food – grouchyfarmer

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.

It’s Time!!!

It’s time to turn this:

Into this.

Finally the tomatoes are coming ripe! We started early this morning, picking tomatoes and basil and prepping garlic, celery, peppers and onions, all from our own gardens, to simmer all day to make pasta sauce. Dear lord it smells good! It’s not even close to being done yet but I keep sneaking tastes.

This year everything in that pot up there came from our gardens. The only thing we’ll have to add is oregano, salt and pepper. Everything else we grew ourselves. All the work we put in is finally paying off, and it’s worth every hour we spent out there tending the gardens. Not only does it taste enormously better than what you can buy, there is the enormous satisfaction of knowing we grew everything that’s going to be in those jars once we’re done canning the sauce.

We generally make enough pasta sauce, chili sauce and canned tomatoes to last us the entire year but we ran short in early summer and had to resort to buying pasta sauce and it was horrible. It was both too sweet and too sour, at the same time, too salty, and utterly lacking in in flavor. I’m afraid most of it ended up going down the drain. We’re spoiled, I guess.

It looks like we are going to have more than enough tomatoes this year to let us stock up.

A few years ago we started using a 6 quart Nesco roaster to cook everything up. It makes a nice sized batch, is easy to work with, easy to control the heat, easy to clean up afterwards and keeps the stove top free so we can still cook and then later prep for canning.

Hmm, I think it’s time for another taste just to make sure the spices are right…

Garden Catch Up, Kindle

Well it’s mid summer now and things are getting a bit hectic out in the gardens. We’ve been harvesting carrots and some of the celery. We spent the morning blanching carrots, dicing them and freezing them. And I forget how many packages of diced celery we tucked away in the freezer. So far the gardens are embarrassingly prolific out there.

We’ve also been harvesting banana peppers for a good week now as well. They’re beautiful this year. The bell peppers aren’t as advanced yet but in another week we’ll be picking those as well.

We put in two or three jalapeno plants, a variety that is supposed to be just as flavorful but with less heat than a standard jalapeno. We got a couple of early ones already and they live up to the claim. Absolutely delicious with just enough heat to them to let you know they’re a jalapeno. The way they’re looking we’re going to be up to our ears in Jalapeno peppers as well in a week or so.

The butternut squash are spreading out over the grass. There are a few flowers in there but not a lot. That’s okay. They’re growing slower because there’s more shade there.

The cucumbers are doing pretty well despite the fact that they were literally underwater briefly a couple of weeks ago. These are coming on a bit slower than I’d thought they would, but they get a lot of shade back there so that’s been slowing things down a bit. These are a pickling variety. I found two baby ones yesterday and, alas, I ate them before I remembered I should have taken a photo for this. Oh, well. They were delicious, though <grin>

The pole beans… Good grief, just look at ’em up there.

And the tomatoes… It’s hard to tell size from that photo up there but those plants are four to four and a half feet tall and at least five feet around, and absolutely loaded with little baby tomatoes. BTW, that’s basil down there in front of the tomatoes.

The almost non stop rain we’ve endured since early spring seems to have finally abated and we seem to be back to a more normal weather pattern. Things were definitely too wet so it’s good to see it starting to dry out a bit. But at the same time it’s more work for us because now we have to start watering everything almost every day, especially the raised beds.

Kindle

What brought this up is that my old Kindle died the other day and I had to buy a new one. Nothing exceptional about the new one. It’s pretty much exactly the same as the old one except this one supports wireless charging, which is nice. But when my old one died, I briefly considered not getting a new one when I realized how addicted to the damned thing. I read a lot. I mean seriously a lot. If I had to buy paper copies of all the books and other materials I read there wouldn’t be room in the house for furniture, the cats, me, MrsGF, etc. And in any case the vast majority of books I read are only going to be read once anyway and then I’d either have to make room for a paper copy I’ll never read again or dispose of it somehow by recycling it or giving it away. If I find a book I especially like I’ll probably buy an actual physical copy. But for most of them it’s going to be a Kindle edition.

