peppers – grouchyfarmer

Catching Up: Solar, Gardening, Flowers, New Computer and Stuff

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!

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…

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?

Random Stuff

Sorry, Ain’t Gonna Happen Department

The Zuck VS Musk Fight. Artist’s rendition.

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.

WTF is wrong with people? Seriously.

Catching Up With Gardening

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.

Anyway, that’s it for now.

Catching Up: Wow It’s Been Busy

The late summer is always a busy time for us because it seems that all of the vegetables we’ve been nursing along since early spring all come ripe at the same time and all have to be dealt with right now. We probably have enough wax beans and green beans to last us two years, and enough various tomato sauces to last us almost that long. On one Saturday alone MrsGF and I processed more than 40 pounds of tomatoes to turn them into tomato soup. Plus we did salsa, chili sauce and spaghetti sauce. And that was from just three plants.

Food made with our home grown vegetables always seems to taste better. We don’t buy any canned tomato products any more because the flavors of the grocery store stuff seems flat, insipid and often just plain nasty when compared to what we make ourselves. And often way, way too salty and way too sweet.

But the beans have been done for weeks now. We probably could have gotten another couple of weeks of production out of them but we were so sick of beans we just pulled them out. Tomatoes are pretty much at an end now as well. But the peppers are still going strong and will probably keep going until we get frost. We put in a variety of sweet bell and banana type peppers. We thought we’d have enough to make pickled peppers, but almost all of them have been going into various sauces.

We were only going to put in 3 cucumber plants because I’m the only one who likes to eat them fresh. But somehow we ended up with 6 plants and they went a bit goofy on us and took over the whole garden behind the garage. MrsGF made four different kinds of pickles plus some relish, enough to last us more than a year, and now we’re giving the things away. They’ve started to slow down but they’re still blossoming. I hate to pull out and compost plants that are still healthy and producing but I’m thinking of just pulling them out this week and being done with them.

It’s hard to see in the photo but there are also a half dozen tomato and pepper “volunteer” plants hidden in that mess of cukes somewhere and now those are bearing fruit.

MrsGF and I both love squash but our attempts to grow the stuff haven’t been all that successful. Last year we had powdery mildew that pretty much wiped them out. This year, though, wow… We planted in a more sunny location, worked in hundreds of pounds of compost before we planted, made sure they were well watered during the drought, and it paid off beautifully. The plants are starting to come to the end of their lifetime now, and we’re seeing dozens of massive butternut squash under the leaves. And I mean massive squash. Some of these things are a foot and a half long, and they all look absolutely beautiful.

We picked one yesterday and we’re going to make that one this week and see what it tastes like. Hopefully they’ll taste as good as they look. We’ll probably end up cutting them up into cubes, roasting them and freezing them for use later.

All the sunflowers got knocked down when we had a storm roll through here, but the other flowers and decorative plants made it through the summer fairly well. We’ve had no shortage of flowers out in the gardens this year.

It was a struggle to keep some of this stuff alive during the drought. We were careful to keep the vegetable gardens well watered but we occasionally neglected the ornamental plants. Still most managed to survive and even grow reasonably well until the rains finally came in August.

We have three roses out there in the gardens now and all of them came through the drought and even looked pretty good. We had something, we aren’t sure what, trying to eat the climbing rose, and MrsGF finally resorted to dusting it with something and that seemed to take of that problem. She only had to treat it once.

The hot, dry weather was not kind to the hostas out front, though. Some of those poor guys are looking pretty rough.

This poor guy looks pretty rough but it will survive just fine.

The giant large leafed varieties did a lot better than the more traditional looking narrow leafed types. The variegated varieties seem to have fared worse than the solid colored ones. This time of year the hostas start to look pretty rough anyway. They’ve all flowered now and are going to seed so there is no need for them to keep putting energy into the foliage, I suppose. They’re getting ready to go dormant for winter anyway.

