Garden Notes Jun 30

Small but steady pea harvest -- like 20 pods every two days. 
Greek oregano dried in the attic, stripped it and chopped the leaves in the blender today, stored away.
Picked the last of the currants.  The red currant bush only yielded about 2 cups total.  The black currant bushes (3) lost a lot of the berries.  they just fell off half ripe.  Maybe a quart total.  Made some jelly though, a cup and a half from 2 cups of berries and a lot of sugar.  Used the French recipe -- equal amount of sugar and berry pulp by weight.  Took all the netting off this week.
Thinned the carrots yesterday and pulled a few 4 inch long specimens worth munching on. 
Lovely borage plant blooming.
Good lot of black raspberries ripe on the north side of the lilacs -- picked a couple of cups. 
Ate a serving of day lily pods this week.
Lots of time this week clearing the rosa rugosa patch.
Got the three New Zealand white rabbits tuesday, seem to be settling in well.  Male born April 4th, females May 6th.  Bought the 2 hutches at the Putnam farmers coop, wire with a wooden compartment on the side.  they have a bad habit of using the compartment for their litter box, particularly the male. 
Found that one of the kiwi plants had sent out runners that then rooted, tried to transplant some over to the sunny fence along the road.  We'll see if it takes.
Thinned the upper tomatoes this week to one Big Red heirloom and one Bolseno plant.  Nice oregano patch up there between them, from seeds planted this spring. 
Chestnut tree is in bloom.
Had about an inch and a half of rain early in the week, weather steadily hotter, upper 80s now.

Garden Notes

Lots of black currants and some red ones too.  White ones about picked out.  Got about 2 quarts of white.
Cabbage plants starting to get eaten.  Something likes those tender leaves in the middle.
79 at 8:30 am, muggy as can be.
Pole beans and bush beans sprouted.  Watered that patch.
Picked first 3 pea pods (English).
Set up the fertigation bucket next to the first currant bush (5 gallon bucket with small hole at the bottom, delivers a lot of water straight to the plant's base).
Stuck the stray sunflower seedling in near one of the currant bushes.
Garlic scapes are ready.
Watered the recently planted gourd/melon/etc seedlings.
Weeded the carrot patch.
Pulled a swiss chard plant to eat and to make more room around the others.
Watered the black locust seedlings, but about half way down the hill the soil becomes damp enough so not needed.  One looks great, the rest are struggling to get established.
Red runner beans are starting to flower and have made it to the fence to climb on.
Fruit trees seem happy with their recent fertigation treatment.
No rain last 8 days, when there was 1/4 inch (jun 12/13).  The week before that, about 1/2 inch.

Local food

Today the moon goes full at 3:19 pm so, according to my spring fast rules, lunch had to be locally sourced. Local potatoes have run out, so I headed out to dig up some Jerusalem artichokes.

They all have these black spots, with red fungus or something staining the flesh nearby. I cut all that off.

Then I headed down to the root cellar and got a cabbage that had been there since maybe November.

It had held up well.

I chopped some up with the sunchokes and steamed it all for a bit, which nicely filled out my meal of local chicken and winter squash.

I really just want to open a can of soup and have some bread and butter, but this definitely forces me to be more creative.

Standards

For today at least, I'm using my blog to file some things I want to remember. I just got a call from Oxfam America wondering if I would renew my monthly contribution. I let it lapse because I'd heard on Behind the News that Oxfam was supporting a project involving genetically-modified seeds. I meant to look into it further, so when this woman called I did a search and found a statement posted on Oxfam's website.

What I like is this sentence:

"Oxfam believes that any decision to use GMOs must be based on the human rights’ principles of participation, transparency, choice, sustainability and fairness."

Nice list for evaluating, what, social structures? My local government? Anyway I felt like filing it somewhere.

Free speech

A candidate signs up to get public financing under Connecticut's election laws and gets state funds to use in his campaign. Then his opponent spends another million dollars, and so he goes back to the state and asks for supplemental funds. The Federal courts have decided this restrains the free speech of his opponent. Funding = speech, they've decided, and if you had to worry that if you 'spoke' ie spent a million dollars and then your opponent might do the same, you might restrain your speech! So much for free speech!

That's kinda weird, hunh?

I got that from this article about recent rulings in CT:

"Supporters of the law breathed relief that the combined state and federal rulings overall preserved the basic thrust of the laws. But some expressed concern about the decision against supplemental grants. The federal panel echoed an argument offered by the U.S. Supreme Court in a recent decision involving Arizona’s public-financing law (the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case) that such supplemental grants violate a self-financing candidate’s constitutional right to free speech. Here’s the logic: If a wealthy candidate’s own campaign spending (now considered “speech”) triggers more public money for a taxpayer-financed opponent, that will affect the wealthy candidate’s decisions about how much money to dole out to broadcast a message, thereby restraining the candidate’s exercise of free speech."

There's a great new e-newsletter coming out weekly called CT News Junkie, it really helps keep tabs on state elections.

Don't forget the primary August 10th!

Rollover 1

My digital camera takes short videos.

June night

You may have to put your speakers next to your ears, but here we go...

Recovery

I'm profoundly tired. I just had dinner: Michele made some cod, and boiled a potato, and I thawed some home-made chicken broth and cooked some frozen spinach. Then it all went into the blender in various combinations, through the strainer, and down the hatch. A buttery potato / cod puree, and then a spinach/ginger/butter/salt soup. C'est bien fait.

I had put in a case of chicken broth in liter Tetrapaks, and find a cup has 1/2 gram of sodium, no calcium, and 10 calories. Really not what I had in mind. What was I thinking?

