An Interesting Day

Some days are routine, others are not.  I went grocery-shopping.  I have a lot of meat stored away in the freezer, but fruits and veggies don't do well with that so I had to get more.  It's that time of year when many fruits are either not available or poorer quality through long shipping. 

And it has been a hard year for growers.  Haven't seen a peach since September and the plums are gone.  Strawberries have doubled in price.  But blueberries were cheap.  I have no idea why.  Bananas stay cheap.  Apples stay cheap.  So I eat those after dinner.

The grocery store cashier was unusually conversational.  Wanted to know how my day had been.  "average".  Was I happy?  Huh?  Well, I worked in department stores for a few years and every new manager thought we should be "friendlier" on demand so I know how that works.  So I was friendly in return (while watching the checkout display screen like a hawk; they make errors).

But I'm conversational about things that aren't secrets, so we talked.  Then I realized he was just standing there.  He had bagged the last items and handed them to me.  He was waiting for my card in the reader...  He could have mentioned that.

But the weird part of the day came after I got home and put the groceries away.  I knew I had bags of cooked and uncooked meat in both the upstairs and downstairs freezers (or refrigerators).  So I decided to sort them out and put them in meat-specific plastic containers.

Took HOURS!  OMG, I had more pork than I realized.  I think I like cooking more that I like eating.  Its almost a hobby.  And chicken.  And NY Strip steaks.  And Filet Mignon (when on sale).

So I sorted it all out.  I AM organized.  I have individual large plastic containers for each meat that fit perfectly into my basement refrig freezer.  So I put the newest stuff on the bottom of each and the older stuff on top.

But I had WAY too much pork to fit.  Well, I keep containers around, and found one that fit perfectly in the upstairs refrig freezer.  I'll be eating a lot of pork for a while, LOL!  I don't mind that.  Pork is easy to use in many ways.  Stir fries, cubed with gravy, smothered in carmelized onions or bell peppers, added to baked beans, etc.  But I sure won't be buying any for a while!

But I DID get all of it organized, and that was good.  

So what did I have for dinner tonight?  Spaghetti.  I found a frozen hamburger patty in the freezer, so used it up...  Can of crushed tomatoes, saute'd onion and mushroom, crushed garlic, lots of Italian Seasoning.  Touch of sugar and red wine.  Best I've made in a year.

But I really DO have a lot of pork to use up.  Any favorite recipes?

Indoor Gardening Started!

It's always a bit of work to get started each year.  Here is how it looked last week...

Well, things pile up over the Winter.  So I organized some supplies into piles, moved some stuff to the shelves in the garden shed, and threw out some junk.  That left me with this...

NOW, I have some working space and am ready to go.  The barrel (above) holds my personal premixed potting soil.  WAY cheaper than buying those small bags, and I know for sure what is in them (I try to stay organic).  The tubs below are the various components that are left over, plus some of them are used potting soil from last year.  Those are fine for established plants but not for new seeds. Kitty litter tubs make great containers (good size, good handles, good tops). 

The long narrow planters are for indoor lettuces, pak choi, and leafy celery.

The stacked trays below are filled with my sterile potting soul mix for the new seeds.  I poured an inch of hot water into each tray so the soil could soak.  Dry potting soil takes a day to get saturated.  It is not like regular dirt, LOL!

So, tomorrow, I will be able to plant seeds.  The first will be the heirloom tomatoes I hope to graft onto vigorous disease-resistant rootstock.  I've never succeeded in that in 3 years but I keep trying.  I learn a little bit each time.

The rest of the trays will go to perennial or self-sowing flowers I am trying to establish in old beds, some mass-annuals like marigolds and zinnias, and other veggies like bell peppers and melons.

I used up 1/2 of the barrel of the potting soil, but the trays are filled and saturated.  That means all I have to do is plant seeds according to schedule.

And I have a great schedule!  Years ago, I made index cards for each veggie, sorted by "weeks before and after last frost date".  Each card has the name of a veggie and the indoor or outdoor planting date, the kind of fertilizer it wants, and the spacing per square foot of garden space.  Example:
 
And I have 2 calendars marked with + or - weeks related to last frost to remind me which cards to look at for planting each week.

The growing season has STARTED!

Pansies

I love pansies.  They flower in Winter and Spring.  Few plants do.

