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.
Apparently Cat 1 cloned herself and we got two tabbies now? Sort of a matched set? Yeah, we got two of them now. That’s Cat 1 on the right and Cat 2 on the left. Or is it Cat 1 on the left and Cat 2 on the right? Both tabby, both large economy sized kitties and I’ve already resigned myself to constantly confusing which one is which.
Cat 2 is a sort of refugee. She was a shelter kitty who was adopted into a home where a pre-existing cat decided she hated her and beat the crap out of her every chance she had. Not a good situation. So we agreed to try taking her in and see how Cat 1 would handle having another kitty in the house. As you can see, Cat 1 has no problem with having a new roommate at all. The two of them have been together about 4 days now and are getting along just fine. They aren’t exactly cuddle buddies but there’s been no hissing or spitting or growling or fighting. In fact no drama at all.
And considering this is Cat 2’s fourth home in about 3 months she’s adjusting remarkably well. She spent about the first hour here under the sofa, then decided that was boring and went and sat under the bed for a while, and the next morning she was acting like she’s lived here all her life. She’s not a lap cat like Cat 1 is, but she’s become downright affectionate towards me.
We were nervous about how Cat 1 would handle an intruder but aside from eyeing her with suspicion for the first day or two there hasn’t been any problem at all. In fact I think the two of them colluded in a 4 AM raid on the butter dish this morning. I woke with a start upon hearing a loud crashing noise and rushed out to find the two of them sitting under the dining room table and pretending they had no idea how MrsGF’s favorite ceramic covered butter dish ended up in many pieces on the floor. They would have had to get a rather heavy, covered, ceramic dish, with a quarter pound of butter in it, lifted up over the top of a one inch thick cutting board, shoved about three feet along a counter and then onto the floor, and I don’t think either one of then could have done it by themselves so I think both of then were in on it.
So, it’s spring! Yeah, sure it is. Temperature was down around 28 degrees last night. Sigh… Good thing we haven’t got anything planted out in the gardens yet. We do have flowers, though. A few of the more daring plants have been putting on a show.
It’s wonderful to be seeing color out in the gardens again.
Let’s see, what else?
Oh, I mentioned before that we were going to be getting the roof on the house and garage replaced sometime this year. We had the contractor out here Monday morning to measure everything up, give us a quote, and now we have that scheduled for sometime in late May or early June. Estimated cost for that is going to be around $13,000. That’s actually a bit less than I had anticipated so I’m pleased with that.
Once the roof is replaced I can start thinking about putting up a permanent solar array on the south facing garage roof. Hopefully I’ll be able to finally get enough solar panels up there to adequately feed the solar power system so we can fully utilize it at last. Going to have to see what the budget can handle. Might have to wait a while for our household budget to be able to deal with about 5 KW of solar panels.
Covid For Christmas – The Great Pi Famine -Lettuce In December – Weather – Dreams
Covid
So on Dec. 23 MrsGF got an unwelcome Christmas present, Covid. Don’t worry, she’s doing fine. She still has a nasty cough but she’s feeling much better and has been testing negative for two days now so we’re hoping it’s all over. Somehow I avoided coming down with it. I took precautions, staying in the basement most of the time, eating our meals separately, wearing N-95 mask whenever I was upstairs, etc. But even so I figured I’d come down with it too. Well, I still might. She’s been testing negative for 2 days now. They say that the incubation time for the current strain is about 2 – 4 days, so I’m not going to be able to relax much for another couple of days.
And me… I’m a hypochondriac. All through the pandemic, every time I coughed or sneezed or my head got stuffed up, I was convinced I had Covid myself. And I have some pretty nasty upper respiratory allergies on top of it, so I pretty much have mild symptoms that could be mistaken for the early stages of Covid all the time.
The Great Pi Famine
RaspberryPi 4. I’m still amazed that they can squeeze a complete quad core computer with 8 gig of RAM, hdmi video, sound, 4 usb ports and WiFi into a package this small. Storage on this one is a 128 gig micro-SD card.
