The last week has been a combination of ambient temperatures in the high 80s to low 90s, heat index of 105 or more, and thunderstorms. As a septuagenarian I stay inside with air conditioning once I finish early morning, outdoors chores to avoid passing out in the heat and humidity.
I took a box of cherry tomatoes to the community food pantry. My other Monday errands included filling the auto gas tank and lottery gambling. It was a quick trip, with exposure to people. I like the people part of it, and finishing while it’s relatively cool. Monday errands has become a thing in retirement.
It has been a struggle to mow the lawn, so the grass is growing long. I’ll need the cut grass for garden mulch and if nature dials down the humidity for a day or so, I’ll harvest it. I did manage to mow the ditch as it dried out, and before it got too hot. It was a workout.
When I was younger I would work strait through the heat and humidity. A few years ago I got woozy and had to lay down on the ground to recover. After that I decided to take better care of myself. As an Iowan I’m used to the heat and humidity. As a senior I learned to live another day.
Then there are the big salad dinners of summer.
Big salad (before dressing) with fennel, celery, cucumber, tomato, bell pepper, and broccoli from our garden.
Grandma Sarah Elizabeth (Dean) Miller’s bentwood rocking chair made from willow. She was my great, great grandmother. Photo taken by the author in 1983, Cox Hollow, Wise County, Virginia.
Sometimes we would go on a trip and take photographs. In fact, in my time, a trip and a film camera seemed to go together. Because I was able to purchase a camera with money from my newspaper route, I took photos when on family trips. When Mother and Father went on a trip they would take my camera. You go on a trip, you take some photographs to develop and show the folks back home. When trip photos got processed, we would sort and edit them. Sometimes we made them into an album. Simply put, trip photography was a cultural behavior with a beginning and endpoint and fixed technology for a trip’s duration.
I’m speaking of the pre-internet days. We got our first home computer on April 21, 1996. We didn’t do much with online photography until May 3, 2008 when I bought my first digital camera to make it easier to post on social media platforms. Back then, the process to put print photographs online had some obstacles, importantly, the lack of a scanner, which was expensive equipment. In 2025, with mobile device technology, that is all pretty seamless. It was not so in the 1980s and ’90s.
This photograph of Grandma Miller’s rocking chair was from a trip my spouse and I made to Virginia in 1983. The image records the artifact. There is a backstory. We both sat and rocked in the chair. We had a discussion about it with my great aunt Carrie who had possession of the rocker when we visited. We discussed it being made from local willow trees. I’m not sure, but believe I have a photograph of Grandma Miller’s daughter, Tryphena Ethel Miller sitting in it. (Spelling is “Tryphenia” on the 1940 U.S. Census). The chair is both an Appalachian artifact and a family heirloom. Forty years later, I don’t know what happened to it, although it may still be sitting on that front porch in Cox Hollow where we first saw it and took this photograph.
On that trip, my great aunt said she did not want her photograph taken. So many years later it is hard to remember the conversation. I believe it had to do with the Appalachian belief or superstition that there was a connection between a photograph and one’s soul or spirit. I was not trying to steal a part of Aunt Carrie’s soul. I respected her wishes and did not take a photo.
Also on that trip, my uncle, spouse and I visited Grandmother Ina Elizabeth Addington’s grave. She died in 1947 of food poisoning. She was also the granddaughter of Grandma Miller. My uncle got teary eyed while we were there visiting his mother, so I did not take a photograph of the grave marker just then. We returned the next day for that. Discretion is an important part of trip photography.
While trip photographs serve as a form of aide-memoire that conjures our living memory of what happened, so often they get separated from memory and stand as orphans. Their dependence on the photographer and the specific trip is a consideration in curating any photographic collection. In this case, I will likely put all the 1983 trip photographs that are not in an album in an envelope together and label it. Likewise, when considering which images to keep and which to label by writing a short note on the back, we can make a big difference when the photographer dies or leaves images behind. Deciding what to do in cases like this is a main task of this project.
This photograph has a date of July 1983 printed in red ink on the back. I added the following text: “Grandma Miller’s rocker. Made of willow. Grandma Miller was Tryphena’s mother.” A person needs to know more than a little context for that to make sense. Compared to most prints I have, those are a lot of words. Working through how and what to write on the back of prints is another main task of this project.
I could say a lot more about trip photography. As an organizing principle, it just makes sense to put all the images captured on a specific trip together. That doesn’t answer the question of passing along one’s heritage. I need to flesh this out in a future post.
~ Read all the posts in this series by clicking here.
We have visitors from the east this weekend. On Friday they drove through an Iowa summer thunderstorm in an open-bed pickup truck laden with boxes of household goods for storage. The load was well tarped and secured. Some of the boxes got a few drops of rain, but mostly the first principle of transport came into effect: secure your load properly to avoid problems. We hardly used the tall stack of towels I got out to dry the boxes.
The lightning and thunder were exceptional. Enough of it to make a show. Not too much to worry. A few lightning bolts hit close to home, yet for the most part the storm did its work and moved through the area without incident. It saved me from worry about watering the garden.
These August days are busy in the kitchen garden. Apples, pears and vegetables are abundant and both the garden and kitchen are full of them. I enter either place, and suddenly, four hours filled with work rush by. Being engaged in the conversion of nature to foodstuffs seems righteous. Neither “farmer” nor “gardener” nor “cook” are the right words to describe this. It is an amalgam of living in the present, tradition, education, and experience. I don’t feel any specific descriptor is needed.
We cleaned off the dining room table to sit and talk. I made a simple repast of cut garden vegetables, fruit, cheese, and crackers for the visitors. We talked about what we would accomplish this weekend, not thinking too much about the future or the past. As the United States has its authoritarian moment, such discussions define us… help us cope… make us better people.
