Holidays

Twas the day before Christmas. I arose all bleary-eyed from my bed and made my way to the kitchen, where my wife stood facing me, wearing an apron, spatula in hand and with a large white chef’s hat on her head. I mumbled something to her—I don’t remember what—and she informed me the next time I spoke to her I should address her as “Madame Chef.” She was only half kidding; you don’t mess with a mother in her kitchen when she is holiday baking. I took the strong hint about the pecking order for the day and only reentered the kitchen when invited in to do KP on dirty pots and pans.


In the days leading up my name had come up in conjunction with that of one Ebenezer Scrooge several times but that is really not a fair comparison since Scrooge was rich and tight and I’m not at all rich. I only asked that when buying presents we first ascertain that there was a true need for the item by the receiver of the gift; don’t just buy to be buying. For example the bathroom scale had recently taken to giving my weight as 140 lbs; obviously something amiss there. One morning my wife took a bear paw swat at the radio alarm and knocked it off the nightstand after which it would not turnoff; so another good candidate for a present. During the holiday shopping I served only as chauffeur and napped while my wife and daughter shopped in the store—an excellent arrangement for all concerned.


When the big day arrived we had a couple inches of snow on the ground. At the church service we sang every carol known to Christendom which suits me fine since all the “joyful” lyrics on the radio are sung by someone who is crying into his martini at the bar of the later day mourners. At the two days of family get-togethers which followed someone must have thrown the naughty-or-nice scale right out the window because I made out like a bandit despite my less than sterling behavior. I only got stuff I really did need; maybe they think I’m about to kick the bucket or something. I can only hope that what we gave was also appreciated. I trust my wife’s instincts on that.


I enjoyed the family get-togethers and the day after was the best ever. I got up and had coffee and oatmeal cookies by the light of the lit Christmas tree IN THE QUIET. Later I went out for an hour-long walk in the snow and the pines and the QUIET. I took an afternoon nap. Yes Virginia, there really is Peace on Earth—times are back to normal. As usual I really get into the Christmas spirit a couple of days after the holiday is past.

The Furnace and the Wife

It was midday and frigid when the furnace went out. This tended to confirm my prejudice that our appliances are too complex and over-engineered and fail when they are most needed. I called the office of our heating man. The answering girl seemed almost afraid of my response when she told me they were overwhelmed with furnaces failing in the cold snap and could not get to me until sometime the next day. We would have to spend a night without gas heat. I reassured her that I understood and tomorrow would be fine.

As I hung up I realized I would be fine...until my wife came home at least. Afterall, we still had electricity. I put a sweater over my flannel shirt and a fleeced turtleneck sweat shirt over that. I put on three pairs of socks and a second pair of fleeced sweat pants. I was warm but still had freedom of movement. I lit a candle in the middle of the kitchen table, put a teapot of water on a low burner to shoot steam away from the cabinets and into the kitchen center and I decided to cook a pot of rice. This kept the kitchen at a fairly comfortable 50 degrees as I warmed my hands over the teapot steam or wrapped them around a mug of hot tea.

The problem my wife has with such life situations is that she suspects that I am secretly enjoying them as some sort of survivalist challenge. This is pure perversion to her. As she arrived home tired from work and physically under the weather, I was secretly ready to find a hotel room if she demanded but refrained from telling her this outright as I explained the situation and how lucky we were that the temperature was only going down into the twenties tonight and not near zero as it had the two previous nights. “Well I guess you’ll have something to blog about,” she dead panned.

After a supper of canned soup over rice and the last of her birthday cake we retired to our two living room recliners with a electric space heater between them and blankets over our torsos. We watched TV until eight then turned off the heater and retired to a bed of covers and blankets which we pulled up to our chins. I put a fleeced blanket by the headboard which we could pull down over our heads so that only our noses and mouths weren’t covered. We were warm but restless all night. Frequent trips to the bathroom made me wonder how the kids in Little House on the Prairie ever made it to their outhouse.

In the morning after a breakfast oatmeal and coffee, the space heater had managed to bring the bathroom temperature up to a balmy 55 degrees and my wife spent what seemed like an hour in a hot bath. Fortunately the repairman arrived around nine AM. He immediately did more for our marriage than any marriage counselor could have. The temperature is now up to 70 and we are back to what passes for normal around here.

Free Heats

A normal person would just install a programmable thermostat, set the nighttime setting and the workday/school day setting to 55 degrees and the breakfast rush hour and evenings to 70 degrees and be done with it. Since I am seldom described as normal, I forgo the programmable settings and instead fiddle with the thermostat through the day. Too much time on my hands? I try to recognize “free heats” and incorporate them into my 24-hour schedule. What follows is a description of what passes for a normal late November day.

The thermostat is set at 50-55 degrees while we sleep under heavy blankets at night. Two free heats are at work during the night. First is our body heat, the heat that the rest of the animal kingdom relies on. Second, is ambient heat given off by the refrigerator and the freezer. Sometimes my wife will cook something overnight in a slow cooker crock pot and this adds to ambient heat in the house. At higher thermostat settings ambient heat is not very effective in reducing utility bills but in the lower ranges it is a balancing factor which goes a long way in keeping the furnace from kicking in. A cool house is also a win for the fridge and freezer since they don’t need to work as hard. Comfort is the major concern and we do sleep better in a cool house than in a warm one.

When the alarm goes off, I get up, turn up the thermostat and start the coffee maker. The lights and heating coffee are more ambient heat. My wife gets up to take her bath (we leave the water in the tub until it cools) and uses the hair dryer to dry her hair (more ambient heat.) I make breakfast using the toaster, electric range and microwave. Even though we pay for the electricity for each of these appliances their usage was for a main purpose other that warming the house and so the extra heat produced is simply a beneficial spinoff byproduct.

When my wife heads off to her job, I turn the thermostat back down, dress in comfortable layers and go outdoors for an hour morning walk and then an hour of yard work. Exercise generated free body heat is totally underrated and underappreciated. By the time I return to the house, that same house that had felt cool when I went outside now feels uncomfortably hot until some body heat dissipates.

Once I have cooled from my morning exertion, I make a cup of hot tea and go out onto the front porch to enjoy it. The cup warms my hands while the tea warms my body core. If it is sunny the front sun porch will be quite cozy with free passive solar heat which I share begrudgingly with the cat dozing in a sunbeam on the porch swing. Once the porch heats up warmer than the house I simply open the front door and let the porch heat enter the house; the furnace won’t kick in once. On really cold cloudy days I can go to the library to read or net surf on their computers to get free public heat until it’s time for my wife to return home. Hard as it may be to believe, I am not totally averse to taking an afternoon nap on our couch if I don’t go for the free public heat.

When my wife returns from work we again turn up the thermostat but this is partially offset by the heat from the evening meal, the TV or computer, the lighting and maybe a load of laundry in the dryer. Beware, if you own a gas clothes dryer never try to vent the excess heat into the house. If you own an electric clothes dryer and really, really read up on safety issues you may be able to safely get away with venting part of excess dryer heat indoors.

Besides being aware of and utilizing the free heats (body, ambient, passive solar, and public) another concept to keep utilities down is micro space heating. Simply heat the room with the thermostat in it with a safe space heater and the stupid thermostat will think that the whole house is warm and not kick the furnace on. I spend most of my time in the living room anyway so why keep the whole house warm. Beware again; never shut or block room heating vents; it will destroy your furnace. Just fool the thermostat instead with a space heater.

In the evening we again set the heat down to 50 degrees and hit the sack. That concludes a normal day in the life of an abnormal man. Like I said, most people would just install a programmable thermostat.

Changing Seasons

Never thought I’d get old but now that Metamucil and Milk O. Magnesia are my two closest friends, I guess I have arrived. Like the seasons of my life the season of the year has changed and I am now moving into my winter retiree mode: more reading, more writing and more afternoon hibernations.

When my daughters moved out leaving us as a couple of empty nesters, my wife immediately claimed their bedroom as her Den/Yoga room. Most recently she traded the double bed that used to take up so much space in the room for a single sized bed which she has disguised as a couch with large corduroy covered pillows. The couch/bed, the computer and computer desk, a roll top desk, three file cabinets, and a potted plant stand under an east window form the perimeter of the room. The center of the room is now open space and she has put a large oval rug with a thick underpad there to be her “yoga mat.” There is a full length mirror on the closet door and for the first time in memory the room actually feels roomy and not crowded.

As bad weather has set in I have taken to going into her room when she is at work to write on the computer and check the web; I do some crunches and pushups on her yoga mat. I take off my shirt and do curls and presses in front of the mirror. At my age this is an act of humility not hubris; a sort of forcing myself to face reality. I have long ago traded my six pack for a full keg. My goal this winter is to work out an hour each day in an effort to keep what I’ve got left; use it or lose it.

When my better-half returns home from work and finds me on her computer in her inner sanctum a comic argument between two curmudgeons ensues.
“It’s not your damn den…it’s my damn den.”
“No, it’s not YOUR damn den …Now it’s MY damn den.” And so on, back and forth forever. I know it is really her room but after a day without her I am bored and need a few minutes of good verbal sparring. It’s our way of greeting each other. For verbal variety and good measure we throw in a couple: “Don’t you make me come over there!” and “NO…Don’t YOU make ME come over there!” threats. Anyway I like what she has done to make the room a studio apartment and I will sneak in when I can.

