gardening – Page 15 – grouchyfarmer

Spring Photos

How about some spring photos?

Baby pears! The tree is loaded this year. It’s a long wait, they won’t be ready to eat until mid to late September, but they’re worth it.

I normally prefer bright, showy flowers, but there is something to be said for subtle colors as well.

Hostas! These guys have been thriving in the cool, wet spring we’ve had so far.

We have several different varieties and colors of iris here, and they’re doing really well this spring as well. They’re just on the verge of popping open. They should be in full flower in the next day or two

I’ve always been fascinated with these guys. I have no idea how they keep growing. They’re basically growing in nothing but rock, areas where nothing else can survive.

Let’s wrap things up with this one, one of the brighter, more showy flowers we have going at the moment.

That’s it for this time!

Get out there and play in the dirt!

This Tree is Amazing. No words, just photos

click the first photo for the slide show

Garden Stuff

It’s been a ridiculously pleasant day, warm, sunny. But we have thunderstorms moving in now so I have a chance to get caught up here.

The falling petals from the pear flowers almost make it look like it’s been snowing in the backyard. We’ve had better flower coverage last year, but the tree seems to go in two year cycles, a year of ridiculous overabundance, with it being a bit less ridiculously loaded with fruit the next year. Doesn’t matter. Even in a poor year we generally have more fruit than we know what to do with and end up giving away buckets of them in September when they come ripe.

We still haven’t done anything with the raised beds, but that will be coming as soon as this rainy spell passes. It was in the 70s today and it’s supposed to hit the mid-80s tomorrow. That’s only going to be for one day and then they claim it’s going to get back to more normal temperatures.

I wasn’t sure the lilac was going to blossom this year. We hacked it back almost to the ground because it was so badly overgrown, but it’s a good four feet tall now, most of it new growth, and it’s covered with budding flowers. And the smell is absolutely amazing. I love the smell of lilac. It seems just about everyone had a lilac lurking somewhere in their yard because when I walk through town I smell them almost everywhere I go.

I’m not sure how Mr. Spiny manages to survive the winter, but he somehow manages. He needs a good wash, I think, but he did not get the name Mr. Spiny for nothing. You can’t really see them in the photo, but the spines on this guy are absolutely vicious. Maybe use the carwash brush on him? And volunteer poppies are coming up all over back there, too. I frankly don’t know how anything grows back there. The soil is horrible, it gets very little moisture because it’s under the eaves of the house.

One lonely tulip popped up amidst the daffodils. I’d forgotten it was even in there until a single yellow flower popped up the other day. Probably should move him. He’s never going to make it in there.

My wife’s sister gave us some raspberry plants a couple of years ago. We decided to move them last fall, dug them up and planted them in the garden behind the garage. I didn’t think they’d make it. My wife says you couldn’t kill these with a gallon of RoundUp and a flamethrower, and it seems she’s right. Not only did all of them survive they seem to be thriving back there with tons of new growth. I love raspberries, but I have ‘issues’ as they say; diverticulitis. I’m not supposed to eat anything with seeds, nuts, anything with chunks that could get caught in the plumbing, so to speak. But when a fresh raspberry is sitting there all red and juicy… who can resist?

My neighbor’s crazy old apple tree is in full blossom. It needs to be pruned badly but we seem to keep forgetting to do it. Not that the tree seems to mind. It’s loaded with fruit every year.

One of the neat things about this town is that there are fruit trees all over. Walk around a corner and Bam! There’s another burst of white or pink or red color with an apple or pear in full bloom. What a beautiful time of year! May is absolutely amazing.

And speaking of amazing, May is also our wedding anniversary. They said it would never last, and maybe they’re right? It’s only been thirty-seven years now, so we’re still pretty much newlyweds, right?

Garden Updates

Even the local dentist’s office is looking colorful these days. Had to stop and take a picture of these guys. There is color bursting up all over, despite the cold weather we’ve been having.

Screen Shot 2017-05-09 at 7.11.42 AM.png

Apparently once you have catnip in your garden, you will always have catnip in your garden. We made the mistake of putting one plant in about fifteen years ago, and we’ve been trying to get rid of it ever since. The stuff is ridiculously prolific, spreading all over. Still, the cats do like the stuff when we bring in a few leaves for them. They roll around on it, sit on it, rub their faces on it, then fall asleep for two hours. Great fun.