If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know I like to fiddle around with electronic gadgets and gizmos and tinker and build stuff. One of the mainstays of the electronic tinkerers out there as a controller of electronic equipment of all types has been a tiny little single board computer called a Raspberry Pi. They’re available in a variety of types ranging from tiny little units that are used as controllers for a variety of gizmos, to a full blown Linux computer that’s smaller than a deck of cards, the Raspberry Pi 4 and now the new, more powerful Pi 5. There are four things that make them attractive. They’re small. Very small. They are designed to make it easy to interface them to the outside world in order to use them to control robots, motors, actuators of various types, collect data from sensors, etc. And three, they’re relatively easy to use, easy to program and enormously powerful for their size.
And the fourth thing, they were cheap. Like really cheap. The Pi 4 which is basically a full blown Linux (using a variation of Debian) computer with up to 8 gig of RAM, built in WiFi, HDMI video, USB 2 and USB3 ports sold for about $40 or even less. If you ever wanted to play around with Linux to see if it could be a viable replacement for the ever increasing horror that is Microsoft Windows, a Pi 4 is an easy and cheap way to do it. Just plug in a monitor, keyboard and mouse, get yourself a good introductory book on the Pi computers, and away you go.
Sidenote: I was just reading an article the other day that illustrated just how much computing technology had advanced in the last few decades. Someone pointed out that the Raspberry Pi 4 is six times more powerful than the original Cray 1 “super computer”.
Note that I used the past tense there. They werecheap. Then the pandemic hit, supply chain problems hit, demand for Pis increased because people were stuck at home and were looking for things to do, and, perhaps most importantly, the profiteers struck. Scalpers, profiteers, scammers and the like snapped up every Pi they could get their hands on, and then turned around and re-sold them for three, four times their original cost. I saw Pi 4s, a computer that sold for about $35 – $40 originally, being sold for $250 or more.
Pre pandemic I had a half dozen or more of the things laying around the house. But I gave them to a friend who was an electronics experimenter and solar power experimenter before the drought hit. Get them back from him? Yeah, well, he lives in Barcelona half the year so that ain’t gonna happen.
After the pandemic, when I couldn’t get them for a reasonable price any more, I switched to using Arduinos for the fiddling around I was doing. But while they and other microcontrollers are extremely useful and fun to play with, they aren’t computers.
But now prices have finally started to settle down. They’re still over priced when compared to what they were before the pandemic, about $75. But that’s cheap enough that I’m willing to get one and start playing around with it.
To make a long story short the nice fellow from UPS dropped one off here (two, actually) and I spent a couple of hours setting it up, updating the software and fiddling around with it last night. So you might be seeing some more stuff pop up here concerning Linux and the Pi in the future.
If you want to fiddle around with one of these yourself and you’re new to the Pi I’d recommend you get something like this from a company like CannaKit in the photo below.
No, I don’t get a kickback from CanaKit or anything like that. There are a lot of disreputable vendors out there, but I’ve bought stuff from CanaKit several times now and they provide exactly what they advertise, ship quickly and their prices, while a bit high, aren’t horrible.
It includes everything needed to get the thing up and running. The Pi 4, a power supply for it, HDMI cables to connect a monitor, a case for it along with a tiny cooling fan, heat sinks for the CPU and two other chips on the board, and a micro-SD card with the operating system pre-installed. It’s more expensive than buying a bare bones Pi but it has everything needed to get it operational. Just plug in a keyboard and mouse, and a monitor.
Lettuce In December
From about the end of may through September we had fresh greens whenever we wanted them out in the garden. All we had to do was go outside, clip off some of the lettuce mix we’d planted, and graze to our heart’s content. I really missed that. And then I was in the basement doing stuff and saw the little portable green house we used to start seedlings in the early spring with the grow lights and heater and thought why the hell aren’t we using that to grow some fresh greens? So we did. And this is what we ended up with.
