Fall Catch Up

Gads, I just realized how long it’s been since I posted anything and I am feeling a wee bit guilty. Where in the world did the time go? I was going to talk about gardening and working with resin and the new camera and a lot of other things but lots of other things always seemed more important… Anyway, let’s get on with this.

One of the things that’s been keeping us busy here is the usual autumn cleanup. The squash plants went absolutely bonkers this year. We’re enormously pleased with the production we got from the squash this year. MrsGF got some organic butternut squash seed in early spring. I think we had about 6 plants all together and conditions must have been perfect for them because we ended up with an entire wheelbarrow full of massive squash. I’ve only rarely ever seen butternuts this large before. And as for quantity, well you can see we for yourselves. I filled a wheelbarrow completely full with the things and there are about a half dozen more not in the photo up there. Quality is excellent too. They taste fantastic. MrsGF is saving the seeds from a couple of these guys for planting next spring so hopefully we’ll get the same results in the future.

We’ve scaled way back on the amount of vegetables we planted but we still had more than we could deal with. Nothing went to waste, though. Excess went to neighbors and family or we give it away at the local St. Vincent de Paul store.

Cleaning up the gardens at the end of the season is a pain but it has to get done. We try to get that finished up as soon as we can because once September comes we never know what the weather is going to be like. We’re lucky enough to live just down the street from the town compost site. They do a great job of composting here and the end product is fantastic. And it’s free to town residents so you can be darn sure we take advantage of that.

We’re experimenting with growing garlic. We use a lot of the stuff in cooking but the quality of garlic we get from the local stores isn’t very good. Usually the bulbs we find in the stores have obviously been in storage for a long, long time and has lost a lot of its flavor. We’ve tried growing garlic before and we weren’t very successful. One batch of ridiculously expensive organic garlic we planted didn’t even sprout. One batch we tried did grow, but the bulbs were disappointingly small. The stuff tasted so intense and so good though, and so much better than what we were buying that we still want to try growing our own. So half of one of the raised beds is now in garlic. Once cold weather hits the bed will get covered with mulch to protect it, then that will be removed in the spring and hopefully in mid to late summer we’ll have garlic.

The rest of this bed is going to be planted in all onions next spring.

Onions are pretty cheap so why do we grow our own? Flavor, of course. In their never ending quest to breed vegetable types that have longer storage life, are easier to harvest and which look pretty even after sitting in a cooler at the store for weeks, what plant breeders have done is also eliminate a lot of the flavor and aroma from their crops. The veggies are still good, still nutritious, but a lot of the flavor and aroma has been lost in exchange for traits commercial producers want. The same is true for onions.

That onion you buy at the store looks perfectly good, is certainly fine to eat, even healthy. But the flavor and aroma? It just isn’t there. Take a garden grown onion and a store bought onion from one of those net bags and slice each in half, and as soon as the knife slides through it you’ll be able to tell which one you grew yourself and which one you bought. Our home grown onions are pungent, rich in flavor, juicy and spicy. Store bought ones? Bleh… We never have any home grown onions last until fall. They’re usually all used up long before the end of the growing season.

And they are ridiculously easy to grow. Just snag some set onions in the spring, shove them about an inch into the ground, make sure they get enough water, and that’s about it. In a few weeks you’ll have green onions for salads or cooking, and a few weeks later they develop into utterly delicious, pungent, luscious bulbs.

Okay, I have to stop talking about food. I’m starting to get hungry!

Let’s see, what else?

Oh, they’re finally tearing down the old cheese factory here in town. This place has been an eyesore for decades. The parent company shut it down ages ago and pulled out, and it’s been left standing there and rotting away ever since and the company refused to do anything with it. It was a blight on the whole town. It sits right across the street from a beautiful town park, and on the main highway so the first thing people see when they come into town is this rotting old building. Not exactly a good impression.

After many, many years of trying to get the company to do something, anything, with this nasty mess, the town finally convinced the company to sell the thing and bought it from them. We got state and federal grants to cover almost all of the demolition and clean up costs. Once that’s done the town will put it on the market as a commercial development property and hopefully recoup the expenses involved. It’s a big parcel, almost an entire city block, and right on a main state highway, so we’re hopeful someone will come in and do something useful with it. If nothing else we’d much rather have it as greenspace than sitting there slowly rotting away.

Otherwise I have lots of stuff in the “to do” que. I got quite a few questions about working with resin from fellow woodturners, so I’m putting together a sort of beginner’s guide to using resin. I want to talk about the new camera. I might wander into a sort of game/social media experience called Second Life, a kind of virtual reality system. On the electronics side of things I might talk about how to protect yourself from lightning after losing my gaming computer during a storm a few weeks ago. I’d like to talk about, believe it or not, Chinese television and entertainment. (Yes, I watch Chinese television, heaven help me). Chinese videos are entertaining, silly, puzzling and, frankly, kind of scary.

But enough, time to wrap this up.