The local DIY store had a great deal on them.  18 pansies in cell-packs for $16.  Can't beat less than a $1 per plant...  I bought 6 flats of them 3 weeks ago.  Then it turned nasty outside.  When it wasn't raining, it was cold.  Or windy.  And then we went to DST, so it was dark an hour earlier.   I couldn't find a good day to plant them...

But then there was a day good outside, sort of.  Up to 54F and not much wind.  But then I realized I really needed to sort the colors out.

My sunken patio is a good height for that, so I spent an hour doing that.  But then I realized that to plant them "randomly", I needed to have all the colors mixed in the trays where I could easily reach the different ones.  Nothing is simple, LOL!

By then it was getting dark.  DST is a real change here.  Exactly when the DST change happens, the sun path is blow the elevated house west of mine.  I get TWO hours loss of sunlight.  It gets dark at 3:30 pm and cloudy days make it worse.  When I get up and about at 10 am and eat breakfast and read the newspaper by Noon, that doesn't leave much of a day.

But I got them planted.  Descriptions and pictures tomorrow...

Odds and Ends

No recent updates on my niece and the consequences of the accident.  News could come tomorrow or in months.

I basically solved my confusion about the EU GDPR notice requiring even foreigners to post about cookie use.  I found a brief one elsewhere and stole it.  It seems to say enough.  Feel free to steal it yourself from here (right under the header).  I think that, after a month, I will move it to the bottom of the blog, and later, somewhere barely findable.  Eventually, it will become nearly meaningless like "This site complies with all international laws applicable in the United States Courts to the best of our understanding. 

I do NOT like that Blogger has eliminated forwarding of comments to email account.  There was no reason given.  If it saved them money, they should say so.  If they polled the community and got a positive response to the idea, they should say so. 

The change is a real inconvenience to me.  I mean, no complaint to Blogger if they had a good reason, but none was given.

I'm also annoyed about the end to Open ID commenters.  I have enough of them who are frustrated and they are long-time commenters who don't want to establish Google accounts.  Its not up to ME if they should or should not.

The rain as been amazing this Spring.  Starting in early May, it has rained about 16-20" total.  I didn't keep track (at the start, who knew it would be a lot?).  But I have a good rain gauge and a general idea of how many times I have seen 1/4" to 3".

And the hardest thing is that it has been rather steady.  3" was a LOT at once.  But most times it is 1/2" every day or so.  The problem is that it keeps the soil soaked.  You plant seeds in soaked soil and they just rot.

Joke:  "I planted rice in early May and they have all drowned".

Seriously, I have lost a month of planting.  I planted 4 square feet of Spinach and got only 4 seedlings.  There should have been 4 dozen.  And I can't plant my deck pots when they are all mud.  Squishing around the wet soil creates little tubs that dry out and form hard layers later that flower roots don't penetrate well.

I have molehills EVERYWHERE!  The soft soil is like Heaven to them.  They are even in the front lawn and I've never had them there before; it is usually too hard for them to dig through.  And the voles use the mole tunnels to get at plant roots.  I'm going to have to spray carol oil over the yard.  That doesn't bother the earthworms the moles feed on, but apparently, it gives them  an awful taste to the moles, so they go elsewhere.  and if there are no mole tunnels, the voles are forced aboveground where nearly everything wants to eat them. 

Their are mole poisons, but I can't use them.  A poisoned mole can mean a poisoned predator (like my cats).  And I've never found a mole trap that had any meaningful affect.  You spike or whatever an few adult moles and it makes little difference.  There are always a few fertile adults left and that means more mole babies.  You have to make the adult moles actually LEAVE!

I've started unclutterring the house.  Well, you have to unclutter before you can clean, and I've let that go for too long.  And no matter what you want to do, something else seems to have to be done first.  So I looked around for "first things". 

I tend to save interesting home maintenance, gardening articles and recipes out of the newspaper and stack them on a corner of the dining table.  I went through the stack and threw most of them away.  I'm not really ever going to make those fancy chocolate truffles or hazelnut cookies, I'm not going to make those "tandoori/honey/duck burritos", and I really don't need a 13th way to BBQ a chicken...

And really, if I ever need to refinish a water-spot on a table top or re-grout a tile, I'll just look it up on the internet. It is time to stop saving information when it it so easily available online!

