I know, I know… It’s been a long, long time since I wrote anything here. Here it is mid September already? Where the heck did the summer go?
It was an incredibly busy summer here. Busy in a good way, though. The gardens were spectacular this year, but everything except the tomatoes and squash are finished up for the season and we’ve been working on cleaning out the beds.
We processed the last of the beets and carrots this past week. We have enough carrots, beets, peppers and beans in the freezer to last us for at least a whole year, I think.
The tomatoes just don’t want to stop, though. The darned things are still producing like crazy and we’ve already put up something like 30 or 40 pints of spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, marinara sauce, bloody mary mix, etc. More than enough to last us an entire year. But the darned things are still going.
We just picked these yesterday and by the end of the week we’ll probably have two times this many ready to pick.
We can’t use them any more so whatever we’re getting from now on is going to the local food pantry and St. Vincent de Paul. They said they’ll take whatever extra we have.
That’s the celery in there. That bed is 4 ft wide and 8 ft long and it’s almost solid celery plants except for the onions around the outside
We put in a whole bed full of celery more or less as an experiment and even that was wildly successful. And the flavor was amazing. We used a lot of it ourselves in sauces, froze some, and gave the rest away.
One thing I am really going to miss is smelling the sauces simmering away all day. There were days when walking into the house was like walking into an Italian restaurant with the whole place filled with the aroma of basil, thyme, garlic, onions and tomatoes simmering away.
Now that the canning season is finally over things aren’t quite as hectic here.
MrsGF and I both got in to get our flu shots and the new Covid vaccine. Covid is rearing its ugly head once again. Hospitalizations are skyrocketing. Local hospitals and clinics are requiring people to wear masks when coming in their buildings again, etc. It’s getting nasty out there.
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.
This was going to be a dishwasher review. But I’m turning it into a rant instead because I hate this thing so much I can barely bring myself to use it at all.
So here’s what happened. Our 5 year old LG dishwasher took a dump. The pump went out. Cost of a new pump plus labor was going to be around $500. So screw that. I can get a decent new dishwasher for that, I told the service dude. He said I don’t blame you at all. I wouldn’t pay that either.
Let’s get a Bosch, a certain person who shall remain nameless because, well, they’re family and I don’t want to get them mad at me, told me. Excellent machines, they told me. Eldest son and his wife have one. They had to wait almost an entire year to get theirs but it was worth it, they told me. And it’s on sale for only $1000!
$1000? For a dishwasher? Pay me $1,000 and I’ll wash dishes by hand for the next two years.
No, we need to get this, I was told.
So we got it.
I hate it.
No, that is not a strong enough word. I loathe it. The 3rd shelf is utterly useless. The racks are laid out so badly that it’s almost impossible to load the thing up. It’s like the racks were designed specifically to make it as difficult as possible to efficiently put dishes in it. The controls are on the top of the inside of the door. Why? What’s the point in that? To make me have to open the damned door up just to see if I remembered to set the right cycle? And if you open the door for more than about 2 seconds and close it again, guess what? It shuts itself off if you forget to hit the “start” button again.
It doesn’t come with an owner’s manual. Instead you’re supposed to scan one of those stupid codes and it takes you to a video they had to make specifically to show you how to load the damned thing. I’m sorry, you shouldn’t meed an effing video to show you how to load a dish washer. Scanning another code takes you to another video that shows you how to clean the filter.
Ooo, how thrilling!
Supposedly this is the best dishwasher made in its price range according to the New York Times. It isn’t. I suspect money changed hands in order to get that recommendation. It’s not even close.
When MrsGF isn’t around I don’t use it at all. I wash dishes by hand because I hate that bloody thing so much.
All kinds of stuff have been going on here at the palatial headquarters of grouchyfarmer.com.
