Tag: homelife

Categories
Environment Kitchen Garden

Armistice Day at Home

Group of captured Allied soldiers on the western front during World War I representing eight nationalities: Anamite (Vietnamese), Tunisian, Senegalese, Sudanese, Russian, American, Portuguese and English. Photo Credit – Library of Congress

Most of Armistice Day was at home.

The forecast had been rain, however, a clear fall day unfolded and I planted garlic. Pushing cloves into the ground with my thumb and index finger, I made two rows and covered them with mulch retrieved from the desiccated tomato patch. It doesn’t seem like much, it’s my first garlic planting ever. If it fails to winter I have plenty of seed to replant in the spring.

Had I been more prescient about the weather I would have spent more time outside: mowing, trimming oak trees and lilacs, clearing more of the garden, and burning the burn pile. Neighbors were mowing. The mother of young children piled up leaves from the deciduous trees at the end of a zip line portending great fun. Instead, I spent the morning cooking soup, soup broth, rice and a simple breakfast.

Leaves of scarlet kale were kissed by frost leaving a bitter and sweet flavor. I harvested the crowns and bagged the leaves to send to town for library workers. Usable kale remains in the garden. It will continue to grow with mild temperatures. Leaves of celery grow where I cut the bunches. There is plenty of celery in the ice box so I didn’t harvest them and won’t until dire cold is in the forecast. An earlier avatar of gardener wouldn’t have done anything in the garden during November.

I picked up provisions at the orchard: 15 pounds of Gold Rush apples, two gallons of apple cider, two pounds of frozen Montmorency cherries, packets of mulling spices and 10 note cards. Sara, Barb and I had a post-season conversation about gardening, Medicare and living in 2017.

The morning’s main accomplishment was clearing the ice box of aging greens by producing another couple gallons of vegetable broth. I lost count of how many quart jars of canned broth wait on pantry shelves. For lunch I ate a sliced apple with peanut butter.

We live in a time when favorite foods are under pressure from climate change. Chocolate, coffee and Cavendish bananas each see unique challenges from global warming. In addition, recent studies show the higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is reducing the nutrient value of common foods. Our way of life has changed and will continue to change as a result of what Pope Francis yesterday called shortsighted human activity. He was immediately denounced in social media by climate deniers.

This week, Congressman Ron DeSantis (R-FL) introduced the HERO Act which purports to reform higher education. Specifically, the bill would open up accreditation for Title IV funding to other than four-year colleges and universities. In an effort to break up the “college accreditation cartel” DeSantis would keep current Title IV funding but add eligibility for other post K-12 institutions. States could accredit community colleges and businesses to be recipients of federal loans for apprenticeships and other educational programs.

Telling in all of this is that as soon as he introduced the bill, DeSantis made a beeline for the Heritage Foundation for an interview about it with the Daily Signal. Does higher education funding need reform? Yes. What are Democrats doing to effect change in higher education? That’s unclear. A key problem is progressives don’t have a network of think tanks and lobbying groups funded by dark money to counter the HERO act or the scores of other conservative initiatives gaining traction in the Trump administration.

Even though the 45th president seems an incompetent narcissist, the influence of a conservative dark money network within his administration is clear: in appointments to the Supreme Court and judiciary; in dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, in undoing progress in national monuments and parks, in weakening the State Department, in potentially politicizing the 2020 U.S. Census, and much more. The reason for his success is his close relationship with wealthy dark money donors and the agenda they sought to implement since World War II.

Today is the 39th anniversary of my return to garrison from French Commando School. I returned with a clear mind, physically fit, and an awareness of my place in the world.

“I am ready to experience the things of life again,” I wrote on Nov. 12, 1978. “The time at CEC4 has cleansed me of all things stagnant. I will pursue life as I see it and make it a place where I pass with love and peace for all.”

We work for peace on the 99th anniversary of the Armistice. If people are not unsettled by evidence of climate change and a Congress that ignores it in favor of pet projects designed to please the wealthiest Americans, we haven’t been paying attention. The need to sustain our lives in a global society has never been clearer.

Categories
Home Life Work Life

Vacation Days

Fallen Leaves

It’s a crash landing after the apple harvest and a summer working almost every day at the orchard or the home, farm and auto supply store. Time to sleep, read and rest.

