Hello!
Well, the year is winding down, and I’ve been working full time while everything else suffers. I suppose that I can’t complain because with two incomes, we’ve actually been able to have some fun and make some much needed improvements around the house. Our flooded basement problem which had been ongoing for about a year and a half has been resolved by a nice, actual plumber who came and blew out all the drains in the basement with a high pressure hose. A large pile of dire, junk and wood chips popped down in the swamp, and the basement is not only well-drained, it isn’t even damp any more!
When the basement was so easily resolved, we got really bold and got a new roof on the house, too. Both of these have been great decisions, as we were starting to get concerned about the number of shingles we were finding the yard after every wind storm, and it does get windy up here. In each case, we had people who gave us estimates for the work that were very drastic. People wanted to jackhammer the basement. We dug a six foot deep hole in the yard. A Lowes contractor gave us an estimate for doing the roof that was about $1700 more than we actually had it done for. I advise going local, working with a bank for loans, using family and friends as a contact for finding people to do work around the house. Our roofing team was made up of one of my aunt’s nephews from her side of the family, a grandson of a guy my mom graduated high school with and one of their friends. They were actual contractors, but it seemed like people we didn’t know were more expensive and less reliable.
With the basement nice and dry, I could get some work done on the wood stove which had been mightily abused since it’s been wet down there. I tipped it on its side and sanded off all the rust and mud and splashes of hydraulic cement and caulk from my failed attempts to patch the floor. I repainted with Rustoleum high temperature paint. I don’t recommend it. There are other stove black paints that seem to stick to the metal better, but when I refired the store after using the Rustoleum, there were a lot fewer fumes than with other paint brands, so it wasn’t all bad. So I have a nice, clear freshly painted stove and lots of hickory wood to burn in it, too!
This year was just a terrible year for the garden, but there were some nice things. I have actually planted fall peas, and they are actually doing better than the ones from the spring. Even though you can’t save the seeds (even from supposedly non-hybrid seeds!) I recommend Burpee’s snowbird snow peas because you don’t have to stake them, and you get edible peas very soon. If I had been thinking, I would have also put in more lettuces so we could have a late fall salad of greens and peas. Carrots were good, but I have decided that Nelson-type carrots have a strong, soapy taste that I don’t care for. Luckily, they grew really well. It was also a great year for all kinds of berries even though I believe that my blackberry patch may be on the way out. The Caroline Raspberries that my sister got me as a present my first birthday here are still producing, and the berries are as big as blackberries and taste like koolaide they are so sweet! Not enough for jam, though, and it seems like every time I have a day off it’s either Sunday or raining, so I have not been to pick raspberries this year.
I also have a little patch of groundcherries that are still producing. Now, these are little tomatoes which grow in husks and look like little yellow tomatillos or those orange Chinese lantern plants. They are all related, part of the nightshade family, actually. Groundcherries have this lovely golden color and tiny seeds and a taste that is part citrus and part butterscotch (I think.) they will produce up to the frost, and the book that I read a while ago called “Little Heathens” about this family growing up during the Great Depression has a lot about them, actually. Apparently, they used to pick a lot of them still unripe to save them from the frost. Then, they would lay them out even just on the floor of the upstairs rooms that were buttoned up and closed for the winter. They would keep and also ripen slowly and could be used for pies and snacks until they were gone.
I don’t have a lot of places to lay things out like that in this house. (Though I grew up in a house that was large enough that we did close up one bedroom and one living room every winter so we did not have to heat them.) And every single recipe that I have for ground cherry jam takes about six cups of them. That is a lot of space in the garden to get that much fruit, and usually goatastrophe strikes at least a couple of times a year, reducing the amount of groundcherries I have on hand. (Goats love them!)
I did find out good recipe that used ground cherries that I tried this year, though. It’s from the Farm Journal Freezing and Canning Cookbook, and despite the warnings of the nice Home Extension ladies that taught a canning course I attended this year to never use canning recipes from before 1994, I tried it, and I’m going to share it.
Autumn Cherry Conserve:
3/4 cup ripe ground cherries
1 13.5 oz can crushed pineapple (1 2/3 cup)
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Grated peel and Juice of one orange
5 medium apples, finely diced
1 cup cranberries
1 pack powdered fruit pectin
4 1/2 cups sugar
Hull, wash and prick ground cherries. Combine with Pineapple, lemon juice, grated orange rind and juice and apples, add cranberries.
Bring to a boil, add pectin and stir while bringing to a boil.
Add sugar, stirring constantly. Bring to a full, rolling boil over high heat, boil hard one minute, stirring constantly.
Removed from heat. Skim and stir alternately for 5 minutes.
Pour into hot jars, seal. Makes 5-6 half pints.
Okay, when I made this one, I got closer to 7 jelly jars and one little ittybitty. I also put all the juices into the pan and then chopped at added the apples so they didn’t get brown.
I also followed with 5 minutes in a boiling water bath and used the “modern” method of just getting the jars hot instead of sterilizing them ahead of time. You’ll want the apples very fine, because with just a little boil at the beginning and a minute long boil at the ned, I didn’t feel they got smooshy enough. Also, pop the cranberries as soon as they get juicy and hot because they will not burst on their own, and a whole cranberry on toast is a bit tart. Substitute 2 tablespoons of lemon juice for the juice of a half lemon.
This recipe smells like Christmas in a jar, and it was a good one, too, because it uses just odds and ends. My mom goes to the next town over to do med checks for people and usually hands out fruit as a “thank you for coming to your appointment” present. I only had to buy cranberries and a can of pineapple special since I could use up all her leftovers from her patients for the rest of the fruit in the recipe.