With all of the gardening and harvest stuff going on I haven’t had a lot of time to putter in the woodshop. I haven’t done any wood turning since I produced these two bowls down below…

I love the grain on padauk, and it’s wonderful stuff to work with. It’s not cheap but I think the results are worth the expense.

More padauk. Once it’s finished this stuff almost glows.

this is MrsGF’s favorite. This little one was made from wood salvaged from the old pear tree in the backyard.

I do have some projects in mind, though. I picked up this piece of wood down below at a shop a few weeks ago. Paid way too much for it but I loved the grain and color. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with it.

I’m also trying to adjust to a new computer. I have three main computers, an iMac, a very old Macbook that I use mostly for email and reading the news, and my primary computer, a “gaming” computer my son built for me which I use for just about everything else, including amateur radio, photo and video editing and video streaming and other stuff. The gaming computer was taken out during a severe thunderstorm a few days ago. I think the power supply got fried. I’d been having problems with it for some time and knew it was going to have to be replaced, so I already had a replacement ready to go for a couple of months. Still, it’s a hell of a lot of work to have to try to redo that whole system.

The new one is a fairly high end MSI 17″ gaming laptop which works great for things like video and photo editing and pretty much everything. But I still need to install all my amateur radio software, hook up all the radio gear to it, etc.

But it also gives me a chance to tear everything down and rearrange everything to make things more convenient and less chaotic.

That’s it for now.

Drought Is Over (at least for now), Gardens Going Crazy And a B Movie?

The drought, at least for us here in east central Wisconsin, is over following a week or so of pleasantly damp and relatively cool weather. We got some significant rainfall that’s kick started everything out in the gardens. Unfortunately that also includes weeds, but that’s the way it goes.

We don’t have a lot of raspberry plants, just a fairly small corner of the garden behind the garage. They’re so loaded with fruit this year we had to put up support posts with twine to hold the dopy things up. They’re just starting to ripen right now. This is probably the best crop of berries we’ve had since we put them in a few years ago. We won’t get a lot, but we don’t need a lot. I’m not supposed to eat them because of the seeds, but I can’t help but snagging a handful when I’m working outside. They’re beautiful this year, and sweeter than usual as well.

MrsGF and I both love beets but we’ve had trouble growing them. This year we decided to fill one of the raised beds with them and wow, that worked amazingly well. They’re about 1.5 – 2.5 inches across now and we’ve been harvesting them periodically for over a week now. We just clean them, throw them in a pot, bring them to a boil and then simmer for a few minutes, then plunge into cold water. That lets us slip that outer skin off easily and they’re ready to either freeze or cook up for dinner. They are so good when they’re fresh. Much richer, sweeter flavor. Mostly we just simmer them in water until tender and top off with a bit of salt and pepper. We both love harvard style with a sweet sour sauce as well, but these are so good you don’t need a sauce to perk them up.

We have one bed that’s just assorted peppers. I didn’t think these were ever going to amount to much. They looked healthy enough but just weren’t growing. But now that we’ve had the rainy weather they’ve started to take off. They’ve almost doubled in size in the last 10 days and are starting to blossom. We eat a lot of them fresh off the plants during the season, but most end up diced up and frozen for use during the rest of the year. They get used in tomato sauces, egg dishes, chili, curry, etc. I’m hoping we’ll have enough that I can put up a few pints of pickled peppers as well. I wish I could tell you exactly what’s all planted in there, but not even MrsGF remembers what she all planted in that bed. Which is okay. They all taste good.

Speaking of peppers, I have two jalapeno plants in pots on the front porch again this year. I only grow two because I’m the only one who seems to like them. Last year I put in a ‘no heat’ variety that they claimed tasted like jalapeno but didn’t have the heat. That was sort of true? Kind of? They did taste like jalapeno peppers and they were a bit milder, but I thought they were lacking a bit in flavor. This year I put in normal jalapenos and as you can see they’re starting to fruit. I picked a few for use over the 4th holiday when we had our sons over for a picnic. I’ve been eating them diced up in things like omelets or thinly sliced on a burger. I think they’re delicious. They are definitely not mild but I didn’t think they were that hot until I got my eldest son to try one and he nearly went through the roof. He loves spicy food but he turned bright red, started gasping and had to go walk it off. So a couple of observations. First, apparently I can handle hot peppers a hell of a lot better than I thought I could. Second, I’ve now been told by people who know these things that these peppers are really, really hot, a lot hotter than a normal jalapeno should be. So I’m going to need to be really careful with these when I cook with them so I don’t end up with MrsGF throwing things at me when she recovers from eating them.

