Still too dry. Soon to be hot.

 Blessings Darlings!

We're heading into a little heat wave here - 4 days in the 90's, at least one currently forecast to be 98. And the rain forecast for today didn't arrive, of course.  The somewhat underwatered basil really really wants to go to seed.  I really, really want it to keep going so I can make lots of pesto.  OTOH, the Chubby Hubby HATES pesto.  OTOOH, the Spawn LOVES it.

 
I've watered the potted plants on the patio, but not the ones in the actual veggie garden and certainly not the herb garden. That's hose work, and the hoses are already tucked away because the mowers the management hired come tomorrow morning. So I'll water after they mow, I guess, tho' the day will already be getting hot by then.  

 
If I was in charge of mowing the lawn - I'd certainly not be mowing this dry grass that hasn't grown at all since we're in the middle of a drought.  But I'm not.

 
I've made more progress in my lazy way to expand the garden (I cover the grass with cardboard, the flattened boxes we use to carry our groceries home from Aldi's). I've covered about another 100 square feet - like a 4 foot by 25 foot swath. I don't know if I'll expand plants into it this fall or wait until spring.

Home made olla options

 Blessings Darlings!

Since at THIS moment, Wunderground says that we will get nice rain next week, I'm considering putting in some 'home made ollas' if the ground gets less hard.  Ollas are an unfired clay based watering system - I'm going to let you google it yourself.  I'm going with re-using stuff that others throw out.

I've got empty 16 oz water bottles that folks throw out at work.  If I can dig holes, bury one next to every plant that needs water (with the top sticking out for easy refill, and poke some holes in the bottom, I can get water to the actual roots of the plants.  Less evaporation = less water used.  

I suppose I could use any 15 - 28 oz cans, or the 24 oz plastic bottles from spaghetti sauce that we slowly accumulate, too, in the same way.

I also suppose that after I put this in, rainfall will stop being rain fail, and I won't need them any more.  Because life be like that.  And that's okay.  Better I put it in place (if I can) and not need it than not put it in place and need it.

Frondly, Fern

Drought. And a damned Plantar Wart.

 Blessings darlings!

I have a little time to blog today, since I'm off my feet - well, off one of my feet - due to a plantar wart that is making it very painful to walk.   It's a shock how it went from Nothing to Can't Walk without PAIN in under 7 days!  Urgent Care couldn't treat it (no liquid nitrogen), and getting an appointment with either my doctor or my husband's dermatologist (where I'd be a low-priority 'new patient') can take forEVER.  So I'm doing the OTC treatment the Doc in the Box and I discussed and am off work (where I'm on my feet getting 12000+ steps in a day) today but can't be very useful at home.  Doc in the Box gave me a note for 3 days off of work, but I'm hoping to be able to work tomorrow.  The first three hours back at work will pay for the OTC stuff.  Then I'll need to cover whatever the copay turns out to be - and there WILL be one, tho' I went to the Urgent Care that is part of my plan. 

So I shouldn't go out and water the garden, since doing that hurts.  BUT - we have drought conditions.  So the garden, especially the stuff in pots on the patio, need water.  OTOH, I don't have very much water available for the plants, since the plumbers who replaced the water pump took the hose spigot off the pump head.  All the rest of the water around the house goes thru' the water softener.  I've been going to a friend's house and filling 2.5 gallon jugs every few days and bringing them home to water with.

I could walk over to the cattle barn since that water isn't softened and Chris has okayed it to fill jugs (I sure don't have hoses that are that long, even if they were all attached into one MegaHose) but that, too, is more steps.

It's 'only' a moderate drought here at this time.  My lawn is a mid-August dead brown in color.  The clay soil is dry for inches down, and unwilling to give any of that moisture to plants.  The blueberry bush I planted two years ago seems to have died from it.  IF we get the rain forecast for Sunday and Monday (and we have less than a 50% chance of rain those days) they predict a total of maybe 0.1 inches.  What we need is an average of 0.5 inches a week.

The landlord is going to talk to his plumber next week about connecting the outdoor taps ON the house in a way that routes around the water softener.  He didn't mention anything about my request to add a rain barrel splitter to one of the downspouts, so I can save water when ever it DOES rain.    

This being Monday, I suppose I should do some offerings to the watery Moon for some rain, but weather patterns and global warming are a bit much for a simple one-off working as I know you know.

If you're in the US and want to see if your area is doing okay on rain, check out the Drought Monitor site https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/  It will also give you info on row crops being affected, and grazing/haying area effects.

Frondly,  Fern

Planting by days off, not by the moon

 Blessings Darlings!

