Weather here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters has been actually rather pleasant for a change. Still hot enough that we have to run the AC but no where near as bad as it was. We’re still in a nasty drought here, though. Some rain has gone through but almost all of it has missed us for whatever reason. We’ve only had about 1 inch of rain over the last two months.
August is almost over as I write this, and that means it’s harvesting and processing season here.
We promised ourselves in spring that we were only going to put in three tomato plants. Yeah, well… that didn’t last long. We had several volunteers pop up in various places and MrsGF didn’t have the heart to pull them so we ended up with eight plants, and all of them are loaded with fruit. Two or three days ago MrsGF did about six quarts of tomato soup and today it was salsa. So far we’ve been keeping up but they are just starting to come ripe so we’re going to be deluged with tomatoes here pretty soon. This is not a bad thing, of course. We’d rather have too many than not enough. If they start coming in faster than we can process and can them we just freeze them until we have more time.
One thing we’ve always had good luck with here is peppers. Dear lord, the peppers we got out there this year! We put in more banana peppers than bell peppers this year because we like the flavor better. We’ve been harvesting both varieties for two weeks or more and they’re still going strong. They are easy to deal with. We just wash them, remove the seed pods and then dice them up and freeze them for later use.
We didn’t plant sunflowers this year but we got some anyway. Probably from seeds from the feeder that were dropped by birds. I’m not sure why we didn’t plant any because we both love them and once the flowers fade away we get an additional show when the goldfinches find they have free lunch out there.
And then there’s that one up there. For whatever reason the marigolds have been spectacular this year. Just look at that color! The photo doesn’t do it justice. It’s so bright it almost glows in the dark.
On the telescope front, we finally had a relatively clear night and I was able to get the scope out for an hour or so and got this image.
As the text says, that’s NGC 7000, the North American nebula. If you sort of squint and tilt your head it sort of kinda looks like the North American continent. According to the most recent data I can find it’s about 2,590 light years away from Earth.
I’m still enormously pleased with that little Seestar S30 Pro and the results it gets here in the poor conditions I have in town.
As I look back over the year, 2026 started out pretty crappy. Right after Christmas I ended up in the ER with a severe case of the flu. As soon as I recovered from the flu I came down with Covid and that laid me up through most of February. Then in May I injured my hip somehow and it wasn’t until mid July or so that I was back to normal.
At the end of July I took the bike in to get new tires. I’m astonished they lasted as long as they did. There were around 1,800 miles on them. While it was in the shop they went through the bike, adjusted the shifters, checked the brakes, did a firmware update on the bike’s computer, and I was finally back on the road again. I’d been inactive for so long that it took a while to back up to my normal level of activity. It wasn’t until this past week that I was comfortably back to doing 10 – 15 mile rides on a daily basis.
Let’s see… Oh, yeah, we have to get some major electrical work done on the house. Just about everything from the point where the electric wires attach to the house from the pole up through and including the meter, meter socket and the main breaker panel need to be replaced. The electrician was here early this morning to look things over. We’ll get a formal estimate in a few days but off the top of his head he figured it was going to be in the $5,000 – $7,000 range, which was actually quite a bit less than what I’d thought it would be. I told him to go ahead and get the ball rolling so he’s going to pull the necessary permits from the town and will get me on the schedule. Probably in about 3 – 4 weeks.
And that’s about it for now!
grouchyfarmer 