Others (the ones for which you harvest above-ground parts) tend to do better. I'm seeing the broccoli and cauliflower starting to grow now. I had to leave them in pots for a month because of the rain, and was surprised that they stayed small in the pots. They are growing at last. I hope they can get big enough to produce before frost.

Dying with Its Boots On

This bee was on one of my lima bean flowers, so I decided to take pictures of it. Then I noticed that it was not moving. The weather was not cool enough outside yet to preclude flight, so the bee must have died on the flower. Many people wish to go this way- doing work they like to do, and going quickly. May God grant us a good death and a Home with Him.

Creepy! Creepy!

We have a planarian invasion in the backyard. No pictures with my camera (they're nocturnal), but you can look at examples here. They're called Bipalium kewense Moseley or the land planarian or arrowhead flatworm. They're becoming common enough for schools in Louisiana to use for those head-splitting experiments (split the head with a razor blade, and the halves regenerate to form two heads). I saw one eating  a living earthworm on a slug hunt last week, and even I got grossed out. EEEEW! It is a long, ribbon-bodied thing with a flat, semicircular "head". No eyes, no mouth in the head. Cut the head off, it gleefully grows another. Cut it in pieces, and each piece becomes a new flatworm. You must kill them in alcohol or soapy water, or by spraying, if you encounter them and you like earthworms. They came here from Southeast Asia in potted plants, and they thrive in the Southern US or in green-houses. Cold winters with frozen soil can kill them, but our soil never really freezes. They like high humidity, so dry climates are safe. But they can devastate the beautiful iridescent earthworms in my garden. I'm collecting the dastardly creatures with a skewer (making sure to get all the body, and not let the tail snap off to get away), and drowning in soapy water as I do the slugs. Hope it works- these are somewhat more primitive than slugs. Creepy.

My Fall Garden

Here is a lot of it, though not all. In the foreground are the sweet potatoes, looking to engulf the chard entirely and probably hiding a whole host of slugs and creeping things. In the middle (messy) bed are the melon plants, volunteers, and also a volunteer milo plant from the birdseed. At the back of the main bed is the cauliflower/ broccoli/ beet/ onion/ radish bed for fall. In the rear bed, across the front there is rosemary, Indian mint, oregano, and thyme. In the middle is one straggling amaranth plant (the others already died) and weeds. Across the back, the tall spindly red things are okra plants. Under the crape myrtles is an experimental spinach and kale bed- no germination noted since last week so far. On the right in front of the crape myrtles ( and growing into them) are my tomato and basil plants, with one volunteer melon in the mess of vines. Then the limas are down the fence row with  carrots, onions, bok choy, lettuces, and eggplant, and a little poke salad and Malabar spinach volunteered from last year. Whew! 

White Thai Eggplant

This should be harvested while white if grown in shade on clay soil. They will turn brown (rot-brown) instead of yellow if left on the plant too long. They do not have seeds if harvested in this way. They are the size of a large marble or a small egg, true to the name. This is a cute plant, more for looks than for edible value.

Cleaning Old Wood Floors

This house came with Original Hardwood Floors, according to the realtor. Abused ones that had served as under-carpet flooring for years. People had ripped out the carpeting, painted without covering the floor to protect from spatters, and even waxed dirt into some places. See the before picture here, from a corner between the fireplace and a radiator cover in the living room.

Here is the "after" picture. I took off the paint spatters with sandpaper and a plastic knife, then wiped with a moist rag and re-waxed. It isn't perfect. I need to work on getting the spatters off close to the wall. I did not have the tools to pry an errant staple still sticking out of the floor. But it is better.

Radishes and Beets

I sowed some seeds among the transplants last week for beets, radishes, carrots, green onions, and lettuces- all cool weather plants that should thrive as the trees lose their leaves and more sun hits the garden, at least until frost. The radishes and some of the other plants are already up! This fall gardening may work out well. We are due to fall into the low 50s at night, with highs in the 70s during the day this week. The dogwood that shades the garden from the south is losing leaves slowly now, with the rest so wilted that a lot of dappled sun gets through the branches. The oaks to the west are still thick with leaves from all the rain, so we'll see if we get enough sun to keep going. 

Carrots

This is a photo of one of my baby carrots. They are coming up well. Sun today! Life is good!

Calm Times in the Garden

It is hard to be patient sometimes. The lima beans will start coming in soon, but the pods have not completely filled out yet. The cole family and other starts I put out there earlier this week are starting to grow. I caught a cutworm at work out there last night and dispatched it, but the plants are still small and vulnerable. I have three small melons developing, but with no sun and cooler temps, they are not ripening. At least they have plenty of water!

