Just Desserts

When I plan my garden I think of my plate…and my bowl. In regards to the bowl I consider what vegetables I need to grow in order to make hardy winter stews and soups. On my plate I envision one third containing a healthy starch, (one of those tuber crops I discussed in the previous blog.) I think of another third of the plate as holding either a healthy cooked green such as cooked cabbage, spinach, asparagus, etc. or a healthy colored vegetable like tomatoes, corn and so forth. Thus what I want on my plate determines what I plant; I hope to grow two thirds of what goes onto my plate and only buy the meat portion. I’ve tried to keep my garden quite small so that most people could try something similar even if they do not live in the country; a 50’X25’ plot should fit in a suburban back yard or on a vacant city lot. Either that or I kept it small so I could water my whole garden without moving my chair.

I have a terrible sweet tooth and so I feel the small garden should also provide year-round desserts. Not everyone has room to plant fruit trees. The southwest side of my garden is semi-shaded because of an old apple tree. I noticed that raspberries were volunteering under the tree so I planted a 25’ row of raspberries along the fence on that end of the garden along with several thornless blackberries. I stretched hay bale string taut between the fencepost and trained the bramble into it. Behind the raspberries (to keep grasses and weeds out of them and to give me a clear walking/picking path) I laid a three-foot wide piece of old carpet. Volunteer butternut squash also liked the semi-shade and grew to cover most of the carpet then climbed over the raspberries into the garden. Just inside the garden fence I mulched up to the raspberries with cardboard weighted down with leaves. Before I put the cardboard down I dug bushel basket sized hole that I worked my best compost into and planted half a dozen rhubarb plants. So on this one end of the garden I have the makings for berry cobbler in the late spring, rhubarb pie through the summer, and squash pie in the fall and winter.

During the heat of July and August I eat the cantaloupe and early Crenshaw melons that usually grow in front of my sweet corn; we can freeze some of the melon balls for winter consumption. Waltham butternut squash can be grown in every other corn row and still allow room to harvest the sweet corn before the squash spreads to cover the entire patch by late summer. Waltham butternut, unlike other squash and pumpkins, is very bug resistant so that is all I grow for winter storage. It tastes like pumpkin but without the huge seed cavity. Of course the sweet potatoes can be made into sweet potato pie which can taste like pumpkin pie to pecan pie depending on how much butter you put in it.

My main point is that a small garden can serve you up something to satisfy your sweet tooth year round and still have plenty of room for your other vegetables too.

Roots

I’ve been pondering my roots lately…both the ancestral and garden varieties. First the ancestral. I remember one winter as a young lad going down into the basement cellar of my grandparents’ big white two-story old farm house. I discovered in one room down there a huge pile of potatoes, about a pickup truck load, lying on the concrete floor. These were the fruits of my grandmother’s gardening. This was in the early 1950’s when Americans were meat, potatoes and gravy eaters so in the corner of that cellar was a good portion of my grandparents’ and their Sunday visitors’ eating until new potatoes came in the following year. Mashed potatoes and country fried potatoes were a mainstay on grandma’s dining room table. From an early age I was impressed with my grandparent’s self-sufficiency on their small integrated farm.

Fast forward to my own gardening experiences with root crop for this year. Part of my self-sufficiency gardening plan worked and another part did not. The part that did work was that my stored sweet potatoes from last year did last through the winter until early summer when my new white potatoes matured; the white potatoes in turn have lasted until my crop of sweet potatoes have come in for this winter and next spring. So my idea of succession eating of some root crop year round has been a success and I have been able to microwave me a hot potato for buttering any day of the year. This winter my wife will help me to explore the versatility of sweet potatoes in varied recipes. We are most interested in oven baked sweet potato “fries” spiced with red pepper and also with using sweet potatoes in soups, stews and pies.

I dug my sweet potatoes a little early this year and did not leave them in until the approach of the first frost. It was a trade off; I lost a little in the size of the tubers so I could plant my cover crop of annual rye grass before really cold weather stunted its growth. I really appreciate rye grass as a winter cover crop; it puts down so much root growth deep into the garden so easily. Those root systems produced over winter will be the soils organic material for next year’s garden. It is very easy and cheap; $5 worth of ryegrass seed transported in the back seat of the car. Despite digging them a few weeks early, some of the sweet potatoes were still large enough that one tuber could feed four people for a meal.

The part of my plan for root crops that did not work this year was my delusion that I could plant a succession planting of sweet potatoes in ground where white potatoes came out of. The reality was that the white potatoes were harvested in early July and I planted the sweet potatoes in late April. So successive eating worked but successive planting did not. Still I haven’t given up entirely on successive planting of root crops. White potatoes could be followed with beets, carrots and those huge rutabagas for November harvest. Sweet potatoes (which just sit on their mounded rows for a good month before they begin to spread vines) could be preceded by a quick growing spring turnip like Tokyo Cross® or onions in the valleys between the raised rows. My wife did make some borsht soup with the few beets that I did raise this year and I really liked the flavor so that could become a winter staple. Borsht seems to me to be a stew where the potatoes have been replaced with beets. Good cooking in the kitchen and good recipes are what make self-sufficiency vegetable gardening work.