We didn’t put in a lot because we weren’t sure it was going to work, but as you can see it worked very well indeed. We got more than enough for a couple of good sized salads plus a bit more. And yes, it tasted very, very good. 😊
Other Stuff
The PreciseRF magloop antenna continues to work surprisingly well for me. I was concerned about it’s survivability when set up out in the weather but it’s been holding up well despite the rain, snow and colder weather we’ve had. But the real test is yet to come when it gets really cold here. It’s been abnormally warm here all through December. Even now, on Jan. 3 at 4:30 AM, it’s 35 degrees out there. We’ll see what happens when it’s -30 and blizzard like conditions.
Weather
If we ever get cold weather, that is. Temperatures have been running well above normal here. I vividly remember one New Year’s Eve before MrsGF and I got married. When we got out of the pub where we’d spent the evening it was -34F with a stiff wind and everything, including the car, was frozen solid. We spent the night at a friend’s house and managed to get the car started the next morning, somehow.
It was brutally cold for weeks that January. On Jan 1 after I got back to the farm I had to put a new alternator on one of the tractors. It was so cold that the insulation on the wires the old alternator shattered when I bent them. I managed to get the tractor running well enough to pull it into the heifer barn and then close everything up. 30 or so young heifers put out a lot of heat and it was warm enough in there that I could get the job done. The heifers thought it was great fun. They were all crowded around watching me.
What’s Coming Up
I got a woodworking project going. This is a joint project by ES (Eldest Son) and myself. One of his hobbies is doing stained glass so I’m making a backlighted frame for a piece he did. That promises to turn out to be pretty interesting. More about that when it gets closer to completion. That’s still in the planning stage.
One thing, though, dear sweet lord has good quality lumber gotten expensive! I’ve been spoiled. Years and years ago I bought a whole pickup truck load of very good quality, kiln dried, white oak about 1 1/4 inches thick, 6 feet long and of various widths that ranged from 6″ up to 13″. That’s pretty much run out now so I had to actually go out and buy wood and prices of good quality, furniture grade hardwood are absolutely nuts.
I don’t really have plans for the Raspberry Pi. It’s something I wanted just to be able to play around with Linux and mess around with. If something develops from that I’ll let you know.
Dreams
Dreams are weird. At least mine are. I was up at 3 AM this morning and just couldn’t get back to sleep so I came out here dealt with my email and then started writing this up. I do vividly remember the dream I was having when I woke up. I rarely remember my dreams, but when I do they are often extremely vivid and detailed. This one was like that.
MrsGF and I were having dinner at a rather fancy restaurant with a very nice young couple from India. I have absolutely no idea who they were or why they were in this dream. Nice people, though.
When MrsGF and I left we went out into the parking lot and the car, my Buick, was gone. We thought we mis-remembered where we’d parked it so I pulled out my phone to use the app that tracks my car. And my phone didn’t work. It had been infected with some kind of malware that just kept cycling through obnoxious ads over and over again.
There was a strip mall nearby and a T-Mobile store was there so we walked over there. They were about the close but a nice young woman kept the place open. She got me a replacement phone right away, restored all my stuff and got the phone working. We went back to the parking lot and activated the tracking app and yeah, the car was gone. We called the police and they found it, and the thief, rather quickly.
Elon Musk had stolen it. He’d been at the table behind us and had overheard me making disparaging comments about how utterly hideous his “cybertruck” looked so he’d gotten huffy, hacked the electronic systems in my car and took it.
Still, it’s better than the vivid, realistic dream I had about painting the garage. That was the entire dream, painting the garage. That was it. It was so boring that I bored myself awake.
On the bike trail between Hilbert and Forest Junction. This trail and most of the others around here follow old railroad lines that ran between small towns before they were abandoned.
The calendar may say this is the first day of autumn but it hasn’t felt like it for the last few days. Daytime highs have been pushing 80 and it’s been remarkably pleasant out there. I’ve been out on the bike rather a lot enjoying the nice weather while it’s here.
But it’s dry. Very, very dry. This is what the river north of town usually looks like.
Below is what it looks like now.
I’ve lived in this area since the late 1980s and I’ve never seen the river like this before.
Yeah, completely dry. So dry I could walk across it without getting my shoes muddy.
