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?
I’m a photographer and artist (well, sort of an artist), among other things. While I am strictly an amateur at both, I’ve been using Photoshop for something like 20 years for editing photos, sketching, cartooning, etc. And I have some concerns about what’s going on in the world of photography and art. Let me give you an example.
Look at the photo over there on the left. It’s a fairly generic looking and pleasant image of an attractive young woman. A woman who doesn’t actually exist. That image was created a few minutes ago using Photoshop Beta with Adobe’s generative AI technology. As you can see, generative AI has become very, very good. Scary good, really.
Well okay there are still some “issues”, as they say. Let me who you the entire image that Photoshop came up with when I told it to generate a photograph of two women in a coffee shop.
See the problem? The young lady must really, really like her coffee. Or look at this one, which is another image generated using the same text description.
Generative AI may be very, very good, but it isn’t actually all that smart.
Let me show you another image. This one was generated with the exact same text description but this time I told it to produce a black and white line drawing. This is what it came up with.
Not the best artwork in the world but perfectly acceptable for a simple drawing. I’ve seen a heck of a lot worst human created artwork. And better still, no weird glitches with cups or hands. I got this one when I tried generating another line drawing with the same text description.
I’m sure you see the problem there. Adobe’s AI, and in fact almost all of the ones I’ve experimented with, all seem to have trouble dealing with hands for some reason.
Now, did you notice something else interesting about those images? All four images depict young Black women even though I did not specify a particular ethnicity in the description I typed in. I found this rather curious so I continued. Eventually I generated 20 different images using the same text description. Of those 20 images, 10 depicted Black women, 3 depicted women of Middle Eastern ethnicity, 4 were Asian, one was Indian and 3 were caucasian.
I found this rather curious. The same was true, although to a lesser extent, when I generated images of men. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not upset. In fact I find this rather refreshing because often we’re bombarded with images of nothing but white people in a lot of the videos, advertising, stock photography, etc. that we’re forced to endure every day.
But sometimes the images are a bit – well a bit disturbing. I asked it to come up with a line drawing of a couple sitting in a pub having a beer and this is what it came up with.
Oh, dear… Yeah, seriously. This is what it thinks a young couple in a pub looks like.
Just for the heck of it I added a specification that it should generate an image of a white couple and this is what it came up with.
Oh, dear again. Why does she have a pepper grinder glued to her head? Why is he dipping spaghetti in his beer?
But it also comes up with some stuff that is surprisingly good. I told it to generate an image of a grouchy old farmer leaning on a split rail fence watching a herd of grazing cows and it came up with this.
Not bad, really. Well, if you don’t look at his left had too closely.
For the heck of it I switched from photography to painting and it came up with this from the same prompt.
I actually like that one, to be honest. I would print that out in large format, put it in one of those overpriced tourists shops up in Door County and someone would probably pay actual money for that.
Which brings me to what I really want to talk about, and that is how AI generated artwork is going to effect society in general. We are already starting to see fundamental changes.
First, we’re going to see the end of stock photo providers ike Getty. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Why would anyone bother to license stock images from companies like Getty when with a few words of description and Photoshop or one of the other AIs you can generate a generic illustration for your story or article? Let’s say you’re writing an article about vacations and you want to use a nice beach scene to illustrate it. So why go to a stock image company and buy the rights to use one when you can do this below with a few words and Photoshop?
Took all of about 15 seconds to generate that image from a one sentence prompt.
Stock image companies aren’t the only things that are going to come to an end. Would Normal Rockwell have ever gotten a job doing magazine covers in today’s world? I doubt it. I think illustrators in general are already losing their jobs, their work being done by AI. I’m seeing scores of images illustrating articles, fiction, even news stories, that look suspiciously like they were done by AI.
AI is already making inroads into the world of computer programming. There’s a very good chance that AIs are also already making significant decisions about you health care, not actual real doctors. The customer support person you chatted with on that website? Quite possibly an AI.
You may not like it. I don’t. Isn’t going to matter in the sightest. That horse is already out of the barn. Corporations can and will use AIs to replace human beings every place they can.
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.
Just a nice, simple promotional image, I told them. Farming related, grouchy old man, a farm animal or two, maybe a corn field. And this is what they come up with. Sigh…
grouchyfarmer 