I’ve reached that point where you can remember what happened forty years ago clear as a bell but you can’t recall where you put your keys five minutes ago. On this cold rainy Thanksgiving Day as I sit musing with a cup of hot tea in my (her) den and the raindrops pelting against the window, I am reminded of the rainy season as a soldier in Southeast Asia. As the rainy season arrives the Thai people celebrate with a weeklong festival when any and everyone throws and sprays water on any and everyone. We had been warned by the brass that we were guests in the country and we were to accept and respect this local custom of welcoming the monsoons.

As we stood at stiff attention in dress uniform for weekly inspection, our captain pivoted sharply to stare at each of us nose to nose and then inform us that our sideburns were a quarter of an inch too long or that we needed to shave (even though we had shaved immediately before the inspection.) Finally he pivoted one last time and marched back a few yards to face his line of men as the sergeant dismissed us. Before sarge could dismiss us, one of our crazy barrack’s Thai momma sans came running out of nowhere with a mop bucket and soaked the captain head to toe. It is my all time favorite military memory.

Grandma’s Garden

Now you have to understand a couple things when you read this. First, I am reminiscing back to when I was 4 or 5 years old, so even though I think I’ve got my story straight these are some pretty old memories that I’m dredging up. Second, the reason I am running through Grandma’s garden here is to partially explain my bias against too much variety and complexity—against having too many choices.

Grandma was an excellent gardener and had a large garden, about a 100’ by 100’ square I’d say, and that doesn’t include an equally large blackberry patch. Despite the large size of her garden, Grandma grew only a handful of crops but she grew a lot quantity wise. As I recall she grew potatoes, tomatoes, pole beans, onions, cabbage and maybe a few cucumbers. There was a long row of trellised grapes along the back side of the garden and a row of asparagus along the north side of the garden. I don’t remember ever eating any asparagus but I recall their foliage reminded me of miniature Christmas trees. She also raised a lot of sweet corn but that was in a separate field. I remember that sweet corn field because I helped to hoe it and frequently failed to distinguish between corn sprout and weed. It all looked green to me. This led to my Grandfather speaking German and that was always a bad sign. I never did learn any Deutche sprache from him except for one phrase which although never directly translated for me, I am 99.9% sure meant “Get out of here!”

So there wasn’t much variety in my Grandma’s garden nor for that matter in her meals which were almost completely dependent on home produce. But no one ever complained because could she ever cook! Her recipes were so savory that she didn’t need much variety. I recall sitting next to my Dad when our family would go out to the farm for a Sunday meal and visit. He’d slip his hand under the table and undo his belt; He was ready for some serious eating. Back in those days meals centered around meat, mashed potatoes and gravy…we did not know that crispy fried chicken skin and roast beef were not healthy. Grandma made a delicious vinegar and sugar coleslaw from the cabbages. There was sweet corn with farm butter and green beans cooked with some pork fat. She made a wonderful chicken dressing and dessert was a big chocolate iced cake. These Sunday meals were always pretty much the same. The only question was whether we would have fried chicken and milk gravy or beef and dark gravy.

Sometimes we kids got to stay at Grandma’s during the week for our “summer vacation”—(read that as a desperately needed break for my Mom.) Meals during the week also had a similarity to them. The potatoes were home fried instead of mashed; tomatoes and onions marinated in sweet vinegar tended to replace the coleslaw. Meat was either ham or chicken and there were still green beans or corn. Grandma baked her own bread because Grandpa did not like the store bought bread—he wanted something that would “stick to his ribs”. He finished his meals off with bread and “schmears”, that is her homemade grape and blackberry jams. When she baked bread on Saturday or made jellies it really filled the old farm house with some nice aromas.

It was the strong aromas of frying sausage or bacon and eggs along with strong percolating coffee that awoke my brother and me for predawn breakfasts. Again, my grandparents produced the hogs and eggs and so that is pretty much what every breakfast meal was except on Sunday. On Sunday we ate Saturday- baked kuchen to hold us until the main dinner meal. (Country folks did not have a lunch; they ate breakfast, dinner and supper.)

Just as Saturday was for baking and Sunday was for church services and family visiting, so too every day of the week had its special routine and task. As best I recall, Monday was laundry day—clothes washed outdoors in boiling caldrons with homemade lye soap. Tuesday was ironing day. Wednesday was housecleaning day, no small task in a big two story farm house. Thursday was preparation for “egg and butter” route day. Vegetables had to be picked; blackberries had to be picked. Her truck route customers really liked Grandma’s blackberries but I really hated those thorns. Eggs had to be candled and cream churned into pounds of butter. On Friday, Grandma and Grandpa spent the day in the city running their “egg and butter” route from the back of a black panel truck. Every day had its purpose, its routine. It all seemed to fit together; it all seemed simpler. Not much variety. Not too many choices to fret about.

Failures and Fizzles

“No one likes a know-it-all,” my wife informed me.
“Geez Louise, I did not know THAT!” So endowed with this fresh spirit of humility by my spouse, I think I will write about the things that did not go right in my garden this year.

My pumpkins, which I had hoped to sell as fall decorations and Halloween jack-o-lanterns, totally failed. Despite the vines getting off to a great start, they were too far from the house to irrigate and after the drought, the squash borers, the squash bugs and the cucumber beetles got done with them, I couldn’t find enough plant residue to pick up to put in a compost pile. The field was just bare sand.

I have never seen more apples on a tree than were on mine this summer but that apparent blessing proved a curse since the drought caused almost all to fall from the tree early. I buried about five wheel barrow loads of apples into my garden and compost pile and managed to salvage only about a bushel for us to eat. If you don’t have an apple tree you might consider growing a few rhubarb plants instead; rhubarb makes a very similar tasting pie, ripens in the spring not the fall, doesn’t require the dormant oil spraying and pruning and takes up only a fraction of the space of a tree. I have a brother who will take rhubarb pie over apple any day.

I am starting to hate carrots, what with all the slow germination, thinning and weeding. I have nothing to show for all the effort. I will try one more year and if I don’t get results I will just replace them in recipes with the much easier to grow butternut squash or sweet potatoes. I turned my sister onto growing sweet potatoes this year and in her words, “All I did was plant them and harvest them.” The butternut squash has a shell so tough it is hard to cut with a knife and so it is not bothered much by the pests that do in other squash and pumpkins. Mine grew well between my rows of sweet corn so space was not an issue.

The garden literature describes how wonderfully productive fall gardens of cold hardy crops can be. I have witnessed my sister keep chard and kale growing all winter long in a cold frame made of straw bales with some storm window glass placed over the bales. So I made plans to grow a robust fall garden of cabbages, beets, chard, kale, lettuce and spinach. These crops may do well during the cool, rainy weather of fall but in September the young seedlings took a total smack-down from still ubiquitous insect pests and never got established. Even though I watered daily I got zip for my effort. So my pipedreams of cooked greens, salads and slaws in mid winter remain for another try next year. I think I may broadcast some turnip seed next autumn; that should have the most chance of success.

Lest you consider me a total loser by this point let me say that I was successful in producing significant garden produce for each month of the year despite my fall fiasco. We ate salads almost daily in the spring; we ate huge quantities of melons all summer and into the fall along with potatoes, green beans, corn etc. For this fall I have a good stock of butternut squash and sweet potatoes to get us through to spring. In our freezer there are still some bags of frozen summer produce: cherries, corn, green beans, tomatoes and bell peppers, but I expect these will finished by the new year.

I realize this sufficiency kick of producing some of our food year-round is just a game, but a retiree needs some games to pass his time and I would be really awful at basketball or golf. My wife has a venison roast in the crockpot that I need to go check on now so I better sign off for today as your very, very humble GRAND GURU OF CHEAP!

Hiatus

Wow!…I have taken a real break from blogging; it has been several months since I last wrote one. My last blog was around the time I began marketing watermelons. Then after Labor Day I had to clean up several acres of weeds that had grown among the melons… in places they were taller than me and big around as my wrist, so that was a real chore. Next I had to till everything and sow a winter cover crop of ryegrass. By the time I finished that, the maple leaves needed raking for several weeks and to be piled in wire pens at the end of my vegetable garden to be ready for next year’s mulch. Ah hell, why lie…I haven’t been all that busy; I just wanted to walk the walk a while and skip talking the talk. I always thought writing was best saved for the dreary days of winter, anyway.

Well it is mid November now and pretty darn dreary. I think we will get a welcome rain today. We have had one halacious drought this summer; we are about 16 inches short of normal rainfall for the year. It got so bad that local news reporters were asking the man-in-the-street when the last rain was and got dumb-founded looks from people who could not remember.

Luckily I had drip irrigation and a good deep well, so watermelon production was good; the drought only made the melons sweeter. Although I had a lot of complements on how good the melons tasted, two people stopped eating them because the watermelons messed with their blood sugar levels. I grew seeded crimson sweets which ran about 30 pounds on average and a seedless melon that averaged around 20 pounds.

Still everything was not totally hunky-dory. Production is one thing but marketing is another story. I am really a greenhorn at vending and not a natural people-person anyway so I am really slow at getting into the marketing aspect of gardening. I added a small town grocery as a customer this summer. To try to get my toe in the door, I did not take any money until after the melons sold; basically I was selling on consignment. Any risk of the melons going bad, or breaking or customers demanding replacements (which no one did) did not fall on the grocer so that she could not lose by selling my melons. I know store managers must hate to pay for produce up front and then end up throwing it in the dumpster because it went bad.

Even with me assuming the rot and breakage risk, I knew the store was not going to make that much selling watermelons at $3 and me collecting $2. There just wasn’t that much direct financial incentive. The real incentive for the grocer was that if I could provide extra sweet and large melons at $3 apiece then the melons became a weekly “draw” item which would pull customers into the store where they might do all their shopping. This indirect financial incentive was much stronger than the direct incentive of a mere buck a melon. When I started getting feedback that the grocer’s customers were complementing my produce I knew I was in. Best way to keep a customer is to make your customer’s customers happy.