Now I could read the stuff on my iPhone, but the screen is inconveniently small. Plus I’d rather use my phone’s battery capacity for more important things like communicating with people or watching cat videos on Youtube. I could read on the iPad, but it’s actually too big and awkward. The Kindle is a nice, compact size, weighs hardly nothing, and the display is easy to read and because it’s an e-ink display there’s no annoying backlighting to strain the eyes.

The biggest issue I have with the Kindle is this: Why the blazes are Kindle editions of books so effwording expensive? The majority of the cost of publishing a book comes from printing physical copies on actual paper, binding them, warehousing them, shipping them, getting them into stores, delivering them to the readers, etc. The cost of publishing an ebook on the other hand has none of that. A bit of money goes to the author (a very, very, very small bit). Some of it goes to an editor who has to proof read the thing and perhaps do some formatting. Some of it goes to marketing. And that’s it. There is no printing costs, no warehousing costs, no paper costs, no distributing costs, nothing. So why do I have to pay $24 for an ebook copy of of a book that that i could get in a paper copy for $25?

Catching Up: Gardens, Flowers and a Norton. Wait, Did He Say Norton?

Weather around here has been odd, to say the least. We went from the dryest summer we had in decades with a full blown drought, to a dry, winter that was one of the warmest on record, to a cool, rainy spring and moved now into a muggy, rainy summer. The rivers around here that were literally bone dry last summer are full to overflowing and the ground is so saturated that even a light shower results in flash flood warnings being issued.

Crops out in the farm fields around here look, well, they’re horrible. There’s no other way to put it. Except for a few fields which are on high ground and well drained just about everything is stunted and looking pretty sad because of the almost non-stop rain we’ve been getting.

Still, here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters, the gardens are doing pretty much fantastic. The raspberries are in full swing right now. We don’t have a lot of them but the ones we do have are doing the best I’ve ever seen them. Big, lush, juicy fruits with intense flavor.

The cucumbers are looking great as well. They’re in full flower right now. All the varieties of peppers we put in are already starting to produce fruit and some are even getting big enough to pick here pretty soon. When I was out in the heat mowing lawn this afternoon I saw some banana peppers almost 5 inches long, just about the perfect size for eating fresh.

The flowering plants have been doing great as well. We tried something a bit silly with the stump from the old ash tree out back. We built a sort of retaining wall with round blocks of wood cut from the tree itself, filled it with dirt, and planted it with zinnias and wild flowers just to see what would happen. And this is the result.

I don’t know about you, but I’m enormously pleased with the results. Once the rest of the zinnias start to flower that’s going to be amazing.

Okay, the Norton. What’s a Norton, you ask? It’s a classic British motorcycle manufacturer. Back in the day I owned a 1968 750 Norton that I had a love/hate relationship with. It was temperamental, had one of the worst electrical systems ever devised by man, vibrated so badly every nut and bolt and screw on it had to be wired down so they didn’t fall off, was almost impossible to start when it got moody, and the exhaust system fell off on a regular basis. People would see me sitting at the side of the road having a smoke with the bike and stop and ask if I needed help. Nope, I’d say. Just waiting for the damned exhaust to cool down, and I’d point to the exhaust pipes laying in the ditch.

In other words it was pretty much a classic British motorcycle.

Great fun, that bike. I eventually sold it for $400. I heard later that two days after I sold it the new owner had neglected to follow any of the warnings I’d given him about preventative maintenance and the care and feeding of Brit bikes and had almost immediately run the engine tight. Sigh…

So that brings me to this.

Yeah. It’s a Norton. A 1973 850 Commando. Despite the way it looks, it is all there. The seat, gas tanks and everything else are all there. Somewhere. And apparently it’s mine. I guess. Maybe. It’s a bit up in the air at the moment. It belonged to my late best friend and brother in law John who died two years ago. I don’t know where he got it or what he was doing with it because he was strictly a Harley guy. His wife, also one of my best friends and my wife’s sister, wants to get rid of it. It was sitting in the garage covered with a sheet and since all of John’s friends are Harley guys, nobody seems to want to buy it or even deal with an old British bike. So it might be mine. Maybe? We’ll see.