Four days off work is not enough to fully recuperate but it’s what I have.

Saturday was mostly at home resting, then cooking. Sunday was several long sleep sessions, reading and staying indoors. Today and tomorrow turn toward stuff I want to do and stuff I have to do, mostly the latter. There’s more on my list than will fit in the remaining 48 hours so it’s not really a vacation but more a time to do other kinds of work.

The most important things I do are related to full retirement. Specifically, submitting my application for Social Security benefits to begin after my birthday and changing our health insurance from my work to Medicare. I expect to spend much of today doing just that.

What matters more is figuring out how we want to live going forward. I am already up to my armpits in community organizing so there’s that for the time being.

Once our financial situation reveals itself after Social Security and Medicare, I want to change things around. I expect to slow down or quit at the home, farm and auto supply store next year to focus on writing, gardening and preparing our home for a long retirement. I expect to continue to work in the local food system — at the farms, and at the orchard — but the focus will be on our homelife. It’s been neglected for too long.

Needed work toward sustaining a life in our turbulent world.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Overnight Soup

Deciduous Tree Leaves

In our search for truth and meaning there’s nothing like making soup.

Each batch can be spontaneous yet based in traditional flavors and processes. Soup uses what comes in from the garden, is stored in the pantry and ice box, and our kitchen skills. A gardener makes a lot of soup.

It is honest food.

Friday I drove straight home from work at the home, farm and auto supply store and got started.

I wanted to glean the garden before the weekend’s hard frost. I brought in carrots, eggplant, tomatoes, kale, bell peppers, Red Rocket and Jalapeno peppers, basil and broccoli along with a five gallon bucket of apples.

I’ve had an idea about making crock pot or slow cooker soup for a few weeks. The idea is to do the prep work Friday night and set the temperature on high. At bedtime I would turn it to low, letting the mixture slow-cook overnight. I hope to can fewer big batches of soup while continuing to use up vegetables at the end of the span between fresh and compost. A crock pot makes enough for four to six meals.

It began with a cup of dried lentils and a third cup of pearled barley in the bottom of the crock. I turned on the heat and added a quart of home made tomato juice then got to work prepping vegetables:

All of the carrots from the garden and some from the CSA.
The remainder of a head of home grown celery.
One large yellow onion.
Bay leaves.
Two leaves of green kale, including the stalk finely sliced.
Small tomatoes, quartered.
Root vegetables: kohlrabi, turnip and potatoes.
A leek.
Several broccoli florets with stalks finely sliced.
Dried savory and salt to taste.

The vegetables went into the crock as I cleaned and cut them. When prep work was done I added a quart of home made vegetable broth and covered with water.

That’s it.

In the morning the soup was flavorful, thick and hearty. I had a bowl for breakfast, leaving more than a half gallon in glass jars for the ice box.

In a turbulent society there is no better way to sustain ourselves than with a bowl of hot soup.

I plan to make more.

Categories
Living in Society Social Commentary Work Life

Providers Turning to Protectors and Buying Guns

Working the Garden

Financial inequality is impacting society by making men protectors of what limited resources each family has.

I know few people who are increasing their wealth in the post-Reagan era. The rich get richer and the rest of us pay for it as dollars systematically, relentlessly find their way to the richest one percent of the population. Families struggle to get a share of societal wealth and if they do, feel privileged enough to say, “I’ve got mine.”

The struggle to provide for a family is getting harder with the transformation of American business to globalization, government efforts to eliminate regulations, and the current administration’s tampering with healthcare, defense, foreign policy, energy, education, immigration and more.

The impact of financial inequality on the role of men in society has been to make it more difficult for them to provide for their families. That said, I don’t know many families where a male is the sole provider. Women began moving to the paid work force in large numbers decades ago. The idea women wouldn’t seek paid work is a social legacy of male dominance. The male narrative lacks proper consideration for the value of work by women. That seems obvious in workplaces where women earn a fraction of a dollar men do for the same work, and also in homes where a male provides money and resources for the family and women work unpaid.

Men are challenged to be providers so their role shifted to being protectors of what they have. The rise in gun ownership in the United States is directly related to income inequality and the diminished role of men as providers. Let’s talk about that.

Some of my friends and acquaintances are women who carry handguns.

It’s no big deal. The banal and ubiquitous presence of guns is part of living in the United States.

