If August was a tough month, this summer has been one of the best in recent years.
Moderate local temperatures with reasonable relative humidity, rain enough to help the garden grow, and friends meeting the challenge of growing flowers and vegetables in a changing climate, all helped us feel comfortable.
July was notable for being the hottest month for the planet since record-keeping began, according to the U.S. government. Regional variation made Iowa tolerable, perhaps a harbinger of the impact of humans living on the planet continues its steady deterioration of our biome.
Despite favorable weather it was hard to get off the starting blocks in August on scores of projects needing attention.
It will soon be time to turn the page.
For the time being I’m eating cherry tomatoes and enjoying the last weeks of this glorious summer.
With last Thursday’s death of Mother, as well as that of our friend Lillian Davis, life continues. As we linger around funeral arrangements and schedules, phone calls and meet ups, emails and social media posts, something positive is on the horizon if we can only see it.
Like the single concertina note that begins the David Merrick musical Carnival! it’s familiar and quickly to be accompanied by other instruments. We are uncertain where it will go, but only for a few moments, and then we’ll get swept up in, “Direct from Vienna…”
Warehouse work occupied my last shift at the home, farm and auto supply store on Wednesday. We prepare for the holiday retail season and new merchandise arrives daily. There were trucks to unload, inbound shipments to process, and on line orders to fill. Our store is doing reasonably well compared to our daily goals, although a large-scale competitor is building a new store nearby. Fleet Farm expects to extract $2 million per week in revenue from the area. Our sales and those of others may take a hit. At the end of the year I’ll assess whether to continue there in 2020.
The orchard didn’t need me yesterday because of thunderstorms in the forecast. I used the time to work on funeral arrangements, then we went to the visitation for Lillian. Her children, who were in 4-H with our daughter, are grown and handled themselves well in a tough situation. Lillian would have been proud of them.
Summer plans have been scrambled. To get away from the death reminders I canned the ripe plum tomatoes yesterday. There will be more. I see a physician today and hope to develop next steps to control my glucose levels without medication. Jacque and I have plans to start cleaning the house and downsizing, a process that will go on for a few months. There is more to life than these existential errands.
We do what we can, hoping for the best, and try to make positive contributions in a fractured and turbulent society.
Or as the character Yoda said in the Star Wars movies, “No. Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try.” We can do better.
We have fresh tomatoes with every meal, for snacks, and with everything.
We aren’t sick of them yet and work to preserve some of them is imminent. There’s a lot going on in the kitchen garden this August.
Sweet corn is in. Our local farm has had a spotty year, yet we’ve been able to freeze enough two-cup bags to make it until next year. Last night for dinner we had corn on the cob with sliced tomatoes — a classic summer combination.
First up in tomato preservation is to make a dozen pints of diced. This, combined with a backlog from previous years is enough to run the kitchen. I’ll also make as much tomato sauce as I can. Last year I froze it and that worked well. The freezer is filling up already so I may have to can some of it this year. Last year I froze small tomatoes whole and used them during the year to make sauce. I may try canning them whole to supplement the diced.
Yesterday I picked about two bushels of the first apples. A lot more wait on the trees. Our early apple is sweet and makes a great base for apple cider vinegar. I make a couple of gallons each year and the jars to do so are empty and just need cleaning. Our cupboard remains full of apple butter and apple sauce, so maybe a few jars of each is all I’ll make this year. They are good for out of hand eating as well. I’ll need to find a home for some of them or leave them to wildlife.
I froze enough kale for the year early in the season. What I harvest the rest of the year will be to give away or eat fresh. There is enough vegetable broth for the year, frozen jars of pesto, frozen okra, frozen celery, grated and frozen zucchini, and the hot peppers are beginning to come in. It’s been a good year so far.
The garden didn’t produce green beans. The plants look healthy and there have been flowers. Almost no beans have been produced.
