I’ve been sleeping in fits: lucky to get five straight hours, I’d rather have, and need seven or eight. This morning I woke after five, couldn’t sleep, read 50 pages of poetry, and still couldn’t get back to sleep. I got up and worked my daily routine, made breakfast, and laid down and slept for another two straight hours. It’s no way to live.
During those two hours I returned to a dream from another sleep. I dreamed I was in Germany with one of my farm buddies and other people who weren’t alive yet when I was last there. I returned for a lost item from the previous dream and found it. Then I returned it to my farm friend and woke up.
Details are already sketchy. In typical fashion, I’ll forget about it quickly. For a little while, I wondered what the hell that meant. Then I decided to accept it and get on with my day.
Today is about care packages. I will finish assembling the one to go to our child with garden produce. I’ll also make soup and chili to take to my spouse and her sister the next trip to the state capitol. I don’t know if I’m finished dreaming, yet I hope not.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Part of the shore of Lake Macbride after continued drought conditions.
It is supposed to get hot during Iowa summer, yet not like this. On Wednesday and Thursday, ambient temperatures climbed to nearly 100 degrees with heat indexes approaching 120. I got outside shortly after dawn and walked along the lake shore. Neighbors were also on the trail early to beat the heat. The air was like soup. I spent most of the days indoors after walking and tending the garden.
August is almost a five week month. The writing I have done for Blog for Iowa is helping me get in practice to take up my autobiography again after Labor Day. My readership on this site after cross posting has not been as good as usual. Perhaps that is because my long-time readers are used to a different kind of writing. That’s okay. The small stipend I received to cover a vacation helped pay for necessary, existential things around the house. Things like pumping the septic tank.
I asked my friends on social media what book I should read next. There were plenty of suggestions. I picked The Circle of Reason by Amitov Ghosh, to be followed by A Fever In The Heartland by Timothy Egan. If you have reading suggestions, please leave a comment. Rarely has someone recommended something that I didn’t evaluate and read it.
It occurs to me I haven’t been to the farmer’s market in a couple of years. As I scaled up the garden, I needed less outside produce. I can’t imaging going to the orchard for apples as my trees have more than I can harvest before they fall. The pear tree is keeping us in sweet fruit, so I skipped all the commercial berries, peaches, nectarines and the like in favor of eating from our yard.
The heat is not good for septuagenarians. I feel healthy, yet realize I have to take it easy on working outdoors when it’s hot and humid. All the indoors time has not been particularly good for me, yet I’m able to process vegetables and fruit and cross things off my electronic to-do list. I look forward to autumn.
More and more I feel like a survivor. My parents and grandparents are gone, and I never had an excessive number of friends when I lived in Davenport before 1970. My political friends are aging and dying. I don’t feel like driving, except when I have to get groceries or run an errand. I need a haircut.
My spouse has been at her sister’s home for the last month, so I do what I want indoors. Notably, the radio has been on whenever I want to listen. Our child has their own life, which increasingly doesn’t involve parents. All of this means I am forced to deal with aging in America, which includes a large rasher of loneliness. I’ll be fine. As a writer, I crave being alone with my thoughts and writing.
The pattern of a hot August lives in memory. Living in this week’s excess heat hasn’t followed any traditional pattern. We have a new air conditioner so that’s a plus. (I raise a toast to Willis Carrier, the inventor of air conditioning). Except for dairy products, there is no reason to leave the house. Some say I should give up dairy products, but I’m not ready. When I went outside to get the mail, the neighborhood was exceedingly quiet. So quiet, it was eerie.
I can see the end of this heat wave and it gives me hope. Soon my spouse will be home and we’ll get back to whatever passes for normal. We survived the coronavirus pandemic without contracting COVID-19. We’ll survive this.
Not enough sugar for cider to make vinegar, so apple sauce.
I’m left alone to attend to the house while my spouse is helping her sister. She’s been gone three weeks, and a return date is uncertain. I made a care package of garden produce, a couple boxes of rags, and my labor for some heavy lifting last Wednesday. We had a good conversation about life after the work was done.
The main August activity centers on the garden. There is a lot of food to bring in and preserve for the future. It never seems a straight line on getting things done.
Apples are dropping at the rate of one every minute from the Earliblaze trees. I picked a bucket full, yet there is not enough sugar in them to make cider for vinegar. I guess I’ll sauce them. If it is a bit tart, we can add a sweetener when we open the jars and serve. This was not a good variety of tree to plant back in the 1990s and I have two of them. The Zestar! apples, from a tree planted a couple of years ago, made a great-tasting sauce. That jar is in the refrigerator for immediate eating.
The first round of hot peppers is in and needs processing. The goal is to make at least one quart jar of Guajillo chilies with garlic, maybe two. There are also Serrano peppers for eating fresh and another kind of refrigerated chili sauce. Jalapenos will be eaten fresh. Anticipating a fresh salsa, I bought a bag of organic corn chips at the wholesale club. Once we get past the hot times, there will be a surge of hot peppers.
There is a small patch of celery to bring in. These get sliced thinly and frozen in one cup batches for soup. The leaves are abundant. I put them in the food processor to chop them and then freeze with water in small batches in a muffin pan for soup flavoring. Nothing is so good as home grown celery.
Tomato canning is on deck for the weekend. There are a dozen quarts left from last year and it looks like I’ll need them to get through the year. I’ll have a separate post later about the tomato crop. The ones that are coming in from the vines have had excellent flavor.