I’m not worried about getting shot over lunch or at an event. I also don’t feel any more secure knowing she has a handgun in her purse. It used to be a bit jarring to see weapons unexpectedly in everyday places. Not any more. I’m confident in studies that show women are not the main problem with gun violence, it’s the men.

In an Oct. 10 article in USA Today, Alia E. Dastagir wrote,

Data shows gun violence is disproportionately a male problem. Of the 91 mass shootings in which four or more victims died since 1982, only three were committed by women, according to a database from the liberal-leaning news outlet Mother Jones. Men also accounted for 86% of gun deaths in the United States, according to an analysis by the non-partisan non-profit Kaiser Family Foundation.

Men are more likely to own a gun — three times more, according to a 2017 survey from the Pew Research Center. This, despite marketing from gun manufacturers and groups such as the National Rifle Association to lure women.

Fast forward to Dastagir’s conclusion that to understand gun violence we must examine the cultural forces that equate being a man with violence. Read her information-packed article here.

What is it to be a man? It’s no secret having a Y chromosome is less important than the culture in which boys are nurtured to adulthood. There remains a significant, lingering perception that procreation is part of being a man even though wombs are more important than sperm. Only primitives continue to believe having a large family is a sign of manhood. At the same time male sexual dominance often trumps a woman’s right to choose. We read news daily about sexual predators, soldiers raping villagers, and widespread sexual harassment. Even so, something more powerful than traditional views about the role of men in procreation is at work.

After my first year in college (1971) I went home for the summer. I met with a number of male friends from high school and we each had been able to apply for work at manufacturing plants in the Quad Cities and find a summer job. Some literally went from business to business until they found a job and everyone who wanted one got one. It was easy. That changed.

The jobs environment has gotten very scrappy in Iowa and well-paid jobs with benefits are difficult to find and secure. Such jobs exist, however, the rise of professional human resources consultants has businesses seeking employees who meet very specific “profiles.” Don’t meet the profile or offer something unique to the position? Applicants will politely be sent on their way. If an applicant is lucky enough to be hired, human resource consultants have structured pay and benefits to meet the company’s minimum needs more than the needs of employees. Under the guise of taking inefficiencies out of business operations well-paid jobs with benefits are hard to get for almost anyone. It is worse with large companies who have the capitalization and scale to hire human resources consulting firms.

The transformation from manufacturing jobs to service jobs has not gone well from the standpoint of men seeking work. Retail, lawn care, janitorial, restaurant, banking, accounting, health care, sales, and other low-skill level employment performs necessary work in the economy. Such jobs are far from adequately compensated. Our education system increasingly fails to prepare students for jobs in a service economy. I’m not talking about adding a STEM curriculum in K-12 classrooms, but simple things like how to make a decision to start a business, work for a service company, or get a government job. Provider males are increasingly on their own when it comes to crafting a career, if that’s even possible in the 21st Century. Most I know get by, just barely.

In a society of income inequality, limited resources, women’s rights, and unsatisfactory job options, men get stymied in traditional roles of procreation and providing. They turn to protecting what they have, and that often includes buying guns. It is a predictable reaction in a society with a legacy of male dominance with no outlet.

A focus on resolving gun violence in the United States without considering the changing role of men in society isn’t going anywhere.

Categories
Home Life Living in Society

Fall Work Session

Apple Harvest

Continuous daily work shifts since July 31 have taken their toll. It’s  been challenging to find time for mowing, cleaning, repairs and household chores. It’s also been hard to get enough sleep. And to write. I need time to take care of things.

Monday and Tuesday are job-free so I can prepare for winter. Yard maintenance is high on my to-do list as are catching up on community organizing and the apple harvest. I want to get organized for the next few days, but not too much. I plan to go with the flow of time for a while.

This week U.S. Senator Joni Ernst held a few town hall meetings in the state, including one in Iowa City. I’ve read every news article I could find about the event and I don’t see a political downside. Tough questions were asked of her, including some by people in my social network. Ernst gets credit for holding a public meeting in the liberal bastion simply because the senior Iowa senator has not for so long.

