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 
The garden stuff looks great especially the peppers….I miss my garden since the cancer diagnosis and treatment I have not been in the mood……flowers are always a good thing all the colors and the activity around them….The telescope down here would be a waste of money for we have heavy clouds most nights….good luck with the electrical work…..have a good day….chuq
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There are times when I think the telescope was a waste fo money here as well. I’ve had it for two months or more now and we’ve only had clear skies like 6 nights. Sheesh. Well that will change as the seasons do. But then Wisconsin was never what you’d call a good site for astronomy anyway. But every once in a while we get one of those brilliant, crystal clear nights that makes a the other ruined observing sessions worth it.
Despite the drought everything we planted has done quite well. The only thing that struggled was the lettuce. It was just too hot and dry for that to do well.
The electrical is going to be interesting but it’s a more or less straightforward job that shouldn’t be a real problem. This company also does solar installations so they don’t have any problems dealing with my solar system. In fact we’re going to make some changes there as well after talking with the electrician who was here yesterday to write up the proposal. There is a lot of compromises with the wiring that were made with earlier iterations of the system that can be greatly simplified, especially with the transfer switch system. It meets code and all of that, but the way it’s set up now we’re not taking full advantage of the new EG4 12000XP inverter we put in. Basically it can be made a lot easier to use with some relatively minor changes and modify it to meet the new electrical codes that are coming in a month or so at the same time. Since we have to pull permits, do inspections and all that fun stuff anyway we might as upgrade the solar side of things at the same time.
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I had the problem in the past because of the extreme heat and lack of rain they did not do well at all….only thing that did exceptionally well were my chiles…..have a good day….chuq
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I continue to be impressed by the telescope, and well done with the produce too. I think the estimate for that much electrical work seems very fair. We lost the heat and the thunderstorms arrived instead. Localised flooding in some areas yesterday, and we got a few hours of torrential rain in Beetley but missed the floods. The last time I had a bike was a folding mini-wheel commuter bike in London in 2004. When we moved here I gave it to my step-daughter to ride to work on. I had no idea that bikes had computers!
Best wishes, Pete.
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You guys in the UK have really gotten hit hard the last few years: heat waves, flooding, drought, high winds, you’ve gone through all of it. But then Europe has been hit hard too. My best friend lives about half the year in Barcelona and conditions in Spain have been absolutely horrific with the heat, wild fires, etc.
When my wife and I first got married we moved to a small city called Stevens Point, a college town. We only had one car so my wife took that and I biked everywhere that first year we were married. It was great. I generally could get around town faster and easier than people in their cars did. Then for several years we both worked in the same building and rode together to work so the bike gathered dust until I sold it and I didn’t get another until I retired a few years ago. I needed to do something to get some exercise after retiring, plus I always loved being outdoors so bicycling around the countryside has been not only my main form of exercise it’s just plain fun for me.
Yep, bike do have computers these days. Well, some of them anyway. This one has built in GPS, bluetooths to my health app on my phone, and has an electric motor to give me a boost to get up steep hills. Has hydraulic disk brakes, built in locking and alarm system for security, lights, 9 speed transmission and I don’t know what all else. I can adjust the amount of assistance the motor gives me from nothing up to about 75% of the work it takes to peddle it. When I get to a steep uphill climb I just dial up the amount of assistance the motor gives until I get to the top of the hill then drop it back to zero when I get back on the level. I still get the exercise I need but I don’t wear myself out trying to get up the hills around here. I can bring up maps or even satellite views of my route. Great fun, that bike. I love the thing.
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