Damn, I’m tempted…

Out And About

This is what a typical corn planting operation looks like around here these days. It’s a far cry from the ancient 4 row John Deere planter I used to pull!

Today and yesterday were both absolutely glorious. Brilliant sunshine, warm temperatures, pleasant breezes. I couldn’t have asked for finer weather. So I was out biking around the countryside instead of hanging around the house doing chores because, well, the hell with chores when the weather is this nice!

The farmers have been out in full force planting corn and harvesting first crop hay. We’ve had almost perfect weather for farming so far this spring. It’s about time they get a break. Out at my brother-in-law’s place they put in something like 350 acres of beans and corn in one day.

The sheer size of the equipment they use still seems astonishing to me. Shouldn’t be, I suppose. People have been farming like this for decades now. When I was still actively farming the biggest tractor we had was an Oliver 1655 with a whopping 70 HP that we payed $6,500 for. That tracked CaseIH up there is probably around 400HP and I suspect would sell for well over a quarter of a million, used.

Even something as simple as making hay has turned into an industrial sized operation with massive self propelled forage harvesters and an endless stream of semi-trucks.

But I wasn’t all that interested in agriculture, I wanted to get off the roads and on the trails because of, well, things like this…

It’s spring, after all, and everything is growing, is lush, is in flower. There are flowers almost everywhere I looked and the air was heavy with the most intoxicating scent of a world in full blossom.

But let’s take a peek at the backyard. We have a lot going on out there too.

Every year we try to do something different. This year it’s celery. We’ve grown it before as an experiment a few years ago and it did reasonably well. Well enough that we’re willing to take a chance on planting a whole bed of it this year. Yes, I know celery is pretty cheap but it isn’t the cost, it’s the flavor. Store bought celery is a sad, insipid and flavorless thing when compared to the home grown varieties. The flavor can be so intense that people who are used to the stuff they pick up at the grocery store find it a bit overwhelming, really. Hopefully it does reasonably well. I’m looking forward to this.

We have lots of other stuff in the ground now. Lots of onions. We grow onions around the outside borders of all of the raised beds. A lot of them will get shaded out and won’t grow that large once the other plants get bigger. Don’t care. Even the small onions taste wonderful. The onions won’t last long. They’re almost big enough now to start pulling some. Usually we get enough to eat fresh all summer long. We put in a mix of red, yellow and white onions just for a bit of variety.

We put in lots of beets and carrots this year as well. Again, beets and carrots are pretty cheap to buy. For us the big incentive is the flavor. You don’t know what a really good carrot tastes like until you’ve grown your own.

This corner garden up there in the photo is all tomatoes this year. We make our own tomato sauces, chili sauces, tomato soup, etc. and we actually used all of the home grown stuff and had to resort to buying some the other day and dear lord it tasted horrible!

I don’t have photos but as usual we planted the whole south side “flower garden” along the edge of the living room with pepper plants. We thought we’d gone overboard with bell and banana peppers last year. We didn’t, it seems, because the freezer is empty. We put in a mix of sweet bell, banana, and a new variety of jalapeno this year that is supposed to have all of the flavor of a jalapeno but with less heat. We’ll see how those go.

And to wrap this up, how about a lilac?

The lilacs are in full bloom all over town and the fragrance is absolutely amazing. Damn it’s beautiful out there, so why am I sitting in the house writing this? I’m going out to smell the flowers.

Garden Catch Up

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…

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?

Farm Catch Up: Rail Strike Again, Fake Meat Fizzles, Barges Grounded, Bird Flu

I haven’t done a Farm Catch Up in ages. I used to do these on a regular basis but I’ve been so busy with other stuff that I haven’t had time, so let’s see what’s been going on in the ag industry.