MrsGF and I have been working on cleaning up some of the gardens. The squash, wax beans and pole beans are all done and we have those all cleaned out and have been working on bringing in some fresh compost.
The beans did not do very well this year. Both the pole and wax beans didn’t seem to thrive. Lots of vegetation and blossoms, but not many beans. I’m not sure why. I think partly that was because of a lack of bees. I saw a lot of bumble bees out there this year but I didn’t see a single honey bee all summer long. And the bumbles seemed to avoid the bean blossoms. Or it could have been the hot, dry weather. We watered the gardens almost every day this summer but it still might have been too dry for the beans.
The squash were fantastic this year, big, beautiful butternut squash, and a lot of them. We ended up with the entire wagon full of them. Excellent quality as well.
We ended up with a lot more than we needed so we gave a lot away to friends and family or traded them for things we didn’t have like pears.
We tried a different variety of tomato this year, something called Amish Gold Slicers, a yellow variety. They had excellent flavor but I was disappointed by the yield. At the moment the plants are still going, still have lots of green fruit, but the fruit seems to have stopped maturing. We’ve had almost no ripe ones at all over the last week or so. No idea what’s going on there. I’m hoping that will change, but the way things are now we aren’t going to get much more off of them. They also had a thick, tough skin making them hard to cut unless we used a freshly sharpened knife. Overall they were a bit disappointing and I don’t think we’ll be using that variety again.
We put in sweet bell peppers, jalapenos and banana peppers this year and they all did well. Are still doing well, especially the jalapenos. They’re producing like crazy still, loaded with young fruit and blossoms.
But even the peppers have been a bit odd this year. The jalapenos heat levels have been strange. One will be so sweet and have so little heat I could eat them like candy, and the one right next to it, from the same plant, would be so hot my eyes would water and I ran to the fridge for some milk to try to quench the fire.
The bell peppers were excellent but we let some ripen to turn red and when we cut them open the entire seed cavity was full of mold. Very strange. I’d never seen that before.
The brussel sprouts are looking excellent. I still think they’re one of the goofiest plants I’ve ever seen, but they’re doing well and we’ve had some of the sprouts for dinner a week or so ago and damn, they taste good!
That being said I’m not sure we’re going to plant them again. They take up a lot of space and don’t really produce enough sprouts to justify the amount of garden space they use. So while they were a success, we aren’t sure if they’re worth the effort.
Of course me being me I can’t do one of these without putting up a picture of a flower, so here you go…
There, I got that out of the way. So let’s move on with this.
E-bike update: I bought the Vado e-bike in mid-July of last year so I’ve had it for 14 months now so let’s take a look at how that’s worked out. In that time I’ve put about 1,300 miles on it and it’s worked flawlessly. I’ve had absolutely no problems at all with it. Mechanically and electronically it’s worked exactly as advertised. I love the thing. Range for a bike this heavy is excellent. Cruising at around 12 – 14 mph in Eco mode it does about 1 mile for a bit more than 1% battery capacity. I did 20 miles the other day and the battery was still at around 75%. It handles well, the hydraulic disc brakes are excellent, the lighting is good. This thing was expensive but IMO it was worth it. If I want to get somewhere fast I can kick it up into “turbo” mode and pedal along at about 20 mph. Generally I’m in no hurry so I just toodle along about 10 enjoying the scenery. And because it has an actual real shifter, not one of those stupid belt drives, it even works as a standard bike with the motor shut off so I don’t have to worry about getting stranded somewhere if something does go wrong.
The solar power system update: It is still working well. As noted before it’s knocked more than a third off my electric bill since I put it in. There have been no glitches or nasty surprises.
Sidenote: Just about all of the electric utility companies in the state are asking for significant increases in rates, one company wants to increase rates by 14% over the next two years. And they’ll probably get it, too. Plus there is talk that they’re going to force everyone to accept rate plans that will drastically increase their rates during peak times of the day. They haven’t put forward that plan yet, but there has been a lot of talk about it behind the scenes. That scheme would double what I pay per kilowatt hour during peak periods, pushing it up to somewhere between 32 cents to 40 cents per kWh.
And that’s about it for now!