I had one trick that served me well. The migrant workers in our area clear pick melon fields, probably taking some that are big enough but not completely ripe. They also pick melons a little early because they must be shipped to fairly distant city markets before being shelved and sold. My melons were picked ripe for selling immediately and not just ripe enough to ship. Those were my three marketing ideas: (1) make the produce risk free by selling on consignment,(2) making melons a “draw” item in the store, and (3) making sure the melons were ripe and sweet.

Farmers markets present the strongest possibility for garden produce sale. A lot of people have gotten into the idea that they need to buy local produce rather than produce shipped from 1,500 miles away. I got my feet wet in local farmers markets a few times this summer. It was nice keeping the whole $3 per melon and not sharing with a middleman but then there was also the sitting in the sun waiting for a sale while I could have been doing something else. Still, I feel local farmers’ markets have the most potential for sales. There are two such markets on weekdays at our two large hospitals in Evansville and we plan to look into those next year.

During this year my wife let me know that the watermelons were my baby and that I had better not get the idea that she was going to do any marketing for me AT ALL! When I made a small profit at the end of this season and told her I would need her help spending it, probably on a road trip vacation, her attitude seemed to mollify considerably. She indicated that she might be willing to deal with customers at the hospitals’ farmers’ markets while some big dumb hunk carried watermelons to car trunks. She is much more of a people person than I am so it may work out.

So that is what we have been up to since I stopped blogging in July. I have emphasized the marketing aspect because that is where I am weakest and every small producer needs to think a marketing plan through or be left with a lot of produce to compost. I buried eight pickup loads of melons in my vegetable garden after Labor Day.

Playing the Slots

I have written several gardening blogs lately, so maybe it is time for one on fishing…bass fishing. Adolescent bass are dumber than a box of rocks and easy to catch. Once bass reach legal size (14 inches in most Indiana lakes) they suddenly wise up and become very difficult to catch. I am thinking of one particular lake my brother and I frequent (although I have seen the same phenomenon at other lakes); we caught so many 13”and 13 ½” bass the first year that I was sure that if we went back the next summer they would all have grown to legal size and we would have a heyday. No such luck. After fishing the same reservoir for three summers, catching hundreds (dare I say a thousand) undersize bass, I have only caught ONE legal bass and it was just barely 14 inches. We had a lot of fun but you can understand why I became a fan of crappie which are all legal and became the basis of our meals.

One solution to this problem was to find a “slot lake” in our area. At the particular slot lake we fished, all bass were legal except those in the 13”-15” slot which had to be released. We caught our usual 50 bass between the two of us and had to throw quite a few back because they were a little over 13 inches. (It felt strange to measure fish and then throw them back because they were too big after all those I’d had to throw back because they were a tad small in the past.) Anyway, my brother and I both quickly filled our 5 bass daily limits with 12”to almost 13” bass along with several crappie. My brother is a wall mount fisherman who gets his adrenaline fix from fighting and landing bass over 5 pounds, so when we got home he gave me his share of the catch to get out of cleaning them. I had 24 filets, enough for six meals for my wife and I. I also felt this outcome could be repeated almost anytime we fished a slot lake. Had we gone to most lakes and caught the same fish, we could only have brought home a couple crappie.

Of course Jim has a different solution to this problem and that is to find a way to get larger bass to bite. I think he may be near a breakthrough. When Jim goes fishing he also goes lure hunting for what other casters have left in shoreline trees. He is as passionate about this pursuit as he is about fishing. One particular lure which we found in the bushes was an X-Rap® a new rapella lure that proved so effective against these dumb adolescent /not quite legal bass when fished with an erratic motion that my brother went out and bought about a half dozen more…and Jim doesn’t usually buy lures; he finds them. I liked the X-Rap because it ran fairly shallow-2’to 5’ and could be fished just over underwater weed beds. Because of my medical appointments, Jim has been fishing alone the last couple of weeks. He has bought some deeper running X-Raps which run down to 15’ to fish over deeper weed beds. He has landed a couple bass over 19” and failed to boat a third which he thinks might have gone close to eight pounds. Not bad for daytime fishing in the dog days of summer.

So the bottom line is we are both trying to refine our lure and lake selection and our technique until hopefully one of these days we get it right.

Melon and Garden Update

It is the first full week in July and our rear utility room is flowery fragrant with the aroma of ripe cantaloupe. There is a box of Burpee Ambrosias, a laundry basket of early honey dews and three large yellowing Crenshaws. Of course there are still quite a few in my garden patch which have not turned completely ripe yet. The Burpee Ambrosia have pretty well lived up to expectations and reputation as a standard of taste, although a bit on the medium size. A single chilled melon serves two. All my fruits, bell peppers and tomatoes as well, seem a bit small. I think I may possibly be lacking phosphorus so I am going to try to find some bone meal to buy and spread before ripping out my summer garden next week and beginning my fall garden.

We let the Ambrosias set a couple days in the back room to finish ripening after picking them from the patch when they turned beige and their vines “slipped”. They have been ripe to the rind and excellent flavor. We grew the other two melon types as an experiment just to get a feel for how “winter melons” work. The Crenshaws get as large as an icebox-size watermelon, turn yellow and the vine also “slips” when ripe. If we let a Crenshaw store in the back room until it is all the way ripe the flavor cannot be beat. My wife is reaching the point where she doesn’t want anything else but Crenshaws.

We are doing some learning with the honey dews. Either they were unripe and tasted like cucumber or they had ripened to the point of rotting; no in-between sweet melon stage. Their vine does not slip like the other two melons and must be cut with a knife. As near as I can figure, they should be cut when the skin is white turning to butter yellow color. As I was pondering this problem of determining honey dew ripeness, my wife commented, “Maybe they are like apples” meaning they needed significant post-picking storage time to sweeten up. I think she may be on to something because they are called a “winter melon” which probably indicates they may be a storage-keeper crop. So that is where I am on the learning curve at present. I hope I can figure them out because I have a bunch more out in the field which will come in after the watermelon crop in the fall.

The purpose of our garden melon patch is to get family and friends through to when the field of watermelons ripen, which I expect will be toward the end of July. I am confident that the watermelons will do fine. We are seven inches short on rainfall so far this year and I have been irrigating them on a daily basis. Some are the size of basketballs already. Almost half our crop is seedless watermelons this year so that should improve marketability. Still I am not sure that I am looking forward to sitting on my truck tailgate at the local farmer’s market Saturday mornings in August.

Obviously I am big fan of melons and it is not just because our sandy soil is best suited to growing watermelons. We have several little patches of berries, a couple peach trees, an apple tree, and a couple cherry trees that were rife with cherries this spring. Now I have enjoyed cherry pie as much as anyone this summer but except for the apples, I really don’t care much whether the other fruits make or not; if they make, fine and if they don’t, fine. I must specialize a little and prioritize my time a little. I cannot do everything well in the limited time frame of a growing season, so I pretty well stick to my small vegetable garden which is supposed to help feed us and to the watermelons. Cherries are a good comparison. If I pick a cherry I have something the size of a marble and after I take the time to pit it, I basically have a little piece of red peel. If I bend over and pick up a watermelon, I can have twenty pounds of real food despite the rind.

Melons are also one of the few dessert foods that you can gorge yourself on and still claim to be dieting to lose weight. Melons are satisfying; on a hot day, I can eat one and skip the rest of a noon meal. As I write this, I am within striking distance of losing back the 25 pounds I gained over last winter’s holiday season. Hoeing half a day in a hot melon patch is good exercise and also conducive to weight loss.

It is now mid season, and as I get ready to rip out my early garden to plant my fall garden, I give myself a midterm grade of C as a learning gardener. Heck, given the drought we have been through, make it a C+. My goal has been to grow as much food as possible on as little a garden as possible. I have put a lot of food on the table this year and kudos to my wife; she is some cook. She has done her Dad proud. (He was their family chef.) I grew my little 25’X 40’ garden with only hand tools and organic methods and materials. This does not mean that I am a purist fanatic who will never ever use commercial chemical fertilizer; some day I may give my vegetables a squirt of Miracle Gro ®but before I do that I want to learn the organic method first. The best world may be a blend of the two methods.

I can’t give myself a higher mid-term grade than a C+, because as I look at my now drought browned garden I see how I missed opportunities to get a lot more produce from that small patch. I grew about a third of my garden in cantaloupe and similar melons and about another fourth of the total garden in sweet corn. The melon patch often wilted in the mid-day heat and this may have contributed to my not getting large melons. In hindsight, I should have grown half the garden in sweet corn and grown the cantaloupe between the north-south running corn rows. This might have doubled my corn production while still increasing the size of my melon patch by one sixth. Both the melons and the corn would be harvested by now if I had used transplants instead of direct seeding the cantaloupe. Once the melons were harvested, I could have planted late pole beans on the stripped corn stalks and the shade would have benefited late cabbages and winter squash planted as a succession crop between the corn rows for the fall garden.

I grew an early potato patch which we dug at the end of May, a late potato patch which I am just now ready to harvest, and a sweet potato patch which we put in as slips in late May. All three potato patches were about equal in size…a little larger than a king-size mattress. In hindsight, I should have skipped the late potatoes and planted all three beds in early potatoes; when the early potatoes were harvested in late May, I could have planted all three beds in sweet potatoes thus tripling my sweet potatoes while increasing the white potato by a third. There would need to be some extra potash added to grow the two root crops successively but I think it could have been done.