I have mixed emotions about root crops. They produce huge quantities of food in a small area, they are easy to grow, they store well for long periods and they can be made into a variety of delicious recipes. But they are also inexpensive to buy in the grocery and normally I prefer to grow something expensive like watermelon or cantaloupe or sweet corn. With all the craziness that is going on in the world today maybe it just makes me feel a little more secure knowing there are tubers in the back room and beans and rice in the pantry.

Tight or REALLY Tight

How can you tell if you are just cheap…oops, I mean tight… or if you are REALLY tight? Here are a few examples to help gauge your level of parsimony.

If you grow and dig your own potatoes and add the potato vines to your compost pile and smash any grub worms that you come upon while digging with the back of your shovel then you are being frugal. But if you save the marble-sized new potatoes to be seed for your late straw potatoes and put the grubs in a recycled butter container to use for fish bait and bury the fish heads and bones deep in your garden, then you are really tight.

If you organically grow your own tomato plants and prune the vines to encourage more fruit production and throw the prunings on your compost pile then you are economical. If instead you replant and water the pruned cuttings to try to get a second harvest of free tomatoes just before frost hits, then you are really a tightwad.

If you find a seed company which offers $25 worth of free seeds or plants (Gurney’s Seed and Nursery Co.) and you get seeds for your garden for just the price of handling and shipping then you are pretty parsimonious. If you get several of your siblings to also get the seed catalog and offer for your benefit and buy asparagus spears and blackberries and other perennial plants which may produce food in your garden for the next twenty years then you are truly tight.

If you have your wife give you a buzz hair cut at home to save giving the barber $15 and paying for the gas to get to his shop, well that is commendably thrifty. But if you scoop up the cut hair to put around those afore-mentioned free asparagus plants to act as a high nitrogen, long lasting mulch and also as a human-scent deterrent to keep any deer from bothering your garden patch well that is getting darn near being really tight.

If you ask your significant other to make melon balls from excess melons that would otherwise go to waste so that you can enjoy melon frozen desserts in mid-winter, that’s laudable. However when she’s completed the task if you hint that she should also pickle the rind and parch and salt the watermelon seed then (trust me…) you are truly pushing the envelope.

I could go on with other examples but I think you get the idea already. I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m one of those FANATICS! I wonder if she could boil the watermelon juice down to make pancake syrup…..

Why So Small

It was the end of February. “Got any garden in?” a buddy asked me.

“I got a few early salad greens and a few peas.” I answered and then hesitated and added almost apologetically, “You know Joe…I only put out a small garden; about 25’ by 50’.”

He looked at me silently as if to say, “Frank, why so small? You do live in the country.”

“I do put out about an acre and a half of melons” I added to counter his silent question.

Joe comes from a farming community. He probably used a utility tractor to put in his garden. To put in a small garden in the country probably seemed kind of pointless to Joe. Still the unspoken question “why so small?” bothered me.

First I have neither the desire nor income to buy a tractor and implements to garden; that would be counter to my economic incentive to save money by gardening. I like to keep life simple and power equipment is all about complexity to me. I love hand tools…their quietness, low price and guaranteed startability. I’ve never taken a spade to a mechanic and told him I couldn’t get it to run. I get my exercise quota using hand tools. Some times I have to start up the old tiller to work the melon field, but I don’t like it…can’t hear the birds.

Working a small plot also allows me to concentrate a lot of organic material in a small area to raise soil fertility. Concentration is important. I don’t put the whole garden in in one day but add small sectors all through the spring and summer. I savor my time outdoors.

I’ve always admired those who produced a lot with a little, like those citizens who grew the Victory Gardens of WWII.

I think I have in the back of my mind that one of these days, maybe within the next ten years, I’ll have to leave the country to go to the suburbs to be near doctors and health facilities. I want something that will be doable (by anyone) in a city back yard lot…something I can take with me. Maybe the suburb plots will someday become the new garden lands for local markets instead of shipping produce from an average of 1,500 miles away.

So I guess I am just a small guy who likes to think small and simple. To do otherwise seems too much like work.

Slaw Praise

I harp a lot about the money saving aspects of gardening…I think a lot of that is because gardening is my chosen retirement hobby. The truth is there are a lot of really inexpensive and nutritional foods that can be bought in the grocery…perhaps so inexpensive that it is very questionable whether it would be worth anyone’s effort to garden grow them. Dried beans, dried peas, brown rice, oats, cabbage, onions and carrots are all super healthy foods that are dirt cheap. The pre-pre-prepared “convenience” foods are what make grocery bills high. Probably as much money can be saved by eating inexpensive staples and doing your own food preparation as by gardening.

