The rest of the celery harvest ready for cleaning and processing, Aug. 25, 2022.
The celery I grow is unlike anything available in local grocery stores. Planted March 13, it took the entire five months to get this far. I could have left some of it in the ground to grow larger. There is something to be said for getting the seasonal celery harvest and storage done all at once.
I forget when I first grew celery, yet it must have been during my eight years working on the vegetable and sheep farms. It is now a basic garden staple. How will I use it?
The best stalks will be eaten fresh. Some of the leaves have been frozen in plain water using a flexible cupcake tray. I’ll add one or two of these pellets of celery to each pot of soup I make. A plastic tub of stalks is in the refrigerator for cooking fresh. The rest will be sliced thinly and frozen in one-and-a-half cup portions in zip top bags. Looking at the yield, fresh should last until November, frozen until the next harvest in 2023.
Growing celery in the home garden is all about flavor. There is no comparison to commercially available organic celery grown in California. Mine is better in so many ways. The bold celery flavor adds to every dish I make with it. When operating a kitchen garden, adding distinct flavors to our cuisine is basic.
This variety is called Kelvin from Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Winslow, Maine. Recently someone asked if I save seeds. Usually, I do not. Kelvin celery is an improvement Johnny’s made over the previously offered iteration of the variety. They have a large research operation, and rather than save seeds from plants I like, I seek to leverage what they (and other seed companies) do to improve the genetics. Even though I spend most of my time in the garden alone, it is a collaborative activity connected to scores of people.
I know how to save most seeds. If we get to doomsday prepping, I may start saving them. For now, I’d rather be part of the community.
As the fall campaign approaches, supporters of Elle Wyant, Democrat for Iowa House District 91, are in the local newspapers with letters of support. Here are two examples from this week’s publications.
Vote Wyant for District 91
At the May 12, 2022 League of Women Voters District 91 Candidate Forum, Brad Sherman said the “green movement” is fueled by socialism, and he said, “One of these days the plants are going to rise up and say they don’t have any carbon dioxide to breathe. Then it will all go the other way.” His comments show an arrogant and dismissive attitude toward the real dangers of climate change and toward science in general. Vote for Elle Wyant if you want legislation based on scientific reality instead of extreme ideology.
Glenn Goetz, Amana, Iowa County Democrats
~ Published online in the Marengo Pioneer Republican, Aug. 23, 2022
Wyant vs. Sherman: sensible vs. extreme
Iowa County is peppered with yard signs that say “Brad Sherman Freedom.” Sherman’s Libations for Liberty support this quote from Benjamin Rush: “A simple democracy… is one of the greatest evils.”
Sherman signed a resolution stating there was widespread voter fraud in the November 2020 election (there was not). Sherman is angry that Trump was unable to overturn a free and fair election to stay in power. He is against democracy. He wants to keep Trump in power against the will of the voters. How can he claim to be a champion of freedom? Is this the person we want to represent us?
Elle Wyant is running on a platform that includes education, economic development and equity. She has the sensibility that comes from being part of a fifth generation Iowa County farm family. Vote for Elle Wyant, Democratic candidate for House District 91.
Betty Stiefel, Victor, Iowa Count Democrats.
~ Published in the print edition of the Williamsburg Journal Tribune, Aug. 24, 2022
The remaining two Bur Oak trees in the garden made an abundance of acorns this year. They are weighing down the branches so they almost touch the ground. Acorns are welcome nutrition for squirrels who took up residence in trees I planted after moving to Big Grove in 1993. These particular oak trees were planted from acorns harvested the year our daughter graduated high school and left home. There were three trees, one for each family member, but the August 2020 derecho took one of them out.
The plan is to remove one of the remaining two after the garden finishes this year. It will allow the final one to grow to maturity. By the time it does, I’ll likely be too old for much gardening yet I hope to be able to appreciate its native glory.
It took an hour to harvest tomatoes yesterday. There were two and a half gallons of San Marzanos, a milk jug full of mixed cherry tomatoes, and a bushel of slicers. Today’s plan is to clean them all, remove the imperfect ones to make tomato sauce, and organize what’s left for optimum storage and use in the next couple of days. Tomatoes planted under the oak trees are looking better, so there will be a harvest of plums and Amish paste for canning. This season is running late across the garden.