One last thing:
You heard it here first. OK, this is the official weather prediction for the year. Remember last year when all the bees and hornets were building their nests up in the high branches of the trees, and didn’t we get going on 250 inches of snow, including our first 18 inches about a year ago this week? This year, we had our neighbor brushog the little acre field at the back of the lot, and he had to stop to get out two nests of ground bees. This is just unheard of in a year that is this wet, because ground bees will get downed out with all the heavy rain. And then, we also had remove a nest from right inside the basement. The easiest winder we ever had up here, there were little nests in the scrub hawthorns and one under the lowest branches of the spruce tree were use for our Christmas tree every year. This year I haven’t seen any up high nests and the bees are actually nesting the the ground. I have a good feeling about this, except for the whole thing where we had a giant fricking yellowjacket nest in the basement next to the washing machine!
Showing posts with label Weather prediction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Weather prediction. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Monday, December 1, 2008
The Holiday Season Begins, and I Make My Own Soap (Kind of)
Hi!
It is still snowing!. We had a little break over Halloween, but since then, we have had a few major snow storms. My adopted hometown of Corry, PA actually made it onto the Erie news as a trivia question a couple of days before thanksgiving in a kind of “Guess How Much Snow They Got?” capacity. The answer then was 58 inches, but we’ve piled on a little more since then. We've had a bit of a melting period, however, where a lot of the icicles broke off the house and the snow has settled a little so that it’s about knee deep instead of waist deep. I’ve been pretty annoyed lately with the whole weather service which will predict snow when we don’t get any and also an inch to a coating when it will turn around and give us half a foot. Today is the first day of deer season, and it is an unofficial holiday. The road is covered with snow, and it was just ice yesterday, but the only answer for it is slow down and try to stay on, since the guys who run the plows are all out hunting today. Sounds like a war zone out there.
One more thing about the weather and then I’ll go on to the next thing I’ll ramble about. The almanac predicts heavy snows in the northeast the 12th through the 15th of this month. I’m going to hold them to it!
I did Black Friday shopping this year in Erie, even going into Walmart. (I didn’t buy anything. I just carried stuff for my sister.) I kept hearing a lot of horror stories about how bad it would be, and I guess in other places, there were deaths and injuries from people trampling to get inside the store, but in Erie, it was just crowded. I recently went to a “Twilight” book and movie party at the bookstore there, too, with a younger cousin, and my aunt ( her mother) was not keen on going because she thought it would be a lot of shrieking. In fact, it was mostly giggling. We’re from Northwestern PA, and we are kind of stand-offish. We want the cheap DVD players and laptops, but it’s just not nice to bump into other people to get them.
Getting down to brass tacks, here is another edition of “I Try It”.
Everytime I go through my recycling, I’ve been noticing the greatest portion of my junk is those stupid plastic containers that some genius thinks that cat food should come in now and laundry soap bottles. I can change brands of cat food and if I fee the need for a plastic container I can buy or reuse one I already have, but I was pretty much stuck with laundry soap. I keep trying to use powder or even those little dissolvable tablets that I think come from Amway, but powdered soap just doesn’t rinse out well enough, and underclothes are enough of a bother already without added itching factors.
People have tried to overcome this whole laundry soap thing for a while now. they have double concentrated soap which is an okay idea. I remember back in the ‘80’s for a little while you could get little super concentrated things of soap that you dumped into your old bottles and mixed up with more water. That didn’t last too long, but it was a good idea. I’ve seen little containers of homemade laundry soap for sale at the Amish store, but it was powder based and also had bluing in it, which I’ve heard of but never actually used. Which come to think of it, is probably why most commercial laundry soap is colored blue even though the color really does nothing.
In a recent issue of Countryside magazine, however, I noticed this part at the beginning where the readers write in with questions and tips a recipe for homemade laundry soap. I tried it because I actually had all the ingredients on hand anyway.
The recipe:
1/3 bar of Fels-naphtha soap, grated
1/2 C. washing soda (not baking soda, though it is made by Arm and Hammer)
1/2 C. Borax
1 Tblsp. essential oil (optional)
2 gallon jugs (vinegar jugs)
How to do it:
Grate soap into a large pan with 6 cups of water, heat until the soap melts. Add the soda and the Borax and the scent. Stir to dissolve, heat another 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Take of the heat, let it sit another 5 minutes. Divide this in half into each of the gallon jugs. Fill the jugs halfway with plain hot water. Shake and then fill to the top. Let the jugs set overnight, and it will have a gelly consistency, and you can use 1/2 to 2/3 cup per load, letting the water fill up the machine with the soap in it first and then adding the clothes. Add 1/2 C. vinegar for fabric softener.
Now, this is basically the information contained in the original rec ipe. Shopping tips: Fels-Naphtha soap is actually pretty easy to find. You can keep it in bar from and rub it on as a stain remover. The book that I read called “Little Heathens” about little kids growing up in the Depression describes wash night where the grandmother grated up a whole bar of Fels-Naphtha soap and put it with water in the bottom of the hand crank washer. First they would do sheets and then underclothes and then basically work their way out from nicest to dirties so that everything was washed in the same water, but barn clothes were washed last and needed least to be clean. I’m guessing the formula of the soap was different back then because of laws about phosphates and things like that, but it’s still a nice, retro cleaning experience. Likewise, washing soda and Borax are usually available in the soap and cleaning sections of most grocery stores even if you haven’t noticed them before.
I have vinegar bottles on hand because when I’m ambitions about making yarn, I do some dying. I’d guess with all the hot water that water or milk jugs would not be p to the task, but old bottles from commercial soap are. And you definitely need a funnel. I also invested a dollar on a separate grater so i wasn’t mixing food and soap, though I did just use one of my junkier pots and made sure I had all the soap rinsed off it really well. Essential oils can get expensive, and I chose orange, because it was cheap, but a person who really wants to personalize everything may love a project like this because you can create your own customized laundry scents. it also smells just fine with no scent.
But how does it work?
