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.
I had COVID-19 in August and September 2024, so I did not get garlic planted before winter. Once recovered from the virus, I checked soil conditions each day into December and did not find them right for planting. One thing led to another, winter came and went, and I planted garlic on March 29. My friend Susan told me long ago garlic could be planted in the spring. Ever since I began growing it in my home garden I over wintered.
I began to freak out when the plants did not seem as tall as in previous years. On July 9, I ordered one pound of garlic seeds from Johnny’s Selected Seeds, the first time I ever did that. If my crop was a bust, I wanted something to start over. It was an expensive insurance policy.
When scapes emerged, they seemed of mixed quality. A few looked normal, yet some sprouted multiple scapes, and some were puny. They tasted fine, it’s just the overall volume for 100 plants seems lighter than in previous years.
By August, my garlic is usually harvested, racked, and curing in the garage on the special rack I made. I want the first couple of leaves to start turning brown before harvest, and we just aren’t there. Some are starting to turn, so harvest can’t be long. I dug one head (see photo) and it looked good. Maybe I’ll be alright.
It never occurred to me what life would be like without garlic. It wouldn’t feel like a real life. Fingers crossed I make it through a decent harvest and fall panting in October.
It was hot and humid outdoors all day Tuesday. I managed a hike on the state park trail between thunderstorms. A little after 10 a.m. I drove across the lakes to the wholesale club to secure provisions. My usual three-pound can of generic Colombian coffee had increased to $20.99 from $13.99 the last time I stocked up, a 50 percent price increase. The tariff on Brazilian coffee goes into effect on August 1, after which it will cost even more. I did not replenish inventory at $20.99.
At the end of June, I replaced the whole house water filter. Yesterday I sat down to order a replacement and the new price was $20.19. In February I bought the exact same part for $13.40, a 51% increase in 5 months. I only get two of these per year but this increase and others like it will make household financial management more difficult. It is a preview of what life under the oligarchs will be like.
The garden has me distracted from work on my autobiography. There is so much produce to process, there seems little time for anything else. To preserve the harvest, immediate action is required, so writing is pushed back. In the annual cycle of my life, this is a feature, not a bug. Our lives would be the worse without the garden.
Hours in the kitchen enable my thinking about life and writing about it. I am certain I have at least one more book in me as the urge to write an autobiography has been with me as long as I can remember. At its core, writing autobiography is part of a life well lived. Once I finish and get a copyright, what then?
I envision creating a new document, using the first two books as a base, to which I add autobiographical information and stories. The published books will stand on their own as moments in time, yet my story will continue to evolve as long as I live. Part of it is finding aspects forgotten during the first telling. Part of it is recording new insights on the same stories already told. It will be a continuous work in progress that may never be published the same way again. It will be a never ending memoir.
There are other books I imagine publishing. The most obvious one is collections of my essays first published on this blog. There is enough here to make a book about local food. There is another about sustainability. While I’ll cover the coronavirus pandemic in part two of my autobiography, there is a much longer story to tell about its impacts on my life and on society more generally. That story is just being revealed. Whether I get to any of this is an open question.
For now, I continue to process fruit and vegetables so we’ll have something for our dinner plate long after the frost comes in October. As the harvest winds down, I’ll work again on my memoir. I still hope to finish the draft by the end of year holidays.
I woke early and have been listening to boomers roll across the area. There is a severe thunderstorm watch according to the National Weather Service. Rain is expected to continue until around 10 a.m. It will be another good morning to spend in the kitchen.
There has been so much rain I haven’t unrolled the hose to water the garden for two weeks. That is a good thing on several levels. All the greenery has taken off, including plants I put in the ground and weeds. Indeterminate tomato vines are reaching more than eight feet long. When the rain slows down, I need to get under them and see if any tomatoes are ready. I planted the main rows four feet apart, yet the vines in all the rows reach up and touch each other. We like rain.
Thunderstorms are a characteristic of Iowa summer.
While picking green beans on Monday it was so hot and humid I pushed my physical limits. I was drenched in sweat and felt dizzy a couple of times, yet worked to finish picking mature beans. Sorting and cleaning them was a chore yet I got that done in the kitchen before dinner. We did not eat green beans for dinner, having broccoli from the garden instead.