I wrote an earlier blog about bean soups and incorporated a picture of a bowl of ham and beans and some dark bread. Later it dawned on me that I should also have showed a side-dish of cole slaw in the photo; cole slaw is the perfect taste complement to ham and beans. It also goes wonderfully with fish and fries as well. It is great with chicken, mashed potatoes and white pepper gravy. The same goes for beef, mashed potatoes and dark gravy. One of my favorite grade school cafeteria meals was chicken pot pie and sweet vinegar cole slaw. My parents and grandparents were the meat-and-potato generations; they were also the cooked cabbage and cole slaw eaters. Our generation is the lettuce/spinach salads generation but I doubt that these salads are really healthier than the cancer- fighting cruciferous family. Cabbage stores really well too, whereas the more expensive salad greens will go bad in the fridge crisper in short order.

Cole slaw can be made from cabbage, carrots, an onion, and sweet vinegar; all super nutritious, tasty, and cheap. Problem is these vegetables must be peeled and grated. It’s that food preparation thing I was speaking of earlier. My wife doesn’t care for this grating task so it sounds like a job for “retired man.” (For some reason beyond my comprehension she is forever using that phrase, “sounds like a job for RETIRED MAN.”) Once I am finished grating she adds her secret ingredients and we have a plastic container of slaw in the fridge to go with several meals.

Cooking from scratch and food preparation can be a savvy budgeting concept. Find some good slaw recipes. Here is one I just swiped from my wife’s kitchen counter:
Ingredients:
1 cup fat-free Miracle Whip
¼ cup sugar
8 cups cabbage, finely minced
2 tbsp minced carrots
2 tbsp minced onion
2 tbsp vinegar
Combine the Miracle Whip with sugar and vinegar in a large bowl. Mix well until the sugar is dissolved. Add the cabbage, carrot , and onion, and toss well. Cover and chill several hours. Only 57 calories per ¾ cup serving.

What’s Happenin’

You know you are getting old when you fall asleep during the Super Bowl and your wife has to explain to you what happened in the second half; that and the fact that you remember a lot more of the names of the players on the first Super Bowl championship team than today’s Green Bay team. But what the heck I did get a good nap out of it.

I haven’t blogged much in January because I set aside the month for putting up a tile ceiling over our wavy, uneven, unsquare bedroom ceiling (one of the joys of living in an old farm house built by old farmers not carpenters). How many retirees does it take to change a light bulb? Just one but it’s going to take him all day to do it. That is why I set a whole month aside for this simple project. That and the fact that those farmers used hard oak instead of pine for all their studs and ceiling joists and every nail I drove bent beneath my hammer and expletives.

There is a country song that is popular just now about a man who hears voices in his head, the advice of his parents and grandparents which the wisdom of his own passing years has proven to be valuable and true. When I begin a project like the ceiling or even a task as simple as washing the dishes or simple house chores, I rely on the voices of old sayings, proverbs and platitudes to get past the initial inertia of an evil living room sofa calling my name for a nap and telling me to procrastinate another hour or day.

To get me started there is the old Chinese saying that “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. I ask myself what is the first simple step I need to take to begin. (No! not lie down on the couch and think about it!) Other initiating advice is “Well begun is well half done” and “On the plains of hesitation lay the bones of countless millions” and “Carpe diem”. I find the advice of Julius Caesar especially valuable as a modus operandi in accomplishing any project: “Divide and conquer.” I think he was speaking more to Gauls and Teutons but the adage works well for any unpleasant chore or “insurmountable” problem. It is the basis for my problem solving. Divide the whole problem or project into parts and then break the parts into still smaller parts and those into even smaller parts until eventually you reach a part so microscopic you automatically assert “Hey, I can do that.” Sometimes (most often actually) I can only begin the dishes with “putting the silverware away.” If all other motivators fail there is always my wife quoting from St. Paul’s epistle that “Those who don’t work, don’t eat.”

For my next project I have set aside the whole month of February for doing my taxes. No need to get in a rush; after all I am retired.

poverty or POVERTY

Am I poor? I really don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t feel poor. All my needs are met. Perhaps poverty like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There are different kinds of poverty. There is the stereotypical hillbilly poverty with a front porch full of old appliances and a front yard full of partially dismantled cars and beer bottles. There is the stereotypical ghetto poverty where kids fight over who has the correct NBA jacket and expensive sneakers endorsed by the right sports celebrity. There is the sense of entitlement poverty where people wonder why the government is slow “getting me my money” and “my benefits”. There is the Benedictine/ Buddhist poverty where men and women purposely take a vow of poverty to live a simple life. There are the back-to-the-earth/self-sufficiency types who also want to return to the simple life and opt out of the rat race. There are those who just feel that most of the economy-produced products are so much clutter in their lives and garages. Poverty can lead to simplicity and simplicity to order and order to happiness. A degree of self-sufficiency can lead to a sense of security and security to happiness.

