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.