I believe I mentioned that we had to have the roof replaced a few weeks ago. I had to remove all of the solar panels before they came in, and, as usual, I’ve been exceptionally lazy and didn’t get the solar panels back up until today. MrsGF handles most of the household billing and she noticed the difference right away when our electric bill suddenly jumped up about $65, so she’s been after me to finally get them out of the garage and out in the sunlight. So we’re back to running on solar again. 🙂 Unfortunately we have a lot of clouds floating through here after a cold front came through so I suspect we’re possibly using almost as much battery power as we are solar. Still, even when a cloud passes over we’re still getting about 400 – 500W out of the panels.
I’m writing this on a brand new computer. I finally bit the bullet, got out the credit card and bought a new Macbook Pro to replace the rather elderly and beat up Macbook I normally write on. I use two computers. The Macbook lives in the dining room where it’s my primary computer for doing email, writing this blog, doing correspondence, accounting, tax stuff, budget projections, banking and sometimes simple photo editing.
The other computer is an MSI gaming computer with a high speed Core i7 processor, Geforce graphics card, loaded up with RAM and all those goodies. I occasionally do actual gaming on it, but mostly it’s a working computer that is hooked to my 3D printer, laser engravers and my amateur radio equipment. And because it’s screaming fast, all my Adobe editing tools are on it as well. Plus it’s ended up being my archive computer connected to multiple external drives with my video library, old radio show collection, etc.
My old Macbook was not long for this world, I suspect. It was so old and had been used so much the lettering was literally worn or chipped off most of the keys. So old that it couldn’t run my modern Adobe software. It was getting to be more and more of a pain in the neck to use so I got the new Macbook Pro with the new M3 Pro CPU and new graphics system.
Wow, what a difference! The new screen is amazingly good. And fast? Wow. I don’t think it’s quite as fast as my MSI gaming system but it’s damned close. Even better Photoshop and my other editing tools all work flawlessly and remarkably fast on this new one. So I’m pleased. Apple even makes it absurdly simple to switch to a new computer. Just start up a transfer utility on both computers, they link together wirelessly, and in less than an hour everything from the old computer was on the new computer, including all of my settings, passwords, favorites, photos, videos, everything.
Speaking of computers, I suspect Win 11 is going to be the last version of Windows I will ever run thanks to the crap Microsoft is indulging in now. If you haven’t heard about the company’s latest attempt at utterly destroying your life, Microsoft is starting to implement something it calls Recall. Basically Recall is the ultimate in spyware. It records everything you read, everything you type, every video you view, ever website you visit, every document you write/read, every email you receive/send, all of your banking information, all of your passwords. Everything. All of it easily searchable, and all of it unencrypted, at least according to people who’ve been able to try it.
That squishing, gasping noise you just heard is every scammer, every stalker, every hacker, every malware maker, every corrupt government, every abusive government agency everywhere in the world having a collective orgasm over the fact that some day soon, Microsoft is going to be recording literally everything that flows through your computer for your “convenience”.
But I’m wandering off topic, so let me get on with this.
The weather here has been a bit odd, but not so odd that it would be considered extraordinary. We’ve gone from drought like conditions to almost an overabundance of rain over the last month. Precipitation has been well above average and temperatures have been on the cool side. With only a few exceptions daytime highs have struggled to get above 70F. Fortunately we had enough dry days to let farmers get their crops it, but now they’re struggling to try to get their hay crops off the fields.
For gardeners like me and MrsGF it’s been pretty good. While temps have been a bit cooler than we’d like the abundant rain has eliminated the need to water stuff. And despite the cool temps things are growing well out there.
The onions planted around the outside of the raised beds have been doing amazingly well. They seem to thrive in this weather. All of our other plants are up and doing pretty well. We put in carrots, beets, celery, pole beans, cilantro, lettuce and onions in the raised beds and those are all doing quite well.
We have 6 tomato plants in the corner garden by the AC unit. They’re doing reasonably well. The parsley in front was a carry over from last year and even that’s doing quite well. The stuff is almost knee high. I didn’t think Parsley plants survived over winter but these did somehow.