While I reached into tomato cages to take fruit from the vines I thought about next year. I plan to continue the trellis system for cherry tomatoes and plant two additional long rows, one of mixed slicers and one of San Marzanos, Granaderos, and Amish Paste. The trellis will be longer, as we are using more cherries in the kitchen. It needs to be more sturdy so I may invest in t-posts for the upright supports and place them closer together. They will be flanked by the other two rows, which in turn will be flanked by bell peppers on one side and a mix of eggplant and hot peppers on the other. That would allow focus on that particular garden patch at the same time of year. One can tell fall is not far away by this contemplation of next year.
Where the garlic will go this fall is not decided. This year’s crop continues to cure in the garage and the heads used have been healthy and tasty. I planted 100 head last fall and it produced plenty for the kitchen. Almost every seed planted yielded a head. When the curing process is finished, I’ll save the best heads for seed. This garlic originated on Susan Jutz’ farm and has been planted year after year for a very long time. It has good characteristics and stores well.
Soon I will mow the harvested garlic patch and use the plot to store grass clippings. With the recent rain, the yard grass is long and will make plenty for storage. I also need to tear down the failed onion patch and prepare it to store fencing. I need a sunny afternoon for this work.
We move through the gardening season so quickly any more. In late August, the work continues to be about tomatoes, peppers, greens, celery, and eggplant. Cucumbers and zucchini are about done. I hope to plant lettuce before the week is done. Acorns forming on oak trees are the sign I had better get going.
As daylight moves toward summer’s end, the amount of information available has increased dramatically. After a busy Monday, I have to stop the input and process what I’ve gained. In an ever-forward life, that’s hard to do.
In the next township over, one of the Iowa CO2 pipelines is planned to cross Johnson County. The public debate is whether private companies should be able to use eminent domain provisions of the law the way a government would to run these pipelines. If you got everyone involved in the projects – companies, government, land owners, farmers, and citizens – I’m pretty sure we could agree that these pipelines serve no useful purpose to the environment. During initial rollout of the plans, companies hardly mentioned the environmental impact of CO2 emissions on earth because there are and may be more markets for the commodity. This is mostly about being able to export Iowa ethanol to California, which has stricter air quality regulations than Iowa. Well maybe I’m wrong these folks wouldn’t agree.
In Iowa’s First Congressional District, Republican incumbent Mariannette Miller-Meeks has defined her campaign as one tapping into a mother lode of money and crazy policies in her national party. In a way this makes the race easier for Democrats as she will be out of touch with what all district residents want and need. It will be harder because of the endless well of dark money in politics agitating everything. Democrat Christina Bohannan is busy doing the work of a candidate all over the district. There is a lot to take in as I plan my engagement in the fall campaign.
I am disengaging in my position as president of our home owners association in a development with a population of about 250 people. Finding people to be on our all volunteer board has been challenging. I served on the board in three different periods since first being elected in 1994. There are real responsibilities with managing our public water system, roads, trash and recycling removal, and a separate wastewater treatment plant. We kept the board fully staffed since I returned in 2017, yet few showed interest in leading the effort. Both managing the activities and finding a replacement will take time I’d rather be spending elsewhere.
Our family decided to become home owners. We built new in 1993 and 29 years later, a lot needs attention. Lilac bushes planted in 1994 are now overgrown. Repeated straight line winds and a derecho knocked down trees and branches. We are at 12 years since last roofing the house. Major appliances need upgrade. The list of home repairs and upgrades is pretty long. We have to be ready to slow down, and that means making the house more livable as we age. We tend to avoid these projects because we don’t want to think about them and how we finance them on a fixed income. We have to get going or the to-do list will only continue to grow.
Seems like I spent a lot of my life developing game plans and this is no different. I know enough to stop the input of new projects and focus on optimizing the use of time and resources. I’ll give it until Labor Day. If planning goes on past then, it may drive me crazy.
Tomato-growing has become a way of life in Big Grove. I planted tomatoes at the rented duplex in which my spouse and I lived in 1983, the first year of our marriage. With one or two brief exceptions, some tomatoes found their way from garden to kitchen every year since.
The best part of the tomato harvest is using fresh in the kitchen. Cherries are a great snack, slices go well on so many things, and making sauce daily provides a type of freshness one can’t find in the best canned tomato sauce. Sometimes I take a whole tomato with a salt shaker and eat it like an apple.
This year I planted two seedlings in each cage, over 150 plants in total. The results were mixed, with lessons to be learned. There were plenty of tomatoes for kitchen use, to give away, and to donate to the food pantry.