Rail Strike Still Possible

After union leaders, the railroads and the White House announced an agreement that would prevent a rail strike, I warned people that it was too early to do a victory lap. Union leaders may have accepted the deal, but it still had to be voted on by the union membership. Almost immediately one of the 12 unions involved in the talks rejected the deal, although a small one, and reports coming from out in the real world indicated that the rank and file of some of the other unions were not happy with the deal either. While the deal did give substantial pay raises and improved some benefits, it did little or nothing to fix the real grievances that the unions had, the biggest of which was the RR’s scheduling system which some employees called draconian and even downright sadistic. (I’ve read how the scheduling system works and if half of what I’ve heard is true, I would have quit the moment that system went into place. I won’t go into details, you can find that out yourself if do some searching for the railroad employee scheduling system.)

Now the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Division Union (BMWED) the third largest of the unions involved, has rejected the deal, and we could be looking at a strike by mid-November unless the situation is solved.

The railroads have been having serious problems for decades, but you don’t hear about them because the media is too busy chasing after the latest celebrity gossip or bizarre conspiracy theory. Unless a catastrophe occurs, like a major derailment, you hear almost nothing about how the whole rail system has basically been falling apart.

What does this have to do with farming? A lot. A rail strike would cripple the agricultural sector of the economy. Ag businesses and farmers depend on the rail system to move bulk cargo like grain, beans, cattle feed, fertilizer, propane, fuel and many other products. Then add in everything else that is shipped… A rail strike would be a nightmare for all of us.

Fake Meat Markets Fizzle

Before I start this I should point out that I am not anti vegetarian or anything like that. My personal opinion is that we eat way, way too much meat to be healthy for us and we’d all be a heck of a lot better off if we could get people to eat more fruits and vegetables and less meat. But these fake meats are not the way to do it.

JBS, one of the three or four companies in the country that have a virtual monopoly on meat processing and distributing, announced it was shutting down its Plantera Foods division which was producing the “Ozo” brand plant based fake meat products, just two years after launching the company, because of disappointing sales. JBS says it will stay in the alt-meat business (that sounds better than ‘fake meat’ so I’ll go with that term) but not in the United States.

It isn’t just JBS that’s been having problems selling this stuff either. Sales of alt-meat products haven’t been doing so good. Beyond Meat’s stock value has plummeted. As of Sept.28 it’s stock value had fallen 75% this year. Sales of alt-meat products have falling by 10% in just this year along according to some data I’ve seen.

So why isn’t the stuff selling as well as they predicted? Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat’s products are supposed to be “healthy” and good for the environment and all of that and they’re supposed to be just as good as actual meat, so why aren’t people lining up to buy the stuff?

First is cost. Last time I looked the grocery store where we shop the Impossible Burger was selling for more than twice the cost of real hamburger. I haven’t bothered to look recently because frankly I don’t care, so I don’t know if prices have moderated a bit or not. What matters is that at most of the stores where I’ve found the stuff sell it for a lot more than regular hamburger 🍔 (Oooo, I just discovered that this goofy Macbook’s little status bar above the keyboard suggests emojis for me. Isn’t that just so – so useless?)

Second, the food industry as a whole has a long, long history of outright scamming the consumer and selling us garbage laced with salt, fat, sugar and artificial ingredients and labeling it not only as “food” but also claiming it is healthy. So people are justifiably skeptical of just about everything the food industry tries to tell us these days. If you read the list of ingredients on the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat products, you will find almost nothing in that list that actually looks like real food. What you’ll find is a long list of chemical names, added vitamins, modified starches and other products that come out of the back end of a factory. There basically is nothing in that list of ingredients that I want to put in my mouth and I suspect a lot of people feel the same way after reading that list.

Third, these products just aren’t that good. I tried eating one of these things once, an Impossible Burger that I found in the freezer at the local grocery store. I made it according to the instructions and… Well, I’m sorry, I don’t see how anyone could ever mistake this stuff for actual meat. The texture and mouth feel was just -wrong. The aroma was extremely odd and the taste was, frankly, unpleasant. I couldn’t finish the thing. Slather it was ketchup and mustard and onions and I might have been able to choke it down, but eating it plain? No way. I’d rather eat a Bocca Burger. Still frozen.

