For Every Vegetable There Is A Bug

Posted on 30/05/2023 by Grumpa Joe

At the beginning of May I began to take the baby steps necessary to double the size of I.’s pickle factory. I am proud to announce that today, I completed the final baby step. It was a pleasure to pack my tools, to clean the work area, and to vacate the site. Lovely has already seeded 80% of the new area, even though I continued to put the finishing touches on the fence. The next step is to put the garden under surveillance for Wabbit intrusions. My design for the Wabbit barrier is several steps above the original design. I learned a lot from trying to beat the fluffy-tailed vermin at their game. Time will tell if I succeeded.

In the meantime, Lovely and I look forward to a mid to late summer harvest of some delicious, organically grown vegetables free of pesticides and nasty chemicals. It will be interesting to see how faithful Lovely is to her determination to stay “green” and organic. I fully expect her to complain to me when some nasty bug descends into the yard to have a feast. Over the years, I have learned that for every vegetable there is a bug. Some are scary like the tomato caterpillar. This rather large creature can strip a mature tomato plant of its foliage in a couple of days. When discovered he will scare the bejesus out of me before I pick him off the plant and squash him. It is also a sad moment because the caterpillar morphs into a chrysallis that eventually becomes a beautiful butterfly. By killing him, I have affected the universe in some small way.

I remember as a kid watching my mother’s father, my grandfather, walk the rows of potato plants to pick off the potato bugs. He plinked them into a coffee can filled with kerosene. I often found his cans stashed around the house and in the yard near his favorite yard chair, all of them with with a solid layer of dead potato bugs floating in kerosene. Although Mom’s potato plants remained organic, the bugs met their end drowned in the same stuff that propels jet airplanes through the sky.

2023 Garden Expansion
Tomato Bug
Potato Bug

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Cost to Grow vs Buy

Posted on 06/05/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Expanding the garden at my age only makes me appreciate tomatoes and cucumbers at the grocery store. It is so easy to pick from the pile in the vegetable section compared to picking the same item from a vine that you planted and nurtured, watered, and dusted for bugs. (Oops, I wasn’t supposed to say dusted for bugs). If Lovely finds out I did such a thing she won’t let me eat any of the fruits of her labor.

My part of the garden involves digging, spreading compost, and warding off critters with suitable rabbit deterrents such as fencing. The remainder is up to Lovely. She plants, waters, weeds, and shoos away bugs and birds. I have donated two home made whirly gigs as bird deterrents. I don’t really believe they will scare a hungry bird away from succulent greenery, but it sounds good.

My plan to cure Lovely’s ravishing appetite for onions, cucumber, beets, and sorrel is to expand the space she has to plant. This will be the third expansion since we have been together. (When will I learn that only a 100,000 acre ranch will do the trick.) The first plot was a dainty five foot by eight foot area. The second step added a second plot of five by ten, this time I am going ten foot by twenty, an expansion of five times more space. than the original.

Lovely’s Garden

I promise myself not to keep track of the cost of these vegetables because it includes a love factor that can’t be monetized. Besides the more money she spends on veggie plants the more I will spend for flowers in my little world of the Monet Vision.

One Small Room In Grumpa Joe’s Garden

This week, my big accomplishment was to open the pond. That means dredging the bottom of a thick, stinky layer of fermenting leaves, and then re-installing the pump, and pray that is still works. It did, but the whole effort took two days which equals five hours total of physical labor. Each time I went out with a promise not to spend more than one hour, but each time the job required twice that much time. Each day after completing a specific task, I came in and collapsed in front of my computer for the remainder of the day. I once had a boss who said the job expands with the amount of time available to do the job. As I age, this adage makes more and more sense.

I went out of my way to run to PetsMart to buy some fish, and bought two dozen comets that measure about one inch long. Of course, after stabilizing the water temperature in the bag, I let them loose and they disappeared instantly. It’ll give me something to do everyday, that is, to watch the water to spot one. In the past it was two weeks before I finally saw a fish, and they were about twice the size as they were when I released them them. By the end of summer, about five of them will be four inches long and the rest will be much shorter. Come November, when the leaves drop from the trees into Lake Joe, and begin to decay, the process will consume the oxygen in the water, and the fish will die. In the fifteen years that I’ve been raising goldfish in this lake, I have only been able to winter them successfully twice. In my first pond, I never lost more than four fish over the winter, and I never bought new fish, they propagated. The difference is the depth of the water, aeration, and the filtration system. In the first pond I designed and built all the components, and this pond was done by a professional. It might be time to dig it up and start all over with the same amateur design I used for pond #1.

POND NUMBER ONE
POND NUMBER TWO

This story began with me whining about how much work there is to expand the vegetable garden, and it ends with a Nova like burst of energy required to rebuild a pond from scratch, It isn’t going to happen, I’ll spend five bucks every year to add new goldfish just like I do with the flowers.

Filed under: Biography, Fish, Garden, Pond | 2 Comments »

Garden Dreams

Posted on 28/04/2023 by Grumpa Joe

FINALLY! The weather is beginning to cooperate a little. Of course the warmer temperatures bring on true spring fever. In my case spring fever means I get tired and want to sleep in the middle of the day. Like right now. Our flowering trees are in full display this week, and we rejoice at the beauty of it. Some trees are nearly all leafed out but others, like the cotton woods are still only budding at the tips of their branches.Historically, the Old Farmer’s Almanac warns that the last official freeze date is May 15. Since we experienced some minor snow showers last week I believe the official freeze date is holding, and I won’t waste my energy planting anything just yet.