If I can pull these changes off next year I am going to raise my horticulture grade to B and my rank to gardener second class. I dream on. Got any windmills you need jousted?

Deer and other Pests

There is a semi-wooded area behind our house and garden that I have cut a meandering oval walking path through. Several weeks back I discovered that three deer were also using this as their path and it led them to within two deer hops of being in my garden. I had read somewhere that deer hate man odor and that hanging some bars of soap in trees along their pathway might deter them, so I did. It did not work. After a full-moon night later that month I found deer tracks inside my garden and some leaves eaten from my sweet potatoes. There were also deer prints in my field of watermelons and some plants eaten.

Desperate times call for desperate solutions. I slipped out of my pair of clod hoppers which I wear without laces so I can get out of them easily whenever I go into the house ( this has helped to save my marriage) and peeled off my pair of socks. I put the socks on a couple garden fence posts and that evening after working in the heat a good part of the day I put my rank smelling, long sleeve shirt on a third post. I know for a fact that these articles will repulse even two-legged dear. Yes, Bambi and kin were definitely going to know that “man is in the woods.” It seems to be working; the deer have not returned despite several more full-moon nights and my patch remains protected by dirty socks.

Spot the cat who came to us from my daughter’s downtown apartment has transitioned from city cat to country cat and has become quite a huntress. She and a couple feral tomcats who include us in their territory have kept the rabbits that were the bane of our first retirement garden, well under control. I have only seen one small bunny in my vegetable garden all summer and my wife was able to grow Asian lilies without a single loss this year. Maybe the two-foot chicken wire fence helped too.

When I was in the first grade a bunch of us lads got into trouble (I can’t remember what for) and the teacher decided that we would “have our mouths washed out with soap.” (Yes, teachers did have more disciplinary latitude back in those days…especially nuns). I didn’t understand how the game was being played…that each boy was only touching the tip of his tongue to the bar and grimacing, so when my turn came I bit the end of the bar off and swallowed it. Sister’s eyes about popped out of her head. Before I was back to my desk my hand was up and before I could say a word, the young nun was yelling, “GO…GO…GO!”

Now I guess I just have a mean streak, but I don’t want to kill the insects that attack my vegetable garden; I just want them to go through what I did that afternoon after eating soap in the first grade. So when flea beetles and baby grasshoppers began destroying the leaves on my sweet potatoes, I put a chunk of soap in the bottom of a spray bottle, added water, shook it and misted the foliage. It seemed to do the trick. The damage ceased. Even had several grasshoppers come up to the house and ask for paper.

I had other bug problems too. There were potato beetles that attacked my late potatoes, but I successfully handpicked them in the nymph stage before they got wings and could fly. It only took about three pickings and they were gone. I also handpicked half a dozen fat tomato worms before they did any real damage. Planting early and getting a lot of plant up before the insects hit really helped. Of course what happened with the corn silk beetles is old history in another blog.

Then in June the Japanese beetles came and they did have wings and did fly. Japanese beetles seem to me to have a couple unique traits other than their voracious appetites. First, they seem to really like a particular type of plant species and will ignore other plants right next to that particular species. They are picky eaters. I had pole beans and cucumbers growing together and climbing on each other. The beetles only ate and congregated in large numbers on the highest leaves of the pole beans. If that is what they wanted then I decided to give it to them. The beans had about petered out anyway and we were definitely getting a little tired of eating them so I decided to use pole beans as my “trap crop” to keep the beetles off other more desirable plants.

The second unique trait of the Japanese beetles is that they drop before they fly…about a foot or so. Catching them was just a matter of holding a container beneath a leaf with half a dozen bugs on it and then tapping the leaf. The bugs dropped right into the container. For a long term solution I will need to get some Milky Spore disease into my yard next year.

My real insect nemesis this year has been cutworms…much more so in my field crop of water melons than in my vegetable garden itself. I found an awful lot of large melon plants that were looking great one day and the next day were cut off at the base. Of course this could have been avoided had I had the sense to knock the bottom out of a Dixie cup and use it as a cutworm collar. I’ll do that next year. What I did do was replant…first with more watermelons…then when the season got too short to mature watermelons, I replanted with cantaloupe and finally with pumpkins. I went through plan B… and C…and D. On a positive note, I do appear to have a good watermelon crop growing so I guess in the end, I won.

These are my major pest travails to date this year. As I have more, I will update you.

Succession Gardening and Eating

There is a routine and rhythm in gardening, both in terms of succession planting and in eating what is in season. If you can successively plant your garden with multiple crops over the spring and summer, then you have effectively tripled the size of your garden with no increase in actual space. If you eat what is in season, then there is not near the need for processing and food storage. The produce unrefrigerated, remains fresh-stored on the plant.

I began my early planting in March with spinach, lettuce and early “new” potatoes. By April we were eating a lot of meals with large salads as sides. For variety, there was also wilted spinach and spinach enchiladas which are made with tortillas and cottage cheese; this entre tasted something like lasagna to me. With all the salads and various salad dressings, I finally began losing a little weight.

In very early April, I made a small planting of sweet corn, followed in mid-April by a second planting of corn. I also planted a row of bush beans in an area that I knew would eventually be smothered by melon vines, but not before I got the beans picked. In mid-April I also started a couple tripod teepees of pole beans with cucumbers growing underneath. When we were burnt-out on salads and the lettuce and spinach began to bolt from heat, we switched to eating vinegar marinated cucumbers; as the bush green beans petered out in May, we began eating the pole beans. In late April, I planted some butternut squash between the corn rows for winter consumption. We also planted four well protected tomato plants and four sweet peppers in late April.

In May, I planted late “straw potatoes”, cantaloupe and late in the month we planted sweet potatoes and a field of watermelon transplants. Throughout June, we ate cooked green beans, new potatoes, cucumbers, and sweet corn.

It is now early July, and we are beginning to eat cantaloupe, bell peppers, and tomatoes. July is a harvest month and there is a respite in the work. I have cut back totally on watering cantaloupe which cover a third of my garden in order to ripen and sweeten them. The watermelons have begun spreading out vines, so I am no longer hoeing weeds in that patch. The sweet corn is also finished, as are the potatoes. I am stripping the leaves off the corn and adding them as more mulch around the winter squash between the corn rows. I will shortly plant pole beans around the leafless corn stalks for a fall crop and to give shade to the potato patches on either side of the corn. Where the potatoes were, I will shortly be planting a fall crop cabbages for winter cole slaws and cooked greens. We still have plenty of new potatoes left to eat for the summer and the late potatoes should hold us well into autumn when we will harvest the sweet potatoes and eat on them and the winter squash until spring salads again are an option. By August the cantaloupe will be finished and replaced on our menu by watermelons which we will eat into the fall. So by August the cantaloupe vines can be ripped out to be replaced by another fall crop.

This all sounds complicated, and in truth it is more complicated than I have written in this blog, but there is a lot to be said for succession planting and eating what is in season. I hope to put tubers and greens on my plate and a little dessert too throughout most of the year. Now I just need to do some fishing to put some filets on that plate too.

Duct Tape Corn

Now I don’t believe in exaggerating and I am definitely not one to give into bragging or hyperbole, but I can say in all humility that by late May my sweet corn was light years ahead of anyone else’s in the state. By Memorial Day weekend the farmer’s field corn was only ankle to knee high despite having an exceptionally early dry April planting spell; I had been keeping an eye on all the gardeners and they were at about the same stage. But my corn… my sweet corn was as tall as me, fully tasseled, had yellow silks and ears. I had planted early and covered it with newspaper during a frost. My goal with my whole garden was to get as much plant growth up as early as possible so that when the insect hordes hit, my garden would have enough foliage and be far enough along to take a good hit. I am using natural pest controls not so much because I am environmentally conscious as that I am cheap and lazy. I felt that planting early and getting out ahead of the insects and Mother Nature’s surprises was worth the risk. Besides, for a small gardener like me (and unlike a commercial farmer) it would cost relatively little to buy seed to replant. So by Memorial Day, all I had to do was to wait for the yellow silks to turn brown and I would be eating sweet corn.

Everything looked so dandy I decided to go fishing…bet you saw that coming! After a couple days of relatively good fishing I checked back on my corn patch. All of the silks on my first planting had been eaten back by beetles to the husk. I raced to pull out my organic gardening guidebook. Yes, beetles sometimes do this; no silks, no pollination, no corn; the ears would not fill out. Simple translation: you’re screwed; try again next year.

Had I been slam dunked by Mother Nature again at the last minute? I decided not to go down without a fight. I went out to the patch and pulled back the husks on every ear of my first planting, exposing the tip of the cob and another two inches of golden silks. I grabbed my trusty roll of duct tape and tore off two inch pieces that I held between my fingers like a man preparing to roll a cigarette; I pulled my other hand across the tassels and dumped the pollen beads into my duct tape cigarette and wrapped it around the newly exposed corn silk. If those beetles were going to get these last silks, they were going to have to eat through duct tape to do it!

The following Sunday, after church I told a farmer buddy who sings in choir with me what had transpired and asked for his advice. I’m one who believes in picking an expert’s brain. As he listened politely, he was grinning broadly on the outside so I knew he was guffawing on the inside.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone do that before; it’s interesting how people solve problems. When seed companies want to pollinate corn, they put the pollen they want into a small paper bag and then staple it over the ears they want pollinated. Each bead of pollen has about ten thousand grains of pollen on it. You might try that.”