Shipping Problems

As if disruptions with railroads and trucking weren’t bad enough, now the Mississippi River is giving us problems. A huge amount of product of all types is shipped on barges on the Mississippi River. Farmers and agricultural businesses in the midwest depend on river shipping to not only get grain and beans for export down to the Gulf of Mexico, they also depend on it to ship fertilizer, cattle feed and other products back up the river to co-ops, fertilizer distribution facilities and other businesses that sell bulk products to farmers. And thanks to scarce rainfall the Mississippi water levels are extremely low and barges are running aground. Reports are that water levels in the river system are at “historically low levels”. There are backups of barges at choke points on the river system. Barge loads have had to be reduced by up to 30% or more and towboats which usually push many barges at one time have had to cut the number of barges they can push. As of Oct. 4th the cost of shipping on the Mississippi had jumped up over 200%.

If you’re interested in actually watching shipping along the river, both barge and rail, there is an excellent live camera operated by Virtual Rail Fan in Ft. Madison Iowa that shows both the massive amount of rail traffic going across the Mississippi and a historic swing bridge across the river that has to open to allow river traffic to pass. The camera is on 24/7 and generally has a camera operator running it. In the spirit of full disclosure I should point out I am a VRF member and sponsor and you’ll occasionally see my name (No, not grouchyfarmer, my real name) listed on some VRF camera sites as a sponsor.

Why Are Egg Prices So High? Blame The Flu

I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but around here eggs are pushing up towards $5 a dozen. I was in a local grocery store three days ago and the price there was $4.79/doz. Why? Bird flu is at least part of the problem. Since February we’ve lost 47 million birds, mostly chickens and turkeys, to avian influenza in 42 states in the US. So between losses of birds to flu to increased costs for fuel, grain, labor shortages, etc, yeah, prices have shot up.

It’s affected chicken and turkey prices as well. Unless grocery stores use turkey as a loss leader you’re going to find a lot of families looking for a substitute for the traditional thanksgiving day turkey.

And that’s about it for now. I’m getting bored and I’m sure you are too. As always, comments are welcome. (Note: All comments are moderated and yours won’t appear until it has been checked.)

Fall Catch Up

Gads, I just realized how long it’s been since I posted anything and I am feeling a wee bit guilty. Where in the world did the time go? I was going to talk about gardening and working with resin and the new camera and a lot of other things but lots of other things always seemed more important… Anyway, let’s get on with this.

One of the things that’s been keeping us busy here is the usual autumn cleanup. The squash plants went absolutely bonkers this year. We’re enormously pleased with the production we got from the squash this year. MrsGF got some organic butternut squash seed in early spring. I think we had about 6 plants all together and conditions must have been perfect for them because we ended up with an entire wheelbarrow full of massive squash. I’ve only rarely ever seen butternuts this large before. And as for quantity, well you can see we for yourselves. I filled a wheelbarrow completely full with the things and there are about a half dozen more not in the photo up there. Quality is excellent too. They taste fantastic. MrsGF is saving the seeds from a couple of these guys for planting next spring so hopefully we’ll get the same results in the future.

We’ve scaled way back on the amount of vegetables we planted but we still had more than we could deal with. Nothing went to waste, though. Excess went to neighbors and family or we give it away at the local St. Vincent de Paul store.

I’ve been adding more compost to the raised beds to get them ready for next spring.

Cleaning up the gardens at the end of the season is a pain but it has to get done. We try to get that finished up as soon as we can because once September comes we never know what the weather is going to be like. We’re lucky enough to live just down the street from the town compost site. They do a great job of composting here and the end product is fantastic. And it’s free to town residents so you can be darn sure we take advantage of that.

We’re experimenting with growing garlic. We use a lot of the stuff in cooking but the quality of garlic we get from the local stores isn’t very good. Usually the bulbs we find in the stores have obviously been in storage for a long, long time and has lost a lot of its flavor. We’ve tried growing garlic before and we weren’t very successful. One batch of ridiculously expensive organic garlic we planted didn’t even sprout. One batch we tried did grow, but the bulbs were disappointingly small. The stuff tasted so intense and so good though, and so much better than what we were buying that we still want to try growing our own. So half of one of the raised beds is now in garlic. Once cold weather hits the bed will get covered with mulch to protect it, then that will be removed in the spring and hopefully in mid to late summer we’ll have garlic.