The tomatoes have gone absolutely bonkers. In the last two weeks they’ve just about tripled in size and if you could peek in there you’d see dozens of tiny green tomatoes. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing them coming ripe in a week or two the way they’re going. BTW, there are only 3 plants in that bed up there. I am really glad we didn’t put in more.

It’s hard to see now but there are onions all the way around the edge of that bed. We’ve been doing that for a few years now, sort of double cropping. The onions get a head start and get fairly mature before the main crop in the bed gets big enough to compete with them, and by that time the onions are big enough to hold their own and keep growing slowly through the season.

Why grow our own onions when they’re so cheap in the store? Flavor, of course. Most of the commercial onions are decent, but they just don’t have the intensity of flavor that our home grown ones have.

Those are wax beans in front, with some squash plants in the back. The perspective of this photo is kind of weird. The leaves on those squash plants back there are literally as large as dinner plates or even larger.

This is our “super” garden. It is in a corner of the house where the living room meets the kitchen, and faces south and west. We’ve put hundreds of pounds of compost in this garden over the years and that, together with the good drainage and protected, sunny location generally means things grow like crazy in there. And this year is no exception.

Those beans… Dear lord, what are we going to do with all those beans? There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of flowers on those bean plants in there. If half of those turn into beans we could probably fill up the entire freezer with the things. We love wax beans but I suspect we’re going to end up giving away half of these to anyone who’ll take ’em because we’ll never be able to eat all of these.

We also have pole beans in another bed and those look like they’re going to be just as crazy as the wax beans. That’s only about six bean plants in there. Sheesh…

We were only going to put in two cucumber plants because I’m the only one who really likes cukes. The seeds MrsGF planted out here didn’t sprout so she bought a few plants at a local nursery and put those in. And then, of course, the seeds sprouted as well, so it looks like we’re going to have an overabundance of cucumbers as well.

MrsGF is trying to grow blueberries because, well, why not, eh? We had two originally and haven’t had a lot of success with them though. First because we stuck them in a poor location, and when we transplanted them to a better location one didn’t survive so she bought another one. Then the original survivor had some kind of rust that was covering the leaves. We trimmed all of the infected branches off and didn’t think it would survive, but it did and looks pretty healthy. And the new one that we put in this spring has actual fruit on it. Not a lot but heck, even a few dozen berries is better than none.

On the decorative side of things we have these cute little dwarf sunflowers coming up now. along with a few other types in there including one variety that is such a dark purple it looks almost black.

The hot, dry weather didn’t do the hostas any good this year. The poor things look pretty beat up. They usually don’t start looking this poorly until September. Still they’re hanging in there and coming into flower which will hopefully attract the humming birds. I’ve seen a few humming birds but for some reason they aren’t coming to the feeder. I think they had a nest somewhere out back because I’d see them buzzing around back there, but I haven’t seen them for a while now.

Finally, how about a bee video because without bees none of this would even be possible.

Crazy Gardens and Stuff

Well, it’s official. The gardens here have gone nuts. This is probably the best growing season we’ve had since we moved into this place twenty or so years ago. The ornamentals, the vegetales, fruit, everything is looking pretty much spectacular.

We put in a few raspberry plants a few years ago because MrsGF’s sister gave us some, or we wouldn’t have bothered because I can’t (or am not supposed to, anyway) eat raspberries because I have diverticulosis and seeds and nuts can cause it to flare up. They sit in a little 8ft by 8ft patch of the garden behind the garage and they never really did that well. Until this year. For about a week now I’ve been picking a bowl full almost every day. They’re starting to slow down now and will probably stop producing by the middle of next week. Beautiful berries. Just wish I could eat ’em. Sigh…

I wasn’t going to put squash in this year because we haven’t had very good luck with them. But MrsGF found a different variety and put in a few plants and they’re doing good too. So far no sign of powdery mildew which pretty much ruined them last year.

