Author: Paul Deaton

Categories
Kitchen Garden Writing

Apple Rush

Apple time 2023. Red Delicious.

My focus in the garden turned to apples. By weight, it is the biggest crop I grow. Doing something useful with them drives me to spend much kitchen time processing them. Zestar! and Earliblaze are finished with Red Delicious remaining to close out the garden season.

Of the four varieties I grow, Red Delicious hang the longest on the tree. When they produce, there are many, many of of them. Our needs for juice, applesauce, apple butter, dried apples, and fresh eating are modest compared to the quantity on the tree. I’m already looking for placement of most of them in a Community Supported Agriculture project.

Tomatoes are finishing and it has been a good season. Because of spring trouble getting seedlings to take, there weren’t as many, or as many different varieties, as I had hoped. The difference this year compared to last is that we used most garden tomatoes in our kitchen instead of giving them away. Tomatoes are a brief delight of summer. Once ours are gone, I expect to buy very few tomatoes at the grocer.

I took down the portable greenhouse and noticed a problem with the zipper at the access point. I don’t know if it will be usable next year but I folded it up and put away the frame. Replacing it will be a spring decision, although I likely will. The portable greenhouses are good for a couple of seasons.

I need to figure out fall garden plot preparation. Where will the burn pile be? Where will the garlic go next month? Where will tomatoes go next year?

The burn pile is important because I move it around to deposit minerals throughout the garden. Because we are in a drought I won’t actually burn anything until rain comes. There needs to be plenty of space to pile it high while we wait.

I plan to plant 100 garlic seeds and it will likely be in the plot where the garden composter currently lives. The pallets used to make the composter are getting old and deteriorated. I will likely move the composter to the west side of the garden. I hang my Practical Farmers of Iowa sign on it, so on that side, it may be more visible from the street.

Finally, there are tomatoes, likely the most important crop I grow. This year, deer were able to jump the fence and eat many small tomato plants. Next year I plan to return to a crowding method of tomato planting. By giving deer no place to land inside the fence, they can’t jump in, and the plants grow better. The issue is it crowds me as well. I liked having four-foot rows between the tomatoes this year. It made it easier for me to get among the plants to weed and harvest. It made it easier for the deer as well. I may have enough fencing to install eight-foot tall chicken wire around them next year. This may be the compromise I choose to keep four foot rows. Which plot will tomatoes go? I’m not sure yet, although I favor following the garlic.

As home life turns to apple processing, I enjoy the sense of closure it brings. In years when there are few apples, gardening doesn’t seem the same. In the coming days I’ll embrace the apple rush. Who knows how many more there will be?

Categories
Living in Society

Hobbies in Iowa

Red Delicious apples ripening in early September.

A woman posted her hobbies on a community website to encourage people to contact her to be friends. She was new to the county seat and was having trouble getting to know people, the post said. To encourage people, she listed these hobbies: discovering places/things, thrift stores, garage sales, movies, going out to eat, and museums. I wish her well.

I don’t have consumer-oriented hobbies like shopping or attending events. I’m caught up in living and don’t have time for extras like a hobby. In any case, I view myself as a maker rather than a hobbyist and am consumed with figuring out my world and doing something positive in it. Producing a garden or shopping for books are not hobbies. They are just one more thing I do to keep the operation going.

There is a difference between a hobbyist and a crafter. For example, someone who builds and collects scale model replicas of aircraft spends a lot of time on a kit making it look as professional as possible.The finished product then goes with the rest of their collection. This is a hobbyist. A crafter, on the other hand, sews a shirt with the express purpose of wearing it, and then wearing it out. If I make something, I want to be able to use it and if I wear it out, I’ll make another.

When I attend political meetings, or when I served on a board at the university, invariably someone brought crocheting or knitting to keep their hands busy while the meeting continued. Whatever they were working on was a gift for someone or for some special event. They always found value in even the most tedious meetings. Maybe we all would have felt more productive if we had brought crocheting.