When I got home from church that Sunday, I went to have another look at my corn. I noticed that the silks on my second planting of corn—planted a couple weeks after the first-- had not had their silks eaten on, so maybe this silk-eating phase of the insect’s life was over. I pulled all the duct tape off my first planting and pulled handfuls of pollen off the tassels and mixed it into the now again exposed short silks. I do not know if it was the duct tape pollination or the later hand pollination that worked, but I do know that when the kids came home Father’s Day, we ate buttered corn on the cob, cucumber and onion slices marinated in sweet vinegar, a green bean/new potato and sausage entre and a cherry cobbler dessert baked from the cherries that we picked from our trees and scoops of vanilla ice cream we bought at the store.

Now I’m not one to exaggerate or given to bragging but…FRANK NELLIS-ONE; Mother Nature-ZIP!

Mulch

When I began my garden in March, I did not plan to use so many different types of mulch; I just used what was available and it just happened. First, I had a good pickup load of last fall’s maple leaves which I had tried to compost over the winter but they only partially biodegraded. Once my sweet corn was up about three inches tall, I spread the leaves between the rows. My corn is about knee-high now in mid-May and weed free. I’ve thrown some aged horse manure on top of the leaf mulch and worked a furrow of both into the soil and planted Butternut squash between every other corn row. This leaves me enough empty rows to harvest corn from and after that hopefully the squash will form a living mulch over the leaf mulch and also provide a late season crop.

I had put a bale of straw up against our north-facing crawl space entrance to help insulate the crawl space and water pipes last winter. I laid an old throw rug, rubberized bottom up, on top of the straw bale to keep the weather from degrading the straw. This spring that straw went over a strawberry patch of about 25 plants, along a row of bush beans (once they were three inches tall) and over a plot of late potatoes. I put only straw over the late potatoes, which they have now emerged through, but for the beans and strawberries I put two ply of newsprint under the straw. If I did not use the newspaper, it would just have been a waste product to be hauled to the recycling bin. Newsprint and straw or grass clippings seem to work well as combination mulches. The paper is a difficult barrier for weeds and grass to break through but would blow off without the straw or grass to weight it down. Before I put the top mulch on, I wetted the paper down with a garden hose to get it to mold to the soil. I also used newspaper and cardboard weighted down with soil on the edges to protect plants during a light late frost.

I decided to buy some black plastic for plants which like especially hot soil for their roots such as peppers, sweet potatoes and cantaloupe. I could have also used it for cucumbers and tomatoes, but I didn’t. I am trying some large rocks and bricks around my tomatoes and the cukes are planted along with a couple zucchini to form a living mulch under my pole beans. For the plants in black plastic (except for the bell peppers ), I put an old soaker hose down, covered it with the plastic and made a furrow with a hoe down either side of the plastic, tucked the edges of the plastic in the furrows, and then filled in the furrows with dirt to secure the plastic mulch. I’ve had problems with that old soaker hose blowing out large leaks from my water pressure. I have to tear a hole into the plastic at the leak, slit a piece of old garden hose and use radiator clamps to fix the garden hose over the leaks. In hindsight I probably would have been better off doing my sweet potatoes and cantaloupe like I did my peppers and skipping the soaker hose altogether. For the peppers, in addition to the two side furrows I also made a third furrow down the middle, then put the black plastic down and planted into the middle furrow. The middle furrow forms a trough which catches any water from garden hose or rain and delivers it straight to the plant holes.

Carrots are notoriously slow to germinate; the weeds always come up first and then the carrots are lost to one giant mess of a weed patch. This year I tried a trick an old farmer had told me and planted my carrots under boards. Each day I flipped the boards to one side to see if the seed had sprouted, then sprinkled with a hose and pressed the boards back in place. When the carrots did sprout, I laid the boards to the sides of the carrots to suppress any weeds between the rows. I am very impressed with the results to date and plan to keep an eye out for any surplus unpainted and untreated lumber that I might happen upon. Wood is organic, heavy enough that it doesn’t blow away; it lasts for years so you don’t have to find new material each year and no weeds or grass grows through it. If you need to thin a crop like carrots or beets, or pick a row of bush beans you can place a stool’s legs on the planks on either side of the row and work sitting rather than kneeling. One other advantage is that fishing worms congregate right under the boards for easy picking.

So in conclusion, I have used three types of mulch: organic (like grass, leaves, newsprint, wood, cardboard and straw), inorganic (like black plastic, old carpet, and large rocks or bricks) and living mulch (leafy vining ground covers like cucumbers, cantaloupe, squash and sweet potatoes) to mulch my garden, conserve moisture and suppress weeds.

Half-wild Salads

The irises have been popping blue-purple everywhere. The apple tree and cherry trees blossomed snow white a couple weeks ago, then shed their blossoms and now the green cherries are already beginning to appear. Spring passes in a blur of speed. It has been an unusually droughty April, which the farmers loved because they could get their corn crops in the field, but today the weatherman has promised an inch or two of rain and possibly a twister so I have time to write a blog.

I divided some rhubarb plants and replanted them in one-foot deep and wide holes filled with compost so that next year we should have some early summer pies to be followed by the cherry pies of late summer and apple pies of fall. It is nice to have a succession of eating even though that is not necessary today with a freezer. We had not planned to plant strawberries but when a neighbor gave us 30 plants we couldn’t pass it up. The rhubarb and strawberries now occupy a perennial area in the far west end of my garden. They receive the morning sun but are somewhat shaded by the apple tree in the hot afternoon. The morning sun is a blessing in summer but the afternoon sun is a curse. Next year I also hope to add a permanent bed of asparagus to this perennial area of the garden.

This year where the asparagus will be next year is a bed of salad greens, seven five-foot rows of lettuce and two of spinach. This represents the first produce of the garden we have begun to consume. We have had several salads so far, some of the wilted greens variety made with a hot topping of sweetened vinegar, bacon and bacon grease—the kind we ate in the 50s before salad dressings were sold in plastic bottles. We threw in some sweet violet leaves which are ubiquitous in my yard and edible and tasty in salads. Violets have none of the bitter taste of dandelion greens and have more nutritional value than garden grown greens. We will probably be eating a lot of salads for the next month until later vegetables begin coming in. Good deal for the waistline.

The early spuds are up, about six inches tall, and the late potatoes are planted and under a straw mulch to keep down weed competition. I also have bush beans, pole beans and corn all up and about six inches tall. There are four tomato and four peppers plants. I am taking a chance by planting so early but I have sandy soil that drains well and heats up early. Seed is relatively inexpensive if I do have to replant because of a late frost and I really want to get the plants off to a good start before the insect hordes arrive. I did have to cover everything with newspaper and cardboard one night when frost was predicted, but I think it is worth the effort to beat the bugs and summer drought.

Besides the vegetables I’ve already mentioned, I also have two 25-foot rows covered with black plastic and drip irrigation hose under the plastic for melons and cucumbers. My horseman buddy arrived right on schedule with a free dump-trailer load of two-year aged horse manure. After two years it has turned back into soil and you would never be able to identify the substance as horse manure. So all the beds, including plastic topped, drip irrigated strips are well fertilized. The black plastic has proved a real incubator and Crenshaw, cantaloupe and honeydews are all beginning to poke through the holes in the plastic. I am taking a real gamble with the Crenshaw and honeydews since the local farmers don’t grow them and I have learned not to question the locals. But I am a melon lover and have decided to take the long shot anyway. As for watermelons, I will plant a whole field of Jubilees around May 15, hopefully from transplants and under irrigated black plastic, so they aren’t included in my little 25’X40’ vegetable garden.

That pretty well brings everything up to date. I’ll just sit here, eat my greens and listen to the thunder and rain. I don’t REALLY think there will be a tornado?

Spuds and Naturalizing

It is just spring and not quite April. The Saturday before Palm Sunday and we are in a brief cold snap with the weatherman promising a week of sunny skies and warm temperatures a couple days into Passion Week. Time to plant potatoes. I have halved and quartered five pounds of Red Pontiac seed potatoes and the wounds are curing on a tray on the chest freezer top; they should be ready to plant in a couple days when the weather and soil warm. I will probably plant some straw-mulched late potatoes in early June for fall harvest.

Speaking of potatoes, we just cooked up the last of last year’s sweet potatoes and have a large pot of yams in the fridge to micro wave and eat during this coming week. I was pleasantly surprised by how well the sweet potatoes kept in a basket in our rear utility room. I didn’t follow the best curing methods at harvest but instead just let the tubers dry a few hours in the sun after I dug them. The last of the yams still showed no damage and were as good as the first. For people who don’t have the time, space or inclination for a vegetable garden, sweet potato vines can still be a decorative ground cover in a sunny flower garden for annuals like red cockscomb to grow through. This works especially well if you choose a couple different yam varieties with different shaped leaves and leaf coloration, e.g. forest green and yellow green. As a bonus you still get the root crop in October.

Yellow is the predominant color in the yard now. Daffodils have been blooming now for a couple weeks, and we have gobs of them all around our property. They are naturalized, semi-wild and spread on their own to surprise us in the first warm spell each year. Absolutely zero maintenance. The Forsythia bushes are also blooming now, so still more yellow. My wife cuts daffodils for the table and house and puts them in a dark blue vase. Dark blue seems the perfect contrast hue for all the yellow and we have a few purplish-blue hyacinths up now which give this same color contrast outdoors. The Spirea bushes are sprouting orangeish-red leaves. The scarlet red quince buds are full and will open any day. Quinces are tough as nails and are one of my favorite bushes. I think of them as early-spring roses.