The rest of this bed is going to be planted in all onions next spring.

Onions are pretty cheap so why do we grow our own? Flavor, of course. In their never ending quest to breed vegetable types that have longer storage life, are easier to harvest and which look pretty even after sitting in a cooler at the store for weeks, what plant breeders have done is also eliminate a lot of the flavor and aroma from their crops. The veggies are still good, still nutritious, but a lot of the flavor and aroma has been lost in exchange for traits commercial producers want. The same is true for onions.

That onion you buy at the store looks perfectly good, is certainly fine to eat, even healthy. But the flavor and aroma? It just isn’t there. Take a garden grown onion and a store bought onion from one of those net bags and slice each in half, and as soon as the knife slides through it you’ll be able to tell which one you grew yourself and which one you bought. Our home grown onions are pungent, rich in flavor, juicy and spicy. Store bought ones? Bleh… We never have any home grown onions last until fall. They’re usually all used up long before the end of the growing season.

And they are ridiculously easy to grow. Just snag some set onions in the spring, shove them about an inch into the ground, make sure they get enough water, and that’s about it. In a few weeks you’ll have green onions for salads or cooking, and a few weeks later they develop into utterly delicious, pungent, luscious bulbs.

Okay, I have to stop talking about food. I’m starting to get hungry!

Let’s see, what else?

Oh, they’re finally tearing down the old cheese factory here in town. This place has been an eyesore for decades. The parent company shut it down ages ago and pulled out, and it’s been left standing there and rotting away ever since and the company refused to do anything with it. It was a blight on the whole town. It sits right across the street from a beautiful town park, and on the main highway so the first thing people see when they come into town is this rotting old building. Not exactly a good impression.

After many, many years of trying to get the company to do something, anything, with this nasty mess, the town finally convinced the company to sell the thing and bought it from them. We got state and federal grants to cover almost all of the demolition and clean up costs. Once that’s done the town will put it on the market as a commercial development property and hopefully recoup the expenses involved. It’s a big parcel, almost an entire city block, and right on a main state highway, so we’re hopeful someone will come in and do something useful with it. If nothing else we’d much rather have it as greenspace than sitting there slowly rotting away.

Otherwise I have lots of stuff in the “to do” que. I got quite a few questions about working with resin from fellow woodturners, so I’m putting together a sort of beginner’s guide to using resin. I want to talk about the new camera. I might wander into a sort of game/social media experience called Second Life, a kind of virtual reality system. On the electronics side of things I might talk about how to protect yourself from lightning after losing my gaming computer during a storm a few weeks ago. I’d like to talk about, believe it or not, Chinese television and entertainment. (Yes, I watch Chinese television, heaven help me). Chinese videos are entertaining, silly, puzzling and, frankly, kind of scary.

But enough, time to wrap this up.

Catching Up: Wow It’s Been Busy

The late summer is always a busy time for us because it seems that all of the vegetables we’ve been nursing along since early spring all come ripe at the same time and all have to be dealt with right now. We probably have enough wax beans and green beans to last us two years, and enough various tomato sauces to last us almost that long. On one Saturday alone MrsGF and I processed more than 40 pounds of tomatoes to turn them into tomato soup. Plus we did salsa, chili sauce and spaghetti sauce. And that was from just three plants.

Food made with our home grown vegetables always seems to taste better. We don’t buy any canned tomato products any more because the flavors of the grocery store stuff seems flat, insipid and often just plain nasty when compared to what we make ourselves. And often way, way too salty and way too sweet.

But the beans have been done for weeks now. We probably could have gotten another couple of weeks of production out of them but we were so sick of beans we just pulled them out. Tomatoes are pretty much at an end now as well. But the peppers are still going strong and will probably keep going until we get frost. We put in a variety of sweet bell and banana type peppers. We thought we’d have enough to make pickled peppers, but almost all of them have been going into various sauces.

