the daffodils have actually been out for some timedwarf irises. garliccatnip
We’ve been busy out in the gardens getting things cleaned up, hauling in compost, weeding, etc. Out in the countryside things still haven’t greened up much, but it’s getting there. Here in town, though? Everything is growing like crazy. I had to mow the lawn already last week and I’ll probably have to do it again in the next day or two. We have a whole line of cilantro coming up in one of the raised beds from seed that was dropped last fall so we’re pleased with that.
It’s still way too early to put out the vegetable plants. Its still getting down to freezing temperatures at night.
We’re scaling back on a lot of things this year because we still have quite a bit of pasta sauce, frozen green beans and peppers left from last year. We just over planted. That’s better than not enough, but we have enough pasta sauce to last us almost another year.
And best of all we have solar panels sprouting on the south facing garage roof! 10, 400W bifacial panels are going up there. I don’t think all of them will get up there today. Didn’t get started until almost 2 in the afternoon. But it looks like they have 6 of them up so they’re doing pretty good.
And that’s about it for now. I want to get out there and enjoy the nice weather while it lasts!
I know it’s been ages since I wrote anything here but that’s because it’s been crazy busy here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters. The gardens were spectacularly prolific this year and dealing with all of that has been a struggle for me and MrsGF. It’s October 4 as I write this, it is 91(F) degrees out there, and we’re still harvesting peppers and tomatoes. Plus the brussel sprouts are now starting to come on strong and we have something like 15 big butternut squash ready to pick that we’re going to need to deal with.
We’ve given up trying to process the stuff ourselves. We ran out of freezer space and canning jars long ago. We’ve been giving it to two or three of the local food pantries and they’ve been very grateful to get the stuff. The food pantries have been struggling to keep up with demand over the last few months as it is, and because of recent funding cuts the demand has only been increasing. We took about 40 lbs of tomatoes to one pantry and about 15 pounds of jalapeno and bell peppers and our friend who volunteers there said it was all gone within a couple of hours.
Still the end is here for both the tomatoes and peppers. We’re going to do one last picking of both and then the plants are going to get yanked. The tomatoes stopped blossoming some time ago and the existing fruit is almost done developing. The peppers are still flowering somehow but have slowed down to where there’s no point to keeping it going. We’re going to wait until the weather cools down a bit before we tackle all of that though.
Speaking of weather, it has been seriously strange. It’s the first week of October. It should be in the low 50s at the most, with temperatures getting down close to freezing or even a bit below that this time of year. Instead we’ve been locked in this streak of hot weather for weeks now with daytime highs pushing well into the 80s or more. Normally we might get a few days of warmer weather this time of year, but not this warm and not for this long.
When I haven’t been puttering in the garden I’ve been busy cranking out a whole new line of hopefully amusing drinks coasters and re-drawing the artwork on the old ones to reprint some of those. Looking at the artwork on some of those first ones I made makes me wince today. So before re-printing any of those I’ve been cleaning up the artwork or even re-doing it entirely.
I also have other stuff in the works, like engraving coins, making specialty tokens and quite possibly custom glassware and other goodies. Thanks in part to a new acquisition, that weird looking thingie over there on the left.
That’s a Wecreat Lumos 3W infrared and 10W blue diode laser that comes with a flatbed conveyer thingie and a rotating thingie that I have yet to play with but will hopefully get set up yet this weekend.
Ooo, it’s got a rotating thingie! Cam’t wait to play with that.
It definitely is not going to be replacing the Falcon laser engraver/cutter. This one is entirely inappropriate for jobs I use the Falcon for. This one is going to be for specifically doing metal engraving and, hopefully glassware and jewelry.
Keep an eye out for a full blown review of the Lumos in the future. It is both enormously useful and great fun to use, and enormously frustrating at the same time. Which seems to be about par for the course for these things.
It’s main use here is for metal. Even as we speak it’s engraving “challenge coins” for a small scale production run. It’s not fast, true. I wouldn’t want to have to use this to try to crank out a significant number of items. But for a run of a dozen or so items it’s not too bad.