But naturalization is not all about color; it is very much about tough plants, very low maintenance, ground covers, and just plain being too darn lazy to mow an area. During the first warm snap in early March, I lopped off and hacked down the scrub growth on our road bank. It is a fair-sized area that is too steep and too much trouble to mow, even with a riding mower. I scattered some chopped off aster bushes up around the fence and then planted clumps of Hoosier “ditch lilies” spaced every three feet down to the gravel road. These clumps should take over the bank within a year, a sea of leaf foliage and spreading rhizome roots. I like to plant plants together which have similar leaves but different flowering dates. I intend to add some surprise lilies and yuccas to the orange June-blooming ditch lilies to get some white and purple July blossoms in the same bed.

Yuccas are a desert plant and are unbelievably tough. When we wanted to put in the driveway to our garage there was a yucca in the way. Not wanting to waste a good plant, I dug it up and planted it elsewhere, but it had a deep taproot that I cut off. From that taproot it grew back through five inches of hard packed white rock driveway—twice. I had to use Round Up® it to kill it.

Our sandy, desert-like acreage is full of these tough, yet beautiful flowering plants: trumpet vine, prickly pear cacti, morning glory, and honey suckle etc. which I concentrate in patches to naturalize areas that I can enjoy without any mowing at all. Time to get off the keyboard and get outside. Got to walk-the-walk a little too.

Skimming and Concentrating

After a tough winter of “couching it” a.k.a. holding down the couch, I was taking on the blubberous proportions and pallid hue of Moby Dick. I needed some sun and March exercise. My first impulse was to start a spring walking program, but then I decided to just work my garden this year with hand tools only and skip firing up the tiller. I had plenty of time on my hands and I just might enjoy the quietude and the meadowlarks singing.

Two acts of magic had occurred in my garden patch over the past fall and winter. The first was the disappearing act of the compost piles. Where I had put about ten pickup truck loads of horse manure, ruined hay bales, and autumn leaves, only about one pickup load of semi-finished compost remained. It had literally vanished into thin air. The second act of prestidigitation was the appearance of truck loads of green manure/cover crop ryegrass from the three pound bag of seed which I cast to the wind late last fall. Because of the ryegrass seed, which I brought home in my car glove compartment last year, I have enough organic material for my garden. The compost on the other hand, will have to be rationed out.

With a sharp bladed, long handled shovel I skimmed a little over a foot wide swath of ryegrass and top couple inches of dark top soil and laid the turf to one side of the row. This skimmed area is where I plan to put my planted row. Next I dug out the skimmed-off row to a shovel depth and put the soil to the other side of the row. (I know this sounds like a lot of work, but recall I am doing this as a workout regimen as much as anything; it’s a lot cheaper and more enjoyable than going to a gym.) After I dug out the row, I spread about an inch or two of my limited compost into the trench bottom. Next with a pitch fork I laid the sod that I had skimmed off, inverted grass down, on top of the compost. Then I skimmed off the top couple of inches of sod which I had originally laid sod on next to the new planting row and inverted that, grass-down into my new planting row. Finally, I pulled the soil from the other side of the row, back over all the inverted sod. In a nutshell, what I have done is created rows of concentrated organic material alternating with valley rows of relative infertility. The patch looks like a graveyard of really tall skinny men.

This is all just an experiment. I believe I enjoy experimenting as much or more than the actual gardening. I am really a newbie at gardening and don’t know what I’m doing except that I’m enjoying the outdoors. My plan is to let the long rows of inverted sod rot down in the soil for a month and then plant into them. I hope as the green manure further composts in the soil, that it will serve as a slow release organic fertilizer throughout the summer. I plan to resow the infertile valleys between the seed rows with more grass and then when the soil has warmed up in mid-June, cover the new grass and kill it with Maple leaf mulch. Hopefully this process will bring back fertility and maybe next year my whole patch will be dark soil to a shovel deep depth.

Each year I am curious as to what will get me this year. My first two gardens in my retirement were only marginal successes. (That is a euphemism for “not successful”.) The first year the cute bunnies and the drought got the better of me. Last year insects covered my plants but I decided to wait until I saw actual eating damage to the plants, just in case these might be beneficial predator bugs which ate the undesirables. I waited and no leaf or fruit eating damage showed. Too late I realized these were not eating bugs but sucking bugs. They were sucking the life out of the plant without any visible damage. Live and learn.

So this whole skimming and concentrating process took me a couple weeks. I did enjoy the outdoors, and got some exercise and sore muscles. Now I am just waiting to plant and see what happens next.

Cabbage Casserole

In some of my earlier blogs I mentioned that my still-working, unretired spouse wanted me to take up cooking so that there would be something on the table when she came home. I also talked about the virtues of simple cuisine, a.k.a. “good old Depression food.” What follows is a recipe that is inexpensive, nutritious (full of cancer-fighting cruciferous cabbage), low calorie, and tasty. So yes, I did remember that I said I would share recipes with you. (Even an idiot husband like me can make this one.)
Ingredients:
1 small head of cabbage (or half a large head)
1 lb. ground beef
½ cup chopped onion
1/3 cup uncooked rice
¼ tsp. black pepper
½ tsp. salt
2 cans (about 10 oz. ea.) tomato soup
1 ½ cups water
¼ cup grated Italian cheese
Process:
Chop cabbage into medium-sized pieces and spread in a 9”x13” glass pan.
Brown ground beef in a skillet (with a little water in the bottom.)
Drain off fat and water.
Stir in rice,onion, salt, and pepper, then spoon over cabbage.
In a small sauce pan, heat the tomato soup and water to boiling; pour mixture over cabbage.
Sprinkle with cheese, then cover pan tightly with aluminum foil.
Bake in a 350-degree oven for 1 ½ hr.
I have reason to believe this recipe really did come out of the Great Depression. Cheap, tasty, healthy, and easy to prepare; could this really be the perfect dish? Well… if you ever embarrass yourself in a public place in a public way, just forget you ever read this blog!

March Garden

Thank God, winter is over. I believe Spring-like weather has finally taken hold. This should allow for a major shift in my blogs away from long-winded opinionated soapbox oratory on various and sundry topics (yes, even I was getting annoyed and bored with myself… blame it on cabin fever.) I hope to now begin more realistically chronicling what I am doing out-of-doors.

February was unusually cold, but I did manage to get some brush cleared on our road bank and some trees cut down or pruned. Now the day lilies on the bank can come up unimpeded. I hauled all the brush and firewood to the section of the garden where I want to grow sweet corn and butternut squash. I built fires which I sat around and tended for a couple days. I was really surprised at my lassitude sitting by the flames, but hopefully my stamina and pep will improve as the warm weather progresses. Otherwise, I’ve just plain gotten old. Getting out of shape in winter is one of the downsides of being retired.

I’ve heard numerous people say that farming is gambling and I think gardening is too. My first two gardens after retirement were marginal successes at best, but like the gambler who steps up to the slot machine one more time, I’m convinced that this is my lucky year. I may be making a mistake by spreading the wood ash around my sweet corn patch but I am going mainly on what happened to another area of our sandy ground where we once burned a tree and the weeds grew twice as tall as those on the surrounding soil for a decade. It’s an experiment… but I feel lucky.

About a third of my compost piles are well-aged humus and ready to go. I rolled one compost pile forward and the soil underneath looked absolutely perfect, almost like peat. In this area of perfect tilth, I made a raised bed about 10’x4’ and planted my early salad garden of lettuce and spinach. The traditional day for planting early greens around here is St. Valentine’s Day, so I’m probably not too early seeding it in the beginning of March. If I were so tight for garden space that I could plant only one crop, it would be salad greens (along with a tomato plant.). Bagged salad greens are expensive in the grocery and tend to go bad and wilt quickly in the fridge. Salads are nutritious and one of the best foods for losing pounds. So I have the seed in the ground and watered and that’s a start.

I have put up a two-foot chicken wire fence around a 40'x25’ area to deter rabbits. I may have to go higher. I hope to grow everything within the fenced in plot. My idea is to have a small well kept garden rather than a sprawling one that I can’t keep up. I could plant edible pod peas this early in the year too, but we still have several bags of them in the freezer from last year. The cardinal rules of gardening seem to be: grow what you like to eat, grow what is expensive in the store, grow what is nutritious for your body, and grow the produce that does not keep fresh for long.

That’s enough for now; I will continue my garden journal on another day. It is nice to get out-of –doors, again. Hope really does spring eternal.

Market Epiphany

I had my eureka moment while grocery shopping last weekend. The sales flyer had advertised milk on sale for less than $2 a gallon. Skim milk is a staple in our diet and we drink about three gallons a week. When we arrived Saturday morning the dairy shelf was empty of the sale milk. We were assured that another truck was on the way and would arrive in about an hour. My first thought was that we would take a written “rain check” and break even over a two-week period. We would buy expensive non-sale milk this week and make up for the extra budget expense with rain-check milk the next week.

Then the light bulb went on in my brain. We would be going right passed a Walmart® on the way home and they advertised that they would match any competitors advertised price. We could buy cheap milk this week and next week just by grabbing three gallons and showing the cashier the competing sales flyer. The five minute stop saved us $5; as a wage that would translate to $60 an hour.

I realized that I could collect the mailed sales flyers of all three of Walmart’s local competitors plus a couple large chain drug stores which also advertise teaser food items to lure customers into their store and get the mega store to match all their sales. One store chain in our area was very bad about having small amounts of sale items, so that they could draw us into the store and then not lose money on their lose-leader sales items by being sold out. Their rain checks were pretty worthless too, because when we returned the following week they did not stock the rain-check item. It was a scam to keep us coming back for weeks to get our rain check. We stopped frequenting that chain, but we can still use their sales flyer at Walmart where the product will be in stock.