These times come, and we have to wait in patience. The Thai yellow eggplants are finally producing! They're just not yellow- they are white. Maybe that means they are under-ripe, and I should leave them on the plant longer. Patience again. 

Must go look again, and watch the beets grow. Slow work, but fun.

Broccoli and Cauliflower

This is my broccoli and cauliflower bed. Two of the plants have been shorn off an inch above ground, with no slime trail. One had the leaves nearby, and looked like it had been cut. I discovered the second today, leaves gone. Both broccoli plants. I am sad, but I hope the rest survive. When I find suspicious looking grubs as I dig the bed, I try to kill them so they will not eat my plants. Did one of them (that I missed) do this?  I don't know. This is my first attempt at fall gardening beyond nursing the summer plants through cooler weather to frost, so it is all experimental. 

Fortunately the slug count is a LOT lower than in the spring, with a few big ones instead of multitudes of small-to-medium ones. I'm still going out every night to observe and to minimize damage, as a big one could theoretically eat lots of baby plants in a night. Hunting with disposable gloves on actually works, and really cuts down on the "I'm-actually-picking-up-a-huge-slug-ICK!" factor. Highly recommended for the small-scale "organic" gardener.

I Love My Skillet

If you are going to do ANY Southern cooking, you need  a cast iron skillet. The skillet will become one of the things you would want if trapped on a desert island. You can make wonderful cornbread with a most delightfully crispy crust in it. You can fry everything under the sun in it. You can stir fry in it (much more awkwardly than in a wok, but it works). You can braise a cheap cut of meat in it. You can drop it on a cockroach, or use it as a weight to flatten flowers. You can season it for a non-stick finish that will not give anybody cancer or accumulate in the bloodstream of polar bears. You can scrub off said fat-based finish if it grosses you out, or starts getting sticky. If treated properly, the skillet will last your lifetime, even if it is given to you as a child and you live to be 120. Just hand wash it and keep it dry, and oil it once in a while. That is it. How many "consumer products" can we say will last your lifetime these days? Not many. So if you want to cook like Grandma, get a cast iron skillet. You'll never regret the purchase, unless you drop it on your toe. Just say the requisite expletives and cook. it'll be good.

Magnolias are Strange Trees

We have lots of magnolias in Memphis. DO NOT plant them expecting them to be bushes. They grow up into huge trees in our mild climate. They have huge white flowers with a heavy, over-ripe fruit aroma. After the flowers, they produce these odd seed pods. And look!

 Seeds like those little square pieces of candy-coated gum! I did not try one, but it looks like some pre-historic gum dispenser. God had fun making this tree.

Finally In the Ground!

I finally got my fall crops out of the flats and in the ground this evening, mostly. A few more plants remain for tomorrow afternoon, Lord willing. Must slug-hunt. Pictures forthcoming.

Rainbow Harvests

The picture to the left is from September 7, before the rains slowed down tomato production again. It rained again today! Anyway... I did get the last bed dug and fertilized and a few plants out. I'll start the slug hunt again to try to minimize losses.

I like rainbow chard. The stems are like celery in cooking and keep some of their bright color. The green leaves are beautiful, too. God gives us so many things to enjoy!

Finally Digging

Today is a dirty day. I'm finally having a day without POURING rain, suitable for getting the beds ready. It's still a bit too wet (or potentially wet) for planting, but the sand is going in the carrot beds. I was starting the process, turning around to get the pick, when my slimy nemesis waved its eyes in my direction from the garage wall. A slug! AARGH!! I must beer-bait the beds after digging tonight, to see how many are there and if my precious seedlings can survive. All this is an experiment,so we shall see. Back to digging.

Anybody got any gopher wood?

It is still raining! I was hoping to get the babies (broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, beets, lettuce, bok choy, green onions) in the ground this week-end! If it rains much more, we'll have to turn the backyard into a rice paddy. A co-worker says I should grow basmati. Hmm... the rice growers in Arkansas must be having fun- or trying to harvest by boat like the Native Americans do with "wild rice". Anyhow, if you are dry and warm out there, thank God for it, as we thank God for the gift (albeit prolonged) of water.

A Child at Play

That's how I feel sometimes in the garden. Sometimes I'm just a sweaty dirty beast, but at other times, picking tomatoes out of the crape myrtles or wondering why the slugs don't eat oregano, I'm a child wondering at God's creation again. 