The daily harvest is a generous bushel right now. The season won’t last long, so we make the most of it.
When it is tomato time, daily inspection of fruit waiting to be processed is essential. Blemished tomatoes produce useful bi-products. I wrote and posted this process to my Instagram and Facebook accounts:
Cut off the bad spots, quarter and put them in a soup pan to cook. Bring to a boil, cook until the skins are loosened.Turn off the heat.
Ladle the tomatoes into a funnel, the kind that comes with a wooden tool to press the tomatoes against the screen. Let them sit until the liquid stops dripping out.
Remove the liquid and store for other use.
Using the wooden tool, press the tomato pulp against the screen until all that’s left is seeds and skin. In the catch-basin will be tomato puree.
Pour the tomato puree into a flexible muffin sheet and put it in the freezer.
Once frozen, remove from the muffin sheet and put in zip top freezer bags for storage in the freezer.
The plan for plum tomatoes was foiled by placing the two main varieties under the oak trees. Not enough sunlight affected production. The season is not over yet I know there won’t be as many jars of canned tomatoes for winter. The San Marzano variety was planted in the main tomato patch and did well. There won’t be enough of them to make up for the under-production of Amish Paste, Granadero and Speckled Roman.
Someone asked if I save seeds. I do not. Most of what I plant is F1, or not a pure genetic strain. I don’t like the idea of being constrained in the garden by choices made about which seeds were saved. There are a lot of available tomato varieties I haven’t tried. I also want seed companies to continue in business. I’d feel a bit like I was stealing the genetics and jobs from people who need them by saving seeds.
There is a never ending life with tomatoes. It can be a great life if one gets a grip on it. I feel I am almost there.
The conventional wisdom about Iowa’s First Congressional District election is incumbent Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks has the advantage over Democrat Christina Bohannan. This was borne out by polling sponsored by the Bohannan campaign.
In a Change Research poll conducted June 30-July 4, the results confirmed Miller-Meeks enjoyed a one point advantage at 39-38 percent. This poll is getting stale, and with more than 20 percent of those polled not for either candidate, it is too early to make much of this one point lead. As summer ends with the last long weekend before the election, where do things stand?
Miller-Meeks first.
At her inaugural tailgate, where she announced her candidacy for re-election, Miller-Meeks assembled a typical cast of Republican characters.
U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas joined an array of familiar Iowa Republican faces at Streb Construction to support the freshman congresswoman as she announced her intent to seek a second term representing Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District in 2022. Besides Cotton, who has become a regular visitor to Iowa, U.S. Reps. Ashley Hinson and Randy Feenstra, former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, former Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, and Iowa Republican Party Chairman Jeff Kaufmann tried to fire up a crowd of about 200.
As Miller-Meeks spent time in the 117th Congress, she got to know more Republicans there and began sounding like someone other than the person I met during her early campaigns and heard speak when she was Director of the Iowa Department of Public Health. More than any politician I’ve known, the conversion to Washington, D.C. insider was fast and complete. She sounds less like someone legislating on behalf of Iowans and more like someone who took a crazy pill.
As her re-election campaign shifts into gear after the Labor Day weekend, one of her first campaign events will be another football tailgate in Iowa City, this time with U.S. Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who is the author of the Republican plan to rescue America. Scott wrote, among other things, these two sentences into his plan, “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” Miller-Meeks tapped into the mainline of radical right wing Republicanism.
If it wasn’t known already, at a Thursday, Aug. 18 event in Jasper County, Miller-Meeks made her complete alignment with the 45th president clear. She participated in a town hall meeting hosted by America First Agenda with panelists Linda McMahon, former Administrator of the Small Business Administration, Doug Hoelscher, former assistant to the 45th president, and Matthew Whitaker, former Acting U.S. Attorney General (same person who attended her first tailgate). America First Agenda is an organization that supports the 45th president and his chosen candidates. He even gave the first keynote address for the group. The Jasper County event was the first stop in a nationwide rollout of candidate support by the organization.
Miller-Meeks is a Trump Republican and undoubtedly adheres to the policy statement of America First Agenda. These are hardly Iowa values, yet the Republican seems convinced embracing them will lead to re-election.
Christina Bohannan is different. She is a Democrat. I want to make clear that I am not a campaign insider. The majority of what they ask of me is for financial donations, occasional event invitations, and even less frequently for canvassing help. I am not active in Bohannan’s campaign the way I was and am in other campaigns. I offer no exclusive insider information in this post.
