CaseIH has joined New Holland and Monarch in introducing an electric tractor. We all knew that was coming. The only thing that surprises me is that it’s taken this long. Both the New Holland and CaseIH are more or less traditional looking and traditional functioning tractors. They’re considered “utility” tractors, horsepower ranges from about 75 – 80 HP, and both have run times of 4 hours+ depending on how hard you work them.
The Monarch on the other hand… Yeah, I just don’t know. First of all it’s built in partnership with Foxconn. After the way that company screwed over the state of Wisconsin I wouldn’t trust them to clean my cat’s litter box much less build a tractor that actually works. But the Monarch itself isn’t any kind of tractor that we’d find all that useful here in Wisconsin in the first place. It’s small, narrow, has tiny little tires and is frankly strange looking, loaded with radar and sensors and I don’t know what all else. Supposedly it can follow you around like a dog and, well, I’m sorry, I don’t want a tractor following me around without a driver. It might be useful for orchards or vegetable farms, but for the average farm around here? This thing is pretty much useless for someone who has to get 1,000 acres of corn into the ground or harvest 500 acres of beans. And considering all of the fragile electronics and software packed into the thing it is going to break. A lot. It looks like that aside from small vegetable and specialty crop growers this thing is aimed at wealthy hobby farmers.
How successful will these things be? Will farmers adopt them? Well, maybe? I can see these being useful. But ultimately it’s going to come down to value for money. Farmers operate on razor thin profit margins, and they are very, very cautious about adopting new technology until it’s proven itself to be economically viable. E-tractors have a lot going for them besides just not pumping out huge amounts of toxic exhaust. No more engine oil changes, no more engine filter changes, less maintenance necessary, less noise.
It’s going to come down to how reliable these things are. Are they going to be able to stand up to the day to day use and abuse the average tractor experiences during its lifetime?
On the bike trail between Hilbert and Forest Junction. This trail and most of the others around here follow old railroad lines that ran between small towns before they were abandoned.
The calendar may say this is the first day of autumn but it hasn’t felt like it for the last few days. Daytime highs have been pushing 80 and it’s been remarkably pleasant out there. I’ve been out on the bike rather a lot enjoying the nice weather while it’s here.
But it’s dry. Very, very dry. This is what the river north of town usually looks like.
Below is what it looks like now.
I’ve lived in this area since the late 1980s and I’ve never seen the river like this before.
Yeah, completely dry. So dry I could walk across it without getting my shoes muddy.
MrsGF and I have been working on cleaning up some of the gardens. The squash, wax beans and pole beans are all done and we have those all cleaned out and have been working on bringing in some fresh compost.
The beans did not do very well this year. Both the pole and wax beans didn’t seem to thrive. Lots of vegetation and blossoms, but not many beans. I’m not sure why. I think partly that was because of a lack of bees. I saw a lot of bumble bees out there this year but I didn’t see a single honey bee all summer long. And the bumbles seemed to avoid the bean blossoms. Or it could have been the hot, dry weather. We watered the gardens almost every day this summer but it still might have been too dry for the beans.
The squash were fantastic this year, big, beautiful butternut squash, and a lot of them. We ended up with the entire wagon full of them. Excellent quality as well.
We ended up with a lot more than we needed so we gave a lot away to friends and family or traded them for things we didn’t have like pears.
We tried a different variety of tomato this year, something called Amish Gold Slicers, a yellow variety. They had excellent flavor but I was disappointed by the yield. At the moment the plants are still going, still have lots of green fruit, but the fruit seems to have stopped maturing. We’ve had almost no ripe ones at all over the last week or so. No idea what’s going on there. I’m hoping that will change, but the way things are now we aren’t going to get much more off of them. They also had a thick, tough skin making them hard to cut unless we used a freshly sharpened knife. Overall they were a bit disappointing and I don’t think we’ll be using that variety again.
We put in sweet bell peppers, jalapenos and banana peppers this year and they all did well. Are still doing well, especially the jalapenos. They’re producing like crazy still, loaded with young fruit and blossoms.
But even the peppers have been a bit odd this year. The jalapenos heat levels have been strange. One will be so sweet and have so little heat I could eat them like candy, and the one right next to it, from the same plant, would be so hot my eyes would water and I ran to the fridge for some milk to try to quench the fire.
The bell peppers were excellent but we let some ripen to turn red and when we cut them open the entire seed cavity was full of mold. Very strange. I’d never seen that before.
The brussel sprouts are looking excellent. I still think they’re one of the goofiest plants I’ve ever seen, but they’re doing well and we’ve had some of the sprouts for dinner a week or so ago and damn, they taste good!
That being said I’m not sure we’re going to plant them again. They take up a lot of space and don’t really produce enough sprouts to justify the amount of garden space they use. So while they were a success, we aren’t sure if they’re worth the effort.
Of course me being me I can’t do one of these without putting up a picture of a flower, so here you go…
There, I got that out of the way. So let’s move on with this.
