Tag: cats

Garden Update

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.

Garden Catch Up

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?

Some Solar Quirks and Gardening Stuff At Last

Testing new 220W panels from Newpowa

Now that I’ve been actually using the solar power system for a few days I’ve run into a few interesting quirks. First the solar charging system. Other people with the EG4 6500EX inverter, or who are thinking of buying one, have been following along so I thought I’d warn you about this.

Up in that photo are 5 new 220W solar panels from Newpowa. I picked up 6 of those because I badly need more solar but I don’t have a lot of space to put them. These from Newpowa were the smallest size 200W panels I could find and that’s why I bought ’em. The charger in the EG4 is rated between 80V to 500V input from solar. That’s the minimum amount of voltage it takes to “trigger” so to speak the charger, and the maximum voltage it can handle from the solar panels.

Those five panels in series were putting out about 91 volts, which should have been enough to make the charger work properly. But apparently not. When I plugged them into the EG4 it looked like I was only getting about 450 – 500 watts out of panels that should have been putting out at least 75% – 90% of their rated capacity under the conditions I had that day. They were putting out half of what they should have.

I went back out, checked all of the connectors, all of the wires, made sure I had everything wired properly and couldn’t find any problems. The EG4 has two solar chargers so I plugged into the second one. Nope, same thing, I was only getting a little over 500W under full sun.

Grr, so now what… Could it be that 91V wasn’t enough? I had one more panel that I didn’t have room for. I shuffled things around and connected up all six panels and then checked. I was now getting a bit over 100V and…920W? Yeah, 920 watts. Adding that one panel, kicking the voltage up another 10V doubled the amount of power the panels were putting out.

So apparently that 80V lower limit on the solar charger in the EG4 isn’t quite accurate. I had to push 100V into it in order to get the charge controller to get it to work properly. So if you have one of these things and you aren’t getting the wattage out of your solar panels you think you should, check your voltage. If your panels are putting out less than 100V that could be it.

The other oddity is also related to solar charging. Before I configured the two inverters to work in parallel I was using one inverter alone for testing. It exhibits some interesting behavior. If I had the inverter physically turned off with the switch on the front panel and plugged solar power into it, it would turn itself on and start charging the batteries.

I personally find this a bit troubling. If I have a device that is physically turned off, I expect it to remain off. Period. Now I can understand why they might do this. If you’ve been using the system from battery only and drain the batteries down and shut the system off, it might then start to recharge the batteries automatically when it begins to get solar power. It turned on only the solar charger, not the inverter, so it wasn’t putting out AC so that was something at least.

Once I put the two units in parallel, that behavior changed. When I plugged solar into the turned off master inverter, it would still turn itself on with the power switch turned off. But it wouldn’t actually charge the batteries. It looked like it was in charging mode but it really wasn’t. It indicated it was getting only 47W of power out of solar panels that were putting out 500W. Eventually I figured out that both units need to be physically turned on with the power switch before it will now start actually charging the batteries. I find that disappointing as well. I’d prefer to be able to do what I did before, which was to use the unit to charge the batteries without having to switch the inverters on. Running an inverter while it’s just “idling” along without drawing power from it uses a small but still significant amount of power from the system. Each inverter takes somewhere between 70 – 90 watts of power, or 140W – 180W for the pair. And that’s 140+ watts that could be going into the batteries.

One last observation. These things aren’t exactly quiet. The fans on the EG4s run all the time the units are operating, and depending on the load on the units those fans quickly ramp up in speed. Tucked away in the basement this isn’t a problem but if you’re putting them near a living space some people could find the fans more than a little annoying.

One last thing about the solar system. I finally got the batteries mounted in the cabinet. And found that my existing battery cables going from the inverters to the batteries are too short because of course they are. So it’s time to get out the crimping tools and spend even more money on overpriced copper cable. Always something…

Gardening stuff

We moved the two raised beds from the north side of the backyard to the south side. In the previous location they were starting to get shaded out by a fast growing maple tree and a spruce tree. Growing conditions there were getting worse every year. Now that the ash tree is gone the area where we moved them now gets full sun all day long. Moving them was simple but took a lot of physical labor. Had to shovel out all of the dirt in them, drag them over to the new location and then shovel all the dirt back into them.