It is more difficult to cook for one. I made a big cut vegetable salad and it lasted for days. A person can only eat so many vegetables. I’ve been donating to the food pantry, so that helps alleviate the backlog. Still, there is a lot to process this weekend before the vegetables deteriorate. Better get after it soon.
It has taken four days to recover from the move in Des Moines. Surprisingly, it wasn’t temperatures in the high nineties that affected me. The killer was walking up and down stairs endlessly as we loaded basement stuff into the truck. My legs began to hurt at home on Monday and have been sore ever since. By Thursday I felt on the return trip to normal health, yet am not there yet. I hope this is the last move in which I help someone else.
We’ve entered the humid part of summer. As I write there is a fog over the landscape. Thursday the yard was covered in spider webs with condensation on them.
Spider webs with condensation.
On the plus side, tomatoes are beginning to come in. Another summer day in Big Grove. I plan to make the most of it.
Our local daily newspaper printed the entire Declaration of Independence in this morning’s edition. I didn’t read it again yet appreciate the gesture.
Even though “men” were “white men” in the document, and slaves, indigenous people, and women were not included in the lofty talk about “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them,” the document served to change the course of human events and resulted in the United States of America. It was a radical beginning, one whose promise has not been fulfilled by 2023, if it ever will be.
I am restless about it no more, as instead of turning in my bed while the sound of fireworks ignited near the lake last night, I slept straight through. I have come to terms with American’s many imperfections and focus on making my small corner of it more tolerant and diverse.
Our local food bank was closed for donations on the third, so I found another food bank that could take a large box of cucumbers and zucchini. I had planned to make and can pickles this year but our inventory from previous years is strong. I decided to eat from previously canned pickles for another year, and that created an excess of pickling cucumbers. As I drove across the lake to deliver them in North Liberty, the wakes of pleasure boats were evident on most parts of the surface. The Independence Day weekend was in its full bustle. The food bank appreciated the donation.
We found a water line break on the main entry road to our development. I spent Monday morning coordinating communication with members while the repair was effected. Partly, it is a thing for septuagenarian men to gather at construction events in the neighborhood to “watch.” Partly, as outgoing board president I wanted to make sure the well was turned off and back on in a way that minimized contamination of the water system. Things went well and I felt good about one of my last actions as board president.
We don’t celebrate Independence Day in our household. In the pantheon of annual holidays, it ranks second behind Memorial Day.
Based on what’s in the garden and refrigerator, we’ll be eating one of ten kinds of leafy green vegetables for dinner. That and other dishes as yet unknown. I’ll dig the first garlic plant to see where we are. It has to be close to harvest, so on my to-do list is preparing the garlic rack. Today’s to-do list is long.
Spring has turned to summer and with forecast ambient temperatures above 90 degrees today, I plan to spend the afternoon indoors. I will be cooking, reading, writing, and noting my independence from the tyranny of cultural traditions surrounding our nation’s birth.
As Robert Browning wrote, “God’s in his Heaven, all’s right with the world.” Or so we convince ourselves to believe when the holidays arrive.
Two days after a full moon, in pre-dawn darkness, it was difficult to see it rained yesterday. It hadn’t rained long, just enough to get the ground wet and start water flowing toward the ditch. It was not enough to seal cracks in the ground caused by a lack of moisture. The ditch near the road has hardly been used for runoff this spring. I hope the dry spell is broken.
After a hiatus, today I return to writing. Garden plot seven remains to be planted yet the hard work of putting in a garden is almost done. Already an abundance of vegetables was harvested even if my favorite hot peppers wait in the greenhouse to be planted.
At the point I realized our yard couldn’t produce enough grass clippings and leaves for garden mulch, and began laying down weed barrier to hold moisture and suppress weeds, everything changed. It was helped along by relenting to the need for fertilizer (composted chicken and turkey manure) and some pesticides used by my organic farming friends. Not everything improves with aging, yet my garden was made better by experience.
May was a month of stuff breaking. We scrambled to cover the expense of new appliances: washer, dryer, range, furnace, and air conditioner. We previously replaced the refrigerator, water heater, water softener, and our 2002 automobile. The new technology is clearly better. I can’t get over how quickly batches of water-bath canning jars come to temperature and boil. Our clothes get cleaner as well. All of this took time in May. We are over the hump, fingers crossed.
The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk created turbulence in my social media space. The main change is I notice more trolls. I know to block them without question, yet it is an annoyance. I tried Mastodon, Post, and Spoutible and none of them fills the same need as Twitter. Mastodon was too complicated with their decentralized server model. Spoutible and Post have a lot of nice people, yet the depth of relationship is lacking and may become an issue. The other legacy social media accounts (Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook) are doing what they do without issue.
There wasn’t a lot to write about in Iowa Politics this spring. Republicans in the legislature had super majorities and could and did pass what they wanted. The trouble for a political blog writer is getting a handle on the changes and creating an approach that makes sense while Democrats are in the minority. One would have thought logic and reason would be the path, yet no. Republicans now take legislative action based on tropes and whims from the great beyond. To use logic serves their misinformation purposes. Building a story board will require more effort than usual as we prepare for the 2024 and 2026 elections.
Lack of rain is concerning. The Midwestern garden relies upon a consistent amount of rainfall spaced at predictable intervals. As the atmosphere and our oceans warm, more moisture is stored in the atmosphere. Rainfall we were used to became the exception rather than something upon which gardeners can rely. It leaves us with the unpredictability of life. When the dry spell breaks, we can breathe easier, at least for a little while.
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