It is fair to redefine how we live our lives. If someone calls my gardening a hobby, that doesn’t bother me. It also doesn’t mean I have to call it one too. Maybe I just don’t want to relate to the person in a hobby-like manner. In fact, for me, it’s not about the craftsmanship that goes into a hobby. It’s the fact I can have a conversation with someone about it. That is more sustainable than building a shelf for the knickknacks collected from countless indistinguishable trips to thrift shops.

The idea that I could get together with strangers who share a hobby is off the charts bad. Why would I want to divert from said hobby unless I hoped to learn something to solve a specific problem? I wouldn’t. Life is short. We spend our time as productively as is possible. If it is hobby-like, well that’s not my concern.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

End of the Earliblaze Apples

Bowl of Earliblaze apples

I finished what I’m doing with Earliblaze apples this year. The trees produced so much fruit I could not keep up. There will be plenty for wildlife to eat well into winter.

Besides eating them fresh, I made apple cider vinegar and applesauce for storage. I have a backlog of apple butter and dried apples, so none of that this year.

There is a brief break in apple processing while I wait for Red Delicious to ripen, maybe a week or two. After they do ripen, it will be a mad rush to the end.

When I planted six trees at home I didn’t know much about growing apples. I knew I wanted apple trees, in part because of family stories of my Virginia ancestors. I picked varieties that would space out the harvest. That’s about it. There were four varieties planted in 1994 and two remain. My learning about growing apples came mostly from working for seven seasons as a mapper (person who directs guests) at Wilson’s Orchard beginning in 2013. It was an unexpected job, but one for which I am thankful.

Paul Rasch and Sara Goering bought Wilson’s Orchard in 2009. Chug Wilson had planted more than 100 varieties of apples before he sold to them. During my tenure I learned about many of them. I would come in well before my shift and wander through the part of the orchard where trees were planted to test how they did.

What I value most about working there is countless conversations I had with Paul about apple culture. If I had a question, he had an answer. I would bring in photos of my home orchard for his advice. We talked about everything apples. Learning with an experienced apple grower was a perquisite of the job. It was great!

Years like this one I’m on my own for apples. My trees produced so many I don’t need outside apples. What I’m saying is I’m now an irregular customer of Paul and Sara’s orchard. I buy a couple of half-gallons of sweet cider in season, and if they have Gold Rush apples, I’ll get some for storage. For now, I have all the Earliblaze apples we can eat.

Categories
Living in Society

Labor Day in 2023

Peeling tomatoes at home.

In 2022 I wrote how I felt about Labor Day: “Even though I retired during the pandemic, and its been many years since I carried a union card, I believe I’ll take the day off, work at home, and thank a union.” At 11.3 percent of the workforce, there are not that many American workers represented by a union. The number is down by 0.3 percent over last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Iowa City Federation of Labor is hosting a Labor Day picnic at City Park this afternoon. When I was more involved with politics, I attended the annual event. What I found was it was difficult to relate to young union families with children. It is their event. Rather than feel alienated as a “friend of labor” once a year, I no longer attend. I’m okay with that. The union members in attendance likely won’t miss me.

It is hard to avoid talking about class on Labor Day. George Carlin famously said there are three classes in the United States, the rich who have all the money and don’t pay taxes, the middle class who do all the work and pay all the taxes, and the poor who exist to keep the middle class in line as a warning of what they might become. Carlin was funnier when he said this. The division between the rich and everyone else is no laughing matter.

My member of Congress sent her weekly update Sunday afternoon and it serves as an example of how Republicans attempt to co-opt the middle-class. There was no mention of the Labor Day Federal Holiday in it.

Miller-Meeks believes H.R. 1, The Lower Energy Costs Act is the answer to what’s troubling the middle class. The bill passed the House with four Democratic votes and is stalled in the Senate. I described the bill previously here. The bill represents a rejection of the Biden administration energy policy and establishes a view of the middle class that may sound good yet is off base. Here is the second paragraph from the email.

The consequences of high energy costs are far-reaching, particularly for working-class families who find themselves grappling with the rising cost of living. As gas prices linger almost $2 higher than they were when President Biden took office, many families are left to make difficult choices between essentials like groceries and rent. The relationship between energy policy and the price of goods is undeniable as American companies rely heavily on having affordable energy for both manufacturing and transportation. In fact, a major component of food costs is energy, which affects average Americans every day with much higher food prices. With gas prices nearly doubling in recent years, American companies of all sizes are left with no choice but to raise the prices of the goods they produce to survive financially. With an abundance of energy resources on American soil, hardworking Americans should never be forced to make tough financial decisions on their most basic needs.

