I spent part of Monday prepping the garage to receive two racks of freshly picked garlic plants for curing. In 2024, the harvest was July 12, so with spring planting this year, I’m running a month behind. The garlic plants look a bit weird — multiple flowers per head, small scapes — so I don’t know what I will get. Hopefully there will be enough good cloves to replant in the fall, with the rest to be used in the kitchen regardless of size. I have a dozen head of garlic left from 2024. Later this week I will grind them in the blender with some olive oil to store in the refrigerator until I use them up. My cooking life was forever changed when Susan Jutz taught me to grow garlic.
I made a batch of applesauce with Earliblaze apples and it was not as good as the batch made with Zestar! apples. If I get ambitious, I might cut down one or both of the Earliblaze trees and replace it with another Zestar! tree. I don’t see that happening this fall.
There does not look to be an abundance of tomatoes for canning. With 70 cages, there are plenty to eat fresh and cook with. Just last week I made a batch of chili using San Marzano tomatoes and it was distinctively better. This shows cooking with fresh tomatoes makes a big difference in taste. The tomato harvest is beginning to accelerate so we’ll see where it takes us.
Squash and cucumbers are pretty well done. A few green beans remain to be picked. Leafy green vegetables are aplenty, although the refrigerator and freezer are stocked with enough to last until next season. Hot peppers have just begun to come in. There will be some more eggplant and bell peppers. That is about it.
This is a snapshot of where things are in the garden. It has been a great year.
The Iowa primary for the 2026 general election is on June 2, 2026. At the end of summer the year before the primary there is plenty of action among both Democrats and Republicans. This post is a recap of where I find myself landing in three races a long distance from the finish line.
The governor announced she is not running again, which leaves an open race. Multiple Republicans put themselves forward for governor. I notice superficial aspects of their action yet am more interested in what Democrats are doing. Brianne Pfannenstiel of the Des Moines Register is covering the governor’s race. I was able to get through the Gannett paywall to read her latest here. Rob Sand and Julie Stauch are running as Democrats and there is a no-party candidate, Sondra Wilson. I was an active participant in the 2006 election that made Democrat Chet Culver our governor. I don’t see that type of enthusiasm this summer. In particular, Sand seems a bit droll. The filing deadline for state and federal offices is March 13, 2026. A lot can happen between now and then.
The race for U.S. Senator from Iowa is where most of my interest lies. At the end of June I donated $10 each to the three then announced candidates, Nathan Sage, Zach Wahls, and J.D. Scholten. There are at least three more kicking tires on a run. That’s too many $10 dollar donations to make another.
While a lot can happen before the filing deadline, I believe Sage, Wahls and Scholten comprise the field. Of them I like J.D. Scholten best because of his experience of running against Steve King in Iowa’s fourth congressional district. In addition, he has been prominent in national news media, appearing on nationwide broadcast outlets and newspapers. Just last week he spoke at Netroots Nation. Likewise, he has the attention of Iowa-based political reporters. His ability to attract media interest in things like his recent farm policy statement is important in the primary because Iowa Democrats do watch national news reporting and read the newspaper. His strength in person-to-person campaigning honed during his race with Steve King, combined with media attention makes him a strong contender to beat the Republican nominee whether or not it is Joni Ernst.
I don’t know Nathan Sage, and haven’t heard him speak in person or viewed a media recording. I will do that eventually. He has been making rounds of state Democratic gatherings and keeps an aggressive schedule. I don’t rule him out at this point.
I’m not dismissing Zach Wahls either. His public campaign seems focused on messaging in a way to redefine who we are as Iowans, defining values we hold in common. Iowa needs more of that. Whether that is a path to winning the general election is unclear in August 2025.
So I lean Scholten in the U.S. Senate race.
I have no opinion about congressional races except for in the first district where I live. I attended the county Democratic Central Committee meeting last Thursday where we heard from three campaigns for congress. This race boils down to whether we accept Christina Bohannan’s argument that she lost by 799 votes in 2024, and she knows how to close the gap and win the third time around. She noted in her remarks early polling has her at a 4-point advantage over Mariannette Miller-Meeks.
I don’t know if I buy that argument. At the same time, she is the only candidate with several seasoned staff members from three general election campaigns. When I think of the district, I know many of those Democrats well. They lean more conservative than Johnson County where I live. Given what is known about Bohannan, they seem unlikely to take a chance on a newcomer when they have heard or met Bohannan during the last three campaigns. I didn’t hear anything from the other campaigns to break the attention I pay to Bohannan.
