Wandering

“I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in. And stop my mind from wandering. . where it will go.”

Poor yields this week.  The weather went from 90’s to 60’s in the span of a day.  Cool and almost no sun for a week and the plants just stopped producing.  We need rain badly but got only a little.  Just lots of clouds. 

Sunday was the first nice day for relaxing on the deck in some time, probably a week but it seems a lot longer.  I was going over some notes for a lab I’m teaching at the  Indiana-Purdue campus in Indianapolis, enjoying the quiet and gentle breeze – a perfect September day.   Suddenly there was a loud splash at the pond’s edge, much more commotion than any fish can make.  I looked up over the railing and just below the deck saw a large bird of prey unlike any I had seen before around here.  It was a bit larger than a red-tailed hawk, definitely not a Cooper’s hawk which is much smaller.

The raptor had landed in shallows with its wings spread.  Then it took flight and I could hear the beat of its wings as they lifted it from the water, but no fish was in its talons.  It circled up around the trees, then briefly out of sight, then flew back over the pond.  It started another dive toward the water from treetop height then aborted about half way into the dive, then flew away.  Wow!  Could it be an osprey?  I checked the bird book.  The face markings matched, with a dark streak on the side of the head.  What other raptor dives into water to catch fish?  The map showed that ospreys have a patchwork range in this part of the state.  I really wanted to get a picture of this bird because I may never see another one around here.

There’s  a lot of open spaces in the beds now.  I took out the German Queen tomato plant since it stopped producing.  I seeded some carrots in August and none of them germinated.  Who knew, the seed was only three years old?  And I never got any fall brassicas seeded into pots until late August, probably too late.  There’s one chinese cabbage that was direct seeded that is doing well.   My excuse - the house is torn up from the ongoing remodeling –and I’m sticking to it.   Well I did get the spinach and lettuce planted and it’s already germinating.  Got to keep after it with the watering until we get some rain. 

This is the last patch of bush beans for the year.  I think they are Dragon Langerie, a very vigorous wax bean.  The patch of Roma beans should be good for another week.  The bean beetles have not been real bad this year.  They were just starting to ruin the patch of Provider green beans when I pulled them up.  The beetles eat a few spots out of the bean and ruin it.   Maybe my strategy of planting patches of beans in different beds has thwarted the beetles enough to hold them at bay, or maybe there just aren’t many beetles this year.

The osprey got me thinking about eating fish, so I baited a hook with a chicken gizzard and heaved it into the water.  It took awhile, not that I mind, but a really nice channel cat took the bait.  This is the biggest fish I’ve caught all year – 21 inches head to tail – and it really put up a fight.  It made a pound of filets and the meaty backbone, which was frozen for fish stock, weighed 7 oz.  Breaded and fried it can’t be beat.  I want to harvest more before the weather turns.  They will replenish in the spring.

Totals for the week:  Sweet pepper 7 oz;  Okra 2 oz;  Beans 3 oz;  Tomato  22 oz;  Catfish 1 lb, 7 oz.

September 5, 2011

The two day heat wave is long gone.  The high today never reached 70.  The wind was a steady hard blow all day long.  It would have been a ripping’ good time on a sailboat, and I probably would have been in the water a few times.  Instead I cleaned up the beds, removed dead foliage and suckered the tomatoes which were about eight feet high.  I dug in a wheelbarrow of compost into the greens bed a few days ago, and today I got out the little 2-stroke Earthquake cultivator and tilled the top few inches of soil and raked it smooth.  

     

I planted half the bed with lettuce (Pinetree winter mix) and Space spinach, then spread a little half finished compost over the seeded area.  Would I rather have been on the water fighting spraying whitecaps trying to keep a dinghy upright?  Let’s not go there.  I think there are basically two weather conditions for sailing:  Drink beer sailing and can’t drink beer sailing.  If the wind is light you can hold a can of beer in one hand and sail the boat.  If the wind is hard forget about having a beer, you won’t have time and it will be on its side in the bottom of the boat anyway.  One has to reconcile the need for a beer with the desire to sail.  Life is full of hard choices.

I’ve been picking butternut squash when the vine supporting it dies.  The plant set out some more squash after the first set and it looks like most will ripen in time, unless the plant dies first.  The leaves just yellow and die.  The vines on the trellis are holding up the best, but it’s apparent that a fungus or bacteria is slowly doing it in.  I’ve tried to give it plenty of water and even a few doses of fish emulsion as it’s a heavy feeder, but the plant is determined to die.  No matter, it’s September. 