We cut back on the number of tomato plants we put in. Last year we put in 12 or 14 plants and even though it wasn’t a very good year for tomatoes we still had more than we could ever possibly use. We only put in six plants this year in the raised beds and, well, so far it looks like we’re going to get more off those six plants than we got off a dozen of them last year. They’re just barely starting to come ripe now and I’m looking forward to having fresh tomatoes again.

And dear lord, the beans… We put in two varieties this year, a wax bean and some pole beans and we over planted those as well, it seems. The picking season is only just getting started and we already are getting more beans than we know what to do with and are looking for ideas of dealing with ’em. We’ll probably be giving away a lot of produce this year.

We put in a few different varieties of peppers, and it looks like they’re going to be ridiculously prolific as well. I’m not really sure exactly what variety these are. They were labeled “hot pepper”, but no variety was listed. They aren’t really hot, though. They’re actually quite mild. There is a tiny bit of heat there, but they aren’t even close to jalapeno peppers. Nice flavor, though. I think I might try canning some of these as pickled peppers.

I’m a bit concerned about the pear tree. It’s so loaded with fruit that branches that normally are about head height are already being pulled down almost to the ground by the weight of the fruit. I think I’m going to have to start snipping fruit off the branches I can reach before we start having branches breaking off.

I call this the finch corner. The cone flowers and sunflowers are finch magnets, or will be in a week or two as the seeds start to develop more. In a fairly short time this whole corner will be swarming with finches coming for the seeds. Great fun to watch out of the windows of the house.

Let’s see, what else… Oh, I made a – a thing again!

Bottom part is cherry, top is… Well, to be honest I’m not sure what kind of wood the top is made from. It’s a piece of scrap I found down in the shop and thought it made a nice contrast with the bottom. You can see an indentation around the middle of the bottom part. That is going to be stained very dark, almost black, to add contrast.

What the heck is it? Who knows? It isn’t useful as a bowl or anything. It’s a sort of, oh, art piece? Maybe? Kinda?

Fall Wrap Up

Although the temperatures are still ridiculously warm for this time of year, there’s no doubt that autumn is here and the gardening season is winding down and it’s time to look back at what worked, what didn’t, and start making plans for next year.

The tomatoes are pretty much done for the season. We’ll probably still get about 15 lbs or so off the last remaining plants and then we can clean out the raised beds. The tomatoes weren’t as good as I’d really have liked to see, but we still got more than enough to stock our shelves. There was a bit of blossom end rot at the start of the season, but we’d been doing calcium supplementation and that kept it from being a real problem.

One of two shelving units covered with canned stuff. A few of these are from last year but most were done in the last couple of weeks, plus almost as many on the other shelf. Gee, you might get the impression we like tomatoes around here…

The tomatoes all were canned in one way or another this year. We didn’t freeze any because the freezer is packed solid. We did pasta sauce, tomato soup and just plain canned tomatoes for use in things like chili. I didn’t keep track of how many pints and quarts we put up, but it was a hell of a lot. I think we used just about every jar we have. Our big canner can hold 16 pints in a batch, so it really doesn’t take long to do it. I’m writing this as I’m waiting for another batch of 14 pints to finish up.

Those dahlias I picked up for half price in June turned out way, way better than I could have hoped. Amazingly beautiful, long lasting flowers, and they’ve been in perpetual bloom since early July.

That stuff up there inside of those yellow buckets (the bottoms are cut out) is celery. The buckets protect them from critters and makes weed control easy. Works very well indeed and we’ve been growing celery like this for some time. We’ve been cutting celery off those plants since, oh, early August, I think. Cut a few stalks off and it just keeps regrowing. Incredible flavor, too. The thing with commercial celery is that it has little or no flavor. That’s not the case with the home grown stuff. The celery flavor is intense. Very intense. It kind of surprises people who’ve only ever had the commercially grown variety.