Anyway, more about that later as I said.
The new EG4 12000XP inverter is more or less installed and working just fine. It’s still in “testing mode” so to speak as you can see in the photo because we haven’t finalized the wiring. Those of you who are yelling at the screen about the wiring not meeting code and all of that, I probably know the NEC better than you do and I should point out that when that photo was taken we were still testing and hadn’t yet finalized the wiring. So before you launch into some kind of rant about it in the comments, just don’t.
There were some teething issues with the 12000XP, but they were minor. The first was it wasn’t “talking” to the batteries. That turned out to be a communications configuration error that was quickly corrected. The second was an odd glitch where the AC side would trip out with an overload error if there was power coming from the solar panels, and if the batteries were at 100% SOC an if there was an AC load of more than about 200W. And only if all three of those criteria were met. That turned out to require a software update and as soon as the firmware was updated it was working just fine indeed.
Now we just need to get the new solar panels up on the garage roof. They’ve been sitting in the garage since February waiting for eldest son to clear up some time on his calendar to work on it because MrsGF won’t let me do more than climb a step ladder after she caught up up that tree last spring stringing up an antenna.
And that’s about it for now. Thought I’d better post something to reassure the people who thought I was dead or something. Hopefully the Lumos review will be coming up in the near future.
If you look down towards the feed mill at the end of my street you’ll see all of the haze we’re dealing with at the moment. That’s smoke from the Canadian wildfires and it’s so bad at the moment that they’ve issued warnings that its unhealthy to even be outside. When I go outside it frankly stinks like a trash fire. Someone on television said that being outdoors right for a day would be the equivalent of smoking a whole pack of cigarettes. Judging from the way it looks, smells and feels out there, I would think that is not an exaggeration.
There’s not much we can do about it. We have the house closed up tight, with three room sized HEPA filters running full out and the furnace fans circulating the air in the house through its filters. I’d love to be outside at the moment. Temperature is around 72 degrees, ideal for things like gardening, riding the bike, etc. But I had a severe case of bronchitis and/or pneumonia (they never did figure out which it was, exactly) some time ago and ever since my lungs were never the same so when things get like this I stay in the house as much as I can.
The EG4 12000XP is working nicely. Mostly. After getting the battery communications situation straightened out I have had a couple of curious issues with it that we’re working to resolve. More about that in a moment. Otherwise it’s been doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. In the photo above it’s hooked to a 2KW solar array. You’ll note that it’s only bringing in a little over 1 KW and that’s because of guess what? Yeah, the smoke. It’s amazing how the haze from the wildfire smoke causes solar production to plummet. Almost all of that power is going into the batteries in the photo up there because the house isn’t switched over to the inverter yet. The 21 W it’s currently showing is what the inverter itself uses.
I really like the display on this unit. It is so much easier to read and understand than the displays on the 6500EX units were. The 12000 shows pretty much everything I need to see right here on the main screen. With the 6500EX I had to scroll through a half dozen different screens to get the same information.
But the issues… Twice now I’ve had the inverter trip out with an “Overload” error message and my son and I are both scratching our heads over that because there was no overload of anything. At the time it tripped out the total load on it from the house was only around 2.5 KW total on both legs and this thing is supposed to be able to handle up to a 12KW load, 6KW on each leg. So what caused it to trip out?
I haven’t been able to do much experimenting with it because we’ve had so much cloudy weather of late. Hopefully I’ll be able to “exercise” it, so to speak, more fully once the weather clears up and we can track down what the problem is.
As you can see we’ve been harvesting onions and picking some of the young carrots. The onions are brought into the garage where they will be laid out on a screen for about two weeks to cure them. The curing process basically allows the outer layers of the onion to dry and harden which protects them from rot and mildew. They’re left to dry in a fairly warm, dry place for a couple of weeks to cure, then we pack them loosely into net bags and hang them from the ceiling in the basement for long term storage. If properly cured and then stored they can last for months.