The variety of red beans planted needs to climb and I thought they were bush beans. There are bean pods forming, so there will be some harvest. Next year they need a fence to climb on, if I plant them again. I planted beans mostly to fix nitrogen in the soil.
It seems like there can never be enough beets. I started some in trays and those fared much better than the ones sown in the ground. Will do more of that next year. For now I have one jar of pickled beets to last the year.
The tomato and apple harvest signal the garden’s impending end. There’s a lot of work to be done, but we enjoy the taste of fresh tomatoes as much as anything we grow.
A main feature of the vacant lot we bought in 1993 was its proximity to Lake Macbride State Park.
When we need exercise, or just want to get away from the house, it’s a short walk to the trail that runs five miles from our nearby city to the main park entrance. In August the park is filled with wildflowers, insects and other flora and fauna of living in Iowa. There is as much to observe as there is to escape in quotidian life.
A trail walk can reset our lives each time we venture out.
Two weekends into my seventh season at an apple orchard I continue to enjoy the work and its customer engagement.
A family drove over from Chicago, one stopped on their way back to Rochester, Minn., and regulars return with the micro-seasons within a procession of a hundred apple varieties. Every chance we have to converse is a window into lives where with at least one common interest. It is the beginning of something positive.
A trail walk can get us centered and ready for such engagement.
It’s time to move on. Yet… I would linger in this spectacularly Iowa summer.
It is a summer like those remembered from childhood. Long, warm days that stretch into a vanishing point. Cool nights to greet an early riser well before dawn. A never ending chance to find opportunity in a world which lies beyond the work-a-day society in which careers were spent.
No one can meaningfully say how many more of these days we’ll have before the atmosphere turns humid, making outdoors living unbearable. Despite the lack of rain, it’s been a good summer. A time to reap what we sowed and arrive into autumn.
A couple of things.
I’m tasting the first apples from two trees daily, evaluating sweetness and crunch, background color and appearance. While Japanese beetles invaded the leaves, there will be fruit for the kitchen. One doesn’t see apples like mine in grocery stores because they are small and imperfect from living in a pesticide-free environment. Commercial growers would have culled most of them for juice yet they are a main crop for the production of seasonal baked goods, cider vinegar, juice and applesauce if I need it. Picking and processing them will be a bigger project than usual.
Cucumbers, zucchini and yellow squash are winding down in the garden. Soon I’ll pull up the plants, till the soil and plant next year’s crop of garlic. I am only just learning how to cultivate garlic and looking forward to this second year of my own plants.
My bedside table got crowded with too many books so I need to set priorities for the rest of summer reading. Processing garden abundance will take time away from reading, so I expect to complete fewer books this month. I just started the novel Milkman by Anna Burns, which won the Man Booker Prize last year.
Tuesday colleagues from California met with U.S. Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) who agreed to add his name to the list of sponsors of the No First Use Act introduced in January by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative Adam Smith (D-WA). The bill would establish by law it is the policy of the United States not to use nuclear weapons first, which is what most Americans believe. It was a positive step.
As it usually does, writing daily for Blog for Iowa while the editor was on summer hiatus inspired new interest in seeing the world through a progressive lens. The last of those posts appeared here this week, clearing the palate for new topics and better writing.
However, there are six more weeks of summer to enjoy.
Mixing bowl with summer coleslaw made of local produce and my fermented apple cider vinegar.
Six weeks into summer 2019 we are over a hump, if not the halfway point.
I visited Paris in August 1974. It was hard to find a business open. Eschewing air conditioning we Americans find ubiquitous, Parisians fled the heat of August for the Mediterranean Coast and other breezy spots.
We could learn from that society.
My spouse visited her sister for the month of July. While she was gone I set the thermostat at 84 degrees compared to doing what we wanted in July 2018. The average monthly ambient temperature increased from 75 to 76 degrees Fahrenheit. Between running the air conditioner less and only one person active in the house, our electricity usage dropped by 37 percent in terms of kWh used. I appreciate the savings but I’d like her to return home more.