For those of you who are not big fans of Walmart (and there may be a few, even one at this typewriter) consider that you are not really doing the mega store any favors if you only buy their sales items and lose-leader draws from other stores. You are probably costing them profit on each item. I will continue shopping at the store where they were out of sales milk because I know this does not happen often or purposely and because their Kroger® store-brand products are many, of high quality and low price. I do want the mega store to have significant competition to force them to keep their prices low. But I expect to take the rip-off chain’s sales flyer, whose bait and switch teasers were always sold out, to wally world to see if they make good on their promise to match competitors advertised prices.

Actually, this is not my first shopping epiphany. Earlier I had realized that I could take aisle way canned soup coupons from a store where soup was not on sale and high priced and use them at another store which gave no coupons but had soup on sale. This strategy works well for many items other than soup. Another epiphany was when I realized I could buy whole wheat bread (a healthy staple in our diet) on Tuesdays at the bakery outlet store for 40 cents a loaf. We buy a month’s supply at a time and freeze it to keep it fresh. When there are good sales, we buy in bulk to stock our freezer and pantry so that we often eat out of the pantry and freezer rather than the grocery store. We make a lot of meals from scratch (not much “convenience food” on the table) and have simple menus based on what is on sale that week. We also have a lot of recipes based on inexpensive store-brand staples.

These are some of my strategies for “guerilla-warfare shopping.” If I come up with any new dirty tactics, you will be the first to know.

It’s A Tough Life…

Frugality is just a game for me…a game which I really enjoy playing. Dumb game, you say. Compared to what? Throwing a ball through a hoop? Using a stick to hit a ball into a can? Whacking a ball with a stick and racing around a diamond? Having a donnybrook free-for-all brawl trying to advance a ball passed a line in the dirt (sometimes mud)? Throwing various objects (javelins, discuses, hammers, shot puts) into the air? I see less as more… and I don’t see that as dumber than other sports.

Besides maybe I’m not the crazy austere nut…maybe the more-is-better people who use plastic money to buy plastic goods are the brainwashed crazies. Could be. Anyway I’ve had some experience enjoying living on less. I grew up in a family of 12 kids, so there weren’t excessive toys… but who needs a ball to hit when you have sisters. JUST KIDDING SIS!

In high school I went off to a boarding school run by Benedictine brothers and monk’s (probably a plot by my sisters to be rid of me). I was very impressed by the Benedictines’ vow of poverty, simple life styles and self sufficiency. A brother’s wardrobe consisted of two cowled habits…he wore one while the other was in the wash. As for self sufficiency, they even had a power plant to produce their own electricity and steam heat. Our electric hallway clocks ran a little differently than the rest of the world but we only noticed it when we watched national news on the TV in our recreation room.

The Benedictines ran their own farm. The hogs fed us (we ate a lot of pork link sausage for breakfast) and we fed the hogs (we were warned never to put tooth picks in the after meal table scraps because it might get caught in a pigs digestive system). The monks also baked all our dark whole grain bread and the bakery gave the whole abbey a good aroma.

From the seminary, I went to the military…again another Spartan lifestyle. All my military clothing: the dress greens, the fatigues, the kakis, headgear, shoes and boots along with winter over coat and utility jacket fit into one duffel bag. When we bivouacked, we carried what we needed on our backs.

When I got to Southeast Asia, I saw how simply and happily 3rd world people lived in houses built on stilts with metal roofs. I drank homemade rice wine from a big wooden barrel on the porch of a paddy farmer who raised eight daughters on five acres. They all seemed happy, well fed, and well clothed in Thai silk sarongs.

Eventually I rented my own hut on stilts (reminds me of my brother’s river camp, actually) for $10 a month. It was my week-end escape so that I could pretend for a bit that I wasn’t in the military and taking orders. With a battery powered radio blasting out Thai music, a mosquito net covered hammock swinging on the roofed-over veranda, a bottle of muscatel, and a papaya tree growing up beside the house, it felt more like paradise than poverty.

So FYI, if you should see me now enjoying my retirement in my country bungalow on four acres…gardening, fishing and hammocking…don’t think that I am just being lazy when I am actually in training…to bring home the gold for team USA when being tight finally does become an Olympic sport. ---Honey, could you please pour me another jigger of muscatel?

Family Happenings

The little girl got off the school bus and came into the house.
“Anything interesting happen at school today,” her father asked.
“During recess, some boys came onto the girls’ side of the playground and the girls had to drive them back with purse karate” she replied.
“Wow…purse karate!” the father said, “That must be really hard to learn!”
“Oh no… it’s easy” the daughter replied matter-of-factly, “Just find a real BIG rock and put it in your purse.”
Guess the lads won’t be back any time soon.


The nursing home activities attendant was preparing the room for the evening activities. One elderly lady resident had come in early and was obviously waiting to be assigned some task to keep herself busy. Since the evening activities involved games using dice, the activities attendant said, “Lucy, why don’t you hand everyone a pair of dice when they come in” and handed the woman a box of cubes.
The lady eagerly took the box and stationed herself at the doorway. As each resident wheel chaired themselves in, they were greeted with an enthusiastic:
“Do you want TWO die? Do you want TWO die?”



After 60, marriage can get really funny. My wife and I had just finished up a meal and as we faced one another across the kitchen table, she showed me a JC Penny, 80% OFF sales flyer and asked, “Would you mind going over to the mall after your doctor appointment tomorrow?”

(Anyone who knows me knows how much I like to shop…NOT!)
This was not a request…this was a test. The real question was not would I go shopping … the real question was would I go easy… or would I go hard (and throw one of my infamous conniption fits).

There was no good answer. If I said “no, I don’t mind” then I would be a bald-faced liar and coward-wimp. If I replied “yes, I do mind” then I would suffer the slow agony of spousal pay-back.

Faced with this dilemma, I decided to remain silent and go straight to my trump suit…SARCASM! I immediately dropped to the table with a feigned coronary and then rolled off onto the floor. On my back, I extended my arms and legs into the air and did a long half-minute of my best dying cockroach routine.

Like I said, after 60, marriage can get really funny…and yes, next day, this little cockroach did go to market!

Republicans, Democrats, Independents

Republicans tend to view the economy and society in Social Darwinist terms – survival of the fittest producers and sellers who satisfy the consumer’s and society’s wants. The fittest producers are those who: (a) make the products that consumers wish produced—those who produce unwanted goods and services go out of business, and (b) those who produce wanted products at the lowest price – if your competitors produce the same product cheaper, then again you go out of business. Thus consumers and society are provided with their needs at the lowest price. Prices and money and individuals pursuing their own self interest act as an “invisible hand” directing the whole market process without any need for government involvement. Big government is seen as a superfluous and even parasitic extra layer of society. The market has a much more rapid response to ever changing consumer needs than bulky, grid-locked bureaucracies.

Problem is, does the market respond to changing human needs or does it manipulate human desires and create artificial demand by a constant barrage of wasteful advertisement? Problem is, there are externalities – costs (and sometimes benefits) external to and therefore not born by either the buyer or producer, which are pushed onto the rest of society. If a business avoids clean-up costs by polluting, (just throw it in the river, Bob), then they can appear to produce more efficiently in Social Darwinist terms because they sell at a lower price. Externality costs are about impossible to calculate. For example, what are the real dollar costs of green house gasses and global warming? Nobody really knows. Producers tend to use common-owned resources such as the oceans, rivers and the atmosphere as free inputs into the productive process in order to appear efficient with low priced products as they actually rob society. Finally, the self-interests of CEOs and the various levels of management are not the same as the business’ best interest. Management has been milking corporations since the days of the robber barons to the present. “If I make several million this year, then the shareholders, labor and consumers be damned.” Take the money and run. So from the Democrat point of view, the cost of big government is worth it just to keep the market honest.

Problem is that government is not always efficient, honest or nimble. Re-election contributions and negative campaign ads seem more important than correcting market failings and social inequalities. I think everyone knows the problems of big government without any more listing here.

What I espouse is a subculture of independents, who are not at the mercy of the market (especially bankers and financial institutions) or the whims of self-serving politicians. These independents are not living in precarious houses-of-cards because of mountains of debt. Most of their borrowing is from their own accumulated savings. They live modestly and frugally. Their basic needs are met, but they don’t buy into the consumerism hype. They view their modest homes as their castles and their land and property as their separate, sovereign nations. They grow in their gardens what is overpriced in the market. They are not totally self-sufficient, but feel they have the know-how to be, should the need arise to go to a plan B due to either a market meltdown or failure of grid-locked governance. They feel independent of both market and government.

Subcultures can exist and even flourish within the larger consumerist society. The Amish are an example of this. Sub-cultures can even be somewhat parasitic upon greater society. What I suggest is a subculture of frugality, independent of, but thriving within the greater American society. And in my sovereign kingdom, in front of my castle, I want one really big soapbox.

Phone Bill

As the old song says, “Stay on the sunny side, always on the sunny side of life.” I would add, stay on the funny side of life. If I go down laughing I figure I will have cheated the Grim Reaper of his pound of grief. I’ve seen too many people who have wasted their golden years by going sour and negative and living too much in the good old days instead of the present.

BUT…the phone bill came. It still contained the same three bogus collect calls we worked with the phone company to correct the previous billing cycle and it threatened late charges if we did not pay in full. Originally the calls were not bogus and we paid for them; it was only when they tried to charge us a second time for the same calls (exact same time of day, exact same length of call, different date) that I got miffed. Since the phone company was using the same phony date for all three calls, two of the collect calls supposedly took place at the same time, an impossibility.