A lot of people think that Darwin's theories make God irrelevant. That's like saying that your local mechanic's computer makes the car company and its engineers and factories irrelevant. Darwin's theories are not nearly as all-encompassing as some people would lead us to believe. They DO NOT explain altruism, or love, or joy, or why a lot of insects in amber (millions of years old? Tree sap?) look a lot like their many-great-grandkids. Ants are still ants, bees still bees, lizards still lizards. Waist sizes and hair configurations may change, but that certainly does not involve "evolution" in humans; why should it in insects? I'm one of those who believes more in de-evolution. Downhill, not up, from brilliantly complex to simpler, especially on the ecosystem level. The fossil record shows that in parts of the planet not inhabited by humans, God seems to play around with fantastic body forms and shapes and sizes (Burgess shales, Cambrian explosion, Chinese beds, etc.). He mercifully lets the most delicate and beautiful die before we show up to kill them. We see things with a chance to survive around our clumsy, dangerous, and fallen selves. We live in a world impoverished by our sin, yet incredibly rich nonetheless. Let's take care of it so our descendants can ask those many questions about the wonders they see.

We Need an Ark!

It is raining for the third or fourth day in a row, with heavy downpours last night and rain due the rest of the week. I can't plant anything out or dig in the garden- soil is saturated. With clay, this means wet enough to mold into pottery. I have sand in buckets of sand and water, ready to dig in as soon as I get a break. I like rain, but this is getting crazy!

Wild Kingdom Gets Wilder

Sunday night after 10 PM I was looking out one of our rear windows when I saw a new animal at the plant/animal watering bucket: a possum! Evidently they think slugs are a delicacy. Come to the buffet, then! It was rotund and lumbering. When we tried to get a better look with a flashlight, it waddled to the tree, surprisingly hauled itself up, and disappeared into the leaves. It is amazing how many wild animals are surviving in this urban area. Here are some links with pictures and more information:

http://www.opossum.org/facts.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opossum.

Fall Rains Have Come!

My grandparents mostly farmed bottomland of two small rivers ( Little Harpeth and Big Harpeth, named for brothers who killed people and threw the bodies in the river). The land was fertile, as river bottom usually is, but farming there is always risky. The spring floods came every year except during extreme drought. Both rivers would flood over their banks for a week or two, depositing rich silt and organic material, but leaving the ground saturated so that crops went in late, after things dried out enough to plough the fields. 

Tennessee has a long growing season, so that might not be a problem, except for two more seasonal happenings. We usually have a dry July/August with very little rain. Then things shrivel up. With the spring soaking, the bottomlands held more water and could be irrigated from the rivers until they, too, dried up to barely flowing creeks you could cross on foot without getting your rolled-up pants wet. Then some years the fall rains came, bringing welcome moisture, but the risk of flooding. That's what we have this year. It is all within normal variation of rainfall for Tennessee. But late planting and a fall flood could be devastating to harvests. No wonder my grandparents switched to mostly growing hay and grazing beef cattle in the bottoms, except for a few vegetable patches.

How To Give Yourself a Very Busy Week-end

Buy a half-bushel of apples when you have a meeting at work on Saturday. It took me until 11 

PM last night to get the first batch of apple butter done. Another today and the rest of the apples sliced and either canned or frozen (I'm running low on jars), and the box will be empty sometime tonight.

It has been a rainy week-end, so the urgent digging needed outside has not been done. Looks like it will rain next week, too. Wow! this has been a wet year. Time to work.

Apple Butter On the Way

The dark red, rock hard cooking apples were at the Farmer's market today. You know what that means. Apple Butter Time. Must run. First, a short rant.

I stopped to get some apple juice or cider (storebought, they are the same thing these days) yesterday for the week-end's preserving. All the juice on the main shelf (even the dirt cheap stuff on sale, and the name brands) was from CHINA! We grow tons and tons of apples in this country. What on Earth are we doing getting apple juice from China? I finally bought an "organic" brand that appeared to be American. Aargh. Off to drown my frustrations in a half-bushel of apples. Whew!

My memories of 9/11/2001

I was still teaching middle school math and science in 2001. Newly married during the summer, starting a new school year with a great group of kids and an outstanding team of teachers, I felt that we were off to a great start.

Fifteen minutes into the school day, the assistant principal unexpectedly interrupted the morning routine: "Turn on your televisions now." We did, just in time to see the second plane slam into one of the towers.