Summer in Big Grove Township has been reasonably nice with plenty of warm, sunny days, not enough rain, and an abundance from the garden. Friday the ditch had dried out enough I could mow the tall grass and get it looking more normal. The rabbit that lived there this year is likely frowning as rabbits do.
The yard grasses are in transition and need mowing, but not that much. I thought to do it yesterday and rolled up the garden hose near the house after watering in the morning. Not yet. Maybe today after my shift at the orchard. Maybe not as it is a low priority.
We planted our first garden in 1982 and grew or harvested something from our yard in the five places we lived since then. I’m getting better at it.
Cucumbers
We produced more cucumbers this year than we could eat and preserve. I determined a process using four varieties of seeds: two pickling, a Japanese-style cucumber and the utilitarian Marketmore. I made a gallon of fermented dill pickles as dill came in from my barter arrangement with Farmer Kate. The key to good pickles is the cucumber size. Once cucumbers get an inch in diameter they are too large for pickle making. Just don’t do it.
I made dishes of sliced cucumbers for potluck dinners, gave them away, and ate them as much as I could stand sliced raw, in mixed salads, and with lettuce greens when they were in season. There were plenty for sweet pickles but I overdid it last year and have more than a dozen leftover jars. I struck balance between the desire to use every bit of produce in the garden and how we eat them in season.
Tomatoes
As I posted a couple days ago, we are waiting for tomatoes. The cherries are coming in Jasper, Taxi, Matt’s Wild, Grape, White Cherry and Clementine. The White Cherry, Jasper and Matt’s Wild are surprisingly sweet and delicious. The single Early Girl and Black Krim plants produced fruit. I’ve had a couple Speckled Roma which I found to have tough skin.
This year as last, I planted the rows too close together. I crawled under the seven-foot indeterminate vines and inspected. A lot of good sized fruit waits to ripen under the foliage.
The plants have less blight this year than last. I don’t know why but two things are different. We had extremely cold weather last winter. Perhaps the cold killed some of it off. I also applied diatomaceous earth to the ground after tilling to keep down the crawling bugs that love tomatoes. Perhaps it had an effect on the blight. So far, so good and if all continues to go well, we will have plenty of tomatoes for fresh eating, canning and gifts to friends.
Green Beans
By now we’ve usually had green beans but there are hardly any on the plants. The foliage looks great. There are flowers. No beans. Other area gardeners are experiencing the same thing with a reduction in yield. I picked exactly two beans from a 15-foot row.
Apples
After nearly perfect pollination and fruit setting the invasion of Japanese beetles has the apple trees looking like dirty brown lace. I wait for the fruit’s background color to get right and have been tasting them every other day. The first of two varieties is getting close. Fingers crossed.
A friend sprayed his apple tree with Sevin to kill a Japanese Beetle infestation. The pesticide works although it contains carbaryl, a known carcinogen banned in some European countries. “Aren’t you worried about eating the fruit?” I asked. “Nah!” he said. I continue to refrain from using insecticides, which offer a temporary abatement to the detriment of the environment and apple eaters.
It’s a race to ripeness with popilla japonica. If bugs eat too many tree leaves, inadequate sugar is produced for fruit to ripen. If fruit gets ripe on the tree and they can penetrate the skin, they will mass on it and eat it. There appears to be enough green leaf left to absorb sunlight adequately to ripen the apples. I plan to pick them the minute I find them ripe and ferment the juice to make apple cider vinegar. The second variety, Red Delicious, is for eating out of hand, and everything else apple-related.
The Joni Mitchell song comes to mind, “Give me spots on my apples but leave me the birds and the bees.” In our garden there are plenty of apples and an abundance of birds and bees with whom I enjoy co-existing.
RAGBRAI riders stopped at the Norwalk Christian Church for pie. Photo Credit – Trish Nelson
Trish Nelson will be returning to the editor’s desk next week.