Miller-Meeks Weekly Script, Sept. 3, 2023.

Was there ever a time when people did not grapple with the rising cost of living? No. Since I can remember, our family never had enough money to do everything we wanted. Each bill we got was prioritized in the order of payment. There were good times when we felt we could splurge on a vacation, but mostly, we held our nose to the grindstone to pay for our child’s education, pay off the mortgage, and keep functioning in society. Grappling to meet household financial needs is neither Republican nor Democratic. What is significant is the usage brings “working-class families” under the Republican tent. This is not a minor point.

While middle-class families may be familiar with gas prices when they fuel up, things get complicated when discussing why the local prices increased.

We can see the price at the convenience mart or gas station is higher than in recent memory. Two dollars higher than when Biden took office? No. She rounded up to simplify for the masses. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, the U.S. All Grades All Formulations Retail Gasoline Price per gallon was $2.420 in January 2021 when Biden was inaugurated. It was $3.954 per gallon last month. Gas prices doubled in recent years? No. Half of $3.954 is $1.98. Gas prices have not been consistently below that number since April 2004, although they did hit it for a single month after Trump took office. The congresswoman is selling us subtle woof tickets here.

By sanding the specifics off her message, Miller-Meeks seeks to gain buy-in to a conservative view of how we live. “Grappling the rising cost of living,” “gas prices,” “difficult choices between essentials like groceries and rent,” and “hardworking Americans,” are all political tropes. As gossip columnist Louella Parsons might have said, they are nothing burgers. The evenly-worded message lures the unsuspecting in, and I believe gains the congresswoman votes.

To make lives of middle-class working Americans better, Republicans should support universal healthcare, lifting the cap on Social Security taxes, raising the minimum wage, taxing the rich, smart regulation of business, and our K-12 public school system. I don’t hear any of that from the Republican who represents me in the Congress. If she did want to support the middle class, she might turn her attention to some of these instead of to energy policy which masks the large corporate entities who are pulling the strings on what gets done in Washington.

Best wishes for a happy Labor Day to all my card-carrying union buddies. You earned this holiday.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Diary of Late Summer Kitchen Work

Apple beverage.

This is one tart, tasty apple drink. I’m not sure what to call it.

When I make applesauce, I steam cored apples in enough water to cover the bottom of a pan. Additional moisture is released from the apples. Everything goes into a cone sieve strainer resting on a large Rubbermaid pitcher. Once the liquid filters out I move the strainer to a second identical pitcher and separate the applesauce from the peels. The liquid goes into jars which are stored in the refrigerator until used. I made about a gallon of it already.

Every kitchen has the potential for unique culinary items like this. With the thousands of cookbooks out there, someone is likely to have described this apple beverage previously. It is one more way to use produce in a kitchen garden.

Tomato peeling for canning whole.

I grow enough tomatoes to sort them by size and type. Medium-sized ones are to be canned whole and the process is much like what exists in other kitchens. I core them and put a small X in the bottom. Dip them in boiling water for a minute or two and then cool them in an ice water bath before peeling. Next, I cram them into a quart jar leaving about an inch of head space. Once filled, they go into a water bath canner for 40 minutes. This is a simple, reliable technique.

Some people add salt or a teaspoon of vinegar to the tomatoes before canning. I rarely have an issue with spoilage, so I leave it out. I can’t recall how many quart jars of whole tomatoes I put up in 2022 yet I have a half dozen left.

I make tomato sauce. Most of the crop of Amish Paste and San Marzano goes into sauce. Similar to making applesauce, I steam cook the tomatoes until the flesh gives with a spoon without adding any liquid to the pan. Into the cone sieve strainer the whole thing goes where they sit while the juice drains off. The juice is canned until I have enough quart jars to last at least a year. It is mostly for soup making. In the second pitcher, I separate the skins and seeds leaving a rich, thick tomato sauce. This goes into pint-sized jars. It’s enough to make a batch of pasta sauce for two people. The organic tomato sauce I buy at the wholesale club costs about $0.75 per 15-ounce can. It is good, yet I like using my own first. I’m at the point of summer when I’m running out of new canning lids. When I went to the home, farm and auto supply store to get more last week, they were out as well.