Iowa is a state that voted for Donald Trump by a 9.4 percent margin. In 2014, Ernst beat Democratic candidate Bruce Braley by a margin of 8.3 percent. The wide margin is significant. Ernst is enabled to point to it and say she represents Iowa when she votes for legislation many of us find reprehensible. I can’t think of many policy issues where I agree with Ernst, yet she won the election big. That she would hold a town hall meeting in the county that voted for Hillary Clinton and Bruce Braley only reinforces her status with the people who elected her. Ernst is not the senator Iowa City wanted in 2014 nor the one they want going forward. The lesson is Johnson County liberals don’t elect people statewide and Ernst knows it.

The topic of the day was the Graham Cassidy bill to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Graham Cassidy was a loser from the git go. Reaction to the bill has been lopsidedly negative. With Senator John McCain (R-AZ) announcing he will vote no should it come up for a vote, it seems dead in the water.

Graham Cassidy dominated news media attention obscuring some important health care issues.

The Affordable Care Act is barely affordable, even with the federal insurance premium subsidies. If a person gets sick, the co-pays and deductibles are high enough to disrupt the financial life of those who qualify for participation in the ACA Marketplace. The total monthly premium for health insurance under the law is much higher than anyone can afford. It is also more expensive than the cost of Medicare. If the government were about saving money, those eligible for coverage under the ACA should be enrolled immediately in Medicare.

Health care sucked under the ACA. I had coverage through the Marketplace for two years and experienced something new. My doctor raised the issue of Essential Health Services during my annual appointment, saying what he could and could not do. Rather than listen to my questions as his predecessors in the small, rural clinic did for 20 years, he injected politics into my appointment. He was afraid to give me treatment either because of the ACA or because of instructions from his employer. I did not return to see him and he has since left the clinic.

Health care in Iowa has been bad on many fronts. The mental health consolidation was incomplete at best, failing to include a program for disabled children. Outsourcing Medicaid to private companies has been a costly disaster that delays patient treatment and provider compensation. Despite one of the best healthcare organizations in the country it is difficult to get needed care in this state.

The idea that Medicaid would be block granted to states, as proposed in Graham Cassidy, is one more in a thousand cuts to Iowans. The lesson is Senate Republicans don’t have a clue how to make health care meaningful, cost effective and do no harm.

My fall work session will address our family’s health care transition to Medicare as we both become eligible in January. It’s one more challenge to sustaining a life in a turbulent world.

Categories
Kitchen Garden Work Life

Three Cup Day

Bur Oak Acorn

Today will require an extra cup of coffee.

This week is the biannual vendor show at the home, farm and auto supply store. We’ll be short staffed today and tomorrow while associates from Iowa and Wisconsin travel to Dubuque to attend seminars and discuss products and process with our vendors.

If it’s like last year, my work queue will build up and I won’t dig out until Thanksgiving. The days will pass quickly and my aura may be colored in shades of grumpiness.

Coffee helps.

This weekend — Labor Day weekend — is the unofficial end of summer and I’m ready to glean most of the garden leaving only kale and peppers until first frost arrives in October. I secured seed garlic from one of the farms and will plant in September. The garden has been successful, the most successful in memory. It has been encouragement to plan for next year.

Saturday and Sunday I made a large pot of vegetable broth with items mostly from the ice box: kale, collards, chard, celery, three kinds of summer squash, carrots and onions. The resulting product was dark and rich.

I made rice with the broth, poured some in canning jars, and made a big batch of lentil-potato-barley soup for work lunches. I used eight or ten leeks in the soup which made it slightly sweet. Growing leeks creates a wonderful availability for the kitchen.

Last night I picked tomatoes, peppers, celery and leeks while the water bath canner came up to temperature on the stove. I ate a Red Delicious apple from the tree. It was slightly sweet and mostly starchy. It is time to begin monitoring the fruit’s progress. The pear tree is close to ripe and will be picked this week.

There is plenty of kitchen work ahead.

So begins another day in the final lap of a working life. I’m heading to the kitchen where I’ll make a second pot of coffee before work. The hot beverage doesn’t resolve our challenges. It makes them more tolerable.

Categories
Environment Kitchen Garden

Hurricane Weekend

Hurricane Harvey from the International Space Station on Aug. 25, 2017. Photo Credit – NASA European Pressphoto Agency

Rain tapped the bedroom window this morning on the fringe of Hurricane Harvey.