Green bean harvest on July 28, 2025.
Lately I’ve been thinking about my decision to retire during the coronavirus pandemic. The combination of the lock down, becoming eligible for full retirement on Social Security, and the health risks of working in a retail environment brought the decision together. I’m having second thoughts about being retired. It was evident before, although is clearer today, that if the Congress does not address the shortfall in Social Security in 2032-2034, we will need more income than we have. Changing course to engineer a life that produces more income than our pensions produce is in the near future. That will give me something to think about while I work in the kitchen this morning. In the meanwhile, it is peak Iowa summer and we should enjoy it.
Sunday morning I picked green beans because they were ready. About 20 minutes into the task I was drenched in sweat. With a forecast high of 89 degrees it became clear it would be another indoors day. Once again, I escaped into my two favorite spots in the house: my writing table and the kitchen.
After finishing chores I sat at the desktop and finished my post for yesterday. I also exchanged emails with a friend with whom I am doing this event.
We met in person on Friday and have the idea of talking about why we write books at the end of the time. We are curious about how attendees get information about complex topics. Do they read books to do so? Should be a good conversation.
I am into the second volume of my autobiography and she is into her third, so that’s the origin of that. She sent along a quote about why we write from Nairobi Williese Barnes that said, “(we write) to shift the conversation, challenge harmful narratives, and encourage accountability in the ways we support and uplift one another.” I don’t disagree with that sentiment.
She quoted me back from my own writing from posts on this blog:
So we write, partly to clarify our thinking, and partly to satisfy our need to reach out to others and express the value of our lives, one life among the billions of people walking on the planet. Whether anyone reads or understands our writing is not the point, although we hope they do.
Why am I writing here, in public? Part of it is self-expression, a basic human need. Part is using language to understand complex social behavior. …. Defining a broader moral lesson is the challenge as the memoir progresses.
There are few finer things on this jumping green sphere than writing about writing, especially with a friend.
I made it to the kitchen at about noon and endeavored to get busy. I started with doing the dishes. More accurately, I started with the laundry. On the last Sunday of each month I launder my bed sheets and catch up on other laundry that accumulated. This took a bit of time out of kitchen work as I did five loads. I managed to make what I call “minced salad.” That is summer vegetables suitable for eating raw diced into one eighth inch cubes and mixed together with extra virgin olive oil and apple cider vinegar. I season with salt yet the seasoning possibilities are endless. It came out well.
The garden is about finished with zucchini. I modified my zucchini bread recipe, substituting applesauce for the oil, and by wringing the water out of the zucchini with a towel. It is to set for 2-3 hours before cutting so I haven’t tasted it. It appears to have had the desired effect which was to decrease the moisture in the loaf and reduce cooking time. It should be good.
Zucchini bread baked on July 27, 2025.
The benefit of these activities is I can shut out the rest of the world and focus on our family. We need more time doing that. It is a way to go on living in turbulent times.
Zestar! apples in the sink before making applesauce.
Saturday cooking is one of the great pleasures of life. I use it to set aside worries and concentrate on preserving and making food for our family with an emphasis on taste and using the garden abundance. Rain was forecast all morning so I spent Saturday in the kitchen. This post is a slice of that life.
The day began with breakfast of cottage cheese and some cherry juice left from the recent visit of our child. Next I did the dishes to make space to get everything clean before making a new mess. Then I went through the refrigerator, which is packed to the doors. I pulled out everything that could go into a new batch of vegetable broth and laid the items on the counter. I also went through the cucumber drawer to make sure decaying vegetables were either used up or composted.
Cucumbers take the most management because there are so many of them when they come in and their shelf life is short. I noted the quart jar of pickles was almost gone, so I reused the brine, fortifying it with some new vinegar and seasonings, and refilled the jar. There are already three or four quarts of refrigerator dill pickles tucked away in the back but we have to make them while cucumbers are in season.