Of course there is the government established poverty level of income to decide if one is poor or not. But this “poverty line” income is constant across the country and the cost of living varies greatly depending on the location, even from one county to the next. I had a conversation with a widow this summer who complained about paying thousands of dollars in land taxes. Judging from our conversation, her property was quite similar to what I owned. Her property is near the county I live in. “You need to move across that county line,” I said. I only pay a couple hundred a year.

Then there is the concept of land versus income as an indicator of wealth. Remember land is that stuff that they quit making. The small acreage that I own in the country would make me a wealthy land owner in Rwanda, Haiti, China, Japan or any number of other places on the face of the earth. Are people with higher incomes who live in a big city on a dab of land richer than me? Who knows? If I want anything a city or town has to offer, I just drive in and get it. I am not trying to brainwash anyone or proselytize, but if someone has adequate health care, then the simple back-to-basics lifestyle has much to be recommended for it.

I need to cut this short. I want to go out to the garage and see if there is anymore junk I can get rid of. Simplify…simplify…simplify.

Simple Winter Fare

New Year is past; each day grows imperceptibly longer now. December was the most frigid I can recall and now that we are back to average January temperatures it feels like a spring thaw. Perhaps Old Man Winter has worn himself out or there is no more cold air on the pole or in Canada to slide down into the 48. I can hope. It did get up into the 40s today and was sunny so I worked half a day pruning fruit trees. I probably lopped off more than I should have but the increased roots to branches ratio may help the trees if there is a drought next summer. If given the choice between doing exercises or doing outdoor work on a cold but sunny day I prefer to do yard work because I can see something accomplished afterward.

After the over indulgences of the holidays I am ready for the inexpensive and simple fare of winter. We eat a lot of hot oatmeal with butter, brown sugar, chopped nuts and either applesauce or home-grown cherries or store-bought raisins. A box of store-brand oats costs a couple dollars and lasts a month for two people. It cooks in the micro wave while I make the bed. When we need variety or more protein I scramble eggs and top with salsa or make French toast. Bread and eggs are also inexpensive and nourishing foods. Coffee and skim milk are our normal beverages.

My sister bakes a wonderful heavy dark bread. I like that bread with a homemade white bean soup like white chili or senate soup. (I’ll give the recipes at the end of this; the secret to any good white or navy bean soup seems to be adding mashed or powdered potatoes for thickener.) Anyway, with hot bean soup, a big chunk of black bread and maybe a small glass of left over holiday wine I feel like some monk supping in a Middle Age abbey, fortifying myself against the winter chill. Okay so I do get carried away with my imagination; still, bean soup seems a welcome break from all the sweets and pastries of the holidays.

We make soup by the pot full and then eat micro-waved left-overs for a good while so we may also have soup for an easy evening meal if we have a taste for it. If not, our supper is usually spaghetti or tuna noodle casserole or maybe salmon loaf with cooked cabbage. I try to get some omega-3 fish into our diet in winter. We still have garden sweet potatoes and butternut squash which make good side dishes with a little added butter and brown sugar. It’s a small ego trip to still be eating from the garden in mid-winter. Everything is made in large batches and refrigerated so there is very little cooking and a lot of quick microwaving.

The holidays come with guilt for me as I pack on extra pounds. Judging by the number of people who make fitness resolutions for the New Year I think I’m not alone in this. This simple winter fare probably won’t cause me to lose any pounds but it should hold me steady until spring and summer when I can. Here are those bean soup recipes:

Senate Bean Soup

2 cups dried navy beans
12 cups water
2 pounds chopped ham
1 chopped onion
2 teaspoons salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
¼ cup instant potatoes

garlic to taste

1. Heat beans and water to boiling. Boil uncovered for 2 minutes. Cover with lid and let stand 1 hour.
2. Add ham and heat to boiling. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer 2 hours or until beans are tender.
3. Stir in remaining ingredients. Cover and simmer 1 hour.
4. If soup is too thin add ¼ cup instant potatoes, stir until thickened.


White Chicken Chili
1 medium onion, finely chopped
3 tablespoons olive oil 1 (4oz.) can chopped green chilies, drained
3 tablespoons flour
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 (15.8 oz.) cans northern beans
1 (14 ½ oz.) can chicken broth
1 ½ cups finely chopped cooked chicken breast
In a large skillet, cook onion in oil for 4 minutes or until transparent. Add chilies, flour and cumin; cook and stir for 2 minutes. Add beans and chicken broth: bring to a boil. Reduce heat: simmer for 10 minutes or until thickened. Add chicken; cook until hot.

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.