What I DO need to do is collect all the random stuff off the living room bookcases.  There are aquarium supplies sitting there.  So I need to enclose the existing aquarium stand with wall panel wood and make doors so the stuff has a place to be altogether and out of sight. 

And move some kitchen appliances I seldom use out of the cat-stuff closet to above the cabinets, making room for the 2 shelves of cat toys so THEY are out of sight (but surely not forgotten). 

And then move some stacked books INTO the bookcases, etc...  Figuring out the FIRST thing to do is very important, or else I just end up shifting the clutter around...

And then there is the Cat Room.  Which doubles as a storage room.  My Xmas decorations are still out loose.  I could spend a whole day just in there!  I would like to store them up in the attic, but I had some energy-saving contractor in there a few years ago insulating the place 12' deep (and have never noticed any reduction in my electric bill).  So it is time to put down some plywood flooring (like I used to have there).  And I still have the plywood I originally installed and then removed for the increased insulation in my basement.  But that has to be done before I can move the seldom-used Xmas decorations up there.

There is always something that has to be dome first...

Basement Cleaning

Here is a real "Before and After"!

At the end of the growing season, I've accumulated a lot of stuff "out-of-place".  Well, I get busy, you know?  So it was needing some work to get ready for the new planting season.  And amazingly, the new planting season starts in 3 weeks!

So, I had to get to work.  The clutter was bad. 

Even my light stand was clutterred!  It's the old rule of "any horizontal surface gets covered"...

After 2 days work, I had it down to this...

And to show I didn't just move stuff "out of sight", here is the other previously clutterred space...

That old refrigerator is my "root cellar".  I keep bulk veggies in it at 40-45F.  And my seeds are in the tray there too.

Next, I need to clear out and get my light stand ready to stat seedlings...

Gardening Organization

I love this time of year almost as much as the first harvest.  Planning is in my blood!

The catalogs arrive daily, but that doesn't matter.  Most are junky scammy ones.  I would mention names but I don't feel like getting arguements about them.  I'll just say that if you keep getting catalogs from places you never order from, those are probably them.  LOL!

The catalogs I like are Johnny's, Territorial, Victory, Selected Seeds, and Brent&Becky's.  Burpee's is good too, but I never end up ordering from them these days.

I have a SYSTEM for keeping seeds and deciding when to plant them inside and out.  My seeds are kept refrigerated in medical specimen vials I found cheap years ago.  They last years longer that way.  I number the vials on top and on the sides.

The tray was easy.  I drilled holes the size of the vial bottoms in a piece of plywood and glued another piece under it.  I'm going to build a better one with a 2nd board 1/2 way up (the current bottom holes are tight to hold the vials upright).  But the main point is that the seeds are all in one tray, sealed and refrigerated (in a basement refrigerator also used as a root cellar for potatoes and carrots and such).

I keep a list of the vial contents using Excel (for easy columns).  A part of it looks like this:

	SEEDLIST 2018
	VEGETABLES
VIAL	CROP	TYPE	ACQ YR
101	PAC CHOI	CHING-CHIANG	18
102	TOMATO	SWEET MILLION	17
103	TOMATO	SUPERNATURAL (ROOTSTOCK)	18
104	TOMATO	BRANDYWINE	17
105	TOMATO	PINEAPPLE	17
106	TOMATO	CHEROKEE PURPLE	16
107	TOMATO	STRIPED GERMAN	13
108	TOMATO	MOSKVITCH	13
109	TOMATO	GARDEN TREASURE	16
110	TOMATO	GARDEN GEM	16
111	CORN	ALLURE	16
112	CORN	ALLURE	16
113	CORN	ALLURE	16
114
115	LETTUCE	ROMAINE, RED MARSHALL	17
116	LETTUCE	NEVADA	17

I also keep index cards for each week of planting or transplanting, with notes...

The number in the upper right is the weeks before or after the average last frost date (April 15th here, but I round it to weekends for simplification.  A few days doesn't matter.  And, as you can see, I change the weeks sometimes.  I also have a set of cards counting backwards from the average FIRST frost date for Fall plantings.

I keep all the empty seed packets.  Sometimes there is good information, but it also tells me where I got the seeds from.