We also just peel them, dice them up and freeze them for use later in sauces, chili, tacos, etc. The texture does break down and they get soft but the flavor is still there. We do the same thing with cilantro, freezing it in blocks in ice cube trays in either water or olive oil. That works out really well. When we’re making chili or tacos or something we just pull out a cube of cilantro and throw it in the pot with the rest of the ingredients.
My wife and I both love cone flowers. They’re in all their glory right now. They put on a double show for us. First when the come into flower like they are right now, and then in the fall after the flowers have faded and the finches go after the seeds. We’ll get dozens of goldfinches coming to feast on the seeds in the fall. And best of all, it takes us zero work and expense to grow them. enough seed falls to the ground that they re-seed themselves and they don’t require any work at all in the gardens. They’re even quite drought tolerant.
I’m very, very lucky to have a very nicely maintained trail network just a few miles from my house!
Someone asked if I was still going out on the bike and the answer is definitely yes. I just don’t bring it up much here because I figured people were getting bored with it. I try to put on 10 – 15 miles a day, three or four days a week, and about 5 miles the other three or four days.
I have one of those Garmin fitness tracker thingies with built in GPS. I tried one of those fitness tracker aps on my phone but most of them are worthless and the ones that actually worked reasonably well deluged me with non-stop spam trying to sell me subscriptions and I don’t know what all else. All I want is something that records milage, shows my route, and that’s about it.
It’s a Garmin Edge 130. It’s a tiny little thing that clips to the handlebars of the bike. It has a fairly small, black and white LCD screen that displays things like elapsed time, speed, etc. It’s handy little gadget if ridiculously pricy. I think the dopey thing goes for about $200 these days. That’s like twice what I paid for mine a couple of years ago. I’m not sure why the price has damn near doubled since then.
I am not recommending you get one. I honestly don’t think it’s worth $200. It pairs with an app on my iPhone that gives me all sorts of data that I really don’t give a fig about, to be honest. I don’t know why people obsess so much about things like calories burned, cadence, respiratory rates, hydration and all that guff. If I were in training for the tour de France yeah, I might care. But I’m just an old duffer who likes to know how far he’s gone and can show the wife a map of where I went so she doesn’t think I’m cheating and only getting as far as the local pub.
When I’m out in the country on the bike I might bop along at 10 – 14 MPH but it’ll take me two hours to do 10 miles because I’m constantly stopping to take photos. Every time I come across a cluster of flowers or some interesting looking plants or hear an unfamiliar bird call I’m stopping and looking and listening and photographing. When you run into clusters of flowers like those up there in that photo how can you not stop and look?
And I’m still experimenting with the Falcon laser. I’ve been fiddling around experimenting with doing inlay and other things. I was wondering if I could get a sort of stained glass effect by inlaying translucent acrylic into wooden outlines and that seems to actually work in the simple experiments I’ve tried. I’m also going to try combining it with another hobby of mine, making epoxy resin castings to make decorative panels. If anything comes of that I’ll let you know.
Yes, you saw that right, I blew up the EG4-6500EX inverters on my solar power system. No, not on purpose.
Newly “decomissioned”. I.e. junked.
I am still kicking myself. Look, in addition to farming and everything else I’ve worked at over my lifetime, I’ve in the building trades as well for years, especially building maintenance. My first job after MrsGF and I got married was building maintenance where I did carpentry, drywalling,. plumbing, electrical, concrete work… Especially electrical. The first year I worked for that company I spent the entire summer on the roof, rewiring all of the Reznor rooftop air handling units and putting in new panels down in the basement to feed them, and the rest of the summer rewiring the lift station, irrigation pump and boilers. If it was anything to do with building or maintaining a building and its systems, I’ve done it. Over the years I’ve gone through literally hundreds of hours of training on electrical systems, plumbing, fire suppression systems, alarm systems, building codes, the NEC, etc. So I know how to do this stuff.