Among things she did while on hiatus was ride a couple days of RAGBRAI, posting this photograph of pies behind empty church pews. The image says something more although I’m at a loss to put words to it. It can speak for itself.
Time for me to go on hiatus for a while as well.
Tomorrow I return to the apple orchard where I work in the sales barn doing whatever is needed for the season. If I’m lucky, I’ll have great conversations with some of the thousands of guests who show up on a weekend. If I’m extra lucky, those conversations will be about apples, gardening and farming.
We political activists need to do our best work to elect a replacement for Dave Loebsack in the Second Congressional District and a U.S. Senator to make Joni Ernst a one-term senator. We also need to retain the hard-won seats of Cindy Axne in the third district and Abby Finkenauer in the first. If we have a candidate in the fourth district, there’s work to be done there as well. Those campaigns will have to wait until after the presidential preference in February, because a person can land only one plane at a time. I favor Rita Hart in the second district and Theresa Greenfield for U.S. Senate. There are no clinkers among those running in the primary.
As far as the Iowa caucus goes, I’m in the same boat as a lot of readers. I want to pick a candidate for president to work with after Labor Day. If I can’t decide which one by then, I may go to caucus uncommitted and join a group that needs one more person to be viable.
I expect to run our precinct caucus (because of a lack of volunteers) and don’t want to get into the unseemly discussions we had during the vote count in 2008. Being uncommitted would be a positive in that regard.
Democrats can’t afford to have winners and losers this cycle, so the pre-caucus dynamic is different from 2008 when there were 8-10 candidates for president and everyone worked hard for their guy or gal to be the one. The only thing that remains the same this cycle is Mike Gravel is running again. (Update: The afternoon of the day this was posted, Gravel suspended his presidential campaign).
Someone asked me who were my top three potential presidential candidates. I had to think, but came up with this answer:
Anyone other than Biden, Sanders, Warren and Harris needs a breakthrough by Labor Day (maybe Thanksgiving) to ouster these four poll leaders. Polls and second choices will drive the presidential preference Feb. 3.
If not this week, then soon, the less than one percenters will hopefully have made their point and gracefully exited the race to work on other Democratic priorities. I’m very sorry Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is in this group. She couldn’t get over the Franken blow back among Democrats I know and lost important donors. She is uncompromising on women’s rights.
Look at it this way. Once I figure out what/who I’m supporting I’ll swallow the red pill and follow the rabbit hole where it leads. With the primary in June, there’s plenty of time to work on Rita Hart and Theresa Greenfield after caucus.
Or look at it another way. If Warren had run in 2016, I would have worked hard to make her the nominee. I’m satisfied she’s not too old today. There’s no one else left in the top 4 besides Kamala Harris. I’m less than confident a woman can get elected in 2020. I don’t like most of the men.
So there’s my indecision. If I can’t decide by Labor Day I may not declare and throw my one preference to which ever group could be viable with it, except maybe Sanders.
The most important endgame is coming together once we have a nominee. Keeping the red pill in a waterproof vial for now.
Hope readers enjoy the rest of summer. Thanks for the clicks during the last five weeks.
With late planting and heavy spring rain the garden has been a mixed bag. A highlight of every year is arrival of tomato season and planning the use of what I expect will be a good crop.
The first tomatoes have ripened, and now we wait for the slicers and plums.
We eat them fresh, give some away, and prepare canned sauce, juice and diced with the rest.
As my worklife slows down, it seems there is more work to do in the yard and garden. Growing tomatoes doesn’t seem like work.
My last summer post for Blog for Iowa runs Friday and I am ready for what’s next, including a return to my usual topics in this space. I cross post here what I write elsewhere so a trickle of BFIA articles will continue until they all have been posted.
I begin work at the orchard this weekend for the seventh consecutive season. Hopefully we’ll have ripe apples and great conversations with our guests. It is blueberry season in Michigan and this weekend we will offer them fresh for the last time this year. We’re hoping Pristine, Jersey Mac and Viking get ripe by the weekend so our guests can pick them.