It was a reminder of our connection to the oceans. They are absorbing heat from the atmosphere on a planet experiencing some of its warmest days in living memory. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and the result is intense storms like the Category 4 Hurricane Harvey.

In Iowa we adapt easily to hurricanes because of our distance from the coast. Needed rain benefits our gardens and farms. It recharges our surface aquifers. As the weather pattern moved over it seemed normal, not as devastating as it was when Harvey made landfall in Texas Friday afternoon.

Overcast skies and a slight rain depressed attendance at the orchard on Saturday. There were enough visitors to keep busy, especially in the afternoon when the sun came out. Sales seemed steady if light.

One of my favorite August apples is Red Gravenstein, a Danish cultivar. It was introduced to western North America in the early 19th century, according to Wikipedia, perhaps by Russian fur traders, who are said to have planted a tree at Fort Ross in 1811. Red Gravenstein is tart, juicy and crisp — great for eating out of hand.

The cider mill made the first press of apples for the sales barn. The gallon and half gallon jugs sold well. Over the years I’ve come to appreciate the changing flavor of our cider as we move through the apple harvest. I bought a gallon of cider and a dozen Red Gravenstein apples at the end of my shift.

I’ve been reading recipes for tomato catsup in old community cookbooks. After reviewing a dozen or so I went to the kitchen and created this sauce from the abundance of red bell peppers and tomatoes:

Red Pepper Sauce

Ingredients

Half dozen cored and seeded red bell peppers cut in quarters
Equal amount by weight of cored tomatoes one inch dice
One cup of malt vinegar
One teaspoon salt
One tablespoon refined sugar.

Process

Pour the vinegar into a saucepan and bring to a boil.
Add tomatoes and peppers.
Add sugar and salt.
Bring back to a boil and cook for 10-20 minutes until the vegetables are soft.

Strain the mixture. Retain the liquid to use as vinegar in salad dressings.
Run the vegetable mixture through a food mill and either serve immediately or bottle and refrigerate.

Recipe notes

To make a thicker sauce, either reduce it in the saucepan or add tomato paste.
I used malt vinegar because it was on hand. Absent malt vinegar I’d use homemade apple cider vinegar.

Categories
Writing

Into the Apple Vortex

First Peck of Apples

This year’s apple crop has been one of our best. That means an apple activity vortex beginning now until the last red delicious is picked in October.

The two earlier trees are ready to pick and best suited for eating out of hand, apple sauce, apple butter, apple juice for drinking and cider vinegar, and baked goods.

Red delicious apples are good for these products as well and hold up for slicing, freezing and drying. A bit of everything apple is planned this fall.

Working two paid jobs, seven days a week relegates apple chores, and other processing of pears, tomatoes, hot and bell peppers and the like to late at night or early in the morning. These will be busy days, no doubt.

Canning Soup and Jalapeno Peppers

I’m considering getting a second water bath canner to speed up the process. At seven jars per batch I’ve gotten the work done, but at 14 more may be accomplished in the same time. We’ll see how that goes. I’m ready to start canning.

Some lessons learned. In past years I’ve canned garden vegetable soup and have about 24 quarts on hand. That’s enough to last until spring so there’s little reason to can more. The same is true of apple butter. I need to use some of what I have to make room on the shelf so I plan to skip this year. 20 quarts of apple sauce remain in the pantry from previous years. I’ll make enough to get to three dozen. That should take us through to the next large apple crop.

Ending up in an apple vortex during the last lap in a workingman’s race is not bad. I’d say it’s delicious but that would be an apple joke.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Food Sustains and Protects

Gardener’s Breakfast

The origin of my adult interest in cooking and gardening is time spent in a motel room in Thomasville, Georgia while implementing a logistics project at a large, nearby mining and manufacturing company.

I’d go into the plant early and stay late, returning home to Iowa only every other weekend. When I got back to my room, I turned on the television and fell asleep watching the TV Food Network.

That’s not to say experiences with my mother and grandmother played no role. They did, especially in our kitchen on Marquette Street where Mother prepared meals using familiar ingredients both fresh and prepared, and at Grandmother’s kitchen — first at the Lend-A-Hand and then at the Mississippi Hotel.

Rather than sustenance, food became an escape in my adult years.