I’d say, not bad. Things seem to come clean with no problem. The least successful washing I’ve done with the soap has been a thermal undershirt I had to wash a couple of times after I swept the chimney in it, and even after I bleached it, it didn’t really come clean. Soot is more like grease than it is like dirt. The homemade soap is also a lot cheaper than buying soap. A bar of Fels-naptha costs about $2, washing soda about $2.50 and Borax about $3. That is plenty of ingredients for three batches of detergent, that’s six gallons for about $10. You don’t need scent but if you want it that adds about a dollar a batch in costs. One time purchases include a grater and a funnel.
I have actually made a second batch of soap and plan to keep on using it. Please let me note that this was mostly because I hated having soap bottles clog up my recycling sorting place in the garage and not because I think there is some kind of imminent threat based on the recent elections where Barack Obama is going to take away soap. I talk to all kinds, and one of the things I’ve noticed is people who didn’t like him during the election are now afraid that he is going to take away _____ (fill in the blank) with guns, coal, gas, cars, money, God, etc.
Speaking of gas, cars, and money, I had a recent rather heated discussion with an individual at my place of employment where people were just shooting the breeze and someone mentioned using biodiesel. I reminded them that they were still responsible for paying fuel taxes if they were using the roads, that there were taxed and untaxed uses for fuels, and that more than a few people who were cooking up biodiesel or who had converted their vehicles to run on used cooking oil were finding themselves with tax bills because they had not been using their vehicles for untaxed purposes. This particular person (who is a lazy SOB and can’t be bothered to brush his teeth judging by their condition, let alone whip a mini biodiesel laboratory in the garage) went absolutely ballistic, insisting that sales tax paid on cooking oil was tax enough. As if someone would rush out and pay $6.50 a gallon for vegetable oil to get out of paying for gas. Which just goes to show you the average person will argue til they’re blue in the face about nothing they know anything about. Which just goes to show you that it’s a lot easier to talk than it is to go do stuff, and as writing is akin to talking, I’ve done enough timewasting today, and I’m off to do something!
It is still snowing!. We had a little break over Halloween, but since then, we have had a few major snow storms. My adopted hometown of Corry, PA actually made it onto the Erie news as a trivia question a couple of days before thanksgiving in a kind of “Guess How Much Snow They Got?” capacity. The answer then was 58 inches, but we’ve piled on a little more since then. We've had a bit of a melting period, however, where a lot of the icicles broke off the house and the snow has settled a little so that it’s about knee deep instead of waist deep. I’ve been pretty annoyed lately with the whole weather service which will predict snow when we don’t get any and also an inch to a coating when it will turn around and give us half a foot. Today is the first day of deer season, and it is an unofficial holiday. The road is covered with snow, and it was just ice yesterday, but the only answer for it is slow down and try to stay on, since the guys who run the plows are all out hunting today. Sounds like a war zone out there.
One more thing about the weather and then I’ll go on to the next thing I’ll ramble about. The almanac predicts heavy snows in the northeast the 12th through the 15th of this month. I’m going to hold them to it!
I did Black Friday shopping this year in Erie, even going into Walmart. (I didn’t buy anything. I just carried stuff for my sister.) I kept hearing a lot of horror stories about how bad it would be, and I guess in other places, there were deaths and injuries from people trampling to get inside the store, but in Erie, it was just crowded. I recently went to a “Twilight” book and movie party at the bookstore there, too, with a younger cousin, and my aunt ( her mother) was not keen on going because she thought it would be a lot of shrieking. In fact, it was mostly giggling. We’re from Northwestern PA, and we are kind of stand-offish. We want the cheap DVD players and laptops, but it’s just not nice to bump into other people to get them.
Getting down to brass tacks, here is another edition of “I Try It”.
Everytime I go through my recycling, I’ve been noticing the greatest portion of my junk is those stupid plastic containers that some genius thinks that cat food should come in now and laundry soap bottles. I can change brands of cat food and if I fee the need for a plastic container I can buy or reuse one I already have, but I was pretty much stuck with laundry soap. I keep trying to use powder or even those little dissolvable tablets that I think come from Amway, but powdered soap just doesn’t rinse out well enough, and underclothes are enough of a bother already without added itching factors.
People have tried to overcome this whole laundry soap thing for a while now. they have double concentrated soap which is an okay idea. I remember back in the ‘80’s for a little while you could get little super concentrated things of soap that you dumped into your old bottles and mixed up with more water. That didn’t last too long, but it was a good idea. I’ve seen little containers of homemade laundry soap for sale at the Amish store, but it was powder based and also had bluing in it, which I’ve heard of but never actually used. Which come to think of it, is probably why most commercial laundry soap is colored blue even though the color really does nothing.
In a recent issue of Countryside magazine, however, I noticed this part at the beginning where the readers write in with questions and tips a recipe for homemade laundry soap. I tried it because I actually had all the ingredients on hand anyway.
The recipe:
1/3 bar of Fels-naphtha soap, grated
1/2 C. washing soda (not baking soda, though it is made by Arm and Hammer)
1/2 C. Borax
1 Tblsp. essential oil (optional)
2 gallon jugs (vinegar jugs)
How to do it:
Grate soap into a large pan with 6 cups of water, heat until the soap melts. Add the soda and the Borax and the scent. Stir to dissolve, heat another 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Take of the heat, let it sit another 5 minutes. Divide this in half into each of the gallon jugs. Fill the jugs halfway with plain hot water. Shake and then fill to the top. Let the jugs set overnight, and it will have a gelly consistency, and you can use 1/2 to 2/3 cup per load, letting the water fill up the machine with the soap in it first and then adding the clothes. Add 1/2 C. vinegar for fabric softener.