We were all in disbelief for a while. Then shock set in. The towers fell. People ran. The images started to repeat. A few students asked to go call parents in the airline industry or other relatives in D.C. or New York. A few parents came to pick up children.

I changed my lesson plans from my usual interactive fare to a routine worksheet the students could do without thinking too much- many were too shocked to function well. I let them talk at will, and shut off the television after less than an hour. It was one of the quietest days in my room, even though the kids could talk freely. The students coming later in the day were relieved to find a refuge of quiet; the social studies teacher left her television on all day.

I don't believe adolescents (or adults for that matter) need to be continually bombarded with horror, no matter how "historic" it is. They need to know the facts, and they need to remember them.

Christians do not believe that everyone is fundamentally good, and we all really worship our own "inner light", and as long as you're sincere, you're O.K. If we read the Bible, we know that all men, all human beings, are fundamentally lost. We all tend by choice to do the wrong thing, the cruel thing, the inhumane and unjust thing if we gain power to do it, and we are not fully in Christ. Most of us don't have command of an airplane when we're unjustly fired from a job, or we see others with privileges we do not share, or a gun in our hands when we see our child hurt by another. Thank God for that.

The freedom and balance of powers in America set up by our Christian and Deist founding fathers (even the Deists knew more scripture and had a more Bible-shaped world view than most church attendees have now) must continue. They are not outdated, nor should they "evolve" to reflect a modern amoral worldview. We have to continue holding up a lamp beside the open door for the huddled masses out there. I'm not saying America is a Christian nation. That ended, especially in academia, a long time ago. I am saying that the freedoms we share are based in a Christian system of beliefs and ethics we cannot reject without devastation.  All human efforts to gain Heaven without Christ end in a fireball, no matter how good our intentions. We must remember, and remain free, and fight to help others achieve freedom as well. That is the right remembrance for this day.

WYSIWYG

I'm a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) girl. I don't wear makeup  (chemosensitivity and oily skin turn my face into an itchy, sludgy mess, even with the "hypoallergenic" stuff). I get my husband to hack off my split ends a few times a year hairwise. I'll go gray naturally. I'm currently wearing a 20-year-old skirt, long and elastic-waisted, totally comfortable.

I think more women would be happier if they gave up the pursuit of consumerist cosmetic perfection and just made themselves comfortable. Stop trying to walk with spikes strapped to your heels and get some shoes you can use without shortening your tendons. Let your hair do as it will. Wear clothes that make you happy, not necessarily the clothing retailers. Relax. Your smiling expression will do more for your appearance than all the anti-aging creams and cover-ups on the planet. Smile. And go plant something- watching things grow (and relentlessly hacking out bushes) helps me immensely. If you like fake nails, look at the undersides under a dissecting scope. You eat with those hands. Relax. Your real nails will do fine. Starve the consumer-debt-slave monster and feed your soul. It will work out much better for you.

Amending the Soil

We have a soil composed of a thin layer of topsoil over clay you could use for making pots. It is red. It holds together and can be molded when wet. It is the color of a flower pot. 

I tried growing carrots, radishes, and beets in the spring. The beets and radishes grew on top of the ground, and were small. The carrots came out deformed, even though I grew a stubby variety adapted to clay soil and dug the area extensively. 

I have finally broken down and asked my husband to acquire some sand. He brought home a few buckets-full for me, and has even offered to dig it into a bed. This entire area was once under a shallow sea, and is still well-watered, so everything under the topsoil is layered sand and clay.The layers can be many feet deep, though, so I can't just dig down to sand and mix to solve the problem. Hopefully adding sand now and organic material when I put the bed to rest in late November will help. I'm trying to save as much organic material as possible, to build soil so we can grow more stuff next year. We shall see.

Tomatoes in the Trees

My Sungold plants are close to a crape myrtle tree. They have outgrown their 4-ft cages and decided to use the tree for support. So I have tomatoes in the trees. Last year I had a green bean plant doing the same thing. Maybe this will be a new trend, or a very old one- some of my Indian friends say that they grow Malabar spinach (an edible green on a vine that loves hot weather) up the trees back home.

Hostafarian!

We have way too many hostas. All of them grew from one half-dead bunch I split when we moved into the house. It does not take a lot of talent or horticultural expertise to do this. These plants are survivors. Here's how I split them:

1. Dig up a gigantic mass o'plant. That is my foot (one foot long) for reference down there.

2. Use the Fearsome Hacking Implement to hack a piece of the plant with a sizeable root base off the main group. Usually in a large clump you'll find at least 2 or 3 smaller clumps that can be split fairly easily from each other.