The dehydrator is running with Red Rocket variety hot chili peppers. When these dry, I’ll crush them and use for red pepper flakes, replacing the ones from last year. Since my spouse doesn’t like hot stuff, a little goes a long way.

I picked a half dozen Red Delicious apples and while crunchy and sweet, they are not at peak sweetness. I’ll wait a while before harvesting for the kitchen. Apples and pears have been so abundant this year, most of the crop will feed wild animals though the winter. I need about three more quarts of applesauce. Then I’ll pick the best to eat raw for refrigerator storage and juice the rest until all the half gallon jars are fermenting vinegar. It has been a great apple year.

A couple of bananas were getting overly ripe. I made banana bread for the first time since I can’t remember. I used the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion cookbook for the recipe. It came out quite good. The challenge for banana bread in our household is to reduce oil and take out the eggs and milk products. The egg replacements I used previously haven’t really worked. I use applesauce instead of eggs to make cornbread. Maybe I’ll try that next time. Once I try a recipe that works, and this one did, I then start to tweak it to make it low oil and vegan. Eggs are so much a part of American cooking it is difficult to give them up. We do like banana bread.

For supper I made a pizza with home made dough, my tomato sauce, and toppings of sliced onions, jalapeno peppers and tomatoes from the garden. Cheese was mozzarella and a sprinkle of Parmesan. There will be leftovers.

So that’s what went on in our kitchen today. Despite outdoors temperatures around 90 degrees all afternoon, I made the best of it inside. It felt like a productive day.

Categories
Writing

Kiss of Autumn

Green Ash tree leaves touched by the cold.

Overnight temperatures reached 50 degrees this week. I examined our trees the next day and the Green Ash and Autumn Blaze Maple were both kissed by cool weather and leaves had begun to turn. Summer is over before we know it.

There is a large-scale sporting event this morning. I had to look it up: The University of Iowa football team is playing Utah State at Nile Kinnick Stadium. It’s a day to avoid the traffic and congestion in the county seat.

I attended a few football games at Kinnick. When in graduate school, I lived near the stadium where the house-owner rented his yard for game-day parking. Sometimes patrons had an extra ticket to give us. When I worked in Cedar Rapids, one of my supervisors was a sporting enthusiast. He required his managers to attend certain games with him so I went with the group to Kinnick for an unremarkable contest. During meetings with national staff, we were required to attend professional sporting events. That’s how I was able to watch Patrick Ewing play basketball in Dallas. I don’t regret learning of the ballet-like moves of professional basketball players. Sports has not been my thing.

In high school, almost every freshman boy tried out for the football team. I didn’t make the cut and decided to pursue interests in the arts: reading, writing, music, and theater. High school was an awkward time and I spent most of my non-classroom time on the high school stage crew, reading, or practicing the guitar. Most of my classmates seemed to have a natural instinct to find a partner and be with each other. That wasn’t my thing either.

Being part of a sports team was not that interesting. I suppose of one were on the 1961 New York Yankees roster it would be different. When I played baseball for the Sears Roebuck team it was never at that level. That was a team: Whitey Ford, Elston Howard, Roger Maris, Moose Skowron, Yogi Berra, Clete Boyer, Mickey Mantle, Bobby Richardson, and the rest. On a Saturday in the 1960s, one could listen to the neighbor’s backyard radio broadcasting Chicago baseball games from across the alley. After Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1961, I lost interest in watching or listening to baseball games on television or the radio.

In 1982, when I worked at the University of Iowa, the football team had a berth to the Rose Bowl for the first time since 1959. It was a really big deal and half the city cleared out to travel to Pasadena for the game. I lived on Market Street in a small apartment and tuned in to watch on my 12-inch black and white television. Iowa was pathetic. Washington shut out Iowa 28-0, the first Rose Bowl shutout in 29 years. “Sports are important at a Big Ten university,” Hayden Fry said in his memoir. He apparently didn’t mean winning was.