Coming up: I’ll probably be babbling about amateur radio again in the near future. I have a new antenna on order that should be here soon so I’ll be talking about that.
I want to do a brief look at the Klein thermal imaging camera I picked up a while back. That’s turned out to be quite handy and a lot of fun to just play with too. I’m sure there will be other things tossed in as well.
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…
Not a 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?
I’m sure that you were just as excited as I was to learn that two of the richest and most hated men on the planet were going to beat the crap out of each other on live TV. Come on, admit it, you’d have even paid money to watch that.
Alas, it isn’t going to happen. After Zuckerberg accepted Musk’s ill advised challenge, Musk, who is in even worse physical shape than I am judging from some of the photos I’ve seen of him without a shirt on in the Daily Mail, must have realized that challenging someone who is actually physically fit, trained in martial arts and is reportedly very, very good at it, wasn’t such a good idea and suddenly came down with “neck problems” that would require surgery. After numerous jokes and comments about alleged cowardice on the part of the head Twit, he said he would livestream himself driving to Zuck’s house and fight him in Zuck’s backyard. When Zuckerberg wasn’t actually home, I should point out.
Sheesh. With Zuckerberg’s “metaverse” concept being pretty much a total failure so far, and Musk’s issues with Tesla’s that allegedly stop steering and allegedly lying about battery capacities, exploding spaceships and the collapse of the social media service formerly known as Twitter turning into another Myspace you’d think these guys would have something better to do.
Ooo, Brussel Sprouts!
We got Sprouts!
When MrsGF suggested we grow brussel sprouts I said sure, why not? We’d never grown them before. And they are one of the weirdest looking things we’ve ever had growing back there. They look like some kind of mutant cabbage plant that was grown too close to the Kewaunee nuke plant. But MrsGF assures me that this is indeed what they look like and I’ll take her word for it.
How About A Flower?
There you go.
What? You want another one? Oh, why not…
The New Solar Panels
As I said before I replaced the 8, HQST solar panels with 4 Newpowa 220W panels a week ago so I have 10 of them out there now. And well, damn, they work good. Whenever you see the power ratings of a solar panel you need to remember that those numbers are produced with the panels in laboratory conditions that you will rarely see out in the real world. Especially up here in Wisconsin. So if I get anything even remotely close to the rated output wattage out of a panel it’s doing pretty darned good. And these have been doing better than good. By about 9 AM with some of the panels still getting some shade they’re putting out about 400W. By 10 AM when they’re in full sun they’re putting out about 1,000W or more. And at midday, under near ideal conditions they’re pumping out close to a full 2 KW. Let me run down in the basement and check some numbers quick. Don’t go away, this will only take a minute…
Okay, yesterday the inverters tell me the PV system pulled in 8.1 kWh, and the panels were switched on for about 6 hours. So the average per hour would be 8,100 divided by 6 = 1,350 per hour over those six hours? Egads, that’s not bad at all.
Still More Smoke
Once again we’re under an air quality warning here in Wisconsin because of the out of control wildfires in Canada. I feel so sorry for those people up here. These fires have burned something like 34 million acres so far and it it doesn’t look like they’re going to end anytime soon.
DC Tries Again
Supposedly there is a new Superman movie in the works. Even though I’m a sucker for superhero movies because I’ve been a comic book fan since i was like 5 years old, I’m not exactly thrilled with the idea of them taking another run at a Superman flick. Let’s face it, DC hasn’t exactly hit a lot of home runs with its attempts to adapt their characters to the big screen. The Justice League movie wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t very good either. And Black Adam… Oh dear. I felt sorry for the Rock because he really wanted to make this work and he ended up with a script that was, frankly, pure crap. I haven’t seen The Flash yet. What it all amounts to is that nothing that’s come out of the DC franchise in decades has done anything to excite me. Marvel has put out its share of stinkers but at least it has also put out a few gems that have kept people excited. At best what DC has been putting out has been mediocre at best.