3. Plant 

the newly-severed mini-plants and water generously. They'll need a bit of extra water the next few days, but they'll be fine, though some badly-hacked parts may wilt and die. It will come back next year bushier than ever. You will need to do this again. Praise God for manual labor on Labor Day!

A Labor Day's Labor

I hope to spend a lot of tomorrow outside. The hostas really need splitting. The mums are out of control, growing to the point of smothering some things. Weeds abound. This is the flower bed facing a long-suffering neighbor's house, so I need to get out there, just out of common courtesy. I'll try to take pics tomorrow.

More Canning Tomatoes Today

My plants are back to roughly a pound per day of production. That starts overflowing the windowsill and our eating capacity after a while. So I got another batch of tomatoes from the Farmer's Market and I'll spend the evening crushing tomatoes. We'll be set for chili for the winter, probably. What fun!

Moths To Scare You

If you want to identify that large thing flitting about in the gathering dusk, and it ain't a bat, here's a good place to look:

http://www.silkmoths.bizland.com/TNsphinx.htm. It shows the moths native to TN, what their offspring look like, where they live, what they eat, etc. I could spend days on this site- but then I'd be too scared to plant anything. Neat place to look around.

Okra Flowering

Okra is not the prettiest plant in the world. It grows tall and gangly, with rough pods for fruit. But oh, the flowers! They are good enough to make up for the rest of the plant. I'm growing a red variety of okra, so the plants are a bit decorative with their red stems and pods and green leaves with red veins. The flowers open during the day, so I generally do not get to see them. I'm glad the bees (see one down in there?) do.

Fixing a Cheap Broom

I was sweeping on Saturday when the plastic, dollar-store broom that had seen several years of service broke. The sweeping head broke off the handle in a seemingly irreparable way. I sighed and prepared to go get another one- budget Marts are pretty common in our area, though not the big box ones. My husband stopped me from going, saying he wanted to try some J.B. Weld first. It worked! The broom is fine again. If you're into the economic doom scenarios going around, you might want some JB Weld along with the duct tape and baling wire and stored food in the bunker. It is good for fixing things.

Unknown Citrusy Flowers

My husband bought two root-bound flowering plants on clearance a few months ago. We did not expect much out of them but a temporary bit of color to hang in the pots on the garage. Imagine our surprise to find these beautiful flowers, coming and coming! The plants will soon be too big for the pots, but I can rip out some overgrown mums and place them in a decorative bed. Another interesting thing- I was"dead-head"-ing the plants yesterday when I opened a dead head to show my husband all the seeds inside. It was packed! And after handling them, my hands smelled like oranges! I do not know what these flowers are, but I like them.

Another Praying Mantis

My husband saw this one as he was trimming the wisteria that comes over the fence from a neighbor's house. He almost bagged it, but saw it in time to let it climb onto the plant again. I like the leaf-shaped hind end.

Canning Tomatoes is Easy(ish)

1. Wash tomatoes and cut an X in the bottom end to facilitate peeling. Put them in boiling water in sets of 3 or 4 for a minute to loosen skin.

2. Remove to ice cold water to cool so you can peel them.

3. Peel, core, and slice as you like. Slicing over a bowl is a LOT LESS MESSY and saves the juice for consumption instead of getting it all over everything for you to clean up afterward when you are dead tired.

4. Make sure jars and lids are clean, hot, and ready. Add recommended 2 T lemon juice to each jar for proper pH. I forgot this (again), but I pressure canned them AND measured the pH later. pH is supposed to be below 4.6, and mine was 4.4, which is fine. Just add it for safety, but if you're including slightly under-ripe tomatoes that make your hands start peeling before the end of the evening, you're probably safe if you forget.

5. Leave 1/2 inch headspace . Water bath can for 40 min or pressure can at 10/11 psi for 25 minutes for pints. Then place on racks in a room that is not too drafty and wait for the 

"ping"! of the jar sealing. Woohoo!