There are a lot of other important races this cycle. For me, though, the focus is on these three.
UPDATE: Since posting this, Jackie Norris and Josh Turek announced for U.S. Senate. I will do an update of that race in a new post once the other person kicking tires on a run makes a decision.
When in the 1970s I bought a Minolta SRT-101 35 mm film camera I took it on short trips to take pictures and see the results. Film and film processing were inexpensive. I felt I was a step above people who bought their Brownie camera at the drug store to capture moments of family events. I felt like a creative person with everything to gain by capturing images that weren’t necessarily of people, or remembrances of where I had been. So it is with this image which even 50 years later attracts my eye.
I don’t know why I drove by myself to the Coralville Dam and Reservoir that winter day. I have living memory of the experience. From looking at the dozen or so prints I took that day, I was trying something creative, the way an artist fills a sketchbook with drawings. I hadn’t given much thought to framing the image, or anything else a photographer might consider. I’m thankful I included the signage in the frame to help remember where the film was exposed.
The artist’s sketchbook is a good metaphor for these kinds of prints. While there is a result of the effort, namely the print, what is more important is the learning process I went through that day: the practice at capturing images. 50 years ago, I did a lot of practicing. When digital photography came along and became ubiquitous, we still practice, yet if we don’t like the frame we can immediately take another shot. With decades of experience, all of that practice comes into play with every shot we take.
These were days when we didn’t see the image until receiving the prints from the processor, maybe a week or more later. The disconnectedness of the print from the creative act added something. While there was living memory of the photo shoot, the printed result was divorced from that. The image stands on its own. That is one point of being creative.
When I received my share of the settlement with the elevator company related to Father’s death, I equipped our band with an electric guitar, amplifiers, a public address system and the Volkswagen microbus in this photograph. The photograph is proof the vehicle existed. The band equipment has long been sold, yet this photo remains as a reminder of what once was. It is also proof that I was learning a craft.
I had COVID-19 in August and September 2024, so I did not get garlic planted before winter. Once recovered from the virus, I checked soil conditions each day into December and did not find them right for planting. One thing led to another, winter came and went, and I planted garlic on March 29. My friend Susan told me long ago garlic could be planted in the spring. Ever since I began growing it in my home garden I over wintered.
I began to freak out when the plants did not seem as tall as in previous years. On July 9, I ordered one pound of garlic seeds from Johnny’s Selected Seeds, the first time I ever did that. If my crop was a bust, I wanted something to start over. It was an expensive insurance policy.
When scapes emerged, they seemed of mixed quality. A few looked normal, yet some sprouted multiple scapes, and some were puny. They tasted fine, it’s just the overall volume for 100 plants seems lighter than in previous years.
By August, my garlic is usually harvested, racked, and curing in the garage on the special rack I made. I want the first couple of leaves to start turning brown before harvest, and we just aren’t there. Some are starting to turn, so harvest can’t be long. I dug one head (see photo) and it looked good. Maybe I’ll be alright.
It never occurred to me what life would be like without garlic. It wouldn’t feel like a real life. Fingers crossed I make it through a decent harvest and fall panting in October.
When the email from Macmillan Publishers arrived I knew I would purchase The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb, by Garrett M. Graff. I immediately logged in to Amazon and found I could order it to be delivered the next day, on publication day (Aug. 5, 2025), for full price. I hit the pause button. Didn’t I tell myself I was going to slow down my ordering from the behemoth book seller?
Next I found the website for a local bookseller who was offering pre-order for delivery to the store also on Aug. 5. It was also full price, so I said what the hell. No time like the present and ordered it on their website. It was an experience compared to Amazon.
First, when I received my automated order confirmation, it was detailed, giving me everything I needed regarding the order: tracing, question outreach, price, and so on. One curious bit was the order showed being from an outfit called BookPeople, which is a large independent bookseller located in Austin, Texas. Austin is less like the rest of Texas, so I am okay with that. Besides, I assume my local bookshop does what it must to reduce acquisition cost and build margin on sale. Both of those are necessary to stay in business. So far, so good.
Next came the email from the local bookstore. It was sent by an individual at the store to advise me they would notify me when the book arrived. Nice personal touch.