I’m looking forward to seeing these guys come into blossom. These asiatic lilies usually put on a spectacular show later in the season.

This is our lettuce/greens bed. About four feet across, this circular, partly shaded bed provides us with more than enough lettuce and fresh greens during the season. It’s a bit early, but MrsGF seeded this one over the weekend. I dumped about 4 inches of compost on the bed earlier and worked it in so we’re hoping for better results than we had last year. We had plenty of greens for salads, but the growth was a bit disappointing. The nice thing about this bed is that it’s partly shaded which helps to keep the lettuce from bolting before we can use it. We generally re-seed in late summer so we keep getting fresh growth right up until frost in the late fall.

This bed was a motley collection of — of stuff. And the soil was absolutely terrible. MrsGF was very fond of some of the flowers in here, but even she had to admit it needed to be worked up and replanted. We removed old growth, transplanted some root stock she wanted to save, and then worked it up with the tiller, hauled in about 6 inches of compost, worked that in, and she’s put in a mixture of different flowers. I’m looking forward to this. She put in a section of alyssum which smell absolutely heavenly when they come into bloom.

It’s hard to believe how fast the hostas are growing. Just two weeks ago this plant was little more than a couple of green spikes sticking out of the ground. Even with temperatures dropping to freezing overnight they’ve been growing like crazy. I don’t know how some of these plants survive the frost. It’s been down to 28 degrees at night around here for the last few days.

Then there is these little guys. They pop up in the most unexpected and sometimes ridiculous places, and I always have to smile when I see one. I love their color, their texture, like dark purple velvet and then that burst of yellow in the center. This little stinker popped up right in the middle of the lawn.

Pear Blossoms And More Little Purple Thingies

The pear tree is coming into full blossom. This dopy tree never ceases to amaze me. It is gnarled, misshapen, leans over at about a 35 degree angle and any arborist would wince at the sight of it. But holy cow, does it produce pears! Some of the most delicious, luscious pears I’ve ever had. We look forward to mid to late September when the fruit gets ripe. At their peak the pears are so sweet, so juicy and lush they melt in your mouth when you eat them. Alas, while they are amazing for eating fresh, they’re terrible for canning because the buttery texture that makes them so delightful for eating fresh means they disintegrate when canned. They do make great jam, though!

We tend to ignore the goofy little bushes on the north side of the house. They are generally rather nondescript and often annoying because they grow like nuts and have to be trimmed frequently, and some of them have vicious thorns on them. But every once in a while this one decided to bloom. Tiny little lavender-purple blossoms that are so small they’re easy to completely ignore.

They’re sort of like, well, people. Even the most ordinary, the most nondescript, have incredible beauty within them if you look past the surface.

Farm Catchup

Time to get caught up with what’s been going on in the farming world.

Elderly Corn

China has a problem with corn. As in it has too much of it. It’s been sitting on a large amount of stockpiled corn for years now, and it needs to get rid of it because some of this has been sitting in storage for ages now and if they don’t get rid of it soon it’s going to be unfit for even animal consumption. Agrimoney posted a story indicating China is going to start dumping a lot of it’s aging corn on the market beginning May 5. Some of this stuff has been in storage since 2012. The country has had a problem with this for some time now, and there are rumors flying around that the quality of this stuff is marginal at best. China has been working to make their grain markets less dependent on government support programs and to draw down massive amounts of grain that they have in storage. The result has been a huge drop in the import of grain, especially corn. Chinese corn imports in March were 91% lower than they were a year ago.

GM Corn Saving Lives?

My opinion of genetically modified crops is mixed. I believe the science that proves that the GM crops in use currently are generally safe and that consuming them does not cause health problems. But GM crops have other issues associated with them that are problematic. Like the fact they don’t really improve yield at all, that they lead to the development of herbicide tolerant weeds and that in the long run, GM crops modified to resist weeds and things like the corn borer are little more than stop gap measures that will ultimately fail… The list goes on and on.

But there is one GM crop that could genuinely be of benefit. Aspergillus is a type of fungi or mold that produces aflatoxin, which is not only a carcinogen, but can also cause stunted growth in children and damage immune systems. And it causes liver cancer. It can be found in all kinds of things; peanuts, walnuts, the list goes on and on. Aflatoxin is especially a problem in corn. Corn that is harvested wet, stored improperly, can easily be hit with this stuff, and it can be very nasty.