We’re doing some decorative work as well. An old, crumbling stone wall is being pulled out along the west side of the garage and being replaced with block, so we got a pallet full of blocks coming in the near future.

I’m not looking forward to that project. I am, at heart, a lazy person when it comes right down to it. I’ve developed an allergy to hard physical labor over the last few years. Still, it needs to get done.

Let’s see, what else? Oh, I found this while I was biking around the other day and I had to stop and take a picture of it.

We have some interesting people around here, including some who are pretty good folk artists. From the road I thought this was a real person for a brief moment when I saw the hi-viz vest.

And let’s finish up with a cat.

I love cats and cats love me, normally. But I don’t know what’s going on with this one. She stares at me, yells at me, glares at me and just barely tolerates my existence. I want to pet her and give her treats. She wants to shred my face. Sigh…

We had to take care of our youngest son’s cat for a few days while he was on vacation and she, being a cat, decided she owned the house.

How To Draw A Cat (Recycled from old Tumblr account)

how to draw cat.png

I thought I’d put this one up here at the same time I posted it on the old Tumblr account but I can’t seem to find it here. So here you go, how to draw your very own cat.

I have no idea what was going through my head when I drew this. Sometimes weird stuff just pops up in my brain.

Warm Kitties

Screen Shot 2017-12-23 at 5.45.08 AMThe siamese are warm at last!

The little goof balls spend the time from November through March trying to keep warm. It doesn’t matter how warm we keep the house, they’re still cold. They spend all of their free time going from one furnace vent to another trying to keep their little cat toes warm. It’s rather pathetic, really, seeing them huddled up together by the vents trying to keep warm.

So I decided to do something about it this winter. I bought a heated cat bed off Amazon. Wasn’t real expensive,  under $40. It has a heating pad in it. Not a very warm one, just 4 watts, with a pressure sensor that only turns it on when one of the cats is actually in the bed.

MrsGF scoffed. The siamese aren’t exactly all that smart, she reminded me, and they’d never figure out what it was. She did have a point. I’ve bought things for them before that other cats love; scratching posts, cat houses, toys, etc. And they look at the stuff, then look at me with this “what the hell is this?” kind of expression on their faces, and then go huddle in front of the furnace vents.

But not this time. It took Jay, the gray one at the rear, all of 5 minutes to figure out it was A) a bed, B) it was warm, and C) it was his. I’d hardly got the thing out of the box, plugged in and tested, and he was in it, all curled up and purring away.  It took Meg, the seal point, a lot longer. Even after seeing her brother sitting in it she wasn’t sure what it was. But yesterday I went looking for them and there she was, curled up in it with Jay.

It’s been an interesting adventure with these two. They were young adults when we got them, healthy but completely unsocialized, even terrified of people. They didn’t even act like cats. we almost never saw them. Food would disappear, the litter boxes were being used, there were no messes or disasters, and when we did see them they looked healthy, so we just left them alone. Every once in a while they would forget that they were terrified and start to act like normal cats. We’d hear them running around the house late at night playing.

We didn’t push things with them. As long as they were healthy and seemed to be doing well, we just left them alone. We were afraid of traumatizing them more than they already were. It took a long, long time, but they finally became, well, cats. Meg now likes to sit next to MrsGF on the sofa in the morning, head butts her and rubs against her to get back rubs and head scratches. Jay comes out in the kitchen when I’m cooking and talks to me (siamese can be very vocal. You can have actual conversations with some of them) and rubs against my ankles and wants his back scratched. They’re waiting for us when we get up in the morning, dancing around and chattering at us. Jay is downright playful. He chases small balls around the house, loves to play with shoe laces.

I don’t know what it is about me and cats. I’ve had dogs and I’ve loved them all, but cats? I’ve always been fascinated by cats, ever since I was a toddler. Especially siamese. We’ve had siamese since, oh, the early 1980s, most of them either rescued or from households where they weren’t wanted, and they are absolutely amazing creatures that I still find endlessly fascinating.