It will be cool this morning, with temperatures rising to above 90 degrees this afternoon. I’ll work among my apple tress for a while, then turn indoors to process garden produce. I can see the end of the garden. It has been good this year.

Now that the season has begun to turn, I linger under the foliage. At least for a few more times as late summer becomes autumn.

Categories
Writing

Pivot Toward Fall Writing

Seed garlic for 2023-2024 season.

Summer races toward its end. I’m cognizant there are not that many summers left, a baker’s dozen if I’m lucky. I plan to live each one as best I can without staking a claim to permanence. I’ve come to believe life is lived best in motion. We crave permanence which is anathema to living.

After a break this Labor Day weekend, I turn to my autobiography again. There is a lot to do. Last winter I wrote through to the end of graduate school and sent the draft to a couple of people for feedback. Unlike the traditional chronology of the first part, the next is complex. I have in mind writing it in threads that can be separated from the cloth, multiple concurrent chronologies. I return to the hope this narrative will be relevant to our child.

It has been a weird summer with my spouse gone for the last seven weeks. I don’t mind time alone, yet after a few weeks, I’m ready for us to be together again. We’re not sure how much longer this will continue.

August is the beginning of garden harvest, so she’s missed most of the fresh vegetables. When I make a day trip to visit and help, I take some of what is ready for their table. It’s not the same as being here.

Drought is oppressive. The 2012 drought seemed worse than this year. Both have been bad. We’ll see what the state climatologist has to say once the weather breaks. The last few days have been cooler, yet no rain. No rain forecast for the next week or more. We need rain.

I looked in my cookbooks for a recipe to use hot peppers, tomatillos, garlic and cilantro and found one for tomatillo salsa. It used up half the tomatillos on the counter. That will have to do for this afternoon.

Stroke by stroke I take up writing again. Whatever this summer was, I’m ready to pivot to what’s next. In October I’ll plant the garlic for next July’s crop and it will feel like the garden is done. For today, I’m waiting for Red Delicious apples to ripen, making a couple more pints of tomato sauce, and getting back to writing.

Here we go!

Categories
Living in Society

Interchange Yet No Bridge

Ribbon cutting ceremony at the almost finished interchange on I-80/I-380 near Coralville on Aug. 25, 2023. Photo Credit – Mariannette Miller-Meeks congressional newsletter Aug. 27, 2023.

It has been no secret the interchange between Interstates 80 and 380 near Coralville needed improvement. It has long been one of the most crash-prone places in the state of Iowa. Commenced in 2018, the infrastructure project to reconstruct it is approaching completion, maybe in time for the Labor Day weekend.

On Friday, Aug. 25, the Iowa DOT held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to “open” the Highway 218 part of the exchange. This is a bit of an artificial marker because the place is so large, the part of the exchange I use to travel to Des Moines has been finished and open most of the summer.

The exchange sprawls a lot of land, so that is a negative. A potential decrease in number of accidents and ease of use are in the asset column. Once a driver learns how to use the exchange, it can be a stress-reliever. The rebuilt exchange should improve traffic flows which will be noticeable for University of Iowa sporting event patrons.

Naturally, area politicians attended the ribbon cutting ceremony. Coralville Mayor Meghann Foster got the lead quote in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Iowa City Mayor Bruce Teague was also quoted. My member of congress Mariannette Miller-Meeks was the highest-ranking elected official present and she was not quoted. All the elected officials present were supportive of the project.

Cedar Rapids Gazette photo of the ribbon cutting ceremony for the I-80/I-380 interchange on Aug. 25, 2023.

Events like the opening of an important Interstate Highway exchange could be a kumbaya moment for the community. This one wasn’t. After the ceremonial scissors sliced the ribbon, the politicians broke down into groups by party for selfies. By the weekend, they were posting photos with their friends, said photos, with the exception of the one above, included no members of the opposing party. It was a subtle vibe, but increasingly present as time went on and the partisan pics came across my feeds.

What was I expecting?

