Tag: photography

It’s Iris Time! Plus Assorted Stuff!

Yes, it’s iris time again. If you’ve been following this blog for a while you must know by now that I absolutely love irises. We have a whole garden devoted almost excolusively to irises. And they’re just coming into full flower now. Here are a few photos from earlier today.

And for no reason at all, here’s a silly cat image I stole borrowed from Pete over at https://beetleypete.com/ If you enjoy posts from a retired English gentleman who occasionally puts up very silly images, posts some delightful fiction and chats about life in general in the small town of Beetley, in Norfolk, go check it out. He is a lovely, gentle soul, with a wry sense of humor.

Other stuff:

Meanwhile I’ve been working on this…

It is, heaven help me, a cat riding a T-Rex through the deserts of Utah. Thats going to be engraved on a 37cm X 25cm panel inlaid into a gift box MrsGF is making. Sometimes the stuff I come up with when I sit down with Photoshop makes me wonder what’s wrong with my brain. But never mind.

BTW: If any of you out there would be interested in that image up there let me know and I could make it available for downloading here. I think. Maybe. It would be as a standard .PNG file that would be suitable for importing into a laser engraver. If you’re interested let me know at theoldgrouch@grouchyfarmer.com. I never really intended to set this up to download files but if people are interested in stuff like this I’d probably set up a separate page here with just a listing of downloadable files for laser cutting/engraving.

If you have comments or questions you can reach me at that email address as well.

Weather

The weather has been, well, odd, to say the least. Over in Two Rivers about 20 or s0 miles from here where friends of ours live, they had an intense and highly localized storm that leveled half the trees in the city the other day. Parts of the town were without power for three days. They estimate they had straight line winds up to 80 mph. Meanwhile just a few miles away they got nothing but some rain.

Temperatures have been highly erratic here. One day we have a high in the 50s, the next it can be well over 80. Yesterday it hit 92 here. Now it’s getting cooler and we might struggle to hit 65 by the end of the week. They were predicting thunderstorms last night but those fizzled out before they even really got started. We got about a tenth of inch of rain and that was it.

It’s very, very dry out there. We’re going to have to start watering the gardens already tomorrow.

Weather patterns are changing drastically all around the world. I have friends and family scattered around the globe and what I hear from them is often downright frightening. In India where my niece’s husband’s family is from, this May has been one of the warmest on record with temperatures pushing 113F in Delhi. One of my best friends lives in Barcelona half the year and they’re seeing temperatures pushing up to 100F or beyond. Even in the UK temperatures have been pushing up into the 90s.

Farming

With a name like grouchyfarmer I suppose I should talk about the ag industry at least briefly. Even though I’ve wandered far away from farming long ago and have dabbled in everything from writing to electronics to arts and crafts, I’m still a farmer at heart and what I see going on out there in the ag world is heartbreaking. Especially since all of the problems farmers are having right now are due entirely to decisions being made by power mad, greedy politicians who only care about enriching themselves and clinging desperately to their little bits of power and influence.

Farm bankruptcy rates are up by 50% or more in the last year, and look like they’re going to get even worse as time goes on.

Diesel, the fuel farmers use in their equipment, has gone up more than 60%, from about $3.47 to $5.60. Even as high as $7.50 in some places like California.

Fertilizer prices have spiked up 61% as well, and exactly at the wrong time when planting season is here and young plants need to be fertilized to get strong growth.

Meanwhile prices farmers get for two of their primary crops, corn and soybeans, have plummeted to the point where it looks like most farmers around here aren’t even going to be able to break even.

Dairy farmers are doing a bit better, but they have problems too. I know some farmers around here who are working 18 hour days because all of their hired help basically packed up and fled, even if they were in the country legally. Word is out that if you’re Hispanic, even if you’re in the country legally, you’re going to be swept up, detained for weeks if not months, and probably end up deported even if you have a green card. We used to have a fairly large number of Hispanic families here in town. Wonderful people who were hard working, honest, friendly and becoming part of the community. They’re all gone. All of them.

It’s going to be a hard year for farmers around here. A very hard year. And the tragic part of it is that this is 100% the fault of that bunch of sniveling, greedy, power mad politicians in DC. And I mean both political parties are at fault here. Democrats and Republicans both are more concerned with maintaining their little bits of power, trying to suck up ever more money from corporations and oligarchs through this system of legalized bribery we call a campaign financing system, that they’ve entire forgotten that they are supposed to be the representatives of the people in their home districts.