The parsnip also has a disease but it looks like it puts out enough new foliage to stay ahead of it.  Actually everything looks bad this year.  The tulip poplars and sassafras trees have a lot of foliage that looks diseased.  Two drought years in a row have probably stressed them quite a bit. 

Peppers have done great this year, a real bright spot.  It looks like they will produce a new batch of peppers for pickling or maybe salsa.  With the help of a few stakes the pepper stems kind of support each other at this point.  It seems like Fall weather really intensifies the flavor of sweet peppers like Cubanelles.  And beans, lots of beans, Romas right now.  I think I like Roma beans the best. 

Totals for the week:  Okra 5 oz;  Snap beans 18 oz;  Tomatoes 5 lb 7 oz;  Sweet pepper 11 oz; 

Hot pepper 2 oz;  Eggplant 15 oz;  Butternut squash 2 lb 4oz.

Catfish 11 oz;   Weekly total  10.9 pounds.  Year to date 169 lb   

Another heat wave

The last few weeks the weather in these parts has been fantastic.  Highs in the mid-80’s, low humidity, usually a fresh breeze, clear skies.  On Friday all that changed with a high in the upper 90’s.  Ditto for Saturday.  It looks like a front is on its way with some rain and much more seasonal temperatures for awhile.  Good.  We need rain bad.  The low humidity and abundant sunshine can really pull the water out of the ground.  I’ve been watering the beds every 2-3 days and also the areas of the lawn that are suffering the most but it’s an uphill battle. 

Two weeks ago I started thinking about preparing the bed that will grow greens over the winter under plastic.  The bed has been mostly empty since a patch of spent wax beans came out at the end of July.  The bed had not been watered since then except for the parsley plant and the soil was dry.  For the last two weeks I’ve been soaking this bed when I water the other beds to get moisture content up.  It's about ready.

A few weeks ago I stacked the modules of the compost bin to one side and shoveled the top layers of compost into the new bin.  I left the bottom module that contained mostly finished compost for the greens bed and added a few handfuls of blood meal to juice up the nitrogen level.  Saturday morning I got a wheelbarrow of compost from the old bin and spread it onto the bed, then turned it over with a shovel and watered the bed.  Good thing I did this in the morning because even then the heat and humidity were oppressive. 

After taking out the compost at the bottom I noticed there were a lot of roots going up into the compost.  Looks like the big white ash tree about 20 feet away has been freeloading nutrients off the compost pile.  Next spring the compost pile goes around the corner on the west side of the house – out of reach of the tree.   

   

After this brief heat wave the soil temperature needs to come down before I plant spinach and lettuce.  At least the nights are longer now and a few days of cooler temperatures should bring the soil temperature down.  I’ll plant part of the bed with greens in a few days for a fall harvest then plant the remainder in late September for overwintered greens.

The potatoes left in the remaining cage have put up some nice looking new shoots after most of the foliage was lost.  This was an experiment to see if the potatoes could do a little more.  I’m hoping that the new green solar panels (leaves) will produce some more potatoes, and I always want more potatoes.  This cage got more sunlight and had more exposure to air movement, that is probably why the potato plants did not die completely.  The other two cages averaged about 4 1/2 pounds of potatoes each.    

Pickled peppers

I’ve never pickled anything before.  I’ve been the recipient of many people’s pickling charities and some of them have been really good.  It’s like listening to music – I really like music but I’m not a musician. 

The six pepper plants I grew this year were all peaking in their pepper production.  It was time to pick peppers and pickle them.  I bought the equipment, vinegar, salt and the Ball Co. recipe book and also downloaded some recipes.   I wrote out some instructions the day before.  On Saturday I picked the peppers.  I got about 3 ½ pounds of peppers, half hot and half sweet.  The hot peppers are Red Hot Cherry and Hungarian Wax.  The sweet peppers are Marconi, Cubanelle and Pimento.

The peppers were cut, deseeded and sliced up.  The hot cherry peppers were the most work – I cut them like a pumpkin, removed the cap and scooped out the seeds with the end of a potato peeler.  After cutting the hot peppers I noticed that my nasal passages were free and clear, with a slight burning sensation, and that’s with mildly hot peppers.  Once cut the peppers were put in a dilute salt solution for the day.  I don’t know what this does except salt the pepper for flavor, but that’s what the recipe calls for.