Baby Plants A'Plenty

"Recycled" materials make great starter flats if you don't have lots of money or time to spend making the ones you see in the gardening books. Just lay an empty orange juice carton on its side and cut one side out, so that the juice-pouring opening faces up (you lose less dirt and water that way). Then bash several holes in the bottom with a knife for drainage. Then fill with your potting medium, wet appropriately, and you are on your way. If you're like us, and you drink a lot of OJ, or if you consume other beverages from cardboard or plastic containers, they can really come in handy- and they work. Last week-end I planted 2 kinds of carrots, a lettuce blend, Detroit red beets, marigolds, Tokyo bunching onions, and nasturtiums. I move them along with the broccoli and cauliflower starts into the garage at night to protect from slugs, and out in the daytime for sun. Everything is up now but the nasturtiums. Wow! That is MUCH faster germination than I got in the basement in late winter. The warm temperatures (mid-80s today, so the seedlings are in a place that is shaded much of the day) really help things to germinate.

Hoping to Learn To Play Before I Go

This is one of my paternal grandmother's father's brothers, Cleveland (on the right), with his uncle Frank Crawford (on the left). Cleveland played piano for silent movies and traveled around the country, until he came home one day to find his wife telling him he was not welcome. 

The Rieves family was musical. My great-grandfather could play the fiddle, and did for dances in which they pushed the scant furniture back to the wall and danced right there at home, or out in the barn. Granny said he would throw his fiddle in a pillowcase over his shoulder and go play or preach for anyone (race did not matter) who wanted to hear him. Maybe that is why I want to learn to play a stringed instrument, especially a fiddle, before I go. Just maybe when we all get to heaven I could have a jam session with the Rieves boys, playing the old hymns and telling the old, old story once again. And wouldn't that be heaven?

Where to Go When You Need Info

The cooperative extension agencies located at colleges and universities around the US are gold mines for the home gardener. They have publications about planting schedules, recommended varieties for your region, plant diseases, insects, harvesting and preserving your crops, etc. If you need to know something, they have an expert available. Google them sometime. It'll save you time looking for a book on the subject, when the extension office has a free or low-cost publication.

Tomatoes are Back

It just is not summer without a window sill full of ripening tomatoes. ours are recovering, so what I mistook for wilt was probably just the drastic over-watering from the downpours in July. production has slowed, but it is recovering. Some of the tomatoes are scarred by insect damage, but that is normal for this time of year. It is good to eat your own tomatoes.

Checking Off Goals

I set certain goals at the beginning of the year for gardening and food preservation, and it looks like I'll be reaching those. I was hoping to learn to use the new pressure canner my husband gave me for Christmas, and so far I have used it for green beans and diced tomatoes. I was hoping to learn about making jams, jellies, and preserves, and that is going well, too (strawberry, peach, and blackberry so far). I was hoping to learn how to dry herbs, and at least for thyme, oregano, and rosemary, it is very easy when the humidity is low. Just strip the leaves off the branches and leave them on racks in a well-ventilated room (which will smell fabulous at first) for a few days. Then place in an airtight container after the leaves are crunchy. I'm trying basil next, though it is more succulent, so I'll try it in the attic instead of the dining room, covered with cheesecloth to keep off the dust. 

We're also trying seed saving, with romaine lettuce, radishes, basil (it worked last year), tomatoes(ditto), dill, and corn. I'll also save seeds of the other herbs if they bloom and go to seed. Constant learning is a wonderful thing!

Squirrel Gymnastics

Our dogwood tree has berries now that the squirrels really seem to enjoy. They also usually try a stop at the bird feeder while they're shopping for food, but that often involves dangling precariously upside-down by their rear paws while grabbing seed with the front ones from a slowly spinning feeder. These creatures are truly amazing. With the air conditioner off and the windows open, we can hear the squirrel chew the berries and spit out the hard parts. A backyard is a real blessing.

Another View

This day is too absolutely stunningly gorgeous (low of 61 last night, North winds, low humidity, currently 78 degrees at 3:30 PM in AUGUST in MEMPHIS!) to waste in front of a computer. I'm going outside. Here's another view of that nymph from yesterday that makes the nymph-adult relationship more obvious.

Grasshopper Grows Up

Sometimes the juvenile form of an insect, though it resembles the adult, can temporarily confuse me as to what it is. Look at these two pictures: Does the insect on the left look like the one on the right? They are the same species, different ages. Strange.

Sun and Cooler Weather mean Food Preservation!

And hard work. Here are my plans for the fall, and the associated seeds. I'm canning this week-end. I picked oregano and thyme to dry on the racks yesterday. I'll pick up a box of canning tomatoes tomorrow and make diced tomatoes. We use a lot of those tomatoes over the winter in chili and tomato soup. I'll probably make crushed tomatoes with another box the next week-end. So much to plant, can, dry, etc.! And I spend 8ish to 5ish, Monday thru Friday, at work or traveling to and fro. These are busy times.