The term kumbaya originates in an African-American spiritual song from the American South. The earliest record in the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center (AFC) comes from lyrics collected in North Carolina in 1926 for a song called “Oh Lord, Won’t You Come By Here.” The spiritual pleads for divine intervention—for God to come by here and help a people in great need, referencing an area historically connected to the enslavement and oppression of African Americans. The word kumbaya is taken from the song’s refrain.

Dictionary.com

Maybe we need divine intervention to relieve us of partisanship. What the politicians did that Friday isn’t getting us to the promised land. Society is divided, even at a ribbon-cutting for infrastructure that helps everyone.

At least we have a new, safer Interstate interchange upon which to drive. I’m not sure it helps us get anywhere better with regard to our politics. We need something that will bridge the political gap between us. Sadly, this event wasn’t it.

Categories
Living in Society

Remove Trump From Iowa Ballots

Some days I wish the 45th President would settle into retirement and fade away. That doesn’t seem likely. There is, however, a strong case that Trump is disqualified from being on the ballot because of his engagement in the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Dean Obeidallah presents a case for action in a recent substack post.

Last week, two prominent conservative scholars, William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St Thomas, made a compelling case that Trump is disqualified from holding office in article published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. And just a few days ago, conservative former federal court of appeals judge J. Michael Luttig and famed Harvard Law constitutional professor Laurence Tribe penned an article for The Atlantic titled, “The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Ever Being President Again.” These two distinguished jurists reached the same conclusion that Trump had “engaged in insurrection” and is barred from ever serving in federal office again by way of the US Constitution.

I filed a complaint to disqualify Trump from the ballot and so should you! by Dean Obeidallah, Aug. 23, 2023.

Read Obeidallah’s full article here. Then consider copying and pasting the following email to Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate at sos@sos.iowa.gov. Feel free to edit the email to meet your needs. If you do send the email, I expect your will feel better.

Dear Secretary of State Pate,

I’m writing to your offices urging a formal review of whether Donald Trump is barred from the ballot in Iowa by way of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. That Amendment disqualifies from the ballot any person who “shall have engaged” in an “insurrection.”  For such a disqualification, there is no requirement that Trump or any person be first convicted of any crime—as the Congressional Research Service notes.

In addition, last year after a trial in New Mexico, a judge ruled that Jan 6 was an “insurrection” within the meaning of the 14th Amendment and that Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin was removed from office and disqualified from the ballot for “engaging” in that attack.  Donald Trump’s actions– as detailed in the final report of the “Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack”—far exceed the actions of Griffin in terms of “engaging” in the Jan 6 insurrection.  While that New Mexico ruling is not binding in this state, it is persuasive in its reasoning and I urge your offices to read it.

Finally, conservative legal scholars have recently penned articles reaching the conclusion that given Trump’s conduct, the US Constitution does in fact bar Trump from the ballot.

As the US Constitution mandates, no one should be permitted to be on the ballot who has engaged in an insurrection. The time to review if Trump has done just that and is barred from the ballot is now—well before the 2024 election.

Thank you for considering this issue that is vitally important to protecting our Republic.

Categories
Living in Society

Iowa House Democrats Info Center

After the Aug. 17, 2023 town hall meeting in Shueyville, State Representative Amy Nielsen provided the following information to help stay current with what the Iowa House Democrats are doing:

Official Legislative Website and Subscribe to Newsletter: 

https://www.legis.iowa.gov/ 

Website: 

https://iowahouse.org/

Blue Statehouse Alert Email Alerts (Weekly during session, Monthly during interim): 

https://actionnetwork.org/forms/sign-up-for-the-blue-statehouse-alert

People Over Politics Newsletter by Leader Jennifer Konfrst: 

https://actionnetwork.org/forms/sign-up-for-the-people-over-politics-newsletter

Iowa House + Labor Connection: 

https://actionnetwork.org/campaigns/iowa-house-labor-connections

Facebook: 

https://www.facebook.com/iowahousedemocrats/

Instagram: 

https://www.instagram.com/iowahousedems/

Twitter: 

https://twitter.com/iowahousedems

TikTok: 

https://www.tiktok.com/@iowahousedemocrats