Gardening

The weather finally moved into a warmer, drier pattern here in east central Wisconsin and the plants responded by going nuts to make up for lost time. This is really the perfect time of year here, climate speaking. It’s warmer, sunnier, and the mosquitoes have yet to emerge to drive us back into the house.

We made a lot of changes out in the gardens, but you can’t really tell unless you look closely. One thing we are doing again is putting peppers along the south side of the house. That narrow strip of ground between the house and the grass produced a fantastic crop of peppers of various types last year so we’re going to do it again.

We did something different this year with starting seedlings. We used to put a sort of mini green house in the livingroom in front of a south facing window to start seeds but the results were mixed. The seedlings were often spindly and weak and suffered from severe transplant shock. This year we set the mini greenhouse up in the basement with some inexpensive grow lights we got off Amazon along with a heating pad designed for seedling trays. That system worked amazingly well. The peppers, tomatoes and other seeds we started were all thriving in that environment.

Every year we like to try at least one new thing we’ve never grown before and this year it’s brussel sprouts. MrsGF and I both like them a lot so we thought we’d try growing our own and see what happens. They’re a late season crop, usually not harvested until after the first frost they tell me. Brussel sprouts have a bit of a bad reputation, but over the last decade or so the flavor has changed drastically thanks to new varieties that have been introduced. The new varieties have a milder, less bitter flavor, along with a better texture.

And it’s lilac season here in town. There are lilacs all over town, including in our backyard. It seems to be people’s favorite bush around here, and when they all come into bloom around the same time the whole town smells of lilacs. Another reason why I love this time of year.

Other stuff:

–> We’ve been under air quality warnings for some time now because of smoke from massive forest fires up in Canada. Down at ground level it’s hard to tell but it’s especially easy to see early in the morning right at sunrise. Off to the east right now at around 6 AM it looks like there’s a thick haze up there. I feel sorry for those poor people up there. Huge areas of forests have burned off already, whole communities are under evacuation orders. It’s pretty bad.

The DNR hasn’t been helping air quality here either. They were doing this the other day…

They’ve been burning off marshes around here adding to the already poor air quality. I was told you could see the smoke from this one for 20 miles and could smell it over the entire county.

–> The biofuel industry is continuing to try to desperately to put off its impending demise as long as possible. We live in a world where it seems we are on an inevitable course to switch to electric powered everything, including transportation, garden tools and everything else that is currently being powered by the burning of some kind of fuel. And that means the entire biofuel industry is about to crash and burn because there isn’t going to be a market for its product any more. That hasn’t stopped them from trying to rake in as much cash as they can until the end comes. It looks like they’ve succeeded in pushing for an increase in sales of 15% ethanol blended gasoline and now they’re pushing for more mandates to blend biodiesel into traditional fuels. Diesel fuel is probably going to be the last gasp for this. Trying to make long haul trucks and trains to run off electricity has been difficult because of the huge power demands so those will probably remain for some time after automobiles and light trucks have gone full electric.

What they really need to be doing is trying to slowly and carefully shut down the whole biofuel system to avoid a massive financial crash that will ripple through the whole agricultural sector. Continuing to invest in biofuels at this point in time is sort of like someone heavily investing in horse drawn carriages right after Ford came out with the Model T.

But enough of that. I have gardening to do!