Radishes Growing Like Weeds

I can't bait the slugs if it rains all the time. It did not rain last night, but it did this morning. Yesterday evening, just in case, I placed the seedlings in the garage. Searching their holders, I found seven slugs!  Aargh. Must bait them this week-end.

I left several radish plants out there during the growing season for the slugs to nibble instead of eating the lettuces, and the radishes went to seed. Their offspring are coming up now. The plants look pretty nibbled, but some are surviving. It is neat to see a food crop emerge by no effort of your own past the initial planting. I guess that is one of the things permaculture is about. Fun.

We Have Germination! (and slugs)

Yesterday as I went to water the pots of broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage started Saturday, I noticed something: new growth already in all 3 sets! It took weeks back in the winter in the basement for them to germinate! Guess warm soil is important, even for cool-weather crops to germinate. I put the pots in the garage yesterday evening as a storm was approaching, and I did not want them flooded. I went in this morning to find one pot denuded of cabbage seedlings- and a slug therein! I thought moving them to the garage would help avoid that. The slug, sensing the rain coming, was probably on or in the pot already, and I did not see it in the dim evening light. I replanted the pot. I'll know to look next time. If it does not rain more tonight, I may set out the beer traps.

Fall planting: Broccoli And Cauliflower Starts

Never underestimate what you can get from a neighbor's trash. Back in the spring, one of my neighbors was planting out her flower beds with annuals. I saw her throwing away flat after flat of perfectly usable plastic pots, complete with flats to hold them for easy maintenance. I salvaged two and am using them to try to start some broccoli and cauliflower for the fall. The picture shows the items I used to set everything up. I don't have much experience, so all of this is experimental. If you live in a neighborhood where people completely replant their beds on a seasonal basis, you can probably acquire large numbers of these pots, saving yourself a little time and money.

The Sound of Fear

Yesterday from an open window I looked out on a pleasant flock of sparrows, pecking around under the dogwood tree and drinking from my plant-watering bucket, looking for all the world like humans in a mall food court- eating, drinking, chattering, and looking around for their friends. Suddenly the flock was spooked by a general alarm, and all leaped into the holly bushes under the window, with several little heads peeking out from the branches. 

A hawk landed in the tree, facing the bushes like an armed terrorist arriving at the mall through the open doors, daring anyone to move. All the little heads disappeared into the bushes, and a shivering twittering sound began that I wish I could have recorded. Usually when the cats are around, the birds sit silently in the tops of the bushes until the cats lose interest and move on. The tiny birds were more terrified of the hawk than of the cats, and showed it by disappearing deeper into the bushes, and making that terrified sound.

I ran for the camera, but the hawk was gone by the time I returned. The sparrows were fleeing elsewhere as well, leaving the feeding site silent and still. 

Wild Kingdom: Predatory Wasp

This caterpillar turns into the beautiful Black Swallowtail butterfly, and we don't need much dill anyway, so I leave it alone. Not everyone else does, though. This wasp was very busy trying to skin/ behead one of the caterpillars. It was struggling to hold onto the plant and get its food. It finally flew off with about a fourth of the larva, resting on the fence before proceeding to parts unknown. I hope it likes cabbage worms, too. It's a paper wasp! Never knew they were predatory. You learn something new every day.

I Picked a Peck of Pears

OK,I don't know exactly how many, but it was a lot. I didn't need a ladder,even. With a ladder I would have been able to pick at least a few BUSHELS, and that's way more pears than we eat in a year. These are firm canning or cooking pears, not those for fresh eating. A neighbor has a beautiful pear tree in the front yard, literally dripping with them. We saw pears falling to the ground on our walks last week, so I walked down and  asked if I could harvest some, and they said, "welcome". Wow! Now to put them up... the hard part.

Saving Basil Seeds

Forget the pitiful harvest. My tomato plants are coming out (except for the Sungolds, which are still producing, tiny as they are) this week-end. Those brown things on top are the mature seed pods of the basil plants. Each pod has 4 parts, each with about 4 little black seeds in it, so you can get a huge number of seeds from even one stem of flowers. I rub them out between finger and thumb over my palm or a white piece of paper, then throw the plant waste in the bushes. I let these get away from me a bit and flower early, having harvested WAY too much basil last year. I did not learn how to make pesto until this year, because I needed a low-sodium version, and we don't have pine nuts around here. I grew basil this year from saved seed, and it worked, though I did wind up buying a few plants extra to try to deter the tomato hornworms. When the tomato plants got taller than the basil, the basil had no apparent repellent effect. However, the urge to pose at the top of the plant in the evening when I was watering DID lead to the demise of several of those nasty critters. Lord willing, the garden will be cleared and ready for fall crops by the end of the week-end.