It is an escape from the storm that has already moved on and left us living.
When a person grows a garden they don’t think much about the price of vegetables at the grocer. All the same, when the Producer Price Index for fresh and dry vegetables jumped by 38.9 percent in July, everyone should stand up and take notice.
“The increase is the biggest one-month move for a summer month in almost a century,” according to NBC senior business correspondent Christine Roman. Why? Unpredictable weather, including drought. The ongoing roundup and deportation of immigrant agricultural workers. Tariffs on food. It is a commonplace that margins in the grocery business are thin. These disruptions in the process that produces our food have and will cause a price increase for consumers as wholesale purchasers pass through some or all of their additional expenses.
When I return from the garden with a tub of tomatoes, apples, or greens, I have forgotten how much I spent on the seeds, supplies and equipment to produce it. I looked at my spreadsheet and found it was $921, thus far in 2025 for the entire operation, including the repair bill for my John Deere. Is it a bargain? That question is out of the scope of my gardening. Learning to produce a year’s worth of garlic is a skill that is hard to price. I generate my own seed garlic, so there is almost no financial cost to produce it. Sweat equity is also difficult to price.
The increase in the Producer Price Index for vegetables is a bellwether for other things going on in the economy. Climate conditions, labor, and tariffs will impact pricing on items other than food. The conclusion to be drawn here is everyone should begin conserving resources if they haven’t already. I doubt this once in a century price increase is the last, and we will need every dollar we can squeeze from our budgets. Hear of belt-tightening? Feel lucky you still have a belt.
For now, the refrigerator and freezer are full. The pantry is as well stocked as it has ever been. Produce continues to grow in the garden and will continue until the first hard frost. I knew living on a fixed income would be challenging. I just wish our government would take its knee off our throat, back off, and give us space to breathe.
This year, I produced 103 head of garlic from 103 cloves planted in March. Without doubt, a person can plant garlic in the spring and get a decent crop. I plan to return to fall planting later this year.
There were four or five wet stalks that pulled off, yet the rest of it looked as it should. If anything, there were more smaller heads. That is likely due to the shortened growing season. There are plenty of large heads to seed next year’s crop.
I racked them up in no time.
2025 garlic racked and in the garage.
Because of the moisture from recent rain, I set up a small fan to circulate air around them while they dry. Once they feel less “wet” I will put away the fan and let them cure without it. It usually takes about three weeks.
Small fan to circulate air between the racked garlic plants.
Growing my own garlic has been life-changing. There is no going back.
Crimson Crisp apples from the garden, Aug. 12, 2025.
These two Crimson Crisp apples fell from the tree during Tuesday morning’s thunderstorms. They looked undamaged so I picked them up and ate one of them for an afternoon snack. “Delicious,” he punned. They need to be picked. Apples are beginning to back up in the kitchen, so I better get going with the process.
Stories of my father’s people were about apples. The women worked in an apple canning plant and grew multiple trees on their properties. My great aunt Carrie said she ate apples every day of her life. She passed on a simple recipe for fried apples. Of course the men worked mining coal. Father was lucky to escape such a future when he was a teenager.
I wrote before about my father and apples here. This is the salient memory from that post:
Father taught me to eat apples after a trip on River Drive to buy a bushel.
It seemed unusual to secure so many at once, but he knew someone, and with a limited weekly income from the meat packing plant, the family took what help he could find.
Dad used a knife to cut away bad spots and avoid eating worms. I remember him rocking in a chair eating apples with a paring knife after dinner. He didn’t call them “knife apples.” I coined that term when describing the fruit from our trees. (Knife Apples, Paul Deaton, Oct. 10, 2014).
When we moved to Big Grove Township, I planted six apple trees at the time of my mother-in-law’s death. Three of those remain, one Red Delicious, and two Earliblaze. They are all reaching the end of their lives, but as long as they produce, I don’t cut them down. Recently I planted one Zestar! and one Crimson Crisp in a different spot in the yard. This year is the first all four varieties are producing.
Now that I have a producing orchard, what next?
I grew out of the idea of processing every possible apple into something. Apples now get divided into three major categories. The best ones are tucked away in a refrigerator drawer for eating with a knife. Most of those do not have visible imperfections. The seconds are saved for making three major products: Apple butter (usually 12 pints per major harvest); apple sauce (a dozen quarts and two dozen pints); and apple cider vinegar to fill all my containers. I need about 3-4 gallons this year. When the vinegar jars are filled, I usually reserve a quart or two of fresh apple juice for drinking from the refrigerator. Any other apples are comprised of fallen fruit and the least desirable of what I pick (small or too many imperfections). These go in a pile near the lilac bushes on the property line. They usually sit there decomposing from now until winter, yet in the spring they have all been eaten by wildlife who need winter food.
I used to make dried apples in a dehydrator, but just don’t eat them. Once they get used up from last time, that will be the end. In short, I process to make what I make and anything else goes to wildlife. Extra apples are not usually shared. It takes a certain type of outlook to turn a gnarly apple into applesauce or vinegar. Wildlife don’t complain and eat everything I put out for them.
The main challenge in apple management is getting everything done before they start going bad. That’s where I currently am. The Zestar! have been processed, there are two containers of Earliblaze in the kitchen waiting for processing and a lot on the trees, I’ll pick Crimson Crisp today or tomorrow, and Red Delicious, which is my workhorse apple, are still ripening and won’t be ready for another month or so. Apple management is a process of continuous improvement. Re-defining and knowing what I want is important to keeping my sanity in this busy time of the garden year. Apples are worth the work.
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.
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