I did take advantage of a plant sale being held by the Friends of the Library. They announced their official pick up date as May 13, and I’ll be there to bring home some baby geraniums to plant in the big pot that guards our front door. I love geraniums. Probably because my mother had them every year and wintered them in the house. She placed pots of them in front of each bedroom window to get light, and because the bedrooms were kept cool, the plants loved it. The smell of the geranium plant stirs me almost as much as bright sunshine at 6:00 a.m. every morning.

Today my grass cutter, Jose streaked across the lawn on his stand up mower, and I flagged him down. I’m not sure he has official papers to be in this country, but being a smart man, he married his anchor. I asked him if he would help me expand Lovely’s vegetable garden. Like a dummy, I told her I would double the size of it so she could expand her pickle factory. She is not letting up on me, and now I have to deliver. The problem Jose has is that his hired help left him for a better job, and he can’t find anybody to replace him. Damned cheap labor can’t get any cheap labor.

My indoor project is coming along, but most likely after next week it will go on hold as my outdoor projects will take over. I promised myself that I would drain the pond and clean it this year before I installed the pump for the summer. Then there is a slight remodeling of the landscape next to the waterfall. The grasses that I planted a few years ago are expanding at the speed of light and need to be thinned out. The only positive way to do that is to use chemical weapons. Pond grass roots deep and far. Pulling on the stems only serves to wear out the puller. Since both sides of the waterfall are lined with boulders, digging out the grass is hopeless.

Spring is a good time to split daffodils and resurrection lilies. I have two large clumps of each that I must dig up, separate and then replant further apart. Most likely I’ll spread them around the yard to spread the joy for next spring. I once saw a photo of a field filled with daffodils. I meant it was filled as far as the eye could see. Maybe it was photoshopped, but the attached article explained it was the work of a single lady gardener who kept separating and replanting the bulbs. She had no help, but after forty or fifty years she had several acres of yellow flowers covering her property. In my mind, all I could think is that she didn’t do anything except eat, sleep and replant daffodils all her life. As much as I loved that picture I will never have the property, but more importantly I would never have the drive to do the work. How could I wile away my days at the computer surfing the internet if I was out replanting daffodils from sun-up til sun-down?

This summer the Monet Vision may actually become a vision worthy of seeing, that is, if I can tear myself away from this machine, and my work shop downstairs to make it happen.

I did it once, I can do it again!

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Things that Slither In the Night

Posted on 12/04/2023 by Grumpa Joe

For the past week I have tried to post everyday, but yesterday I missed. The goal is blown. Instead of writing I spent the day in my shop cutting feathers. My latest Intarsia project is a large bird with his wings spread. The feathers become the bird. The goal for this project was to finish by May ’23. It is still possible but only if I never sleep, never eat, spent zero time with Lovely, and grind wood the whole time. It’s not gong to happen. I like to sleep, and eat, and spend time with Lovely that’s why.

A new challenge has arrived to make my Intarsia project a dream, Spring! Yesterday we had a genuine beautiful day, sunny, warm, and breezy. The girls are wearing shorts again, and some guys too, but I don’t lear at guys like I do at girls!

Spring is when “. . . Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it . . .

Then last night as I was retiring my step grandson came to me as white as a sheet to explain that as he opened the garage door to get some night air, he saw a long skinny thing (snake) about 2 cm in diameter slithering past. I looked at him and said “he’s probably horny from being in hibernation since last September. Did he come after you?”

“But, but, but, is he dangerous?”

“Of course not, most likely it is a garter snake, and even though he looks ominous like all snakes do, he is harmless.” The conversation shifted to a discussion on why I should fix all the cracks and crevices between the garage door and the floor to keep him out of the garage. I went to bed.

Today, I’ll search the area and see if I can locate his den. I don’t know what I’ll do if I find him except to greet him with a cheery “happy spring,” and chase him off to the wetlands behind the house. Of course if I happen to come upon him while in the garage he’ll scare the shit out of me and cause me to run to the hardware store to buy a new weather strip for the door.

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Spring is in the Air

Posted on 14/03/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Officially, it is still seven days away from the formal end of winter, but spring is in the air. Winter will lose the battle and allow the sun to return and warm the planet again. One would think that with all of the freezing and warming that planet Earth would begin to crack, maybe it does. Earthquakes are caused by the tectonic plates shifting under us. Who knows, I may be on to something, and win a Pulitzer prize for geologic science.

What I do know is that the trees and shrubs are beginning to bud, although ever so slightly. My desire to sit at the computer to write for my blog is waning as I find myself staring out the window at the sunny days. The to-do list for the garden is building in my mind, and I have some really nice projects lined up. The problem will be to find the physical energy to do them. At the moment the ground is still frozen and hard as granite in the morning, and becomes mushy soft and slippery (that’s what she said) when the day heats up. So I sit at the computer and ponder how I will clean the pond to restock it with fish while daydreaming about the flowers I will plant to make the Monet Vision a vision. Each day I retire totally worn out and ready for a ten hour nap.

I can’t really complain about our winter this year, because I only had to shovel snow once. Most winters the shoveling is a daily task. Same goes for low temperatures. This thing about global warming may be real, except our winters vary from year to year, and I’ll never believe that man made global warming is a real thing. It is more like a communist plot to over throw the civilized world. With summer coming even President Joe Biden will be able to walk out to the street to buy his ice cream cones from local Mexican street vendors. If we are very lucky, he will wander off and get lost.

My memory is beginning to fade. I am actively making dates to conduct vision screenings at schools and then forgetting all about them. This morning the contact at a pre-school reminded me that she will see me tomorrow. After seeing my deer in the headlights look she followed up with a reminder that I made the date to screen all of her kids and that today was just the Tuesday-Thursday classes, and tomorrow will be the Monday-Wednesday classes. If anything scares the hell out of me it is the thought of losing my memory. Once it begins it tends to go fast. Seven days to go and counting fast.

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