Aphids on Corn!

Look at this! We're saving a few ears of corn for  seed (as an experiment), and these aphids and their attendant ants were on the dying leaves of a corn plant. I insecticidal-soaped them after this picture to keep them from multiplying and infesting anything else.

Tired

This is an eggplant flower. The plant has flowered, but no baby eggplants. I am sad about that. My summer plants are tired (at least the tomato and cucumber that produced magnificently earlier in the summer seem to be), and I am,  too. Spent the day scrubbing dust and grime off surfaces in the culture rooms, which should be kept painstakingly clean. Even the hood in which we store pre-autoclaved materials was filthy. No wonder I'm wheezing a bit (wore a mask for the really nasty bits). Tossed a cucumber plant into compost this afternoon. Clearing space to plant anew for fall. Hope it works.

How To Discern Science from Pseudoscience

What do you do when you see a new "scientific story" ? Do you believe it automatically if it suits your political viewpoint? Do you doubt everything, or are you trusting of Ph.D.s, or environmentalists, or your favorite group? How can you tell what is true?

I start in 2 places: Google Scholar for general scientific topics or Pubmed for medical topics.

Here's an example: someone mentioned the detrimental effects of ocean acidification with rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at lunch one day. Totally convinced the ocean is set to become an acid-bath dead zone. I went to Google Scholar to check the facts. From most university campuses (and probably the big-city libraries as well), you can access all the major journals. I was surprised by what I found. Several papers came out in 2003 and 2004 on the topic of ocean acidification. Most started with some variation of the following sentence from a paper in Science, one of the top scientific journals in the English language (I am quoting from memory, so this may be a slight paraphrase):

"Due to a paucity of observational data, we are basing the following calculations on computer modeling of known ocean biochemistry and projected CO2 levels." In other words, all the projections are based not on observation (which has shown ocean pH declining by 0.1 from about 8.2 to about 8.1 in the past 100 years (no citation was available, assumed to be common knowledge in the field)), but on computer models. Other papers from the same time period showed that ocean biochemistry far from human habitation is quite different from that close to land, and some admitted that, long term, more CO2 means a more alkaline ocean, not more acidic. Only in the short term would the ocean become more neutral (7 is neutral so it is alkaline right now). Yoicks! Pays to do a little scientific reading in reputable journals rather than accepting lunch-table environmentalism as fact. 

Beautiful Storms

Storms can be scary. Dark clouds gather. Some of them rotate. Winds whip the trees around. Lightning flashes make the emerging darkness eerily light, temporarily. The rain pours down, drenching everything and flooding the streets. We pray that the hail (and the trees) will not fall.

But storms also bring a welcome coolness this time of year, and the advancing phalanx of cumulonimbus clouds can be a sight to behold. My husband and I stood outside this evening, watching the clouds swirl as birds wind-surfed and the tree branches whipped around. It was great. We pray for all the typhoon victims as we watch the clouds swirl above, knowing our storms are small by comparison.

Take the Picture, Already

This was one patient praying mantis. I had problems getting the camera to focus on it and not the wall behind. It was on a diseased plant on a section of fencing I was taking down for prep for fall planting. It sat through several shots until I got this one. 

Things are a little too wild out there for my taste right now. I saw the coon family last night. Two adolescents were eating cat food in the garage. I yelled at them. They did not move until I went outside and whacked the ground with a plastic broom. Then the mom came up the alley after I went indoors. SHE WAS HUGE. No fear of humans at all. They came up on the back stoop with the inner door open, only the security door closed, looking for food. I do not want a wild animal that size with no fear of man in my backyard. Must get a weapon, before I find Jorge or Diego torn up out back.

Putting In a Fall Garden

These are my rusty green bean vines, a few weeks ago when they were a lot greener. I was trying to capture a magnificent spider web in front of them. They are coming out in just a few minutes, to make room for fall crops.
This is the first year I've ever tried fall gardening, beyond harvesting surviving crops from summer. Upon the recommendations of the University of Arkansas School of Agriculture, I hope to plant lettuce, kale, carrots, and beets this month. Next month I will plant bok choi, new chard plants, more carrots and beets, and green onions. We'll see how they grow. Fall is coming!