Because the phone company had outsourced operated assisted calls to a separate billing company, I contacted that billing company first and talked to Jeremiah. He assured me that we had received a credit for the calls in question and that credit had been passed on to yet another outsourced billing company and would eventually reach the phone company’s billing department in another billing cycle or two. How many layers of outsourcing did the phone company have! In this day and age of electronic data transfer systems and the internet, when I can chat instantaneously with someone on the other side of the world, I am amazed that a single corporation cannot transfer billing data within its own structure in a single billing cycle.

Next I called the phone company’s own billing department to pass on to them that Jeremiah had given us a credit and that we should not be charged late payment fees. (Why Jeremiah could not make this same call, I don’t know.) I talked with a computerized answering machine for 15 minutes, answering numerous yes or no questions and pressing a bunch of telephone buttons and listening to infomercials and disclaimers when, for no obvious reason the system hung up on me.

I dialed back, got the same computerized woman’s voice and was asked for the last eight digits of my billing code, which I read off with careful enunciation. The code contained a 77 but when the computer read it back, it only got one 7. “Is this your correct billing code number?” “No.” “Try again.” On the third try I punched the numbers in off my phone instead of speaking and the computer still read back only one 7. “Is this your correct billing code number?” “Yes,” I lied and finally got out of the death cycle. After a small eternity of “all our operators are busy at the moment… please leave a number and we will call you,” I finally heard a weak, fuzzy, mechanical-sounding voice mutter some well- rehearsed line. “Are you a real person?” “Yes.” Hallelujah, Houston we have touchdown!

As I began registering my complaint to Jessica, she began interrupting me with “You are mistaken…You don’t understand our system”… and so on. I continued coolly, explaining what Jeremiah had said and that I had just gotten off the phone with him. It took the part about being billed for two calls on the same day at the same time to convince her. She put a freeze on any late charges, although the error would possibly continue to appear on the next two billing cycles. (Man, their electronic data system must be slow!)

Immediately after freezing the late payment charges, Jessica launched into a sales spiel to get me to bundle my TV cable with land line telephone. She seemed oblivious to the irony that while I was complaining about her company’s services, she was trying to sell me more services. “I don’t have cable TV,” I said. There was a momentary pause, then “Don’t you want to get cable? Don’t you watch a lot of television?” “I watch very little TV; I read a lot” There was a much longer pause as it took time to sink in just what a backwoods rube she was dealing with. This was good because now I had a chance to get my second bill complaint in.

We had used all our allotted long distance minutes on our plan and a little more; yet we were charged a short fall fee or minimum charge. How could we have gone over our limit and still not have met the minimum charge? “We are REQUIRED to charge the short fall fee because of the new regulations,” she said. It sounded fishy. “Are those new government imposed regulations or just the phone company’s new regulations?” There was silence. “Hasn’t the phone company just raised its prices without informing us?” I asked. “Yes,” she said quietly. I realized the conversation was being taped and she was trying to give the company line to keep her job. Jessica doubled our long distance minutes so that at least we would not be charged an overage fee and a short fall fee at the same time. I think it was the best she could do.

So here I be…waiting two more billing cycles…and staying on the funny sunny side. It’s all just a big joke, anyway!

Why I Write

Besides learning to cook, I am also passing the winter by writing. Writing is a pastime that can be done in a nice warm house and dovetails nicely with my desire to fish and garden in warmer weather. The input costs into the “writing business” are negligible to nonexistent. I’ve always had an existential itch for immortality. When old age has turned my brain to jelly or my dead body lies a moldering in the grave, my thoughts will go on…and on…and on… (at least until someone hits the delete key).

I believe part of my inspiration to pen my thoughts comes from what I consider a waste in our education system. While I was in college, I wrote numerous ten to twenty page papers as requirements to pass various courses. The papers, which often required a lot of research and work, were returned with a grade and perhaps a one-line comment, only to be thrown in a trash can or tucked away in some forgotten folder. Why couldn’t the university (or for that matter why couldn’t I) have organized all the papers around some common theme or thesis, so that each paper could form one chapter in a book. In the eight semesters required to get a degree, I could have been an author and that would have been a heady experience.

A whole book can even be completed in just one semester, if a teacher challenges an entire class to coordinate their individual papers so that each student’s paper forms a single chapter. This sort of class project can be carried out even on a high school level. There would be little extra work for each student than for writing their individual papers. Peer pressure, teamwork and networking could all be turned into positive social forces to advance individual education and to teach inter-personal dynamics. To be able to say, “I wrote a book” would greatly enhance teenage self-esteem and education could (dare I say it) be fun.

Just so you don’t think this is all pie-in-the-sky soapbox preaching, let me say this process and a small class of graduate economics students produced the best seller, The Amazing Bread Machine. The book went through numerous printings and was eventually made into an educational film produced and acted by, you guessed it, the same class of students.

So folks, just let me enjoy my writing as an ego trip in self-expression and please family, don’t hit the delete key until AFTER the funeral.

Garbage man

Trash or garbage…what’s your preference? I’ve always been more of a garbage man myself. It may be because I get a certain satisfaction in my daily routine of carrying the gallon ice cream pail of egg shells, coffee grounds, banana peels, and table scraps out to the garden compost pile. I like making compost; I like organic gardening; I like earthworms, and I don’t like waste. The garbage serves as the “green material,” (i.e., nitrogen) which helps heat up the “brown material,” which for my pile is mostly dried leaves from the maples that shade our home in summer. Compost, green manure (turned under ryegrass), and wood ashes will someday provide most of the fertilization needed for our small garden plot. I can’t put meat scraps or fish heads in the compost because that would draw vermin, so I bury it too deep to be dug up, usually three feet or more down.

Of course some trash is also bio-degradable, notably newsprint (not the colored ads) and cardboard. Both of these can serve as weed-smothering mulches if covered and weighted down against the wind. Earth worms love cardboard and newsprint mulches almost as much as coffee grounds. The worms not only “plow” and aerate garden soil with their burrowing, but also enrich it with worm castings and their dead bodies.

Some trash is recyclable, but most is not bio-degradable. I take a pick up load of trash to the public dumpster each month, only about a fourth of it is recyclable, even though I recycle metal cans and plastic jugs religiously. “How can I bring this much trash in now and have the same amount next month?” I muttered. (In our defense, I must say that we did have a lot less when I burned all paper packaging, but we have cut out burning because of the global warming issue.) “You buy more of it every week when you go to the store,” replied the dumpster attendant.

I prefer bio-degrading to recycling because energy and greenhouse gasses are created in both the transportation and remanufacture of recycled products, albeit much less than manufacturing from raw materials. Home produced vegetables and products require no containers for shipping, so I feel better about garden produce which does not need to be transported cross country or put in metal cans or plastic containers. I also feel a little more self-sufficient and independent. Gardening and turning compost piles are good exercise for breaking a sweat. No need for a gym membership. Of course, trash can be reduced by not buying stuff we don’t need. We need to discern between wants and needs. We are not slaves to consumerism. Besides, I also enjoy turning earthworms into crappie!

Depression Food

It took me a while to put my finger on it, but there was something about the Christmas holidays that I definitely did not like and I breathed a sigh of relief when they were past. It was not the “I’ve maxed my card from shopping” post holiday blues, because I never did play that game. It was more that when I’m around rich food I have absolutely no self-control, and during Christmastide all of womankind engages in some undeclared cooking and baking competition to see who can produce the most calorie-dense dishes. Every year I rue the ten pounds of blubber I gain in two weeks that will take me until July to lose.

In January I look forward to getting back to what we call “good ole Depression food.” Based largely on potatoes, onions, cabbage and beans, it is both some of the least expensive and most healthy fare, and requires the simplest preparation. It takes me back to my youth when the aroma of a fried potatoes and onions with milk gravy breakfast filled the house and fed our brood. We also consumed a lot of oatmeal, eggs, and hot cocoa for breakfast. Lunches were ham and bean soup with cornbread. As a toddler, I called it camel soup because that’s how my ears heard Campbell’s soup. Milk, a teaspoon of butter, black pepper, diced potatoes or tomatoes formed the ingredients for my mother’s homemade potato and tomato soups. Potatoes, onions and hamburger were the basis of various goulashes and hashes. Kidney beans, cayenne pepper and hamburger gave us hardy chili. Lunch sandwiches were toasted cheese, scrambled egg with mayo, and fried baloney with the bubbled up centers. (Ok, so fried baloney isn’t all that healthy…this is my nostalgia, isn’t it!)

We didn’t eat much lettuce or salads back then, but cabbage seemed to find its way into everything. Cooked cabbage, (boiled in sugar and pepper water), served with a peeled boiled spud and some beef was a supper mainstay. On Sundays women made Cole slaw with a sugar and vinegar mix to go with mashed potatoes, dark gravy and beef or fried chicken, milk gravy and mashed potatoes. Most main meals were three courses: meat, potatoes and gravy, and a side, usually either cooked cabbage or canned corn with butter. Dessert was butter and jelly bread. You were expected to empty your plate and it was considered good Hoosier etiquette to mop your plate with bread and eat the mop.

Today the entire front door of our fridge is filled with condiments and salad dressings. In the 50s, it was mostly ketchup, vinegar-sugar water, butter, salt, pepper, and gravies that flavored meals. In hindsight, there was probably too much red meat, lard and salt in those meals and I’d try to replace or reduce those elements today. Still the weekly shopping list was relatively simple and the food tasty in those meat-and-potato meals. Milk, butter, bread, eggs, sugar, flour, vinegar, ketchup, oatmeal, cocoa, potatoes, onions, cabbage, dried beans, canned corn, hamburger, chicken, baloney, and a large brick of cheese, now that is a pretty simple and inexpensive shopping list by today’s standards.

My mouth still waters at the thought of Mom’s simple cooking!