I talked before about the mild jalapeno pepper plants I planted in pots on the front porch as an experiment. That worked out beautifully as well. The two plants produced more than enough peppers to keep me satisisfied (I’m the only one who really likes jalapenos so just two plants were enough). And the flavor was very good indeed. They had the right flavor, but very little heat, just what I was looking for. The plants are pretty much done for the season, so I’ll pick the remaining peppers and the plants will go to the compost pile this weekend probably.

Two more successes were the wax beans and the bell peppers. The wax beans are in the front, the peppers behind them. We’d put in a row of green beans, but something ate all of the plants almost as soon as they sprouted, but whatever it was left the wax beans alone. The wax beans more than made up for it though. Great flavor, good texture, and ridiculously prolific. We’ve been picking beans every four or five days since early August and there’s no end in sight, they’re still in full blossom and producing beans.

The bell peppers seem to always do good in this location. We’ve been getting absolutely beautiful peppers off the plants this year. They’ve been well formed, growing to almost ridiculously large sizes, thick walls, firm texture, good flavor. A lot get eaten fresh but we’ve been dicing up and freezing some as well.

Not everything was successful, though. We aren’t going to get any pears off our tree this year. The tree looks nice and healthy, but almost no fruit. The problem was the weather. When the tree was in full blossom the weather was still ridiculously cold and wet, so it didn’t get pollinated. In fact, I didn’t even start to see bees until two or three weeks after the three blossomed. Earlier in the year I counted about 20 or so pears on the entire tree. There are maybe fifteen up there now, and I saw today that something is eating them while they’re still on the tree. Birds, probably.

The other disappointment is the squash. It started out well but went nowhere fast. Only one plants looks reasonably healthy, but it’s much smaller than it should be and only has a couple of gourds on it. The other plants are much worse, with a few very undersized gourds that will probably end up in the compost. We get lots of blossoms, but very little fruit. I think this is the last year we’re going to try growing squash. It just doesn’t work out for us.

We need to start doing garden clean up much earlier than we normally wood. MrsGF is going in for knee replacement surgery in early October so we want to have everything done that we possibly can before then because after that, well, trying to get anything done outside is going to be awkward because I’m not going to want to leave her alone in the house with a bum leg while I’m out puttering in the gardens.

We’re already talking about putting in a third and maybe even a fourth raised bed for vegetables next spring. They just work amazingly well and are so much easier to take care of than a regular garden plot would be. We’ll probably keep putting veggies in the corner where the beans and peppers are, but the rest of our yard? The soil is so poor and gets so water logged in rainy conditions that it’s difficult, even impossible to grow much of anything except ornamentals.

That’s it for now. Time to pull the jars out of the canner and start cleaning things up.

Let’s see, what else? I’m putting together an evaluation of a new transceiver I just picked up a couple of weeks ago, a Yaesu FT-450D. I hear so many people complaining about how expensive amateur radio is that I wanted to do an article proving that it really isn’t anywhere near as expensive as people think it is, and the 450 is at the core of that piece.

Moving all my equipment to the new location in the basement is about half done, but is now on hold because of MrsGF’s upcoming surgery. I can’t be hiding down in the basement while she’s recovering from knee replacement, so I’m going to be leaving the big equipment up here so I have something to play with while keeping an eye on her and making sure she isn’t trying to do something she shouldn’t. I know her, and I know damn well that she’s going to try pushing things too far, too fast.

And here’s a picture of a cat. Just because.

Garden Catch Up, Storms and Stuff

If you want photos of the storm damage, go look on news sites in this area. There are enough of those out there already. The gardens made it through the storms with little or no damage, somehow, so I can still take photos like this.