Now, this is basically the information contained in the original rec ipe. Shopping tips: Fels-Naphtha soap is actually pretty easy to find. You can keep it in bar from and rub it on as a stain remover. The book that I read called “Little Heathens” about little kids growing up in the Depression describes wash night where the grandmother grated up a whole bar of Fels-Naphtha soap and put it with water in the bottom of the hand crank washer. First they would do sheets and then underclothes and then basically work their way out from nicest to dirties so that everything was washed in the same water, but barn clothes were washed last and needed least to be clean. I’m guessing the formula of the soap was different back then because of laws about phosphates and things like that, but it’s still a nice, retro cleaning experience. Likewise, washing soda and Borax are usually available in the soap and cleaning sections of most grocery stores even if you haven’t noticed them before.
I have vinegar bottles on hand because when I’m ambitions about making yarn, I do some dying. I’d guess with all the hot water that water or milk jugs would not be p to the task, but old bottles from commercial soap are. And you definitely need a funnel. I also invested a dollar on a separate grater so i wasn’t mixing food and soap, though I did just use one of my junkier pots and made sure I had all the soap rinsed off it really well. Essential oils can get expensive, and I chose orange, because it was cheap, but a person who really wants to personalize everything may love a project like this because you can create your own customized laundry scents. it also smells just fine with no scent.
But how does it work?
I’d say, not bad. Things seem to come clean with no problem. The least successful washing I’ve done with the soap has been a thermal undershirt I had to wash a couple of times after I swept the chimney in it, and even after I bleached it, it didn’t really come clean. Soot is more like grease than it is like dirt. The homemade soap is also a lot cheaper than buying soap. A bar of Fels-naptha costs about $2, washing soda about $2.50 and Borax about $3. That is plenty of ingredients for three batches of detergent, that’s six gallons for about $10. You don’t need scent but if you want it that adds about a dollar a batch in costs. One time purchases include a grater and a funnel.
I have actually made a second batch of soap and plan to keep on using it. Please let me note that this was mostly because I hated having soap bottles clog up my recycling sorting place in the garage and not because I think there is some kind of imminent threat based on the recent elections where Barack Obama is going to take away soap. I talk to all kinds, and one of the things I’ve noticed is people who didn’t like him during the election are now afraid that he is going to take away _____ (fill in the blank) with guns, coal, gas, cars, money, God, etc.
Speaking of gas, cars, and money, I had a recent rather heated discussion with an individual at my place of employment where people were just shooting the breeze and someone mentioned using biodiesel. I reminded them that they were still responsible for paying fuel taxes if they were using the roads, that there were taxed and untaxed uses for fuels, and that more than a few people who were cooking up biodiesel or who had converted their vehicles to run on used cooking oil were finding themselves with tax bills because they had not been using their vehicles for untaxed purposes. This particular person (who is a lazy SOB and can’t be bothered to brush his teeth judging by their condition, let alone whip a mini biodiesel laboratory in the garage) went absolutely ballistic, insisting that sales tax paid on cooking oil was tax enough. As if someone would rush out and pay $6.50 a gallon for vegetable oil to get out of paying for gas. Which just goes to show you the average person will argue til they’re blue in the face about nothing they know anything about. Which just goes to show you that it’s a lot easier to talk than it is to go do stuff, and as writing is akin to talking, I’ve done enough timewasting today, and I’m off to do something!
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
The Last Week of Spring!
Hello!
What a busy time it’s been this month!
Basically, the gardens are done, though there are some more tomato plants that still need to go in, a row of peas or two, strawflowers to plant, I’d like to get in more sunflowers and some broom corn. Pumpkins still need to go in, but it was cold, really hot, and now cold again! So no use rushing those! Same with the melons which are doing fine in the green house for now. But most of the tomatoes, the green peppers, beans, cukes, carrots, cabbages, onions, lettuces, and corn (sweet and pop) are all in the grounds and growing along with some gourds and most of the sunflowers plus annuals and herbs and all good things like that. The birds and critters did not eat the corn seeds out of the ground, and it looks like the sunflower seeds will remain undisturbed, as well.
I have also been up in Erie almost every week day baby sitting my niece and nephew. I also made a trip to Buffalo to hear the finals concert in the guitar concerto competition they have up there every other year. I’ve gone up twice, and both times I’ve been rooting for the soloist who played the Castelnuovo-Tadesco concerto to win, and it never happens! I love that piece. But that’s neither here nor there. I only had to worry about using up too much gas, since the weather was so bad, there was no way that I could work outside. I love going to hear the Buffalo Philharmonic play. If I ever get rich, I’m going to have a little apartment in Buffalo so I can go and hear concerts and go to hockey whenever I want and not have to worry about weather! But I’d still spend most of my time here. Or the south of France. With French cooking utensils.
We have been having our usual Sunday afternoon get togethers. Sometimes in winter, we get snowed in and have only my grandmother and sometimes an aunt, but in summer, we get swamped every Sunday. Last weekend, we had my grandmother, my aunt, my dad, my sister and her husband and their kids plus my mom and I. My mom has been on a strange mashed potatoes and fish kick. That’s all she ever wants to eat, and my sister brought cedar planks and a giant salmon steak. My sister hates fish. I find this hilarious because her husband is a fisherman and works in law enforcement for fish and boating. She was really brave and tried to wrestle this almost four pound piece of salmon out of the bag and prepare it, but she just couldn’t do it. I handle stuff I don’t plan on eating all the time, since I’m veg-veg but I’ll cook anything, so she yelled instructions from out of fish-smell distance, and we got it done.
I guess it was good, because everyone but my dad liked it, and he only likes plain and mostly canned things. So that’s where I get it from. Basically, you can get short little cedar boards, about ten inches long, six inches wide, and maybe three quarters of an inch thick. My sister got hers at Linens and Things, but you can get them at grocery stores with good seafood departments, too. You soak the planks in water for about an hour, and get the grill heated up to about 375. (You can also do this in the oven, but I would guess the taste is not as smoky.) While this was going on, we put olive oil on the fish and used one of those spice rubs. Then you put the fish on the wood, skin side down, and put the whole thing right on the hot grill for about fifteen to twenty minutes. Keep a water bottle handy to put out the plank if it catches fire! The fish is done when it starts to flake.