We have about 11 or 12 pepper plants of various types in that narrow strip along the side of the house. We’ve been putting peppers in there for some time now and they do amazingly well in there. We probably over did it with pepper plants. I think we have something like 20 of the darned things all together, a mixture of sweet bell, banana peppers, jalapeno and I think there are a few pimento plants in there too. MrsGF and I both love peppers. We freeze them, can them, pickle them. One trick we tried that worked well was to keep them whole, cut the tops off and take out the seed core, and then freeze them whole and use them to make stuffed peppers.
And we got the first rose of the season!
I’m still out on the bike on the trails and backroads whenever the weather cooperates. I’m afraid my average speed when I’m out biking isn’t as good as it could be because every time I see some wild flowers I have to stop and take pictures.
That’s not a bad thing, but it does mean that what should be a one hour ride generally turns into two hours.
The raspberries are just starting to bud. I’m really looking forward to that.
We don’t grow a lot of them. Technically I’m not supposed to eat them at all because I have diverticulosis and I’m not supposed to eat anything with seeds, but come on, who can resist fresh raspberries?
It’s been an expensive month here. New roof, new computer and now a new dishwasher as well.
That’s a Bosch 800 and it came highly recommended. Reviews I’ve seen pretty much consistently rate it as a top of the line dishwasher. My eldest son and his wife have one and love it. Me? I hate it.
Oh, okay, I don’t hate it. It works just fine. I just don’t like it very much. The small third rack at the top of the interior compartment is pretty much utterly useless, the racks are oddly laid out making it awkward to get dishes stacked into the thing, the removable silverware basket is half as big as it should be. But I’m told your silverware is supposed to go up in that stupid 3rd rack at the top, where it just sort of lays there and flies around whenever you pull the rack out, even if you carefully place the silverware in the provided slots.
Yes, it does a perfectly fine job cleaning dishes, but so did our old LG which cost half as much and did just as good a job at cleaning.
But that’s about it for now. I have way too much to do and too little time to do it, so I’m out of here for now!
So this is what the branch of the Manitowoc river near here looked like last year.
And this is what it looks like now.
Here’s how another stream I cross over regularly on the bike looked like last year.
And here’s the same stream now.
As you can tell we’re no longer under drought conditions here in Wisconsin. Finally. We’ve had enough rain now to pretty much replenish everything and make up for the months long drought we had up through this past winter. Everyone around here, especially the famers, were afraid that the drought was going to continue.
Rainfall has been a bit above average and weather has been relatively cool, but growing conditions have been pretty good.
So, Cat…
I ordered one of those walking harnesses for Cat One because, well, why not, right? You don’t really take cats for walks of course, cats take you for a walk. They go where they want to go and if they don’t want to go where you want, they’ll just sort of lay there and your cat walk turns into a cat drag, I suppose.
But if you’re the patient and willing to follow where the cat wants to go, it can be fun.
Sort of, I guess? Or so they tell me.
I don’t think she’s ever seen grass before.
We got to the bottom of the stairs of the front porch and she smelled something that really got her interested and there we stood for a while as she smelled, and smelled and smelled. And then, of course, started eating grass. Then she went over into the hosta bed and tried eating one of the hostas. Fortunately one nibble was enough and she swore off those for life.
Then a truck came down the street and the next thing I knew I was holding an empty harness. She was just gone. I mean like instantly gone, and instantly, without occupying the intervening space, she was up on the table on the front porch trying to get in the window.
How the hell did she even do that? The harness is one of those ones that has a collar around the neck, and a strap that runs around the chest right behind the front legs, and it hadn’t been loose. It had actually been a bit snug. All the straps and buckles were intact. She was just instantly gone and up on the porch.
Apparently cats can teleport now? Why didn’t someone warn me about this?
grouchyfarmer 