It was a day off of my 'paying' job today, so it was all about resting and garden work.  By 'garden work' I mean I planted more sprouting seeds in real soil and started hardening the plants off.  I can't work in the actual garden because we have a drought going on here at this time, and if I want to do anything with the garden I'll have to water it before I can work the earth.

While I never like to pump up groundwater for the garden, right now all the water I have is softened water.  When our pump died a couple of months ago, the plumbers removed the tap on the well head that was our only non-softened access to water.  Any water from the house taps has tons of softener salt in it, and kills plants.

Yes, there is a way to route water around the softener - but only for the entire house.  Tomorrow I am likely to do that.  Then I'll still have to first dump lots of softened water from the pipes on to the gravel driveway to the house/barn before I can get water that is free from the salt/etc.  It will waste a crap load of water plus electricity to pump it.  So I'll only water the parts of the garden that I'm likely to actually work on tomorrow.  And I'll have to do it after I wash and hang clothes so I have softened water for that (Local water is HARD HARD HARD in this schist rock area.) 

But I'll have to do it so I can prepare beds to plant.  And planting and eating what we grow is important to me.

Here's hoping that the rain that forecasters promise for this weekend actually arrives.  Forecasts have been wrong about that for the past 6 weeks.  This time they are promising a full inch of rain on Saturday afternoon.

That said, almost all my seeds are sprouting well, other than the usual lazy pepper seeds.  I lost the first round of Cherokee Purple tomatoes and shishito peppers when I went to the Sacred Space/Between the Worlds conference (I hadn't explicitly told the family about water and 'take them in if there is a freeze') so I'm trying to make up for lost time.  I found 11 shishito seeds I hadn't planted, so I'm hoping to get at least 3 producing plants from them.  I bought more Purple Cherokee seeds, and found I had some old Roma and Rutgers seeds, too.  Alas, no Brandywine seeds around the house. 

If I can work the ground tomorrow, planting (late, as always) beets, radishes, neeps, and swedes will commence.

And just maybe, the Chubby Hubby will get the rain barrel ready for Saturday's rain.

Frondly, Fern

Midnight Music?

Blessings Darlings! 

I forgot to blog yesterday! 

It WAS a busy day, with eyeglass stuff for the Chubby Hubby, appointment with nurse practitioner for me then I went to the hardware store and the pharmacy (which didn't have the drug I needed), and with doing all the usual stuff in the garden, cleaning, cooking, etc.

We will all survive the fact that I missed a day.

I've been hearing music in the middle of the night.  Hard rock, with an emphasis on electric guitars - I hear them, not any base.  It's soft, not very close ... but I hear it just as loud in the house with the windows closed as I do outside.  I have NOT NOT NOT gone wandering to seek the source of it.  Sure, most likely it's a human neighbor.  But ... sigh ... the Good Neighbors could have some hard rock interests.   It's not at all clear how they'd be powering electric guitars, of course.  What IS clear is that I am NOT following strange music in the middle of the night.

The hot weather, bugs, dry weather, and clay soil is doing a number on my newly planted and transplanted Swiss Chard.  I'm going to have to transplant more, and give all of it special attention.  I'm already giving the summer squash bug egg checks two times a day, I'll have to water and bug check the chard at the same times. 

Now, a lot of us are attending meetings via Zoom now, and have been watching/making podcasts for ... years.  Wouldn't you like transcripts?  You can get them, easily.  And free/cheap.  The Otter App does it.  I just whined about no transcripts for podcasts, and ... realized that we have this tool as part of our business.  I didn't PLAN on posting it here, but I'm about it.  We are not an affiliate of theirs, but I DO think that if a lot of folks get the paid version we get some gift.  That said, we use the free version and have never needed the paid version.
Here's the link :  https://otter.ai/referrals/UL62OMEZ

A free account gives them 600 audio minutes per month. 

If they need a transcript of a video, they can upload the video file, and Otter will extract the audio from that.
If they need a transcript of audio, they need to upload an audio file:

Otter lets you import existing recordings in the following formats:

    audio: mp3, aac, wav, m4a, wma
    video: mp4, avi, mov, wmv, mpg


If they need more info, the Chubby Hubby can help.

 Damn, it's hot and humid today.  I should plant a new batch of green beans, but instead I'm hiding indoors with the air conditioning on.