Theoretically, you can reuse the plank, but I found that hard to believe after seeing how charred it got.
The planked salmon went over really well, even though our family is pretty spoiled because we have smoked steelhead in the fall and fresh perch that is just breaded and fried in a pan. That works on the grill, too. All you need is a deep cast iron pan. Junk shops and estate sales and yard sales are great places to find cast iron cook ware. You don’t have to buy the new stuff which generally comes from China and isn’t of the greatest quality. If you get a really gunky old cast iron pan, just toss it in a campfire or the fireplace and let it burn clean. Wait for the fire to get cool, scrub off the pan, rub it with cooking oil or fat and call it good. You can use a heavy cast iron pan to fry things in oil on top of the grill and keep the house from getting too stinky and smoky. Afterwards, though, I always play a little game called “Where can I dump the fish fry oil where Sally Ann is not going to roll in it and then jump in my bed?” I usually lose, and the dog ends up in my bed with greasy cornmeal stuck all over her.
This year is just going to be a crazy bumper crop year of all things berry. Something really drastic is going to have to happen to mess this up. The strawberries are ready to ripen, there are more currants than I have ever seen. The black raspberries are loaded, and even the troublesome blackberries are having their best year at least since the first year I had them. Even with all the pruning, there are going to be just mounds of grapes. I have been struggling to keep bird netting on the currants. We get a mighty amount of wind up here, and the netting just doesn’t want to stay at all. With the strawberries, I just tack the netting down with poultry fence staples and reach under to pick. When the netting is on the strawberries, it is better to go barefoot in the garden, because the netting catches on any kind of shoe tread, and button up shirts also present a problem. My strawberries are also about a week and a half behind the ones closer to the lake. The lower temperatures up here really make a difference. And I probably just jinxed myself and my berries since it is getting pretty chilly out there. I don’t think it’s going to frost or anything, but it will be in the forties the next three nights or so.
Speaking of weather, the National Weather Service finally released the snow total map for the season. We were right on the line between the color for 120-140 inches and that for 140-160. I thought we had a little less snow this year than last, when we had 180 inches. We ran out of wood bad this spring, though. I need to get on the ball with that, since our backup propane tank is almost empty, and with everything going up, filling it is falling farther down the list of priorities, especially since we have a nice new wood stove. Though, we did stretch the tank through three winters just with what was in it when we moved here. Little did I know that was going to be like getting a thousand dollars free with the house! We had our 36th coldest spring on record, and I’d like to think that if we’d had a little closer to normal temperatures and not so much rain that I could have either not run out of firewood as quickly or been able to get another load, but it never happened. I have a little bit of a jump on it this year, though, since my uncle brought a partial load as a Mother’s Day present, and I got another partial load from my aunt’s yard where a big piece of her cottonwood tree fell down.
That’s all I can think of which I’m just sitting around waiting for it to quit raining.
Monday, April 21, 2008
All the Spring Things Are Happening
I know everyone always says it seems like spring will never get here, but, really, this year winter seemed especially long. After the January thaw, we really didn’t have any of those nice warm days that pop up in February. There were a couple of half days that were freakishly warm, but I spend most of those days down in the basement wading around and running the sump pump. How on earth you can get a flood in a basement on the top of a hill is beyond me, but this late winter and early spring, our happy home featured a spring fed pond plus a spring fed basement as the French drains reversed themselves and started sucking water out of the swamp and into the basement.
March was wet and rainy, too. In fact, it was one of the top ten rainiest Marches ever according to NOAA. I’m a big fan of the National Weather Service. They have great statistics and tolerably good forecasts and their storm warnings are better than what they have on the local weather, that’s for sure. I’m waiting with baited breath the final diagram of season snowfall total amounts. Last year we were in the 180 inch zone. It seems like we have had more snow this year, though. 180 inches sounds like a lot, but, in one of the big snow storms, you can get 30 inches just in a day or two. If that happens a few times, viola!
We got quite a bit just in March alone. It was like Mama Nature misread leap year and not long did we have an extra day in February, we had two Februarys March was so bad! And now, April is dry! Can we ever win? The almanac says heavy rain that last weekend of the month. We’ll see. I actually plunked down at the computer and started typing because it was clouding up out there, and one of the main items on my to do list is watering, and I’m hoping to get a little sprinkle instead, but now it’s looking sunny.
Seed starting has gone very, very well with just about everything making a good go of it, including a lot of seeds I gathered from plants in the fall. I see in “Organic Gardening” magazine there is a little blurb about ground cherries. I grew a few last year, and I thought they were kind of good. They look like Japanese Lantern plants but they have this juicy little berry in them that is kind of citrusy-caramelly tasting. I never got enough to make anything with them, but I did get enough to save the seeds, and they are coming along nicely. My tomatoes are in, and the earliest variety has already been transplanted. Alpine strawberry seeds that I saved and cold treated are growing, too, along with a few herbs and flowers.
There are a lot of good books on starting seeds, but actually, the seed packets themselves are good enough a resource. I use a combination of things for starting seeds. I prefer the peat cups just because it makes things easier to water from the bottom. I have a quart container I just dump water in plus a squirt bottle. When I plant seeds in peat cups watering is quick. If I’ve just thrown the seed starting medium into an old cake pan and added seeds, I generally mist them, and that takes longer and needs to be done more often. Peat cups are cheap, and I use quite a few of them. I tend to get the larger ones and plant four or five seeds in each one. And I keep everything in a combination of tin cake pans and cookie sheets and also a few “real” cookie sheets that are cheap at the dollar store.
My original cookie sheet plant tray was one of the “air” cookie sheets that were popular in the ‘80’s that were supposedly made to keep cookies soft and squishy and never let them burn. The sheet never let them brown, either, and you also couldn’t submerge it in water or the steam could build up inside next time you baked and make the cookie sheet EXPLODE! I’m not sure they have those sheets anymore, but it they ever try and bring that one back, remember the ‘80’s and just say no to air cookie sheets. Needless to say, the sheet has had a better career as a plant tray!