Bohannan check-boxed the summer with appearances throughout the district at Democratic gatherings, parades, meet and greet events, fund raisers, visits to county fairs, a State Fair appearance flipping pork burgers, voter canvassing, and other typical campaign events. Bohannan acknowledges she is behind in fund raising (she recently had $1.27 million cash on hand to Miller-Meeks’ $2.66 million), yet believes they have enough money to meet campaign goals. This is all fine, and necessary.
The issue Bohannan faces is threading the needle of support for President Joe Biden’s policies with sufficient distancing from him to counter Republican attacks of being a “Biden Democrat.” While I like Biden Democrats, when I say it, it means something different from Republicans who speak in dog-whistle language. Republicans have been relentless in pursuit of this attack meme.
Here is a link to a WHBF interview with an example of how Bohannan responded to a direct question, “Will you run on Joe Biden’s record or run away from it? Where do you disagree with the administration when it comes to policy, if at all?” I like her answers. She refused to accept the interviewer’s framing despite his showing more persistence on the point than most journalists. Attempting to re-direct attention from Biden to Miller-Meeks is a solid response for Bohannan. It needs work because she comes across as dodging the question more than getting us to focus on her opponent. If she doesn’t address her clear support for Joe Biden more directly, the meme will stick.
Having a Trump minion in the Congress is not good for me or for Iowa. Because Republicans need to retain the seat to gain a majority in the U.S. House, they have and will invest big in Iowa’s First District. I believe Christina Bohannan is up to the challenge yet it will be a long, hard road to election day. Bohannan can use our help. Click here to learn how you can join the effort.
Some days I’m thankful for the ability to walk the state park trail and see the ever-changing plant, animal and insect life. Being thankful is enough for this Saturday.
There is something about the Hammond B-3 organ. We’ll look back on these coronavirus pandemic videos with fondness one day, I predict. (hat tip to David Shorr).
I’ve been with retired Admiral Michael Franken enough to know he would make an excellent U.S. Senator. My comparison is with Tom Harkin, with whom I also spent time. Harkin was arguably Iowa’s best senator to date. If elected, Franken could also be one of the great U.S. Senators from Iowa.
Franken and I both served in the military. In my conversations with him – about his leaving the Navy after the election of the 45th president, about how he would control the military budget by knowing where the pork is hidden, and about ending the nuclear arms race – he is much like me. Many of us seek that in a candidate.
What makes him different from typical politicians is Franken is doing the work of a campaign by visiting all parts of Iowa and speaking with everyday people instead of to the limited network of party activists. He is positioning himself to represent all Iowans, something his opponent has forgotten in his many years of living in Washington, D.C.
Franken is doing things candidates are expected to do, flipping pork burgers at the State Fair, walking in parades, shaking hands with people wherever he goes, and considering a constituent question before he answers it.
Instead of electing Chuck Grassley again, we should send Michael Franken to the U.S. Senate because he is the best person for the job.
~ First published in The Little Village Magazine on Aug. 18, 2022.
The rest of the potato harvest. It was a good crop.
In August there is plenty of extra garden produce for donations to the local food pantry. Potatoes are popular and I could easily have donated this whole bin. They all would have been taken. Potatoes are elemental.
After a period of rodents eating potatoes while they were still in the ground, I decided to plant in containers. That solved the problem. When I think of the future, I should plant six instead of four containers so I have more to donate. What we have will serve us until they are gone before the end of the year.
We cook potatoes in four primary ways: roasting; grated to make hash browns; as an ingredient in soup; and boiling. All of the smallest ones are used for soup. Every once in a while I use boiled potatoes to make potato salad. Whatever I make with potatoes gets eaten up because they are especially good.
I used to leave the containers buried and replant in the same location each season, using a little composted chicken or turkey manure as fertilizer. This year, I moved them and used soil from the two composters. The production was robust. Given the small amount of time and care it takes to grow potatoes, it is well worth it to have a fresh, great-tasting vegetable. Digging up the containers and harvesting potatoes has become a milestone in the garden season.
The food bank is a nice option to get what I produce into the hands of people who need it. The garden is at the point there are too many cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, and bell peppers. There will never be too many potatoes. It’s hard to believe a few years ago we didn’t have a food bank. It has become a vital part of the community in which we live.
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