At the end of the day I canned them.  The jars were taken from the dishwasher and filled, and the hot pickling solution ladled in and the lids put on.  I never scraped the sides to remove air bubbles (forgot), but did set the filled jar on the countertop with some authority.  The peppers filled six jars and there was just enough pickling solution to fill them with a little left over.   After boiling, the jars were set on a towel and in a few minutes each one emitted a small pop as the lid sealed.  It works!  I found it’s similar to setting up a reaction when I was a bench chemist.  I’d like to open a jar now but I know it’s better to wait a few weeks for the flavors to mingle. 

 

Now I’m thinking hot pickled okra, hot pickled carrots, dilly beans, the sky’s the limit.  It's a great new pickling world out there. 

I haven’t been tracking the fish harvest religiously.  On Saturday I caught a catfish and ate it for dinner with green beans and red potatoes.  Pan-fried fish reminds me of the lakes in northern Indiana and frying up a mess of fish, usually bluegill, perch and bass.  I’ve been averaging one fish a week from the pond this summer and there’s still plenty of fish left.  Here’s some picks when I was feeding the catfish a few days ago. 

  And this:

Today I removed more beans.  This year I planted bush beans as fillers in spots that open up in the beds.  I’ve found that a 3x4 patch with two rows of beans can produce a lot of beans.  I try to stagger plantings two to three weeks apart to maintain production.  This patch had Provider beans, which have been a really good bean, productive and tasty.  The bean beetles recently moved into the patch and were ruining most of the beans.  With damaged beans and few new flowers it was time to remove the plants before they became an incubator for beetles.  I cut them off at the base so the roots can continue to inoculate the soil with nitrogen fixing bacteria and put the plants in the compost bin.

The last remaining plants in the brassica bed are cauliflower, a Burpee’s variety called Summer Harvest.  They were doing great until the heat wave.  Nearly a month of continuous highs in the 90’s stopped their growth and burned the new leaves.  Somehow the plants survived.  When the weather cooled a few weeks ago they started growing again.  This plant produced an odd head with the leaves interspersed with the florets.  The cauliflower is a bit strong raw but it may be OK when cooked.  It’s amazing that a plant that was seeded the end of April and set into the beds in late May actually produced something.

Results for the week:   Eggplant 15 oz;  Tomato 4 lb, 11 oz;  Hot pepper 1 lb, 15 oz;  Sweet pepper 1 lb, 13 oz;  Snap bean 2 lb, 7 oz;  Cauliflower 12 oz;  Butternut squash 1 lb, 11 oz.  See Results tab for spreadsheet of yields for the year.   

Monday August 22, 2011

What happened to my dehydrator?  My own personal dehydrator web page on Amazon claimed it should arrive on Monday.  I checked the status on Tuesday and it was in Cincinnati.  OK that’s not too far, should be here soon.  Then I checked the history.  It arrived at the FedEx hub in Indianapolis on Monday, then it went to Cincy.  I had a Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot moment.  The FedEx hub is on the SW outskirts of Indy, about 30 miles from my house as the crow flies.  Cincinnati is further away, a lot further.  

On Thursday the mail carrier shows up in my driveway.  He’s driving an old Taurus station wagon and I get the impression he never quite got back from Woodstock.  But a nice guy anyway, and he has the dehydrator.  I’m not going to try to figure out the journey, it’s here and it works.  I like this dehyrator.  It has a temperature control and thermostat, so the temperature can be tuned for herbs, vegetables or jerky.  I first dried some Brandywine tomatoes, a slicing tomato.  The dried tomatoes are good in an omelette.  

After the tomatoes I dried some sweet peppers.  The paprika peppers have been outstanding this year, large and abundant.  I bought the plant at the Bloomington farmers market.  There’s a Marconi on the left, two Cubanelles in the center and the paprikas at a right angle.  To give you an idea of their size those are 2x4's.  The paprikas were sliced in halves and the seeds removed, the larger peppers were quartered, before they went in the dehydrator.  Guess I’ll try to grind up the paprikas, or just cut them really fine, once they are dry. 

And here’s a pic of pimento peppers.  Beautiful heart-shaped peppers, sweet with a thick wall.  To me they are like the best bell pepper ever.  I like them with cucumbers and tomatoes and some Ranch dressing.  It’s been a great summer for peppers.  I’m going to try pickling some hot peppers soon, on a day when the windows can stay open.

Growing butternut squash and bean together on a trellis just did not work.  The squash plant was suppressed and the beans were hard to find in all that foliage.  I pulled the beans several weeks ago.  The squash had been setting flowers but the newly formed squash always died off, apparently because not enough nutrients were directed into them.  I’m sure they were pollinated because there is a healthy bumblebee population here.   Now that the squash bugs are mostly under control the plant has been setting new squash and they are growing.  So it looks like I’ll get some more butternuts if we don’t have an early frost.  Here's a green one alongside some mature butternuts. 