When the seeds start coming up, I start to thin them a little. I’ll pull out the slower ones or the smaller looking ones. It sounds mean, but you’re not a gardener unless you kill plants! After second and third leaves appear, then I start transplanting. I’ll transplant into anything. I reuse old plastic flats and cells from plants bought at the nursery, yogurt cups, more peat cups, clay pots -- they’re cheap and reusable, but it’s hard to control the amount of water plants get. With the yogurt cups, you need to take a hammer and nail and punch a hole or two in the bottom so water can drain. Last year, I transplanted a ton of tomatoes into styrofoam cups with the top inch or so peeled off. All I needed to pop holes in that was a sharpened pencil, and the tomatoes grow better than in anything else. Also, the nice white styrofoam made marking the plants really easy. If I have one complaint about the peat cups it is that there is no way to reliably mark the variety of plant in it. I’m planting about twelve different kinds of tomatoes this year, and last year I have fewer kinds and lots of trouble keeping them straight.
Okay. My embarrassing little secret is that I do not have a bed. I’ve been sleeping on a succession of second and third hand couches that I’ve gotten from different aunts and uncles for about ten or fifteen years now. But I do have a miniature greenhouse in my “bedroom”. In a week or two, when more of the plants have been transplanted, I’ll migrate the whole operation outside to the pop-up greenhouse. I use the same shelves and everything, only when I put them outside I take a couple of short t-posts and drive them in the ground and tie up the shelves to keep them from falling over. That happened to me the first year, and I’ve also had trays of plants flip off the shelves in high winds, too. But the greenhouse has been remarkable even with the amount of wind we get up here.
I’ve also lost plants to frost even in the greenhouse, so once my babies are outside getting used to being on their own, I’ll get up and monitor the temperature a couple times a night if I think it might frost. Last year, I hooked up two heat lamps in the greenhouse and ran an extension cord out there and that was enough to keep things warm. I don’t have anything fancy for lights. I got a couple clip on shop lights and put grow lights in them and have all of about twenty dollars invested in lighting for both indoor and outdoor planting.
My other big and kind of crazy project has been turning over ground for my planned Three Sister’s garden. I’m really excited about this, but I decided about a week ago that instead of just marking off a bunch of spots where I would be planting individual hills of corn, I was just going to plow under all the goldenrod and make the plot into a proper garden patch that I might be able to use next year or the year after. My big problem with that wording is that I have no plow. I have no tiller. I have a shovel and a motika. So I started shoveling. I squared up the plot and just started loosening the sod in strips. Then, I went back through and flipped the sod and gave it a chop or two and went back up the strip.
I’ve done this before. I’ve cleared a good sized garden patch out of thicker sod and more weeds and junk down the hill from the house. In that case, I removed the sod entirely and made a sod pile down by the compost pile and have been using up the sod little by little to patch holes in the yard where my uncle got his truck stuck in the fall bringing a load of wood. It was wet. We were pushing it bring the truck down and not just unloading onto the driveway. We should have listened to my aunt. I’m pretty sure we might have learned our lesson.
Anyway, down below, when I expanded my second garden, I added clover seed to the newly turned dirt and turned it again when the clover sprouted and got big. It was so incredibly easy compared with all the other garden digging I’ve done around here, and the quality of the soil was fantastic. So, even though I’ve left the sod in place up above here, I have still added red clover seed to the new dirt, and hopefully, it will rain or dew enough to get a good sprout going by early June which is when you put corn in up here.
The guy at the farm co-op said ten pounds of clover seed was enough to seed an acre. I got five pounds, which raised some eyebrows. Which also leads me to my second problem. Once I got committed to digging out the whole patch, I figured it is somewhere in the neighborhood of a tenth of an acre. I’m done with it. The cover crop is in. My arms are a little tired.
So, this is picture of the fence we put up the first year we were here. Behind the fence is my new patch. To the right is border of wormwood I planted around a flower patch of annuals last year, and I hope to put ground cherries in that spot this year.
Just a note: I was reading in the Independent yesterday -- which is a British lefty newspaper -- how there has been a three year study done scientifically on the productivity of Monsanto’s genetically modified soy bean seeds. According to the study, the GM seed produced on average under the same growing conditions ten per cent less than the non GM seed. With extra added nutrients, the farmer was able to bring the GM seed up even with the regular seed, but was never able to surpass traditional seed.
Scientists were able to explain the results of this study, and the US Dept. of Agriculture agreed, by the simple fact that it is easier and faster to improve plant productivity by traditional plant breeding methods, i.e. crossing the healthiest, most productive plants and planting those seeds, than by mechanically modifying the genetic makeup of the seed. Also, plant productivity is at the frontier of its possibility. The only improvements that can be made by any means will be very slight.
Please, keep this in mind and quote the results of this study to people who will claim that genetic engineering of plants is the way out of the coming food crisis. GM seed is simply a tool by which very rich companies are trying to gain control over the food supply by patenting varieties of seed which they claim to have improved. Speculation in the food markets and the interference of large corporations are some of the root causes of the growing food crisis, not some deficiency in the seed. These companies have tried and failed to do things like patent rice to force all rice farmers to buy seed from Monsanto instead of using saved seed. As ridiculous as it sounds, Monsanto has successfully sued farmers in Canada who replanted seed after Monsanto patented pollen blew onto their fields. These are bad, ruthless people who think nothing of starving whole countries, and I’m getting off my soapbox now to do some real work!
March was wet and rainy, too. In fact, it was one of the top ten rainiest Marches ever according to NOAA. I’m a big fan of the National Weather Service. They have great statistics and tolerably good forecasts and their storm warnings are better than what they have on the local weather, that’s for sure. I’m waiting with baited breath the final diagram of season snowfall total amounts. Last year we were in the 180 inch zone. It seems like we have had more snow this year, though. 180 inches sounds like a lot, but, in one of the big snow storms, you can get 30 inches just in a day or two. If that happens a few times, viola!