We were only going to put in 3 cucumber plants because I’m the only one who likes to eat them fresh. But somehow we ended up with 6 plants and they went a bit goofy on us and took over the whole garden behind the garage. MrsGF made four different kinds of pickles plus some relish, enough to last us more than a year, and now we’re giving the things away. They’ve started to slow down but they’re still blossoming. I hate to pull out and compost plants that are still healthy and producing but I’m thinking of just pulling them out this week and being done with them.

It’s hard to see in the photo but there are also a half dozen tomato and pepper “volunteer” plants hidden in that mess of cukes somewhere and now those are bearing fruit.

MrsGF and I both love squash but our attempts to grow the stuff haven’t been all that successful. Last year we had powdery mildew that pretty much wiped them out. This year, though, wow… We planted in a more sunny location, worked in hundreds of pounds of compost before we planted, made sure they were well watered during the drought, and it paid off beautifully. The plants are starting to come to the end of their lifetime now, and we’re seeing dozens of massive butternut squash under the leaves. And I mean massive squash. Some of these things are a foot and a half long, and they all look absolutely beautiful.

We picked one yesterday and we’re going to make that one this week and see what it tastes like. Hopefully they’ll taste as good as they look. We’ll probably end up cutting them up into cubes, roasting them and freezing them for use later.

All the sunflowers got knocked down when we had a storm roll through here, but the other flowers and decorative plants made it through the summer fairly well. We’ve had no shortage of flowers out in the gardens this year.

It was a struggle to keep some of this stuff alive during the drought. We were careful to keep the vegetable gardens well watered but we occasionally neglected the ornamental plants. Still most managed to survive and even grow reasonably well until the rains finally came in August.

We have three roses out there in the gardens now and all of them came through the drought and even looked pretty good. We had something, we aren’t sure what, trying to eat the climbing rose, and MrsGF finally resorted to dusting it with something and that seemed to take of that problem. She only had to treat it once.

The hot, dry weather was not kind to the hostas out front, though. Some of those poor guys are looking pretty rough.

This poor guy looks pretty rough but it will survive just fine.

The giant large leafed varieties did a lot better than the more traditional looking narrow leafed types. The variegated varieties seem to have fared worse than the solid colored ones. This time of year the hostas start to look pretty rough anyway. They’ve all flowered now and are going to seed so there is no need for them to keep putting energy into the foliage, I suppose. They’re getting ready to go dormant for winter anyway.

With all of the gardening and harvest stuff going on I haven’t had a lot of time to putter in the woodshop. I haven’t done any wood turning since I produced these two bowls down below…

I love the grain on padauk, and it’s wonderful stuff to work with. It’s not cheap but I think the results are worth the expense.

More padauk. Once it’s finished this stuff almost glows.

this is MrsGF’s favorite. This little one was made from wood salvaged from the old pear tree in the backyard.

I do have some projects in mind, though. I picked up this piece of wood down below at a shop a few weeks ago. Paid way too much for it but I loved the grain and color. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with it.

I’m also trying to adjust to a new computer. I have three main computers, an iMac, a very old Macbook that I use mostly for email and reading the news, and my primary computer, a “gaming” computer my son built for me which I use for just about everything else, including amateur radio, photo and video editing and video streaming and other stuff. The gaming computer was taken out during a severe thunderstorm a few days ago. I think the power supply got fried. I’d been having problems with it for some time and knew it was going to have to be replaced, so I already had a replacement ready to go for a couple of months. Still, it’s a hell of a lot of work to have to try to redo that whole system.

The new one is a fairly high end MSI 17″ gaming laptop which works great for things like video and photo editing and pretty much everything. But I still need to install all my amateur radio software, hook up all the radio gear to it, etc.

But it also gives me a chance to tear everything down and rearrange everything to make things more convenient and less chaotic.

That’s it for now.