Northeast Wisconsin got absolutely hammered by severe storms, some of the strongest we’ve ever seen around here. The training I’ve had for SkyWarn taught me how to estimate wind speed fairly accurately, and I guessed we had wind gusts of up to 75 MPH here, and the NWS reports later confirmed that. It was scary here for a while. We were lucky, though. The worst of it seems to have skipped around this area. Other areas, especially just to the north and west of us got hit hard. There were three tornadoes. NWS reported winds of up to 120 MPH in Wrightstown, about 10 miles north of here. Outagame, Brown and Winnebago counties all are reporting very serious damage. Thousands of people are still without power around us, and the utilities are saying conditions in those areas are so bad from downed trees, broken power poles, etc. that it could be days before everyone has their power restored.

The only good thing about it is that the cold front that triggered the storms has finally brought relief from the extended streak of heat and humidity we were going through. My thermometer here recorded high temps well up into the 90s, with humidity of 95% or higher. The highest temp we hit was 97 according to the recorder. The heat index was well up in the 100s. I’m going to hate to see what our electric bill looks like. Our air conditioner was running full blast for days struggling to keep the temperatures in the house down to a reasonable level. I’m very surprised it’s managed to keep going at all.

While the extreme temperatures haven’t been good for people, the plants around here seem to have been loving it. Everything is lush and green and growing like crazy. Unfortunately we also seem to have a bumper crop of mosquitoes this year as well because of all the rain we’ve gotten. So here are some pictures of what’s growing around here.

The sunflowers are just barely starting to come into bloom. This is the first one that’s popped out.

this is a new one for us. MrsGF put this climbing rose in at the start of the season and it’s decided that it really likes it here. It’s tripled in size and and has been flowering almost continuously for the last three weeks.

Ah, our poor pear tree. It looks more lush and wild than it really is because you’re seeing the canopy of the tree immediately behind it as well. It’s reasonably healthy, but almost no pears at all this year. I’ve counted less than a dozen young pears on the entire tree, and I’m surprised we have those. When it was in flower it was extremely cold and wet, and there were no bees around at all, so it didn’t get pollinated.

MrsGF and I are both enormously fond of mountain ash trees (they’re actually not an ash, they’re part of the rose family, so the emerald ash borer doesn’t attack them). We have one in the backyard and we see seedlings popping up all the time, so we transplanted one into a corner of the hosta bed where it seemed to fit in, and it likes it there. The photo doesn’t do it justice. It’s really been thriving there. It’s more than doubled in size in the last month or so.

We tucked onions into the edges of the raised beds around the tomatoes this year as an experiment and it’s worked way better than we ever hoped. They’re absolutely beautiful. It’s a mixed variety of red, yellow and white onions, and they’re all doing well. Bulbs are about 2 inches thick and they taste amazing.

This is one of two jalapeno plants we have in pots on the front porch. They’re an experiment. It’s a new variety I found that claimed it had all the flavor of a jalapeno but without the heat. Now I love jalapeno peppers, but sometimes the heat gets a bit much for me. I’ve had mixed results growing them in the past, with a wide variation in the amount of heat they produce, even in fruit from the same plant. These have lived up to their billing. All the bright, crisp flavor but with very little heat. Just enough to remind me it’s a jalapeno. I dice ’em up and throw them in omelets, mac and cheese, anywhere I want to turn something bland into something a bit more interesting. I’ve been picking these little guys on a regular basis for the last, oh, two or three weeks. Even MrsGF has been using them. Definitely a success. I’ll probably be putting about 4 of these plants in next year. That should be enough to freeze to supply us through the winter.

The tomatoes have been going crazy. We planted way too many of them last year so we still have shelves full of canned tomatoes in the basement, so we only put in half as many plants as last year, and now that seems it may have been too many. They’re in full flower right now, and if they produce as prolifically as it seems right now, I don’t know what we’ll do with all of them. But that’s a good thing. I’d rather have too many. We can always give them away to friends and family if we can’t deal with all of them. We’ve managed to avoid blossom end rot once we switched to using the raised beds, but there were some signs last year we might be heading for a problem, so we’ve been using a calcium supplement to try to fend that off.