In July I signed up for a nutrition class paid for mostly by Medicare. The goal is to watch my blood sugar levels and develop better eating and exercise habits. A by-product of the classes has been losing ten percent of my body weight. I feel better and hope to stave off diseases of aging such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, eyesight deterioration, influenza, pneumonia and the like. Fingers crossed. I still have a lot I want to do and good health is an important prerequisite.
As the sun ascends on another brilliant Iowa day the garden needs watering, and I want to get a trail walk in before leaving for the home, farm and auto supply store. There is a long to-do list needing attention as well. Thanks for reading.
A summer parade in Iowa is a chance to showcase lives for the entire community.
Farmers, restaurateurs, insurance agents, bankers, retailers, construction companies, government organizations and more cleanup their equipment and parade it through town handing out treats and small gifts along the route.
People line the street to watch, sitting on lawn chairs, standing under shade trees and chatting with friends on the sidewalk. It’s mostly for children yet adults get involved as well. Anyone can stand almost anything that marches by in the span of a couple of minutes.
Solon Beef Days Parade Watchers
I.
In 2013 our situation got dire. I had run out of money and held no job that paid enough. Not wanting to return to transportation, I took one low wage job after another to earn enough to get by. Most of the work involved standing on concrete floors, which precipitated a case of plantar fasciitis. Not only did my feet hurt, on a physician’s advice I gave up jogging after 37 years because of it. While the condition is resolved, it persisted until I left full-time work in 2018.
Expenses got delayed during this period, as did preventive health care. It wasn’t clear how tight money had been until I began taking Social Security benefits which brought relief.
II.
An Early Thanksgiving
The story begins with the proximity of relatives. Our maternal grandmother and grandfather made visits to our home. I never knew my paternal grandparents except in stories and photographs. As much as anything, my grandparent story is about my relationship with Grandmother from my earliest memories until she died Feb. 7, 1991.
We were lucky to have her with us for so long.
Grandmother had five children and 15 grandchildren. She spent more time with our family because of our proximity. She lived with us off and on during my early years, but eventually maintained her own apartment. In later life she lived at the Lend-A-Hand, a residence for women at the time, then moved to the Mississippi Hotel where she lived the last years of her life in an apartment until moving to the Kahl Home for a brief period. Grandmother had many sisters and a brother. We had a lot of relatives, or so it seemed.
III.
I read The Overstory by Richard Powers. It engaged in a way most fiction fails to do. The author must have spent an enormous amount of time researching trees, forests, and the culture around them. He wove them into a spellbinding narrative. I could go on gushing about the book, but just pick it up and read it. If you do, and are interested in the environment, I doubt there will be any regrets.
I stood outside in early morning darkness where there was a refreshing yet decidedly warm breeze.
The overnight low was 80 degrees Fahrenheit. I’m not sure if that’s warm enough to hinder apple production but scientists believe at some point failure to cool adequately at night does impact taste and texture.
They don’t fully understand the impact of climate change on apple production. For the home fruit grower it’s one more thing for concern.
The breeze dissipated with arriving sun. The forecast is clear and hot with ambient temperatures rising to the mid-nineties. We’re getting used to the heat, especially after the 2012 drought.
After sunup I went to an apple tree, picked one and ate it. The sugars are beginning to form but it is still a “green” apple.
Tonight begins the two-day festival in the small city near which we live. The ambient temperature is expected to peak around 6 p.m. when things are just getting going. Tomorrow is the parade through town when it’s pushing 90 degrees. I’m not sure it is a good idea to attend this year so am skipping the famous hay bale toss tonight and will re-evaluate the parade in the morning. A friend from across the lakes in Big Grove Township is running for sheriff so I want to be there to support him.
It’s blazing hot! We have an air conditioner and refrigerator with an ice maker that both work. There are also three bushels of vegetables that need processing. There will be plenty of inside work to keep me busy now that the heat is here.
Journey Home 
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