While cleaning the fridge, I made a cut vegetable tray for snacking. Celery, zucchini, cucumber, and bell peppers cut and ready to eat if I need a break from the action. This is for sharing, yet sometimes I am the only one who eats this convenience food. I typically like some kind of salad dressing with them.
Vegetable broth is an easy use of vegetables nearing the end of their life. I make it with standard mirepoix, bay leaves, and the oldest bag or two of leafy green vegetables from the freezer. This day, I used up a couple of bags of last year’s celery leaves to make way for new. One of the last gifts Mother gave me was a large All-Clad multipurpose stainless steel stock pot. If I’m working a full shift in the kitchen, I usually put a pot of broth on and water bath can it. I made six more quarts. At 42 quart jars in the pantry, I am good for most of the rest of this year into spring 2026.
This may seem like a lot yet it was preparatory of making apple sauce.
One of the few surviving photographs of our family in Appalachia is of Granny Reed at Stella’s funeral. Reed’s given name was Josephine, yet I only discovered that from searching the U.S. Census a few years ago. She was always called Granny Reed. She is our child’s great, great, great grandmother.
Granny Reed, along with other female family members worked at a canning plant where they put up apples. When I am picking, sorting, peeling and coring home grown apples for use, I inevitably think about those Virginia women. When in 1983 I visited the home places in Virginia, my Uncle Gene talked about apples.
Next, we went to Norton, another of the places Grandma and Grandpa lived. Uncle Gene talked about apples, how Grandma used to work on peeling and coring apples for one of the big companies. At one time, then, there were large orchards. But now, there is only the coal companies. They used to eat fried apples for breakfast. Later Aunt Carrie told us how to make them. Slice apples into wedges, fry in a little water, sprinkled with sugar. (An Iowa Life by Paul Deaton).
Uncle Gene talked at breakneck speed and I tried to get it all down.
Something that goes through everything is the presence of apples. Grandma worked in an apple cannery, had orchards. There is an apple tree on the old home place, Aunt Carrie served fresh applesauce for us, she said a day hasn’t gone by when she hasn’t had apples. Uncle Gene talked a lot about the apples and how he and the boys helped with them. And everywhere we ate them, the apples were good, the trees bearing fruit. The apple trees bearing lots, even the ones abandoned for years. Eat them green, cooked, fried, in applesauce. (An Iowa Life by Paul Deaton).
As Gene said, “That Granny Reed was always a smart one.”
My entry into Zestar! apples had me eating them fresh and making apple sauce. Before now, I had only every made applesauce from Red Delicious and Earliblaze apples. It turned out on Saturday the flavor profile of Zestar! apple applesauce was delicious (no pun intended). I am so glad that tree is now a part of our home orchard.
I was dog tired at the end of my six-hour kitchen shift. It was an inexpensive escape from the internet and everything on it. A time to live in the past with my forebears, if only for a few hours.
In July, we are in the thick of harvest season. There has been adequate rain, and growing conditions are almost ideal. 2025 will be one of my best gardening years ever. Among the benefits of a productive garden is frequent donations to area food pantries.
Zestar! apples July 21, 2025
One measure of abundance is Zestar! apples. It was the first large harvest from a tree I planted a few years ago. The taste is sensational: juicy and tart. They will make great applesauce. This year I decided to can applesauce in pint jars instead of quarts. One main use is as a binding agent in my Iowa vegan cornbread and the pint is more likely to be used up before it goes bad.
Use of apples goes way back on my father’s side of the family. Stories survive of family working in the apple canning plant in Appalachia in the early 20th Century. I am happy to have four varieties of apples growing in our back yard. Calling it my heritage is not wrong. I don’t spray, so they are not perfect. Boy howdy! Do I use them up!
Harvest on July 21, 2025.
When the garden is going gangbusters, the challenge is to use up or preserve as much as possible, as soon as possible. Two of the crates in the photo above have celery in them. Celery gets processed into four different things: I keep “hearts” of celery for cooking fresh, ending up with ten of them this year. The various outer stalks are separated from the leaves. The stalks with some size to them are chopped into small bits and frozen to add to soup. All the very small pieces of stalk and stem are roughly cut, bagged and frozen for use in making vegetable broth. Finally, the leaves are rough chopped, bagged and frozen to add to soup. I use the whole plant. All of this takes a bit of work, yet the flavor makes it worth the effort.