All of which makes me even more upset with myself because I did something really stupid because of a momentary lapse of concentration. I thought something was shut off that wasn’t, plugged something in that I shouldn’t have plugged in and BANG… I blew up about$3,oo0 worth of inverters.
There was no property damage, except to the inverters,. no one got injured or anything like that. But it never should have happened.
To make a long story short. I had to spend close to $3.000 to buy a replacement inverter. There is a sort of silver lining to this, though, because I replaced the two 6500’s with that beast over there on the left. That’s an EG4 12000XP off grid inverter and to say it is very, very nice and light years better than the 6500s is an understatement.
It was easy to install. It took longer to drill the holes in our poured concrete basement wall to put up the mounting brackets than it did to wire it in. I should add that it is very, very heavy, weighing in at over 100 lbs.
It’s up and running, powering the entire house at the moment, and just purring along with no muss or fuss or headaches.
Not all was “plug ‘n play”, though. At first it wouldn’t communicate with my EGR-LL batteries. It didn’t even “see” that they were there even though it was getting power from them and would turn on.
Here I have to give a shout out to the folks at Signature Solar where I bought the inverter. I submitted a report to their customer service department via their website and within 12 hours I got back a very detailed response that explained what the problem was and how to fix it, including screen shots of the menu options on both the batteries and the inverter, pictures of the actual DIP switch settings, everything I needed to correct the communications problem. Within half an hour of getting the email from them I had the problems fixed and it was running exactly as it should.
Also I got in the mounting hardware for the new solar panels that are going to be going up on the garage roof. Close to 5 KW of new. bifacial solar panels are going to be going up there yet this summer. I should have a grand total of something like 7.5 KW of solar panels up before the end of the summer. Not sure when that will happen, though. MrsGF caught me about 25 feet up a spruce tree in the backyard hanging up a new antenna that one day early this year and now she won’t let me climb anything higher than a step stool so I’m going to have to depend on my sons finding time to get out here on a weekend and put the new panels up.
Anyway, more on that as things progress.
Gardening Stuff
This has been one of the best growing seasons so far that I can remember. Temperatures haven’t been too extreme, we’ve had regular rainfall and enough of it so that we’ve only had to water things once so far this year. And the plants out in the garden have responded by growing spectacularly. Here are a few photos to show you.
This photo is outdated. That little head is now over a foot across!The cilantro has been going absolutely crazy. We’ve been harvesting the stuff since late May and it’s still going strong. None of this will go to waste. About half of it will be harvested and frozen for use in sauces, etc. during the year. The rest will bve allowed to go to seed for planting next year and for coriander. Tomatoes with onions planted around the border. The onions are already being harvested pulled, allowed to harden off and will go into storage.And the flowers this year are absolutely spectacularNot a flower. A frog. Trying very hard to pretend he’s not being seen. I think he’s an Eastern Gray tree frog. Normally on a tree these little guys are darn near invisible but somehow he ended up on the railing on our porch and he doesn’t exactly blend in.
Other stuff
Yes, I’m still playing with the Falcon laser engraver and I am still enormously pleased with how well it works. I still think it is hands down the best 10W diode laser for the money on the market.
Solar Prices
If you’re in the market for solar panels right now you have my sympathy. All of the deals I was talking about earlier are now long gone and prices have gone up anywhere from 50% to as much as 100% or more. Panels in the 300 – 400W range which I was seeing for around $70 – $100 range are now up to around $150. The 400 – 450W bifacial panels I got back in February for $107 are long gone. Panels in the 400 – 500W range are now up to at least $175 – $200.
To give you an idea of just how badly we are being ripped off by our own government, solar panels we’re paying $200 for are selling for around $70 or less in the EU.
This is perhaps a good place to end this with the reminder that tariffs are not paid by the country of origin. Tariffs are a tax, on us. We pay it, you and I and anyone who imports or buys products from overseas. Not the country of origin. We do. This isn’t punishing China or Canada or whoever over unfair trade practices, this is punishing us, people already stretched to the breaking point by ever rising prices, stagnant incomes and a government that’s more interested in making up snarky memes to insult members of the opposition than it is in actually fixing our problems. Read some of the history of this country. We’ve gone down this path before and it nearly bankrupted the country.
