Garden Update, Backyard Astronomy and Stuff

With most of the state being under moderate to severe drought conditions we’ve been watering the gardens almost every day for weeks now. Officially our location is listed as being under mild drought conditions. But that doesn’t take into account the fact that the rains we did see have been extremely localized. I just checked my rainfall monitor and we haven’t had any rain here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters while just a couple of miles away they got over an inch of rain the other day. Judging from the way the soil looks here, I’d classify the area here in this locality as being under severe drought conditions.

And no rain means empty rain barrels. So we’ve had to resort to using town water for the gardens and I’m sure I am not going to like our quarterly water bill when it comes in.

Anyway life goes on, as they say. And so does the garden. Despite the dry conditions things have been going pretty good. Mostly.

We’ve pulled all of the onions. They were way, way ahead of normal for whatever reason. We put in a mix of yellow, white and red onions. They generally store pretty well. We pull them, cut off the tops about 2 inches from the bulb, then let them “cure” for about 2 weeks or so before putting them in net bags and hanging them from the ceiling in the basement for long term storage.

Yes, onions are fairly cheap to buy in the store but it’s the flavor I’m interested in. Commercially grown onions just don’t taste good to me. The commercial varieties we see are too mild, too sweet. You shouldn’t be able to bite into an onion like an apple, for heaven’s sake. A good onion should bite back, hard, so to speak. And I only get that sharp, pungent real onion flavor and aroma from the home grown varieties.

The peppers are doing quite well this year. We put in a nice, slightly spicy banana pepper mostly this year, with a few regular bell peppers. They’ve both been producing beautifully with excellent quality fruits in both varieties. The ones we don’t eat fresh either get diced up and frozen for future use or get canned as pickled peppers. MrsGF tried a new recipe this year for a kind of refrigerator pickled pepper as an experiment and we took a pint of them along to a family event and they were a huge hit. People loved them on burgers or even just eating right out of the jar. So that’s going to be a keeper.

We’re going to start harvesting celery this week as well, I think. That’s been doing amazingly well this year. I mean just look at that stuff over there. Very intense, lush flavor. Again I know celery in the store isn’t that expensive, but the commercial varieties seem, at least to me, almost completely flavorless. I think people forget that celery isn’t just a vegetable, it was originally considered an herb and was grown for the flavor it added. This stuff will knock your socks off. I got in the habit of snipping off a stalk and munching on it when I’m out mowing the lawn.

Yes, those are #10 cans around the base of the plants. We’ve always grown it this way. The cans protect the plants when they’re small and first transplanted into the beds not just from wind and from early frost, but also give them some protection from the rabbits we have. We just leave the cans in place until the end of the growing season and then pull them out and use them the next year.

The beets are all done with. Mrs GF just pulled those last few you see in the left side of that bed over there this morning and is processing them as I write this. Some get par-boiled, so to speak, and frozen for use later. Most though end up as pickled beets that we like either as a main vegetable with a meal or just as a snack. There’s also a late crop of lettuce left in that bed. We’ll be using that this week for salads and then we’ll have that bed cleaned out.

The only issue we’ve had this year is blossom end rot on the tomatoes. That’s usually caused by a calcium deficiency I’m told. We’ve been using a calcium supplement but apparently not enough of it? Maybe? It’s very frustrating to see what looks like a nice tomato starting to turn ripe and go to check it and finding the bottom of it is rotted away. Grrr…

Sidenote: I’m making chili for supper tonight, and everything in that pot is stuff we grew ourselves <grin>. Canned tomatoes from last year, MrsGf’s award winning chili sauce, our home grown garlic, onions, celery and peppers. Only thing that we didn’t grow ourselves is the ground beef from our local butcher who sources his meat from local farmers. Ooo, I wish you could smell this stuff simmering!

Astronomy stuff:

I finally got an opportunity to get the Seestar telescope out two nights ago! That was the first time in weeks that we’d had relatively clear skies at night.

That’s an object called IC-1318A, part of the Butterfly Nebula. I did some post processing on this image to darken the sky a bit to improve the contrast. That’s mostly a cloud of ionized hydrogen gas called an emissions nebula. Intense ultraviolet radiation from nearby young, hot stars causes the gas to glow with that reddish color. Normally this is a very faint object that would require a rather large aperture telescope and very dark skies to see. It’s about 4,000 – 4,900 light years away from us. That I can get an image this good of this nebula with a little $500 automated telescope sitting in the driveway is still a bit astonishing to me.

Then there is this…

My sister in law has been remodeling her house and brought this out and set it up in the dining room. This piece is a bit melancholy for me. Let me explain. My wife’s sister married my best friend. John passed away four years ago today of a sudden heart attack. This piece has deep family connections in more ways than one. I made this as an anniversary gift for them many years ago. It was the first large piece of furniture I ever made. On top of that, it was made from white ash boards that were harvested on my wife’s family farm that had sat up in the barn for almost a hundred years from trees that were taken down during an ice storm. So seeing this cabinet out in the dining room on the anniversary of his passing was a kind of heart wrenching moment for me as it brought back many memories.

Anyway, that’s it for now! One of these days I’ll talk about the new Bambu Labs 3D printer in detail.