We bought a little table top portable grill.  The guys have finally put it together.  We finally figured out how to light it.  It is now on the 15 minutes 'burn off toxic shit' stage.  I don't know if this has enough BTU power for my purposes. 
Update - it takes at least 4 minutes per side for yellow crook neck squash slices.
Now I have pans of chicken in it.  Because I didn't have time to marinade the chicken and I want them immersed in flavor.  Maybe tomorrow I'll throw drumsticks on = because I don't think I'll have to worry about burning them using direct heat.  Tonight is boneless chicken.

Tonight was also the first evening I heard the screams of the cicadas.  They were the musical accompaniment to the beginning of the firefly show, but they didn't  scream for very long.

Until tomorrow ...

Frondly, Fern

First pandemic Monday in July.

Blessings Darlings!

That sudden windiness at 7 pm was caused by pop-up thunderstorms in various parts of the larger area.  Alas, no rain where I am.  So by 8:30 am today I was out watering the garden again.  And checking for pest eggs. 

The Washington Post - The morning's most important stories, curated by Post editors.

(AP)
Seven-day average case total in U.S. sets record for 27th straight day
Local officials issued dire warnings about the spread of infections, blaming outbreaks on early reopenings and saying the virus was rapidly outpacing containment efforts.
 Ain't we got fun?

I am SO INCREDIBLY PISSED that the US WASTED 3+ months of isolation ... hell, wasted then entire time from the first big warnings about Covid 19 at the end of December/early January until the foreseeable future.  We did half-assed attempts to ask people to isolate, no serious enforcement.  We decided that human lives were less important than money.  And now, no surprise to folks with actual brains, our ICU beds are full again.  Our death rate is HUGE, even with states like Florida refusing to release actual stats on Covid-related deaths.  In 11 more days it will be 4 full months since I've gone out without a mask on.  4 months since I went out for anything other than needed shopping and a few trips to large parks to take walks with my family.   And under our president - who denigrated mask wearing and closing businesses, refuses to put a plan together, has gagged the US experts on infectious diseases, and cut funding for COVID research - and his allies, while I kept myself/my family safe, we are no safer than we were before.  Oh!  As of midnight tonight, masks are mandatory here in WV.  3 1/2 months (at least) later than they should have been declared mandatory.  Wait - it's not a mandate.  It's not enforced.  It's only fucking 'strongly encouraged'.  This is some fucking bullshit.

Oh - and if/when they get a vax for this, they'll be happy if it's only 50% effective. And you can bet that means if it's 50% effective on young healthy folks, not on ... everyone. Cancer survivors with now compromised immune systems? Nope. Folks over 60? Nope. Diabetics? Nope. Folks with asthma? Nope. Lupus? Nope. Fibro? Nope. 

How dry is it? Dust devils swirling in the pasture dry.  This is why I water some things daily (seedlings and the heavy producing squashes.)  

Today is one of those 'hard' days for me.  Depressed, no energy.  But I made my 'to do' list, and am trying my best to work on it.  Paid rent. Paid health insurance.  Worked in garden.  Washed clothes, and hung them on clothes line.  Obviously working on blogging.  Working on exercising ... in small doses at a time.  Dishes are all caught up on.  
It's 96 degrees out, feels like 101 -  and that's not helping, tho' we have AC on set at 81 degrees.   All the cattle - all black angus cattle - are under the trees where it's shady.  Horses are out in the sun, kicking up dust as they walk.  But they look like they are heading in the general direction of some trees themselves.  Fleshy weeds have taken over the garden and pastures, purslane in the garden and spiny pigweed in the pastures.  I might go harvest and cook the leaves on the pigweed next week, and maybe the purslane tomorrow.  

The Spawn found reduced price whole chickens on sale when he went out today (wearing a mask).  I'll stick a can of beer up it's ass, liberally (of course) apply Memphis Rub to it, and throw it in the oven for dinner.  I'll put an insulated car reflector on the oven, too, to keep as much of the heat IN the oven and not radiating OUT of the oven.  It will still end up heating the house, of course, but at least I'll have tried to reduce that.  He had money, so I told him to get the biggest reduced one they had, so we could get the most meals out of one oven use.  I'll throw in baked potatoes for the rest of the week, too, tho' corn will be our starch.

Sheesh - maybe today would be less overwhelming if I didn't have to keep adding stuff to the 'to do' list.  I used the last of the home made laundry powder today, so making more of that is on the list now.

Frondly, Fern

Cool, damp summer

Blessings Darlings!

While we DID have a dry month early this summer, on the whole this summer has been coolish and dry.  There have been less days over 90 degrees than usual, and rain levels have been more than usual since the early hot dry spell.