All was going well when my contact reached out with this message: “The Devil Reached Toward the Sky has arrived and I have set aside a copy for you at the back information counter. All of the copies which we received were damaged so I picked out the least damaged one to set aside for you. Have a look at it and we will order another copy for you if you don’t like this one.” Seriously? Well, it is not my bookseller’s fault the book was damaged in shipment, so I started a string of emails, which turned into text messages. The text exchange took 30 minutes and included photos of the damage and discussion of price for damaged goods. We were able to work it out and I drove the 25 minutes to the county seat to pick up the book, paying cash.
If a book got damaged with Amazon, I know the drill. I contact them and would get disposition instructions while they credited my account and shipped another book. Most likely, if I had to return it, I would have had to drive to their return consolidation point at a local big box store. Goods damaged in shipping is always a hassle and the blame always lies with the party that packaged and did the shipping. It is a rare occurrence to receive damaged goods from Amazon.
I will just assume this situation is a one-off and will order new books I want to add to my library locally, especially when there is no price difference. I don’t like taking so much time dealing with a local store, yet hopefully we will get to know each other better and develop a relationship. When my annual book-related budget is about $1,000, it’s not like I am the biggest fish in the sea. It is one more way I can spend more of my life relating to people, even if it’s because of a glitch in the process.
The more I walk on the state park trail, I notice the way light filters through the foliage. The familiar reveals itself as varied in presentation. It takes an active mind to notice.
Here is a series of photos about light on the state park trail. Some are subtle. Some, less so. They are all valuable as part of my journey with photography.
Light on the state park trail.Foggy October sunrise.On the state park trail.Emerging from the trail.Light on a clump of trees.Clearing ahead.Sunlight crosses my path.Light on tree trunks.Cloudy day on the trail.Sunrise reflection.
Hiroshima, Japan after U.S. Nuclear Attack. Photo Credit: The Telegraph
The anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Aug. 6) and Nagasaki (Aug. 9), found me without useful things to say. Enter President Trump on July 25, “(New START is) not an agreement you want expiring. We’re starting to work on that.” He added, “It’s a problem for the world when you take off nuclear restrictions, that’s a big problem.” This from the president who dismissed the New START arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia as too favorable to Russia during his first term in office.
Talk is cheap. Despite Trump’s statement, no plan or policy to reduce nuclear arms has emerged, according to Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association. The president spoke with Russian President Putin at least six times this year. According to call readouts, the topic of nuclear arms control was not broached. Meanwhile, the recently passed budget reconciliation calls for almost $1 Trillion in nuclear complex spending.
Without clear and sustained efforts by world leaders to prevent nuclear war, our luck in avoiding one may run out.
My worries about nuclear attacks began as a child. Gathered with family in the backyard, we watched the Soviet satellite Sputnik fly over. If they could launch Sputnik, could they send a nuclear bomb to Iowa? In school we performed drills on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. Today we pray the president will stop talking about nuclear arms control and do something. It is an open question whether he will.
~ First published by the Cedar Rapids Gazette on Aug. 3, 2025.
Green slime on the state park lake due to over-application of nitrogen in the watershed.
Weeds will grow anywhere in Iowa with open ground. I use plastic fabric to suppress weeds in the garden, yet a weed will find even the tiniest pinprick, plant itself, and grow. The purpose of weeding is to favor one side in the competition among plant life and improve crop yields.
This post isn’t proceeding how I thought it would. I am from an agricultural state, so when I think of weeds, I think of how it impacts row crops, corn and soybeans. I feel obliged to discuss that first.
On Sunday crop dusters flew over the house most of the day. It’s time to spray pesticides and herbicides, I guess. In 2024 Iowa corn yield was 211 bushels per acre according to the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship. According to Farm Progress, failure to control weeds, especially early in the crop cycle can lead to anywhere from 20-40 fewer bushels per acre. When the corn is taller, and has established a canopy, competing weeds can reduce yields by about 3 bushels per acre for every day they are left uncontrolled, according to Iowa State University. Corn farmers live on tight margins, so they usually don’t hesitate with a generous application of glyphosate. Those 20-40 bushels can mean the difference between a good year and a bad one.
I have been reading Chris Jones’ book The Swine Republic. In the way the universe sometimes comes together, Monday morning’s reading happened to be the chapters on glyphosate and Dicamba, two herbicides widely used in Iowa. I was already writing this weedy post, so it added a certain something to my mood. This isn’t the rabbit hole I intended when I began.