E-bike update: I bought the Vado e-bike in mid-July of last year so I’ve had it for 14 months now so let’s take a look at how that’s worked out. In that time I’ve put about 1,300 miles on it and it’s worked flawlessly. I’ve had absolutely no problems at all with it. Mechanically and electronically it’s worked exactly as advertised. I love the thing. Range for a bike this heavy is excellent. Cruising at around 12 – 14 mph in Eco mode it does about 1 mile for a bit more than 1% battery capacity. I did 20 miles the other day and the battery was still at around 75%. It handles well, the hydraulic disc brakes are excellent, the lighting is good. This thing was expensive but IMO it was worth it. If I want to get somewhere fast I can kick it up into “turbo” mode and pedal along at about 20 mph. Generally I’m in no hurry so I just toodle along about 10 enjoying the scenery. And because it has an actual real shifter, not one of those stupid belt drives, it even works as a standard bike with the motor shut off so I don’t have to worry about getting stranded somewhere if something does go wrong.
The solar power system update: It is still working well. As noted before it’s knocked more than a third off my electric bill since I put it in. There have been no glitches or nasty surprises.
Sidenote: Just about all of the electric utility companies in the state are asking for significant increases in rates, one company wants to increase rates by 14% over the next two years. And they’ll probably get it, too. Plus there is talk that they’re going to force everyone to accept rate plans that will drastically increase their rates during peak times of the day. They haven’t put forward that plan yet, but there has been a lot of talk about it behind the scenes. That scheme would double what I pay per kilowatt hour during peak periods, pushing it up to somewhere between 32 cents to 40 cents per kWh.
And that’s about it for now!
Coming up: I’ll probably be babbling about amateur radio again in the near future. I have a new antenna on order that should be here soon so I’ll be talking about that.
I want to do a brief look at the Klein thermal imaging camera I picked up a while back. That’s turned out to be quite handy and a lot of fun to just play with too. I’m sure there will be other things tossed in as well.
So people have been wondering what’s going on with the solar power system. We’ve been keeping track of our energy usage, of course, so we just got the bill for August and here’s the results.
Last year it was pretty hot and we used the AC a lot so our electric usage in August last year was 1,971 kWh.
This August, which was even hotter, our electric usage was 1,074 kWh.
So we cut our electric usage almost in half, during a month that was even hotter than 2022 was. And that’s only running the system part time. I’m pretty darn pleased with that.
Egads, I haven’t written anything here in a long time so let’s get this started with catching up with what’s been going on in the gardens.
As you probably know by now we had what looks like the hottest summer of all time here in Wisconsin with average temperatures above normal all season long. On top of that we’ve been under drought conditions almost all summer as well. We just went through yet another multi-day heat wave, with high temperatures pushing 95F here. And now we’re finally going to be getting down to more seasonable temps. It’s currently about 55 here at 7 AM and won’t get much above 60 they tell me. We were supposed to get some badly needed rain as the cold front came through, but nope, except for some spotty showers we got pretty much zip.
But let’s look at some butternut squash…
Not a squash.
Oops, wait a minute, that’s not a squash, that’s Solar Cat, isn’t it?
Ah, here we go, that’s the squash up there piled up in the old coaster wagon. And yes, they’re massive this year. We were watering those suckers almost every evening all summer long and now we’re finally getting our reward. They’re beautiful. MrsGF and I both love squash (she makes a squash soup that would probably make Gordon Ramsey jealous). But we sure as heck can’t handle all of those. We’ll end up giving a lot of them away to friends or anyone else who can use them. That’s part of the fun of gardening, giving stuff away to friends who don’t have the space to have a garden themselves or swapping our stuff for stuff other people grew that we didn’t have room for. In fact MrsGF just swapped one of those for a big bag of pears from one of our neighbors.
We tried a new variety of tomato this year, something called Amish Golden Slicers. We got the seed from Jung and they’ve been well above average. Tomatoes can come in a wide variety of colors ranging from gold to orange to red to purple to even green. What matters most is not color but flavor and texture. Some tomatoes are best for eating fresh, some are better for making sauces, some are in between. These are probably best for eating fresh. They have an amazingly lush, slightly tart flavor that I absolutely love, although MrsGF isn’t all that thrilled with them for some reason. We only put in 3 plants this year but that’s still more than we can eat fresh, so we’ve been making sauces and soups with them.
We put in lots of peppers of various types, bell, banana and jalapeno, and they’ve all been doing amazingly well this year for some reason. The bell peppers especially. They’re freaking huge this year. We’ve had to stake up some of the plants because the weight of the fruit has been making them fall over. Again way more than we can use ourselves so we’ve been giving those away too.
And of course there’s the jalapenos. We have 5 of those, two in pots on the front stairs and three in the raised beds. The two in pots didn’t do well but the ones in the raised bed have been producing way more than normal just like the bells have been.
MrsGF put in a couple of banana peppers just for some variety. We’ve always had good luck with banana peppers and this year is no exception. Lots of very nice fruits, good flavor.
Wax beans were just sad this year even though we watered them just about every day. I think it was just too hot for them.
Alas the wax beans did not do very well this year. I suspect that the heat didn’t help them any. The pole beans we put in weren’t the best either but with them it was because little four footed critters were nibbling them off almost as soon as they started to grow.
Then our son brought over this weird houseplant…
Oh, wait, that’s another cat, isn’t it? We catsat our youngest son’s kitty while he was gone on a three day weekend. That’s Kai the Wondercat. I love her. She hates me. Go figure.
And let’s wrap this up with some flowers because why not?
grouchyfarmer 