In the 1990s I escaped into the T.V. During thirty minute segments I could forget extreme poverty and plain family restaurants that served a meat and three sides in rural Georgia, and engage in personality chefs who enjoyed what they were doing as locals did not. I had no kitchen so the interest was intellectual. I did learn techniques, some of which I would use later in our home kitchen. We don’t get Food Network any longer but it set me on a course for being the kind of home cook I am today.

Yesterday I made breakfast of steamed broccoli, fresh tomatoes and quesadilla — a gardener’s breakfast. In a social climate of political turmoil, disease, famine and extreme weather events food continues to represent escape as well as nourishment. Producing local food and dishes is a way of navigating diverse interests in a society that seems to have gone mad. Not only escape, but protection of who we are from those who would change us.

In western culture we begin each day with choices about food. The lesson I learned in Georgia, on the T.V. and in family kitchens is to choose fresh and local in order to sustain our lives, and there’s more. Make something of our choices. For a brief moment yesterday it was a gardener’s breakfast. Now to turn to today.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Caesura 2017

First Pick of Apples

Between planning, planting and weeding a garden, and fall’s frosty end, lies a time to harvest, cook and preserve the results. So it is with our lives.

As humans we possess a unique ability to envision a future: one where we need supper and know we will need food later. We produce in abundance, fearing we won’t have enough. With modern food supply chains producing readily available foodstuffs in the United States this isn’t rational. In this sense, a gardener is an archetypal human living a life on urges, needs and wants we don’t fully understand.

Saturday Harvest in High Summer

The culture that produces a kitchen garden is complex, involving not just the gardener and soil, but seed producers, greenhouse operators, equipment manufacturers, chicken manure composters, potential future diners and others. A gardener is deeply engaged in human society. Much of our garden time seems solitary but isn’t. Animals wander nearby and we view the results when they eat garden plants and produce we’d hoped to harvest later. There is a daily drama of birds which are abundant in Big Grove. There is also a vast and little understood society of insects, some of which are annoying, a few deadly, and without others, the garden could not exist. A gardener embraces the complexity of life’s culture.

A gardener is not only a gardener nor does he or she seek to be. Each is just one iteration of humanity engaged in a broad society and we Americans are a peculiar bunch. We work hard, long hours whether it is at home or in a workplace and leave little time for enjoyment of the fruits of labor. Sometimes, like this weekend when I am between work at farms, we get time to ourselves to enjoy life lived how best we know. My story of Saturday is in four parts.

Predawn

My day begins around 4 a.m. and if I’m lucky, I got six or seven hours of sleep. I slept well Friday into Saturday waking only briefly to put in a load of laundry around 2 a.m. The routine was basic. Do stretching exercises, make coffee, say hello to spouse, go downstairs, and turn on the desktop computer to see what’s going on in the world. That’s not to say I didn’t already know. I use my mobile device in bed before turning on the light. Usually something new has happened since retiring the night before.

I wrote a series of tweets to better understand my memory of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as it pertains to the false accusation it is a job killer. I recall local businessmen who said after the law went into effect they were in a position to add jobs but didn’t want to do so because they would have to provide health insurance per the ACA mandate. The assertion is the mandate killed these jobs and that idea got blown up into hyperbole of unprecedented proportions. Re-circulation of this idea is ongoing and rarely fact checked any more.

Businesses of a certain size should provide a health insurance benefit to employees or risk the possibility of being unable to recruit qualified staff. By defining the size at which to mandate health insurance, the law changed the business structure. In highly competitive local markets for landscapers, concrete workers, framers, heavy equipment operators and the like, employers faced a changed landscape. Operating on tight budgets, rather than embrace quality of life for employees they resisted change. The core problem lies in that the K-12 education system does a really poor job of preparing students to enter business. People carve out a niche, generate revenues and go out of business if they don’t properly manage risks or aren’t adequately capitalized. Small-scale operators I know are not educated in things we took for granted when I managed the profit and loss of a $12 million annual revenue transportation and logistics operation as part of a billion dollar corporation. The problem is not the ACA, or teachers. It is our education system doesn’t provide an adequate path for people to be successful owning and operating a business.

Pickle Fermentation

Outside

If there was no rain I water the garden shortly after sunrise. Without thinking it turned into weeding, then harvest and before I knew it the time was 11 a.m. The garden looks more like a weedy mess but inside there is abundance.

Before going outside I started soup to take for lunch at the home, farm and auto supply store, and mixed the brine for a batch of dill pickles.