So now I have issues from those factors in my garden!  I've only lost a couple of zucchinis to end rot from the rain, but on top of those losses some of the zukes haven't been well pollenated - they grow right the first few inches then sudden narrow and don't develop the rest of the way down the fruit.  Others, while properly pollenated have seemed to started to hibernate instead of finishing growing.  And my tomatoes are not just waiting for a few hot days to suddenly have hundreds of them suddenly ripen all at once - the indetermanent ones that ARE coming ripe one at a time all have big cracks at the stem end, the standard sign of too much water. 

I'm concerned I won't get any of the sweet potatoes, as they need rather a lot of days over 90 degrees to move from forming vines to forming tubers.

By the way, the DE didn't do squat for any of the bugs on the beans.  I don't think I'll be getting even enough beans for a dinner side dish, let alone freeze or can any.  The leaves of the beans look like delicate lace.  And the daily rain means that anything I use on the plants gets promptly washed off.

To paraphrase the folk saying:  humanity proposes, nature disposes.

Frondly, Fern

 

Hoping for Mud Season

Blessings, Darlings!

I mentioned "mud season" in last week's Imbolc post.  For those of you with lawns rather than pasture areas, let me explain this a bit.  Mud is what you get when you combine pastures with animals (especially hooved animals) with rain.  Mud season is when you have a spring with normal rains.

Unfortunately, most of the US (and a goodly part of the rest of the world) hasn't been having normal mud seasons.  The serious drought continues across the US. Worldwide, humans used more wheat than we harvested (and in the the US, most of the wheat is winter wheat, which relies on spring rains, rather than winter wheat which relies on summer rains).

While the area I'm in isn't having a current drought problem, my area isn't the breadbasket of the nation/world.  That blighted area of the Great Plains IS that breadbasket.  This has been going on for almost a year, and the weather pattern does not seem to be changing at all.

Rains.  Long and slow and renewing.  We needs it.

Frondly, Fern

Corniness

Blessings Darlings!

No offense to either all y'all or to Eban Pagan - but I'm multitasking here, and writing this blog while in one of his Webinars.  This one is on how to create an information product, specifically how to find a profitable niche, create the product, and into to how to reach your audience.  Given that his first, and so far most profitable info product was "Double Your Dating", using the pen name David de Angelo.

Combine his first title with my planned post on buying corn, and that equals the title of this post.  It might not make sense to you, but it clicked for me!

So, that done, let's talk corn. I headed over to the feed store this week, in order to try to fix some holes in my food storage.  Since none of the local farm and feed stores carry wheat, I grabbed a bag of corn.  BTW, the corn was already amazingly expensive.  Yes we all know that there is a drought and this years' corn crop is trashed, but I figured I'd be getting a bag of LAST years corn, so the price wouldn't have gone up much yet.

I was wrong.

Not only was the price for the 50 pound sack of feed corn (which I'm planning to use to feed me and my family) already $12.80 instead of the $8.00 I paid last year .... but as I prepared it for storage (in food grade plastic tubes with great lids, adding carbon dioxide gas to displace oxygen, instead of easily permeable but thick paper bags) I LOOKED at the corn.  And the quality is BAD BAD BAD.  At least 15% of the kernels are brown or black and NASTY.  Not stuff I'm going to choose to eat.  I've never run into this before in feed corn.  Before it's always been really high quality.  I'd take a cup of the kernels, pick a FEW nasty ones out, give 'em a quick wash, let 'em dry, grind them, and I'd be baking corn bread.  This stuff is going to be more like ... well ... uh .... Like cleaning lids of cheap marijuana from the 1970's.  The seedy cheap low quality stuff.  Stuff you'd lose 1/2 of by the time you got the stems and seeds out. 








I may make a video showing the corn and cleaning it.  In my copious free time, eh?

Yeah, I'd feed all this stuff to livestock.  I admit I'm pickier about what I feed my family and myself.  I'm quite sure that you are, too.

Just a word to the wise.

Frondly, Fern

Staff of Life

Blessings Darlings!

It's Lughnasadh!  Let's talk wheat!

SOME Examiner.com writers are fucking morons.  One posted her article on a Prepper list I'm on.  She went on about how the drought trashed the winter wheat crop.  Except ... it hasn't.  The crop has been harvested a bit early due to the drought (no rain slow downs), but even Kansas, HARD hit by the drought, had a great winter wheat crop.  Winter wheat in the US finished being harvested in the middle of July.