Supposedly the whole DC multiverse is being “rebooted” yet again. The Batgirl movie, already completed and ready to roll, has been flushed down the toilet and will never be seen. I have to wonder just how bad it was that the company didn’t dare to even release it. New people have been brought in and there is a whole new “vision” for the Superman movie.
Hmm, I distinctly remember writing a Black Adam review but I can’t find it in the archives here. Did WordPress flush it? Did I delete it and I don’t remember? Sheesh…
David and Goliath
How about some peppers?
The tiny red one is actually supposed to be a jalapeno. I don’t know what happened to it. The ones in pots up front are just funny looking. Taste good, though. I associate tiny, tiny red peppers with intense heat but that one up there was relatively mild, even sweet.
The bell peppers are doing crazy good this year for some reason. We’re getting massive bell peppers bigger than my hand. MrsGF had to stake some of them up because the weight of the fruit was making the plants fall over.
Anyway that’s about it for now. We’re bracing for heat right now. The latest weather reports are telling us that we’re going to be getting up to around 101F tomorrow, the hottest it’s been up here in ages. We are not looking forward to it.
House Insanity
Okay, so the house just around the corner from our place just went up for sale. It’s small, about 1,200 sq ft, 3 bedrooms, 2 of which aren’t much bigger than my walk in closet, just extensively remodeled. Virtually no yard at all. And they’re asking $350K for the thing. $350,000 for what is, I’m sorry to say, a 100 year old polished turd.
That got me and MrsGF talking about how utterly insane house prices have become in the last few years and speculating about what our place might be worth. We paid $85K for it about 25 years ago. The town appraises it now at $180K for tax purposes. Our insurance company claims it’s worth $500K. And if we look at real estate ads for houses with similar amenities, size and size lot in a nice neighborhood we’re seeing prices pushing up over $750K.
It’s been a while since I wrote anything here so let’s get caught up.
Haze from the Canadian wildfire smoke seems to be an almost permanent thing these days.
Smoke from the Canadian wildfires is still an issue here. I wish I’d kept track of the number of days we’ve been under air quality warnings because of it, but I haven’t bothered. I have respiratory allergies and this stuff hits me hard. For about four weeks straight I was on Claritin which did help, but I was still sniffling and sneezing and hacking until the air cleared up a bit.
The bell peppers are doing very well indeed this year. We’ve already started harvesting and eating these guys and some of the banana peppers.
The vegetable gardens are doing quite well despite the drought, but we’ve had to water everything pretty much every evening until just recently when we started to get a bit of rain. We’ve been harvesting wax beans every other day or so for about two weeks now. Some we eat fresh, most are blanched and bagged and frozen. The tomatoes are looking pretty good too with lots of young fruit on the vines.
MrsGF put in some jalapenos this year as well. We have a couple in pots in front of the house to make it easy to snag one to mince up to throw into an omelet or soup or something, and there are a couple out in one of the raised bed. Last year they didn’t do well at all for some reason but this year it looks like we’re going to get way more than we’ll need. I’m the only one who eats these things but I’m never going to be able to eat all of these so I’ll end up freezing a lot of them for use later.
We have a few “volunteer” sunflowers that popped up all on their own which happens sometimes. The birds and chipmunks drop the seeds from the bird feeder into the gardens. We generally leave them alone because, well, sunflowers are just fun.
First the smoke and then the extraordinarily hot weather we’ve had have been curtailing my biking. It’s hard to enjoy getting out on the bike when either the air is so think with smoke you can chew it or the temperatures are pushing up into the 90s. We had storms roll through last night that have brought a bit cooler temperatures and seem to have helped clear the air so maybe I can get out today and do a 10 or 15 mile ride. We’ll see.
Utility Companies Are Not Your Friends Department
For those of you in Wisconsin who might be thinking of setting up a solar power system and selling power back to your electric utility, don’t bother. It isn’t worth the time, effort or equipment costs. One of the big utilities has dropped the rate they pay to home solar owners down to a whopping 4 cents per kWh. Two more of the big utilities just applied for permission to drop the rate they pay down to 4 cents as well. Sigh…
Mr. Spiny the cactus is doing beautifully this year. Brilliant flowers for a week now.The poppies, like dill and a few other things in the garden, come up by themselves every year. I’m not a big fan of these. The flowers are beautifully colored but they only last a day or two. This little guy was one I found along the side of the road out in the country when I was on the bike the other day. Google tells me that it’s a type of rose.Columbine is another volunteer that keeps coming back year after year. Very pretty flowers but the darn things spread like weeds in the garden, usually turning up where we don’t want them.