We got quite a bit just in March alone. It was like Mama Nature misread leap year and not long did we have an extra day in February, we had two Februarys March was so bad! And now, April is dry! Can we ever win? The almanac says heavy rain that last weekend of the month. We’ll see. I actually plunked down at the computer and started typing because it was clouding up out there, and one of the main items on my to do list is watering, and I’m hoping to get a little sprinkle instead, but now it’s looking sunny.
Seed starting has gone very, very well with just about everything making a good go of it, including a lot of seeds I gathered from plants in the fall. I see in “Organic Gardening” magazine there is a little blurb about ground cherries. I grew a few last year, and I thought they were kind of good. They look like Japanese Lantern plants but they have this juicy little berry in them that is kind of citrusy-caramelly tasting. I never got enough to make anything with them, but I did get enough to save the seeds, and they are coming along nicely. My tomatoes are in, and the earliest variety has already been transplanted. Alpine strawberry seeds that I saved and cold treated are growing, too, along with a few herbs and flowers.
There are a lot of good books on starting seeds, but actually, the seed packets themselves are good enough a resource. I use a combination of things for starting seeds. I prefer the peat cups just because it makes things easier to water from the bottom. I have a quart container I just dump water in plus a squirt bottle. When I plant seeds in peat cups watering is quick. If I’ve just thrown the seed starting medium into an old cake pan and added seeds, I generally mist them, and that takes longer and needs to be done more often. Peat cups are cheap, and I use quite a few of them. I tend to get the larger ones and plant four or five seeds in each one. And I keep everything in a combination of tin cake pans and cookie sheets and also a few “real” cookie sheets that are cheap at the dollar store.
My original cookie sheet plant tray was one of the “air” cookie sheets that were popular in the ‘80’s that were supposedly made to keep cookies soft and squishy and never let them burn. The sheet never let them brown, either, and you also couldn’t submerge it in water or the steam could build up inside next time you baked and make the cookie sheet EXPLODE! I’m not sure they have those sheets anymore, but it they ever try and bring that one back, remember the ‘80’s and just say no to air cookie sheets. Needless to say, the sheet has had a better career as a plant tray!
When the seeds start coming up, I start to thin them a little. I’ll pull out the slower ones or the smaller looking ones. It sounds mean, but you’re not a gardener unless you kill plants! After second and third leaves appear, then I start transplanting. I’ll transplant into anything. I reuse old plastic flats and cells from plants bought at the nursery, yogurt cups, more peat cups, clay pots -- they’re cheap and reusable, but it’s hard to control the amount of water plants get. With the yogurt cups, you need to take a hammer and nail and punch a hole or two in the bottom so water can drain. Last year, I transplanted a ton of tomatoes into styrofoam cups with the top inch or so peeled off. All I needed to pop holes in that was a sharpened pencil, and the tomatoes grow better than in anything else. Also, the nice white styrofoam made marking the plants really easy. If I have one complaint about the peat cups it is that there is no way to reliably mark the variety of plant in it. I’m planting about twelve different kinds of tomatoes this year, and last year I have fewer kinds and lots of trouble keeping them straight.
Okay. My embarrassing little secret is that I do not have a bed. I’ve been sleeping on a succession of second and third hand couches that I’ve gotten from different aunts and uncles for about ten or fifteen years now. But I do have a miniature greenhouse in my “bedroom”. In a week or two, when more of the plants have been transplanted, I’ll migrate the whole operation outside to the pop-up greenhouse. I use the same shelves and everything, only when I put them outside I take a couple of short t-posts and drive them in the ground and tie up the shelves to keep them from falling over. That happened to me the first year, and I’ve also had trays of plants flip off the shelves in high winds, too. But the greenhouse has been remarkable even with the amount of wind we get up here.
I’ve also lost plants to frost even in the greenhouse, so once my babies are outside getting used to being on their own, I’ll get up and monitor the temperature a couple times a night if I think it might frost. Last year, I hooked up two heat lamps in the greenhouse and ran an extension cord out there and that was enough to keep things warm. I don’t have anything fancy for lights. I got a couple clip on shop lights and put grow lights in them and have all of about twenty dollars invested in lighting for both indoor and outdoor planting.
My other big and kind of crazy project has been turning over ground for my planned Three Sister’s garden. I’m really excited about this, but I decided about a week ago that instead of just marking off a bunch of spots where I would be planting individual hills of corn, I was just going to plow under all the goldenrod and make the plot into a proper garden patch that I might be able to use next year or the year after. My big problem with that wording is that I have no plow. I have no tiller. I have a shovel and a motika. So I started shoveling. I squared up the plot and just started loosening the sod in strips. Then, I went back through and flipped the sod and gave it a chop or two and went back up the strip.
I’ve done this before. I’ve cleared a good sized garden patch out of thicker sod and more weeds and junk down the hill from the house. In that case, I removed the sod entirely and made a sod pile down by the compost pile and have been using up the sod little by little to patch holes in the yard where my uncle got his truck stuck in the fall bringing a load of wood. It was wet. We were pushing it bring the truck down and not just unloading onto the driveway. We should have listened to my aunt. I’m pretty sure we might have learned our lesson.
Anyway, down below, when I expanded my second garden, I added clover seed to the newly turned dirt and turned it again when the clover sprouted and got big. It was so incredibly easy compared with all the other garden digging I’ve done around here, and the quality of the soil was fantastic. So, even though I’ve left the sod in place up above here, I have still added red clover seed to the new dirt, and hopefully, it will rain or dew enough to get a good sprout going by early June which is when you put corn in up here.