Wax beans and bell peppers in the background. The wax beans are amazing. We’ve been picking those for about a week now. They’re young and tender and delicious. We aren’t sure what happened to the green beans we planted. Something ate them off, leaving only the stems, almost as soon as they emerged, but left the wax beans alone. This area is fenced to keep the rabbits out so it wasn’t them. We aren’t sure what got them, and why they left the wax beans alone. Well, at least they left us those.

The raspberries are behind the garage where they get shade all morning and part sun all afternoon, and they really seem to like that. They’ve taken over that entire end of the garden and they’re loaded with fruit. I’m not supposed to eat raspberries or anything with small seeds, but I have to admit that I watch those plants like a hawk when they’re starting to fruit and it’s very rare that a berry escapes me and makes it into the house.

Garden Stuff

The hostas loved the cool, wet spring. They’re wonderfully lush this year.

Despite all the water we’ve been getting the gardens have been doing pretty good. We’re still a bit behind schedule because of the cool weather we had up until now, but the gardens at the house are definitely doing better than what the farmers around here have been experiencing.

When we bought this place some twenty or so years ago the front of the house was a mess. The space between the front of the house and the sidewalk was a nasty little border type flower bed mulched with small stones, sort of curved and indented, with some of the worst grass I’d ever seen between that and the sidewalk. It was a maintenance nightmare. The plants up there were some of the worst you could possibly select for a border, and because of the stones it was impossible to properly weed or do anything to improve the horrible soil.

We finally got fed up, went in with the tractor and ripped everything out, scooped up the stones with the front end loader and hauled them to a friend’s farm where he used them for fill, and we put in the cedar rail fence and the hostas. No bushes to trim any more, the fence has weathered to look like it’s been there for generations, and the only maintenance is to go in with a hoe and knock the few weeds growing in the mulch down once in a while. There are a couple of spots where I want a bit better coverage so I might throw in a few more hostas.

The tomatoes are looking pretty good. We put in a lot less of them than last year because we were nearly overwhelmed by them last year. We still have enough canned tomatoes to last us probably through 2019, although all of the soup and pasta sauce got used up.

With fewer tomatoes we had some extra room in the raised beds so we put onions in along the edge and they’re doing beautifully. We tried raising them in a different spot but they never got enough light and didn’t do well. They’re looking fantastic in this new location. They’re big enough now that I can run outside and pull a couple whenever I need onions for anything. I love green onions so they may never reach maturity, but that’s okay.

Every year I have to put in something different, this year it’s this, something that the label says is a “hot salsa pepper”. And that is literally all it says. I don’t know what variety or anything else about it. It is starting to produce pretty little yellow peppers, so that’s something. I picked one yesterday and tried it and it is most definitely not hot. Not by any standards. I’m not one of those people who loves peppers that make your face turn red and your eyes bug out and necessitate a trip to the ER because they’re so bad, but I do like a pepper that bites back at least a little. Jalapenos are about the limit of what I can handle for heat. But these, well, there’s just nothing there at all. Hopefully they’ll get better as they mature.

Speaking of jalapenos, I got another experiment going in pots on the front steps, a “mild” jalapenos. The two plants are doing quite well, both are in flower now and one is starting to develop fruits. The blurb on the tag was “all of the flavor without the heat”. I’ve tried variations of peppers like this before that claimed they still had flavor without heat, and they were disappointing. Usually when they breed out the heat, they also breed out the flavor, alas. But we’ll see what happens with these. They certainly are looking healthy.

And then, of course, there’s the water. Oh brother… The ground is still so saturated that you can audibly hear it squishing when you walk through the grass. And the whole area back by the raised vegetable beds still had standing water under the grass as you can see in that photo. If we didn’t have the raised beds nothing would be growing back there this year. I don’t think we’ve gone more than three days in a row without significant rainfall since April.

Let’s wrap this up with this one:

I end up with dozens of photos of that lily every year because I love the color, the shape of the flowers, and just about everything about that plant. It certainly didn’t disappoint this year.