Well it’s spring, or so they tell me. And judging from the lack of posts here it seems I’ve been hibernating most of the winter, doesn’t it?
After a ridiculously warm winter we’ve had a ridiculously cold spring. It isn’t until now, early May, that we’ve gotten reasonably warm temperatures during the day, although it’s still plunging down to near freezing at night. Anyway, the daffodils are in full bloom, even some of the irises are popping open which is always delightful to see.
MrsGF has had her seedling operation going in the basement for some time already. We have tomatoes, brussel sprouts, peppers and I don’t know what all else popping up in the little greenhouse down there. We have onion sets ready to go out as soon as the weather improves. The garlic she planted seems to be thriving. She only put in about a dozen garlic cloves and somehow all of them seem to have survived the winter and are now about 8 inches tall out behind the garage near the solar panels.
If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know I love bicycling, and by this time of year I should have been going out almost every day. But thanks to the cold weather that hasn’t been happening. I’ve managed to get out exactly twice since mid-April. It is very frustrating.
Solar Stuff
I think I mentioned that I picked up a bunch of solar panels with the intention of getting them up on the roof of the garage to supplement my rather pathetic 2KW of panels leaning up against the back of the house. Alas, that hasn’t happened either because of the poor weather. Hopefully soon. MrsGF has a fit when she sees me up on a ladder or on a roof, so getting those mounted is going to have to depend on when my sons can get over here to work on it. And I suppose I better actually order the mounting hardware, shouldn’t I?
I just got done completely rewiring the entire AC side of the solar power system to bring it up to snuff so it will pass an inspection. It’s configured a bit differently this time. The inverters struggled to keep the central air conditioning running, to the point where we couldn’t run on solar if we had to use the AC. That meant that whenever the weather got hot, we were entirely on the grid, which was not a good thing. The system has been rewired now so that both the AC and the electric clothes dryer are always connected to the grid while the rest of the house can be switched over to the solar system. So we’ll be able to keep cool and do laundry while running the rest of the house off solar.
Also this brings the system into compliance with electrical codes and it’s passed inspection.
Laser Stuff
This is one of the reasons why I’ve been so busy that blog posts have been neglected. If you’ve been following grouchyfarmer for a while, you know that I’m sort of an artist/electronics geek/computer geek/maker/… Well, you get the idea I suppose. Years ago I got a deal on a cheap, flat bed laser engraver. While it was fun to play with, it was also woefully slow, cranky, fiddly, annoying, had zero safety equipment, zero smoke control, inaccurate, but fun.
And it sparked some ideas as well. Commercial ideas that eventually developed into actual products. I eventually got a much better, much faster, much more accurate and much more useful laser, and I started cranking out things like company logos, art projects, things like that. I didn’t do a lot of it because despite what you may see on YouTube, there really isn’t any actual money in doing this kind of thing unless you’re willing to invest the time, money, and especially the equipment, into going into it almost at an industrial scale. What mattered to me was that I was enjoying it, it gave me an outlet for this need I had for artistic expression and all that high minded guff, and it gave me an excuse to play with a lot of high tech equipment.
I thought that part of my life was pretty much done with, though. I was getting a bit tired of it. Technology was moving on, if I was going to continue doing it I was going to have to get serious about learning Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator at a level that was deeper than I really wanted to get involved with. And to top it off my laser engravers were starting to show their age.
And then stuff started happening. People I’d made things for before started asking about doing more, the brewing company told me that all of the joke coasters I’d done for them had been stolen and they wanted more and oh, could I look into doing a few promotional items for them like maybe branded keyfobs or bottle openers. And then I was getting the urge to make “art” again…
Okay, to make a long story short, i got a new laser engraver/cutter and I’m back in the business again. And yes I’m going to bore you with all of the details, but not in this post. I’ll reserve that for a different time because to cover everything I want to talk about is going to take some space.