Okay, rant over. I swore I was not going to get political here in this blog and for the most part I’ve kept that promise. But when I see the sheer crap that is going on in Washington and here in Madison in the state legislature… Never mind. Enough.

Astronomy

It’s been so long since I talked about it here that you’ve probably forgotten that I’m also an amateur astronomer. That’s one of my telescopes down there, my 11″ Celestron.

I’ve reached a point in my life where I just have too many interests and hobbies and I’ve started to do a bit of triage. I’ve pushed aside some things like tinkering with electronics and a few other things to have more time to devote to the things I enjoy the most. So I’m able to spend more time with photography, art, the whole engraving thing and yes, astronomy.

My interests have changed a bit over the years. I’ve become more interested in astrophotography than in direct visual observation, especially photography of deep sky objects. The Celestron is a fantastic telescope but there are “issues”. It’s size and weight are one. That sucker is big and it is heavy. The optical tube assembly weighs in at around 60+ pounds and I’m not exactly a spring chicken any more. Trying to maneuver that thing up and down the stairs, getting it set up on its mount, etc, well I’m just not physically capable of wrestling with that thing without risking dropping $5,000 telescop down the back stairs. So it’s gone to live with my eldest son who is planning on using it as the core for a fixed observatory set up in his back garden with a small building with a roll off roof, concrete pier, power, internet, etc.

Meanwhile I have a new telescope on order that should be here by June 7, they tell me.

And as you can see, it is something entirely different from the Celestron. It doesn’t even look like a telescope to be honest. For one thing it is exclusively an astrograph telescope, it does photography only. It doesn’t permit visual observation at all. In fact I don’t even have to be near it to operate it. It is controlled by a tablet computer or app on a cell phone via WiFi or bluetooth so I no longer have to endure the clouds of mosquitoes that we get around here. Just set it up after dark, turn it on, and then sit in my nice, air conditioned house controlling it entirely by computer from the kitchen table. Or if I take it out to my sister in law’s farm to get away from the light pollution, from inside of my car.

I admit that I’m taking a bit of a chance here. I find it hard to believe that a scope this small and this cheap can get the results I see in the reviews of this thing. Supposedly this thing can get good images of even difficult deep sky objects like the Horse Head nebula in just a few minutes, even in relatively poor conditions. And it’s only about $600 compared to around $5,000 for something like my Celestron. It sounds too good to be true.

After I’ve had a chance to get it set up and have figured out how to use it, I’ll talk about it more.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Time for me to get out of here!

Flowers

The other day I was taking photos out in the gardens and the light was just about perfect so here are three of my favorite photos. You should be able to see the images in full size if you click on the photo.

I love zinnias almost as much as I love irises. There are at least a dozen different varieties in the mix MrsGF put in back around the old stump.

Something, we aren’t sure what, has been eating the buds off our lilies but this one somehow managed to survive.

And then there’s this one, which is my personal favorite.

Just look at the color on that little poppy. It’s so brilliant that it almost glows.

That’s it for now.

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!

Out And About

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.

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

It’s been a while since I wrote anything here so let’s get caught up.

Haze from the Canadian wildfire smoke seems to be an almost permanent thing these days.

Smoke from the Canadian wildfires is still an issue here. I wish I’d kept track of the number of days we’ve been under air quality warnings because of it, but I haven’t bothered. I have respiratory allergies and this stuff hits me hard. For about four weeks straight I was on Claritin which did help, but I was still sniffling and sneezing and hacking until the air cleared up a bit.

The bell peppers are doing very well indeed this year. We’ve already started harvesting and eating these guys and some of the banana peppers.

The vegetable gardens are doing quite well despite the drought, but we’ve had to water everything pretty much every evening until just recently when we started to get a bit of rain. We’ve been harvesting wax beans every other day or so for about two weeks now. Some we eat fresh, most are blanched and bagged and frozen. The tomatoes are looking pretty good too with lots of young fruit on the vines.

MrsGF put in some jalapenos this year as well. We have a couple in pots in front of the house to make it easy to snag one to mince up to throw into an omelet or soup or something, and there are a couple out in one of the raised bed. Last year they didn’t do well at all for some reason but this year it looks like we’re going to get way more than we’ll need. I’m the only one who eats these things but I’m never going to be able to eat all of these so I’ll end up freezing a lot of them for use later.