I picked two of the butternuts that were on a dead vine.  I'm thinking about drying the smaller one as a candy.  Time to do a little research on the Net.

Totals for the week:

Tomato 4 lb 15 oz;  Eggplant 1 lb 10 oz;  Hot pepper 6 oz;  Sweet pepper 4 lb 1 oz;
Snap Beans 2 lb 2 oz;  Okra 6 oz;  Butternut squash 4 lb 5 oz.    
Yearly total 146 lbs. 

Sweedey Hollow

Since the oppressive heat has broken I got the itch to do some hiking.  Tuesday I drove to Morgan-Monroe State Forest, about 20 miles from my house,  to hike the Low Gap Trail.  It’s a 10 mile loop trail through the Southern Indiana hill country.  It’s not as rugged as Brown or Jackson county, but there are some 200 to 300 foot climbs on the trail.  That may not seem like much to those who live near the Appalachians or out west, but there are few parts of the trail that are level, you are either climbing or descending, so it’s a good workout. 

The best part of the trail is the descent into Sweedey Hollow.  The trail drops down from a ridgeline then parallels a creek bed, crossing it several times.  Soon the walls of the hollow get closer and closer and some eye-catching rock formations appear.  The rocks in this area are sandstone with a strong grain.  They tend to break off in flat pieces into the stream bed.  Many of the larger rocks in the hillsides have lost their lower parts and now overhang the hillside.  I read that there are some endangered orchid species in the hollow.   

Here’s a pic of the stream bed through Sweedey Hollow, dry as a bone.  Most of the rocks are flat pieces of sandstone.  About four miles further the trail crosses another stream which has a very different geology. There the rocks are mostly round and there are a lot of geodes, although you have to get away from the trail to find any now.  Geodes look like big gray eggs, but break one open and it is hollow with crystal formations. 

This is a pic of a rock that had some nice lichen patterns.  The camera, or my camera skills, don’t do it justice.

This is a pic looking up at a rock formation that has lost the lower part and now has an overhang.  There are a number of formations like this in the hollow.

Before reaching the largest overhanging rock the batteries went dead in the camera.  There’s a large rock formation near the streambed with an overhang  about 100 feet long that you can walk under.  There are some large trees on the hillside directly above the overhang.  Makes me wonder when it will finally collapse – tomorrow, a hundred years from now, or not for another ten thousand years, you just don’t know. 

August 15, 2011

The Nesco food dehydrator is supposed to arrive today.  This week there’s going to be a glut of peppers and tomatoes that are all ripening at once, so the dehydrator will be just in time.  I ordered the 700W model with an adjustable thermostat.   It costs a little more than the basic model but it has one more tray, adjustable heat and some extras that the basic model doesn’t have.  And it looks a lot more solid.  It’ll be fun to try it out – I’ll have to make some jerky later. 

Here’s a pic of the Giant Marconi peppers.  It’s my favorite sweet pepper, tangy and sweet.  I picked one yesterday and grilled it with eggplant and chicken.   This morning I picked the first pimento pepper, they are sweet and thick-walled and great with tomatoes and cucumber.

These are the paprika peppers, very large this year.  I bought the plant at the farmer’s market and will be back for another one next year.  These will go in the dehydrator.

And here’s the red hot cherry peppers.  I’ve read these are good for pickling.

Tomatoes are really coming on.  The brandywine especially are very good.  The ones in the picture are German Queen.  I’ll probably go back to raising at least one Supersonic F1  tomato next year.  It’s just been a very good robust plant for me that produces excellent tomatoes from mid July to fall.  And I’ll plant one heirloom, probably Cherokee Purple.   

The lavendar touch eggplant is about four feet tall.  Good thing the tomato plant on it’s north side is almost seven feet tall.  It has completely outgrown the fairytale eggplant that was seeded at the same time.  The fairytale plant is a little over a foot tall.  Probably the last year for that variety although it is good on the grill.

 

I put some produce in a cooler for the delivery person.  I know it’s a long trip to the middle of nowhere and it’s usually their last delivery of the day, so a little reward is in order. 

Weekly totals:

Tomato 8 lb 6 oz;  Okra 3 oz;  Eggplant 11 oz;  Sweet pepper 9 oz;  Hot pepper 11 oz;  Beans 8 oz 

The spreadsheet under the Results tab has been updated as well.