I picked a box of kale for the library then went plot-to plot to collect what was ready. There were broccoli florets, leeks, onions and fairy tale eggplant in one. Jalapeno peppers, a bell pepper and cucumbers in the next. More broccoli and celery near the locust tree. Four kinds of tomatoes in the tomato patch. Basil is ready but I left it in the garden until I’m ready to make pesto.

Apples are sweet enough to eat out of hand, but not sweet enough to juice and ferment into apple cider vinegar. I picked the ripest for a batch of apple sauce. There are a lot of apples this year because of almost perfect pollination during spring. It should be a long apple season starting now.

I collected the harvest in a crate and placed it on the kitchen floor. There was another two hours of work cleaning the produce but that could wait.

Soup for Next Week’s Work Lunches

Short Trip

I try not to leave our property on weekends unless for work. Ours remains a car culture and we don’t have disposable income for shopping if we thought we had it before. Saturday I went to HyVee to pick up canned goods, pantry staples, organic bananas and Morningstar Farms frozen products we use. Organic celery is permanently on the shopping list although we have a lot of celery ripening in the garden. I picked three heads that morning so bought none at HyVee.

On the eight mile trip to town I noticed two sweet corn stands on Highway One.

One is the farm where we get most of our sweet corn, Rebal’s Sweetcorn. Supply was uncertain from their Saturday post:

It was tough picking this morning; we had to really search for the corn in this patch… we’ve got corn today, but it’s not a full load, so if you want it, try to get out here early. And, because of having to search to find the better ears, we might just let this one go and wait for the next. We’ve got 4 blocks (patches) coming up that look beautiful!!! The question is when they’ll be on… we’re checking them every day, so I’ll keep posting

They had plenty as I passed Southbound.

Lindsey Boerjan runs a seasonal road-side stand further south and was featuring sweetcorn and melons. I wrote an article about women farmers in the Sept. 22, 2015 Iowa City Press Citizen:

Lindsey Boerjan is a fifth-generation farmer living on the family-owned century farm where she grew up. She moved back in 2011 and farms alongside her aunt, uncle, husband and daughter, who run a beef cow and calf operation. To supplement income from beef sales, Boerjan raises chickens and operates a small community-supported agriculture project.

The CSA didn’t make it, although the road-side stand likely does better. I decided to stick with Rebal’s on my return trip.

A musician played for free will donations outside the entrance to HyVee. He seemed too young and inexperienced to be playing Folsom Prison Blues, although he was very musical.

Dinner Salad

Cooking

On arrival home I put away the groceries and started cleaning the morning harvest.

Leek stalks make a great vegetable broth base so I got out the large stainless steel pot. I added the leek leaves, broccoli stalks, a turnip — greens and root, kale and onion tops. I don’t usually salt vegetable broth and this time I didn’t add bay leaves. It cam out dark and flavorful — two and a half gallons.

Part of summer cooking is going through the ice box and making sure old stuff is used first. We have a broccoli abundance and need to do something soon with the gallon bags of florets. The freezer is almost full, so freezing more is not a good option.

I found some lettuce and decided to make a small salad and pizza for dinner. The salad is a work of art with two kinds of lettuce, kohlrabi, two kinds of tomatoes, cucumber, grated daikon radish, bell pepper, pickled jalapeno pepper, sugar snap peas and other items either from the farm or grown in our garden. Ironically I forgot to put some small broccoli florets on the salad.

I also made applesauce, salsa with tomato, garlic, jalapeno peppers and onion, and a cucumber salad of diced cucumbers dressed with home fermented apple cider vinegar, salt and pepper.

Our pizza process is to buy pizza blanks from the warehouse club and add toppings at home. Making our own pizza dough is no real work, but the convenience of a pre-made cheese pizza for $2.50 presents value. I added Kalamata olives and a diced red onion from the farm, then topped with Parmesan cheese. 15 minutes in a 425 degree oven plus a minute under the broiler and done.

This Morning

Everything on my list didn’t get done Saturday. I’m processing the vegetable broth in a water bath this morning and figuring out how to pack a summer’s worth of yard projects into today’s glorious summer weather. That is, I wrote stuff on my white board. Once I move outside into humanity and culture, I will likely forget about the plans and do what comes naturally.