Finally the drought…
This used to be a small river, a branch of the Manitowoc river just outside of the town where I live. Note the white box in the bottom center of the photo. That’s an old computer someone pitched over the bridge.
Dear lord it’s dry here! This is one of the worst droughts I’ve seen in years. I can’t remember seeing water levels in the local lakes and rivers this low. We haven’t had a decent rain since early May. What rain we did get has been very spotty. One day when we did get some rain moving through the area if I looked out one window it was raining, but it wasn’t raining on the other side of the house. The corn fields are looking terrible in a lot of places around here, the leaves curling up and in some places even turning brown.
We’ve been watering the gardens almost every day so they’ve been doing okay but the other stuff… We’ve actually had to start watering the hosta garden in front of the house. That’s the first time in about 15 years that we’ve had to water them.
There’s a 50% chance of rain today and tomorrow. We’re keeping our fingers crossed.
Egads, it’s been dry here, as it is in much of the rest of the country. We finally got a good rain yesterday and hopefully that will indicate that we’re getting out of this dry spell. Up until yesterday we were watering everything just about every day. But things have still been growing like crazy.
We have a little bit of everything in the raised bed this year. We have a several different types of lettuce, beets, carrots, onions, pole beans, tomatoes and peppers in the four raised beds this year and they’ve been doing pretty darned good as you can see from that picture up there.
We put in a lot of onions this year. We’ve had good luck with putting onions around the outside of all of the raised beds. There doesn’t seem to be much competition between the onions and whatever is growing in the main part of the beds as long as they get enough sunlight.
MrGf and I both love the flavor of home grown onions. They tend to have a much more intense flavor than the store bought variety. I don’t know if it’s just me, but it seems that over the years the commercial varieties we’ve been buying in the store seem to be becoming sweeter and having a less intense and less spicy onion flavor.
And we’re trying something new.
Those are brussel sprouts. We like to try growing something new every year and we picked brussel sprouts because, well, why not? So far they’ve been doing pretty good.
Most of the pepper plants went into a narrow bed along the south side of the house. We’ve put them in there before and they’ve always done very well. The biggest problem with that location is that it’s very dry there and we have to be especially careful to keep them well watered.
The wax beans and squash are doing quite well also, as you can see up there. All things considered the gardens have been doing pretty well. Some of the pepper plants and the tomatoes are starting to blossom already.
And, of course, we have flowers everywhere. We rarely water our decorative plants but somehow they’ve managed to make it through the drought.
I am a bit worried about the hostas, though.
We’ve never had to water the hostas in their location, but if we hadn’t started to get rain I think we would have. They were starting to look a bit rough around the edges, suffering from heat stress, I think. Days of 90 degree temperatures and the lack of rain was starting to get to them.
After a rather dreary and cool spring, summer has hit with a vengeance. Temperatures for the last few days have been abnormally hot, in the high 80s and low 90s, temperatures we usually don’t see until well into mid summer. It’s also been very dry. We haven’t had a decent rain in something like a month now. Grass normally doesn’t go brown and dormant around here until late July. My lawn is already as dry as dust and turning brown. Still, the flower beds seem to be enjoying it and it’s a riot of color out there.
There are the irises, of course. They’re looking absolutely stunning right now.
But if you stop and get down on the ground and peer around you’ll find little treasures as well, like these…
With the showy irises taking center stage it would be easy to overlook those little guys up there.
And no collection of flower photos would be complete without the first rose of the season.
That’s it for now. The weather changed drastically. We went from hot and dry to cold and wet which is actually something of a relief. We hadn’t had any rain in something like a month and a half before this weather system moved in so no one is complaining.
grouchyfarmer 