We have a few “volunteer” sunflowers that popped up all on their own which happens sometimes. The birds and chipmunks drop the seeds from the bird feeder into the gardens. We generally leave them alone because, well, sunflowers are just fun.

First the smoke and then the extraordinarily hot weather we’ve had have been curtailing my biking. It’s hard to enjoy getting out on the bike when either the air is so think with smoke you can chew it or the temperatures are pushing up into the 90s. We had storms roll through last night that have brought a bit cooler temperatures and seem to have helped clear the air so maybe I can get out today and do a 10 or 15 mile ride. We’ll see.

Utility Companies Are Not Your Friends Department

For those of you in Wisconsin who might be thinking of setting up a solar power system and selling power back to your electric utility, don’t bother. It isn’t worth the time, effort or equipment costs. One of the big utilities has dropped the rate they pay to home solar owners down to a whopping 4 cents per kWh. Two more of the big utilities just applied for permission to drop the rate they pay down to 4 cents as well. Sigh…

I’m Bored So How About Some Photos?

Bored… So bored… Let’s look at some flowers

Mr. Spiny the cactus is doing beautifully this year. Brilliant flowers for a week now.
The poppies, like dill and a few other things in the garden, come up by themselves every year. I’m not a big fan of these. The flowers are beautifully colored but they only last a day or two.
This little guy was one I found along the side of the road out in the country when I was on the bike the other day. Google tells me that it’s a type of rose.
Columbine is another volunteer that keeps coming back year after year. Very pretty flowers but the darn things spread like weeds in the garden, usually turning up where we don’t want them.

Finally the drought…

This used to be a small river, a branch of the Manitowoc river just outside of the town where I live. Note the white box in the bottom center of the photo. That’s an old computer someone pitched over the bridge.

Dear lord it’s dry here! This is one of the worst droughts I’ve seen in years. I can’t remember seeing water levels in the local lakes and rivers this low. We haven’t had a decent rain since early May. What rain we did get has been very spotty. One day when we did get some rain moving through the area if I looked out one window it was raining, but it wasn’t raining on the other side of the house. The corn fields are looking terrible in a lot of places around here, the leaves curling up and in some places even turning brown.

We’ve been watering the gardens almost every day so they’ve been doing okay but the other stuff… We’ve actually had to start watering the hosta garden in front of the house. That’s the first time in about 15 years that we’ve had to water them.

There’s a 50% chance of rain today and tomorrow. We’re keeping our fingers crossed.

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.

More Flowers (Ooo, the excitement)

After a rather dreary and cool spring, summer has hit with a vengeance. Temperatures for the last few days have been abnormally hot, in the high 80s and low 90s, temperatures we usually don’t see until well into mid summer. It’s also been very dry. We haven’t had a decent rain in something like a month now. Grass normally doesn’t go brown and dormant around here until late July. My lawn is already as dry as dust and turning brown. Still, the flower beds seem to be enjoying it and it’s a riot of color out there.

There are the irises, of course. They’re looking absolutely stunning right now.

But if you stop and get down on the ground and peer around you’ll find little treasures as well, like these…

With the showy irises taking center stage it would be easy to overlook those little guys up there.

And no collection of flower photos would be complete without the first rose of the season.

That’s it for now. The weather changed drastically. We went from hot and dry to cold and wet which is actually something of a relief. We hadn’t had any rain in something like a month and a half before this weather system moved in so no one is complaining.

Autumn

The weather here in NE Wisconsin was absolutely beautiful for a few days and I took advantage of that and got out on the bike for a while. But that’s changing fast. They’re now talking about a possibility of snow for us by next week. Sigh…

Jalapeno peppers still growing outside in mid October? Yep. Actually they’re doing better now than they did all summer. I didn’t get more than a dozen or so peppers of both plants during the summer but now the dopey things are covered with flowers and baby fruits. Go figure…

But that being said we have no right to complain. The fall weather has been pretty darned nice. We still haven’t had a hard freeze. We’ve had a few mornings when there was frost on the ground but not enough to really cause any damage. We still have flowers growing around the house and I have two jalapeno pepper plants that are still in flower for heaven’s sake.