Here in the US and other first world countries corn and other food crops are tested for the the stuff, but that’s not the case in other places that don’t have the resources, the money, or the expertise to do the testing.

They’ve developed a modified variety of corn that resists the development of the toxin in the corn kernel. Aspergillus can still develop, the the toxin itself will not get into the kernels of the corn.

The early test results are very promising, but they’re going to have to hook up with someone who can afford to foot the bill for large scale testing of the modified crop and go through all of the regulatory paper work and testing.

It wouldn’t just help poorer countries which can’t do the testing. Farmers have huge amounts of corn rejected because of testing positive for the toxin, so a variety of corn that didn’t develop the toxin would be a significant financial benefit.

Weed Wars

I ran into this item over at agweb.com: When Will the Herbicide Cavalry Arrive? It talks about herbicide resistant weeds and new chemicals to kill them and all that stuff. The usual kind of thing that reads like a PR piece written by the chemical companies. But if you scroll down a bit over halfway through the piece, you’ll find a somewhat different tone when someone, finally, utters the phrase “we’ll never spray our way out of the problem.”

And we won’t. Sooner or later the pests will develop resistance to whatever chemical solutions they come up with and the problem will come back just as bad, probably worse, than it was before. They go on to praise two Australian “innovations” that attach to the combine to capture weed seeds before the combine can blow them back out onto the field.

It’s certainly a good idea. Any weed seeds you can capture at the combine aren’t going to germinate the next year to infest your crops. But innovative? Hardly. Similar technologies have been around for decades. Back in the late 1950s our old Massy Harris combine had a device mounted on it that did something similar. It collected the weed seed that would have been blown back out onto the field or gone into the grain tank with the oats and dumped it into a feed sack attached to the back of the combine. At the end of the day we’d have bags of the stuff. It certainly wasn’t 100% effective, but every weed seed it did collect was one that wasn’t going to cause a problem the following year.

Will these devices be helpful? Hell yes, if they ever get them into production and farmers buy into the idea.

I’m not sure why the process went out of favor. I think our combine was the last one I ever saw that was equipped with it. I suppose people figured why bother when all we need to do is just spray. Just blow the weed seed out the back of the combine and let the chemicals deal with it.

School Lunch Controversy

You’d think that one thing everyone would agree on is that school kids should be fed lunches that are safe and healthy, right? But you’d be surprised. Opinions range all over the place out there, from people who think parents should be responsible to feeding their kids and the schools shouldn’t be serving any food at all, under any circumstances, to those who think schools should be feeding kids everything; breakfast, lunch and dinner.

And as for what schools should be serving, well, it’s turned into an utterly ridiculous and totally unnecessary political fight that started the moment the Obama administration announced new rules to insure that what kids were being fed in schools was, if not actually good for them, at least wouldn’t actively harm them. There is absolutely no doubt that we eat too much fat, too much sugar, too much salt, too much processed food and we don’t eat enough vegetables, fruit and whole grains. The new rules were intended to help deal with that, and from the moment they were even mentioned, the fight started because, well, Obama, and as far as certain politicians and special interest groups were concerned, anything coming out of the Obama administration was automatically the spawn of Satan.

As the current administration works to roll back or eliminate everything that it’s predecessor did, it’s been going after the school lunch program as well. The ag secretary announced in a self promotional fluff piece that reads like it was written by the food processing companies and backed with “information” that either isn’t true, is misinterpreted or cherry picked, that they’re going to “make school meals great again” by rolling back the Obama era nutritional guidelines, and allow schools to return, at least partly, to serving kids little more than junk food disguised as a meal. Restrictions on salt, fat, sugar, serving increased amounts of vegetables and whole grain breads and fat free milk are all being rolled back

One of these days I need to do an article about the school food service system. I’ve been involved in it either directly or indirectly for decades and some of the crap going on in that system, well, it’s scary sometimes.

You want some flowers? Here you go!

First Harvest! Rhubarb

The first actual harvest out of the garden here every year is rhubarb. The plants are

It only started to break through the soil about two weeks ago and it’s already over a foot tall with dozens of stalks.

ridiculously hardy and are always the first to spring up. After the chives, which pop up as soon as the snow is gone, rhubarb is the first real thing we harvest. As soon as the goofy looking red bulbs of the sprouts

Sprouting rhubarb looks like some kind of emerging alien eggs or something. Creepy

pop up we start thinking about rhubarb custard pie, rhubarb and strawberry, rhubarb sauces of various types. In some parts of the world the more tender stalks are dipped in sugar and eaten raw.

