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.