Some of the flowers that have survived this fall so far are a bit surprising, like the alyssum. This little cluster of flowers popped up in the spring all by themselves, which surprised me a great deal. But I was very pleased to see them because I love those tiny little flowers, not just because they’re beautiful but because some types of alyssum are amazingly fragrant.

Getting out on the backroads and trails on the bike this fall has been great fun. I’m really going to miss being out there every day once winter hits. It’s been especially interesting out there because I’ve been seeing a lot of reptiles and amphibians out there, far more than usual. I’ve seen dozens of snakes, usually grass snakes and the like. We have two of those little beauties living in the backyard. Unfortunately they’re fast little buggers and my attempts to get them on camera haven’t been very successful. I’ve seen quite a few of them out in the wild as well. Unfortunately I’ve also seen quite a few of them flattened on the roads as well because some of them have a habit of sunning themselves on the roadway.

I’ve seen quite a few turtles out there too, including Fred, who is a regular sight down near the stone bridge that goes over the river.

Almost any sunny day I’d find Fred sunning himself on his favorite spot. He’s a cute little guy, maybe about six inches across with beautiful markings. I’ve managed to get about six or seven fairly decent photos of him.

Most of the migrating birds are gone now. I’ve seen a few cranes still hanging around but those will be gone soon. Ducks and geese are mostly gone. I’ve seen very few birds coming to the feeder in the yard as well. I haven’t had to refill in it some time now. But this time of year the seed eating birds are finding more than enough to eat out there in the wild.

Let’s see, what else? MrsGF and I are sketching out plans for major changes to the gardens now that those big trees are down. Now that the area back there is getting full sun it opens up a lot of options. We want to move two of the raised vegetable beds over to that area because they’re now getting shaded out by a fast growing maple where they are now. The area where the beds are now may become occupied by a garden shed because we need the storage space. We want to put a large decorative raised bed where the stump from the ash tree is located, one that matches the existing bed we have now that surrounds the little maple.

That’s not going to be a cheap project, though. If we do everything we’ve been thinking of it’s probably going to end up costing us in the neighborhood of $5K when it’s all said and done.

We’re still waiting for the garage door company to get the new doors in so they can replace the 30+ year old garage doors and openers. They’re in pretty rough shape and I don’t think they’ll last the winter.

Let’s wrap this up with a siamese cat because why not?

Meg, we’re not sure how old she is but she’s at least 16, maybe 17, and an absolute sweetheart. This foot rubbing thing is fairly new with her but I’m told it isn’t uncommon with kitties. She’s turned into quite the lap cat. If there is a lap anywhere in the house, she will find it and sit on it. She has this thing now where when she’s on my lap she likes to climb up on my chest and rub her face in my beard which is cute but that cat’s claws are like little razors and when she gets relaxed she starts doing this kneading thing it gets a bit interesting.

Oh, almost forgot, the new vacuum thingie. It’s a Shark self emptying robotic vacuum. Normally I wouldn’t have bought one of these but I got the dopey thing on some kind of sale on Amazon for less than half the normal retail price. It was marked down to $200 or so from $500, and I admit that it was sort of an impulse buy.

Now we had a robot vacuum before, one of the early Roomba machines, and it was utterly horrible in every single way. It was incredibly noisy. It couldn’t deal with even 1/4″ tall thresholds between rooms, couldn’t deal with, well, it couldn’t deal with anything, really. It fell down the basement stairs twice. It would just stop dead in its tracks for no apparent reason. And even worse it was damn near worthless at actually cleaning anything.

This one is actually surprisingly good. It maps the rooms as it cleans so it can develop a more efficient pattern of movement. It doesn’t just scurry around at random. It’s been able to negotiate even the rather steep threshold between the dining room and living room. It wanders back to its dock and recharges itself when it needs to and when the battery is topped off it picks up where it left off. And best of all it empties itself! The bin on the dock has to be dumped every couple of weeks or so but that’s no big deal. It hasn’t fallen down the basement stairs yet. And best of all it does a pretty darned nice job cleaning the floors.

I’m not quite sure what in the world it’s doing under the sofa, though. It seems to spend an inordinate amount of time under there when it’s cleaning. Since it has wifi I suspect it’s looking at porn while it’s under there.

Anyway we’ve had this thing for a couple of weeks now and we’ll see how it goes. So far we like it. Even the cat doesn’t mind it.