That’s about it for now. It’s actually nice out today, so I’m heading out to put a few miles on the bike.
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…
The other day I was taking photos out in the gardens and the light was just about perfect so here are three of my favorite photos. You should be able to see the images in full size if you click on the photo.
I love zinnias almost as much as I love irises. There are at least a dozen different varieties in the mix MrsGF put in back around the old stump.
Something, we aren’t sure what, has been eating the buds off our lilies but this one somehow managed to survive.
And then there’s this one, which is my personal favorite.
Just look at the color on that little poppy. It’s so brilliant that it almost glows.
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?
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.
So here it is, mid-June, and the gardens here are going a bit crazy. everything is growing fast thanks to frequent rain and relatively mild temperatures. We have had critter problems, though. Here’s our pole beans, for example.
They should be much bigger than this but something, we suspect rabbits, ate the top leaves off the plants after they got about 4 inches tall. The red stuff you see on the plants and soil up there is crushed dried red pepper, a type normally used for making kimchi. I buy the stuff in 2 pound bags off Amazon. Whatever critters are eating our plants seem to dislike this stuff enormously. It’s a relatively inexpensive way to repel the little buggers without having to resort to traps or toxic chemicals. You definitely do not want to handle the stuff with your bare hands if you have cuts or scrapes, and make damned sure you wash your hands thoroughly after scattering it around because if you accidentally rub your eyes… Well let’s just say you’ll have the delightful experience of learning what it’s like to be pepper sprayed.
I never used to like cilantro but then a few years ago it was like a switch flipped in my head and I started to love the stuff. Why? Who knows.
We put in lots of cilantro this year. We were told by someone who supposedly “knows these things” that it would repel the critters eating our plants. It doesn’t. But it does taste amazing! I’m always astonished by the difference in taste and smell between the home grown stuff and even the “fresh” herbs we get at the grocery store. We bought a couple of bunches of fresh cilantro at Walmart in late winter for a special Mexican dinner we did and it was really rather sad. Had very little flavor. This stuff will knock your socks off. Bright, brilliant flavor and aroma… Damn I need to stop talking about food. I’m getting hungry.
MrsGF ran a batch through the dehydrator to see how that works out.
We planted quite a few carrots this year. We need to get out there and thin them out or it’s going to be a mess. Rabbits never bother carrots. Despite the Bugs Bunny cartoons, rabbits don’t like carrots all that much and they hate the green tops.
The onions… I don’t know what’s going on with the onions this year but they’ve been going nuts. I looked back at photos from the last couple of years and this year the onions are literally twice as big as they were at this time in previous years. I’m not complaining. I’m just wondering why?
The beets got hit hard by the critters. Almost all the beet tops were chewed off before we noticed and started putting out the pepper flakes. Some managed to survive but they look rather poorly. Just to make sure we get something we planted more. A bit late but we should still get something.
The celery is looking amazing as well this year. It’s already about 8 inches tall and looking beautiful. Celery is another one of those plants where there is no comparison between the flavor of the store bought varieties and the home grown ones. Interestingly, people are so used to the insipid flavor and aroma of grocery store celery that when they encounter really good, full flavor celery they think it’s too intensely flavored and don’t like it.
Let’s wrap this up with Doofus Cat…
That’s what I’ve started to call her because, well, that’s what she is, a doofus. I love her dearly and she’s a sweet heart but let’s face it, she’s just not very bright. The other morning she was trying to lick up a dark spot on the wood floor in the dining room because she thought it was a cat treat. Sigh…
She has her own comfy pillow back there in the office that she can snooze on. You can see it just to the lower left. But she’s decided she’d rather nap on top of the printer for some reason.
She is also a big kitty. She’s bigger than a lot of the dogs in the neighborhood. She weighs about 13 pounds and it’s all muscle. I’ve seen her do a standing high jump from the living room floor to the mantle above the fireplace, almost 5 feet straight up, without even straining herself.
grouchyfarmer 