Farm Stuff: Bayer Pulling Roundup Off Consumer Market and Milk Milk Everywhere

Bayer, the owner of Monsanto, announced on July 29 that it was voluntarily withdrawing glyphosate (sold under the brand name RoundUp) from the consumer market by January, 2023. Once existing stocks are cleared out of the supply chain the company will no longer sell glyphosate in the lawn/garden market. A herbicide labeled “Roundup” will remain on the market but it will no longer contain the glyphosate herbicide. It will contain a blend of other herbicides, older ones, which presumably will be less lawsuit prone.

Bayer has been facing widespread lawsuits (the last I heard Bayer was facing 30,000 claims) in the US over claims that glyphosate causes some types of cancer. And it has been losing, not just in local courts but also in appeals court. The company is apparently appealing to the US Supreme Court but it isn’t known if SCOTUS will even take the case up, and if they do no one knows how they will rule.

Since 90% of the lawsuits are coming from the home consumer market, Bayer’s decided to cut its losses and stop sales, but only in that market. Glyphosate will continue to be sold to the agricultural market so the product will still be in widespread use.

The whole situation is — is complicated, to put it mildly. There is even considerable debate over whether or not glyphosate is actually a carcinogen. So I’m not going to get into that whole argument.

I know some environmentalists who are celebrating, claiming this is some kind of victory. It isn’t. Let me point out some things.

Bayer, and only Bayer, is withdrawing glyphosate from only the consumer market. This means two things.

One: the most widespread usage of glyphosate is in the agricultural market in the first place. That usage will continue unabated. Also glyphosate has been off patent since 2000 so it can be made and sold by any licensed herbicide manufacturer for any legal market. Under US regulations glyphosate is still legal to make and use. Bayer stopping sales to the lawn/garden market isn’t going to do anything to reduce the usage of the product.

Two: glyphosate was widely adopted because it was actually safer than a lot of the herbicides in widespread use at the time. There were far less health risks involved in using it, it was less persistent in the environment, and it was less toxic to wildlife. Many of the herbicides in widespread use at the time glyphosate was first introduced were seriously nasty. Bayer has already announced that the new “Roundup” is going to include a blend of various herbicides, some of which probably predate glyphosate, and which could very possibly be much, much worse for the environment, far more persistent in the soil, and worse for the health of human beings, animals and insects.

Sidenote: One wonders what the hell Bayer thought it was doing when it bought Monsanto. Just about everyone, including a lot of Bayer shareholders, saw the disaster in waiting that Monsanto was when the purchase was made. The first glyphosate cases were already in the courts, and the whole dicamba fiasco was already on the horizon. Bayer’s attempts at defending itself have probably cost the company tens of millions of dollars in legal fees, court costs, PR damage and regulatory problems, not to mention ~~bribes~~ lobbying efforts to various politicians.

Milk, Milk Everywhere. Here We Go Again

Photo by Monserrat Soldu00fa on Pexels.com

Well, here we go again… Sigh… Dairy farmers have been getting fairly decent prices for their milk for the last few months, but it is highly unlikely that situation will continue for much longer because milk production has been skyrocketing. If USDA’s estimates are accurate, the dairy industry is on track to produce in 2022 at least 8.4 billion pounds more milk than in 2020, 13 billion pounds more than in 2019.

The climate situation has caused some cutbacks, but not much. Dairy farms added 153,000 more milking cows to their herds since last year. This is the largest number of dairy cows on record since 1993. And you have to remember that modern dairy cows are much more productive than they were back then.

What it all means is a massive increase in a production while there is no corresponding increase in demand and even a slight decrease in demand. The result is that wholesale prices for cheese and butter have been falling, and stockpiles of unsold cheese and butter have been skyrocketing. USDA says that the stockpile of unsold cheese as of mid year is the highest on record, and the butter surplus isn’t far behind, with wholesale prices dropping there as well.

At the consumer end of things generic butter and cheese have been dropping in price. I’ve seen a lot of generic and house brands of butter going for $1.99/lb or even less. Interestingly, brand name and “artisanal” butter is still going for absolutely insane amounts of money, ranging from $5/lb to as high as $11/lb for some brands of “organic” butter.