Another big project ahead is using garlic scapes before the garlic harvest. I have a good crop of basil, so I expect I will make garlic scape pesto. I already have plenty of half pint jars of pesto in the freezer, so I don’t need many more. Will see how far along with that I get.
Growing a large garden ties a person to home. There is so much to do in July, if we don’t pace ourselves, we may be tuckered out for the August tomato season. Can’t let that happen.
2025 is turning into an alcohol-free year. I didn’t even purchase my normal case of bottled beer for the summer. Some days, I don’t know who I am.
I drove across the lakes to the North Liberty Community Food Pantry and donated the day’s harvest of yellow squash and cucumbers. It was the third food bank donation this week. I like having an outlet when I grow too much of something. It enables me to pick the best produce for the kitchen yet find a home for all of it. Patrons of the food pantry truly need what donors provide.
On the way home I stopped at the convenience store to gamble $2 on the lottery. I noticed the display of many types of shots of liquor between the two cash registers and asked,
"Do you sell a lot of these?" "We do," replied the cashier. "I imagine you sell a lot on Friday nights," I said. "Actually, mornings are the biggest sales. You'd be surprised how many people need a shot to start their work day."
I went to the orchard where I worked eight seasons and bought Michigan cherries. A family member grows them and they are some of the best I have ever tasted. Expensive? Yes. Worth it? Also yes. It is a summer tradition worth continuing as long as I can afford it. In the sales display with the cherries they had bags of Lodi apples. This signifies the apple harvest has begun its long season continuing into late October.
The first crop of Zestar! apples will soon ripen in my garden. I picked one today and while the sugars are beginning to form, they are not yet ripe. It won’t be long, though, maybe a week or two.
The work of planting is mostly finished. From here, the work changes to weeding, harvesting, cooking, and leveraging other growers for what I don’t produce myself. It is all part of the circle of life when you grow food. I feel a part of something bigger than myself on days like this.
Donation to community food pantry on July 7, 2025.
The gutter clogged during a Saturday afternoon rainstorm. I looked at the forecast and rain was expected, on and off, for the next six hours. I decided to get the extension ladder and climb on the roof to clear the blockage so water wouldn’t overflow into the lower level of the house. I waited until the driveway showed signs of drying and went outside. Even though a misty-feeling drizzle hit my face, I persisted. From the time I got the ladder down until I returned it to its rack was less than 15 minutes. At 73 years, I should limit my time on the roof, yet the problem was immediate, the consequences of doing nothing were unacceptable. The situation wants a permanent solution.
I had a fitful night’s sleep the evening of July 4. Community fireworks were scheduled for July 5, so that didn’t keep me awake. News of the administration’s budget reconciliation was likely at the heart of my restlessness. That, with the courts enabling parts of their agenda. It’s as if every good public work I have done since graduating high school is being undone. It’s intentional, so my restlessness is not without reason.
Today there will be a decent harvest for the food pantry. Yellow squash, cucumbers, and leafy green vegetables, for sure. When the sun rises, I’ll take my daily walk on the state park trail and get into the garden. With the rain, the garden is really producing, to the benefit of our household and some who are food insecure.
Rain has consequences, both challenging and positive. A summer rainstorm provides opportunities to improve our lives, if we are open to seeing them.
The first harvest of basil was huge this year. I used part of it to make this pesto-like spread for toast and with pasta. A purist would say it is wanting in pine nuts and Parmesan cheese and therefore not pesto. In my world, there are not a lot of purists. These two jars went in the freezer while I use up previous year’s jars of pesto for lack of a better name.
Fresh basil pairs nicely with last year’s garlic crop, which needs to be used up before garlic scapes appear this year. Garlic, basil, extra virgin olive oil, and a little salt is all this needs. This batch used two and a half large head of garlic, and four cups of chopped basil. The measurements are flexible.
I made a batch of vegetable broth and this pesto while the ambient temperature outdoors was in the low 90s. It was a fine Saturday afternoon to work in the kitchen.
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