I think that the author can't tell winter wheat, which was planted late last fall, from spring wheat which was planted this spring.  Spring wheat IS likely to be affected, but it's a far smaller crop than the winter wheat is.  Spring wheat is just beginning to be harvested now.  I've never lived in an area that grows any.  Here the rotation is corn one year, beans the next followed by a fall planting of winter wheat the second year, then harvest the winter wheat and plant beans year 3. 

Corn and soy beans ARE going to be affected, of course, as will all the things with those crops in them, from vegetable oils to meat to soda.  Prices of 'veggies' might rise 5% due to increased cost of irrigation, but amounts of them shouldn't be affected much. Local veggies and soft fruits are going to be more price-competitive with supermarket ones.

Still, in the US we spend a WAY smaller percentage of our income on food, so we're going to be hit far less than most other countries.  Without imported grains, there will be famine.  People will die.  Rulers will be overthrown.

Buckle up.

Frondly, Fern

Fire Protection, Redux

Blessings Darlings!

As many of you recall, last August/September there were some terrible fires in the Texas region, brought on in part by severe drought.    Some Pagans on Facebook got together to fight the fires by trying to get a hurricane to hit the area, as I noted here.

They never updated their Facebook page to say if they felt that they succeeded, or if they didn't how to do magic better.  I'll do that for them right here because I'm nice that way.

Here's the USGS Drought Monitor summary for last year.  It seems to be missing the last few months but DOES include the ends of July and September - the time the group was working in.  What happened? The drought continued to increase.  Here's the summary for the first 12 weeks of 2012, so you can compare the beginning of 2012 to the beginning of 2011.  What happened? The drought is worse now than it was early last year.  I'm having trouble finding any archives of the fires from last year to link to, sorry about that.  As I recall ... the number and acreage involved increased during September.

I am NOT here snarking about trying to do big magic. I am all for that. I AM pointing out that the group didn't like me bringing up how they were going to measure success or failure to the point of refusing to consider doing any measurements.

Looks to me like the magic failed.  Just like the magic my coven did for "Peace" during the Olympics .... and within a week Russia and Georgia were at war.  Not all magic works, and when it doesn't - heck, even when it DOES work - you need to look at what did and did not work.  That is how you LEARN.  That is how your magic IMPROVES.

Have a few extra bucks and want to improve your magic?  Pick up one of those "Spell a Day" books published by Llewellyn, and do the spells .... and look into why they call for this, that, or the other 'ingredient'.  Or look at the goal and make up and do your own spell for that.  Yes, a spell a day. Just like if you were learning piano or martial arts you'd practice daily.  Just like a baby learning to walk practices and practices and practices.

Go forth and be wonderful.

Frondly, Fern

Purple Sweet Potatoes

Blessings, Darlings!

I removed all the sweet potato vines from my garden.  They go into compost unlike the tomato vines which, due to risk of blight, don't get composted.  While removing the vines I found yet MORE potatoes.  Bringing my harvest up to about 18 pounds.  I'm VERY happy with those numbers, given I had NO idea what I was doing and planted only 3 slips 'lasagna' style over solid clay soil.  These are, after all, a crop that loves SANDY soil, the opposite of what I have!

So, I hear you asking, how are they for eating?  Remember - I've grown these in the wrong soil and in a drought/heat wave, so YMMV.  Not as sweet as most orange sweet potatoes to me, and while the skin on most of them is thin ... just under the skin is a fair amount of fiber which can be nasty.  But I'm sure that I'll learn how to deal with that better soon.

I expect that the leaves are edible, too, but haven't tried them yet.  The deer LOVE them.  I let the deer in at the end of the season, so they could help remove the vines.  Working WITH nature rocks!

So, again - nice flavor, GREAT color, GREAT yield.

Frondly, Fern

Drought or No Drought?

Being sluggish this morning I'm disinclined to look up the definition of 'drought'. My garden says we are having one. The statistics in the newspaper say that we are far from a drought, having had VERY much rain in May and June.

"VERY much rain in May and June" means we had gullywashers - short, hard, intense rains that mostly ran off in to gutters and streams and into the Chesapeake bay. Not long, slow, soaking summer rain that brought moisture 10 or more inches into the earth. Did my rain barrels get filled? Yes.

But the effects of that rain on my veggies was short-lived. And, of course, I've planted more veggies since then, and they are not yet deeply rooted. So I've used up all my rain barrel water already. This coming week I'll need to use city water at least on the beans and turnips, maybe on the tomatoes as well. I'll use grey water from doing dishes for part of it, but I know that I'll have to use 'virgin treated tap water' for some of it.

Dramatic sigh. Officially a drought or not, my garden needs added water or it will die. In MY life, that qualifies as a drought.

Frondly, Fern