Oddly it seems a lot of people I know have no idea what to do with the stuff. Granted, it is utterly horrible if you try to eat it raw. But once it’s cooked a bit and has some sugar added — well, okay a lot of sugar added, it’s delightful stuff. Well, to me at least. For a lot of people it is definitely an acquired taste, and one which some have no desire to acquire, I fear.

Rhubarb does have one “gotcha”, and that is it’s leaves. They are fairly high in oxalic acid, which can cause serious problems or even death if you eat enough of them. (I read that you’d have to eat something like 11 pounds of leaves to build up a fatal level of oxalic acid.) The stalks have very little oxalic acid so those are safe to eat. Some people have claimed that you can only eat rhubarb early in the season, and that after the plant has come to full maturity, the level of oxalic acid in the stalks rises and makes it dangerous to use. This is not true. It’s safe to eat the stalks all through the growing season. If you let the stalks get too thick, it becomes woody and even hollow. But if you harvest it regularly and only select the new growth the stalks will remain tender all season long.

You want a fast and easy way to make a sauce? Sure. Here you go:

Take about six or ten stalks and cut them into very small pieces. Put in a pan and add about a quarter cup of water. Turn up the heat until the water begins to bubble, then turn it down to low and let simmer. Stir every few minutes. After a very short time the pieces will begin to disintegrate and turn into a kind of pinkish mush. At this point throw in some sugar to taste. Start with a couple of tablespoons and taste, then add more as needed to get it to a level you like. Then serve hot, or throw it in the fridge.

What do you use it for? Put it on ice cream, use it on pancakes. Use it instead of strawberries on shortcake. Or use it with strawberries. The two go together very well indeed. I put it on cereal.

Wet. And Jazz

Wet is what describes the weather here. Wet and cold. We had almost 24 hours of rain and everything is completely saturated around here. The gauge indicated we had about 2 inches. And the temperatures plunged as well. High temp yesterday was around 45 degrees, a good 20 degrees colder than the day before. If anyone thought winter was over, this will disprove that. Up in the Bayfield area they actually had to cancel schools the other day because of ice and snow.

Jazz – Last Sunday I worked for the high school jazz band’s spring concert. The students did a great job but the turnout was disappointing. Screen Shot 2017-04-28 at 6.55.47 AM.png I don’t think we had more than 50 – 60 people showed up for it, even though it’s a free concert. Most of the parents showed up, but that was about it. I suppose the scheduling was part of the problem. Because of scheduling conflicts they could only do it at 4 in the afternoon which is a fairly awkward time for a lot of people.

My job at these events is basically to keep things running smoothly and deal with emergencies if they turn up. But they aren’t making it easy. I found out last weekend that they pulled the control computer that operates the HVAC systems at the high school. Now if I have to make changes to the heating/cooling settings, I have to make a 20 minute trip to the downtown building to get on the computer there, then drive back to the high school…

I imagine it saves them money. They probably have to pay a license fee for that software at the high school, plus the cost of the equipment itself, but come on, really? If something goes wrong, I have to drive 20 minutes one way to read the diagnostics, drive 20 minutes back to the HS to fix the hardware problem, then drive 20 minutes back to downtown to check the diagnostics again and reset the systems, then drive 20 minutes back to the high school…

Oh brother… This is not going to work out well for them, I can see that. If we have a HVAC problem at the high school during a special event and I can’t get it fixed quickly because I have to run downtown just to get at the control systems, there are going to be a lot of very angry people at the event. Last year I got a panic phone call on graduation day that the temperature in the gym was 97 degrees and climbing. If I hadn’t had the control computer at the high school itself at the time and would have had to run back and forth between the two buildings just to do diagnostics, I wouldn’t have gotten the problem fixed until after graduation had been over. Hmph….

Sedum!

If you could see my yard and house you’d find out quickly that I really, really love plants, but there are some plants I love more than others. Hostas are one, and we ripped up the little patch of grass in front of the house and have been turning it into a hosta garden.

Another I love is sedum. When the FFA had their plant sale a few years ago they had a lot of stuff left over that didn’t sell that they gave me a whole flat of young sedum plants that immediately came to live in our back yard, and they’ve been thriving ever since. They are all up now and looking very well. They’ve tolerated an amazing variety of conditions in the years we’ve had them, ranging from near flood to drought and are still hanging in there.