The guy at the farm co-op said ten pounds of clover seed was enough to seed an acre. I got five pounds, which raised some eyebrows. Which also leads me to my second problem. Once I got committed to digging out the whole patch, I figured it is somewhere in the neighborhood of a tenth of an acre. I’m done with it. The cover crop is in. My arms are a little tired.
So, this is picture of the fence we put up the first year we were here. Behind the fence is my new patch. To the right is border of wormwood I planted around a flower patch of annuals last year, and I hope to put ground cherries in that spot this year.
Just a note: I was reading in the Independent yesterday -- which is a British lefty newspaper -- how there has been a three year study done scientifically on the productivity of Monsanto’s genetically modified soy bean seeds. According to the study, the GM seed produced on average under the same growing conditions ten per cent less than the non GM seed. With extra added nutrients, the farmer was able to bring the GM seed up even with the regular seed, but was never able to surpass traditional seed.
Scientists were able to explain the results of this study, and the US Dept. of Agriculture agreed, by the simple fact that it is easier and faster to improve plant productivity by traditional plant breeding methods, i.e. crossing the healthiest, most productive plants and planting those seeds, than by mechanically modifying the genetic makeup of the seed. Also, plant productivity is at the frontier of its possibility. The only improvements that can be made by any means will be very slight.
Please, keep this in mind and quote the results of this study to people who will claim that genetic engineering of plants is the way out of the coming food crisis. GM seed is simply a tool by which very rich companies are trying to gain control over the food supply by patenting varieties of seed which they claim to have improved. Speculation in the food markets and the interference of large corporations are some of the root causes of the growing food crisis, not some deficiency in the seed. These companies have tried and failed to do things like patent rice to force all rice farmers to buy seed from Monsanto instead of using saved seed. As ridiculous as it sounds, Monsanto has successfully sued farmers in Canada who replanted seed after Monsanto patented pollen blew onto their fields. These are bad, ruthless people who think nothing of starving whole countries, and I’m getting off my soapbox now to do some real work!
Monday, November 12, 2007
Weather predicting
Right now, it's raining. Typical November weather. But I can also hear rumbles of thunder in the distance. Not as usual for this time of year. We've already had one good snow fall of about six inches. Even with all the rain, there is still snow in the long grass and in the ditches. Up closer to Erie where the real lake effect snow set in, they have quite a bit of snow on the ground.
Lake effect snow, for people not familiar with it, is practically unreal. There are only a few places in the US that get lake effect, generally downwind of the Great Lakes. When the lakes are unfrozen, in early winter, late winter, or in some mild winters when the lakes don't get cold enough to freeze over, we see lake effect snow. The cold winds from Canada come in from the west and north and gather water vapor off the open water on the lakes. When all that wet air gets back on land, downwind of the lakes, there can be really heavy precipitation. Usually right by the lake is okay, but as soon as there gets to be a little elevation and distance from the lake, snow starts falling.
The lake effect show sets up in "bands" that follow geographical features. Right by the lake or even a few miles away, it can be a sunny day with no snow and a nice breeze. If you are driving on a lake effect day, you can see the bands as you approach them like a wall of white. In the bands, you can be getting so much snow, it's as dark as night, at rates of many inches of snow per hour.
People like to exaggerate about snow, but there are lots of great lake effect snow stories without even needing to make them up. I was in Fredonia, New York once and we got thigh-high to waist deep snow in an afternoon, and it got even deeper farther away from the lake. I have been in lake effect storms as far as sixty miles inland. The bands shift and drift with the wind and don't follow regular rules because they aren't really fronts or systems, more like freak accidents.
Anyway, even though we had snow, the thunder this evening reminds me of some weather things, we always say in our family. The real common thing is the wooly caterpillars. The more black on these common little orange and black guys, the worse the winter will be.
My dad always says: Thunder in fall, no winter at all.
Also, the height of the hives. If you find wasps and hornets nests built up high in the trees, then it will be a bad winter. I've seen two high hives this year. Last year I only had one low one. We had a mild winter, but a cold spring.
When I went to the feed store the other day, I got a free calandar with an almanac for weather predicting for each month, also. I'd like to see how accurate it is, but I need to wait until January for when the calandar starts.
Lake effect snow, for people not familiar with it, is practically unreal. There are only a few places in the US that get lake effect, generally downwind of the Great Lakes. When the lakes are unfrozen, in early winter, late winter, or in some mild winters when the lakes don't get cold enough to freeze over, we see lake effect snow. The cold winds from Canada come in from the west and north and gather water vapor off the open water on the lakes. When all that wet air gets back on land, downwind of the lakes, there can be really heavy precipitation. Usually right by the lake is okay, but as soon as there gets to be a little elevation and distance from the lake, snow starts falling.
The lake effect show sets up in "bands" that follow geographical features. Right by the lake or even a few miles away, it can be a sunny day with no snow and a nice breeze. If you are driving on a lake effect day, you can see the bands as you approach them like a wall of white. In the bands, you can be getting so much snow, it's as dark as night, at rates of many inches of snow per hour.
People like to exaggerate about snow, but there are lots of great lake effect snow stories without even needing to make them up. I was in Fredonia, New York once and we got thigh-high to waist deep snow in an afternoon, and it got even deeper farther away from the lake. I have been in lake effect storms as far as sixty miles inland. The bands shift and drift with the wind and don't follow regular rules because they aren't really fronts or systems, more like freak accidents.
Anyway, even though we had snow, the thunder this evening reminds me of some weather things, we always say in our family. The real common thing is the wooly caterpillars. The more black on these common little orange and black guys, the worse the winter will be.
My dad always says: Thunder in fall, no winter at all.
Also, the height of the hives. If you find wasps and hornets nests built up high in the trees, then it will be a bad winter. I've seen two high hives this year. Last year I only had one low one. We had a mild winter, but a cold spring.
When I went to the feed store the other day, I got a free calandar with an almanac for weather predicting for each month, also. I'd like to see how accurate it is, but I need to wait until January for when the calandar starts.
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