I would use the weed paradigm differently. Whenever I enter the room where most of my artifacts live, they compete for attention. By getting rid of some, they would be out, freeing me to follow the vein of an idea where it may lead without distraction. Part of me doesn’t mind the diversions. Empirical me understands I only have so much time left on this jumping green sphere and I’d better make the best use of it.
I should weed out things of marginal interest to the broader thrust of my work. I don’t want to. My wants and urges have little to do with logic. They arise from a complex experience of a life that seldom conformed to social norms for their own sake. This is part of what makes me unique. Unwillingness to execute a plan to downsize possessions is a feature of my creative life, not a problem. Rational me understands the house will explode if we try to fit much more in it. Creative me says if it will, let it explode and we’ll see how it unfolds.
When I’m in the garden I pull weeds as I go. This is especially important as soon as seeds germinate and emerge from the soil. Like the corn farmer, I know this is the time to eliminate competition for nutrients, light and space. It is better to do it before seedlings emerge. I do what I can to produce a bountiful harvest. My creative issue is the seedlings in my life emerged long ago and have grown to become part of the living landscape. Weeding the stuff would create a new way of seeing. What if I don’t like it?
Maybe I’ll feel better about weeding my stuff after I finish the autobiography.
Anyway. It’s time to set all that aside and get to weeding. We can’t take it with us and don’t want to leave a big mess for my heirs to clean up.
Stump cut to make a resting place for the gardener.
With four weeks left until Labor Day, summer is about finished. A lot of work remains. The only compensation I receive for any of it is the satisfaction of a job well done.
Is my work the same as working for an employer? I think so, yet there is an attitude shift when we work for ourselves. I find more personal risk and am particularly careful I don’t get injured or make a bad financial decision. There is no malarkey in my work life. It is based on empirical tasks, cash flows, and bank loans, all of which are necessary to piece together a life. Most things break down into short projects upon which I can work until completion. There is no overtime pay, or any of the benefits allowed many workers. My spouse and I pool our pensions and hope they cover the bills.
I came up in a work environment where I earned more money than needed for minimal survival. It enabled buying a house, saving for our child’s education, and then later, when our savings proved to be not enough, it allowed us to pay the student loan to take that out of the child’s bucket. I also earned enough money to be able to quit my job multiple times without immediate prospects. The biggest adjustment to living on pensions is there is no longer any “extra” money.
From the time I left the job where my spouse and I met, until we moved back to Iowa and our child left to attend college, she worked at home. The work she did was valued and important to raising our child. There was the avoidance of child care expenses, and a clear division of labor, yet it was more than that. It was a way of life that had little to do with money except treating it as the fungible commodity it was. Ours wasn’t a perfect life, yet we got by.
I resist framing what I do every day as a job. The old farm word for it is “chores.” It’s more than that. With our more sedentary lifestyle, we need exercise, a healthy diet, and some amount of socialization. I suppose that makes us more than a cog in the machine of life. I hope we are more than that.
In the end, photographs are objects. They have qualities — paper, coloration, moisture, processing technique, subject matter, and many others. In the beginning, one has to take a pile of them and just start organizing. This is especially true if during the collection process, there was no organizing principle, other than all photos go into a certain box labeled “photos.” It’s a process, or may be one once I have gone through everything on an initial pass. Here I’m talking about paper photographs.
Somehow I ended up with large quantities of photos, stacked one-on-one, placed together only by happenstance. Now I review them, one-by-one, to see where the journey leads. The immediate task is separating them into groups according to when they were taken. For example, there is a set of our young child getting a home permanent. They obviously go together in their own stack. Another stack is photographs I took when I lived in Mainz and from the travels around the area. It is a tall stack because I avoided thinking too much about them. They are easily grouped for later analysis. Going through them quickly is a necessary first step.
The hardest part of a review and sorting is to turn off memory while doing it. That was a stumbling block because I easily got distracted by memories evoked by the prints. I also felt I had to turn immediately to my autobiography and write about a set of photos. Now, one pile, one box, is sorted at a time. I group the objects together as they appear before me and as I recall how they went together.
Each pile could be a story in itself. To get through them, the stories need to be set on the sidetrack to be hooked up to the train later. Maybe it’s not optimal, yet it is a way to get from randomness to a better understanding of what I have available… and how each image might be used. This process will be about my personal cultural attributes, some of which I know, and some lie unawares in the conglomeration of personal cultural artifacts.
For now, I decided to make a weekly post about how my photography process evolves. The first one is here. Going forward, I will use the tag A Life of Photos. I hope readers will follow along.
Journey Home 
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