Today the plastery bandage came off my chin, 5 days to the hour after the surgery. I've stopped the pain killers after last night's misery. I feel much calmer, if heavy with unspecified ache. Only the stitches on the side hurt in particular, when I cough, which I do from time to time from throat tickles. Maybe tonight I'll sleep some, instead of waking every 10-15 min with throat tickles and chokings.

I keep pondering the role of drugs. When I came out of surgery I kept throwing up. This wasn't as horrid as one might think -- the worst is when you're not really throwing up but might sometime soon. But the nurses wanted to control it and they tried 5 different methods on me, including Halcyon, if I heard them right. At another point the next day some dutiful soul approached me (still nauseous) with a syringe of liquid Tylenol. What is it with these dark red sticky sweet preparations? My antibiotic is served up in a similar fashion. I know, someone has Thought All This Through, but something got lost along the way.

And then there's the split pea soup Michele picked up for me - "split pea and ham" with a picture of the little chunk of ham on the label, but the ingredients tell you it's just the water from cooked ham that they let slip into the soup. General Mills. What a world.

Well, that's what's on my mind right now folks. Thanks for listening and have a peaceful night!

Surgery

I sent this email to a friend, thought I'd post it here for the curious / concerned. This is happening in Boston at Mass-Gen.

I was in for the pre-op last Monday so they went over everything again. They'll knock me out, slice open my chest, take some cartilage from where the ribs meet the sternum, play God and fashion a new woman.. no, I mean fashion 2 new jaw joints (the condyles, to be exact), slice me open just in front of each ear and again under the chin on each side (4 incisions around the face), saw off the deformed condyles and stick on the new ones, tuck a bit of flap from the muscles around the joint into the socket for cushioning, and sew me all back up. They'll stick a "splint" ie a piece of plastic between my teeth to hold them apart a little bit and then fasten the teeth together so I don't move the jaw at all for the first week or so while hopefully the bone graft takes. It's a six hour operation! Takes place on Monday the 15th, first thing in the morning. I'll be in the hospital one or two nights, depending how I do.

After about a week they'll give me a little mobility so I start moving the joint and after about 6 to 8 weeks I'll have an open mouth again. Meanwhile I'll lose 5 or 10 lbs and drink a lot of broth and protein drinks and such. The ribs will grow back. Life will go on. I'll be relieved it's over.

The point of this is to give me back the centimeter or so I've lost from my lower jaw and tip it back so the teeth meet properly and I can go back to eating things like salad and nuts and such. I mean, I can eat those now but it doesn't work so well, and I can only fit little bites of everything.

They'll probably inadvertently slice some nerves in my face and I'll have numbness or muscle weakness, which will slowly abate over a year or so. As a rule it's only peripheral nerves.

The ribs will hurt a lot and I'll have to be careful to take lots of deep breaths so my lungs don't get infected.

Sometimes I get pretty freaked out about all this but I saw the surgeon and his chief resident on Monday and they're awfully nice so I felt better. And I find the hospital kind of fascinating -- such a big, self-contained organism.

I'll probably get back on my bike next summer. Maybe. No one tracks bicycle accidents so it's hard to assess the risk very exactly, but it's not negligible. But it's such a fun way to get around it'll be hard to resist.

So that's the report...

Town affairs -- land use

Went to a planning meeting last night; the town is slowly working towards a new 10 year plan addressing conservation and development. Memorable tidbits:

Dave Hosmer said whenever they draw down Lake Bungee and Witches Wood Lake, he gets flooded out and last year he lost a crop of mulch hay. They draw it down to clean their docks and such, but there's no system to warn those downstream. The problem is worse for folks farming downstream from Thompson Dam and the other dams on the Quinebaug.

Jean Pillo gave a presentation on water. Woodstock holds the headwaters for water ways headed into other towns, and by state law we're supposed to be careful to keep it all clean. That means no one can build a new sewer system here. That limits a lot of larger development.

A lot of the water in town is in a layer of hard rock, but there's a large section in the SE of town where the ground water is in a layer of sand and gravel, and much easier to contaminate. In 2009 Putnam diverted enough water from the Little River (is that the one? I may have the name wrong) to completely dry out a section of it here in town so's nothing was left very lively in that section.

There was a lot more to the meeting but those are a few things I didn't know before. Some of it was tedious, as zoning can be, and some of it seemed out of touch from reality, or my reality. We're not going to build a big solar farm around here and provide all our energy needs. Most of our lifestyle of large houses and long commutes is gonna half to go. In fact, we'll be lucky if we don't descend into large scale chaos in a decade. But it's hard to frame a discussion that way, and easy to repeat the basics -- we like lots of open space, farms give us that, what can we do to keep the farms here?

But after blurting out a few thoughts I was reminded that discussion makes you examine your assumptions. Why should we support the farmers when their product is sold to far off markets and they're at the mercy of Federal policies? That question got me some strange looks but I'm glad I asked it.

Move Your Money

Look, someone's on it! There's a movement afoot to move deposits to community banks. I must say that there seem to be a number of good options in this area for banking -- unlike restaurants!

Big Banks

Check this chart out. The four biggest banks have gained a lot of market share. I wonder who lost that share?

Scrooge

"Oh ! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge ! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner ! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days, and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas."

Dickens, A Christmas Carol

And I almost didn't start it, thinking, I've seen it on the teli...

Winter poem

Dreams

Generations are born and generations pass,
the generations glide like streams,
die and vanish and become extinct,
and yet enticing dreams never die:
to live in the sun, in sorrow and the storm,
grow numb and be laid on the bier,
rise up again in shimmering form,
follow in each other's footsteps.
However they come and however they go,
gliding like reflecting streams,
however they vanish and become extinct,
eternal dreams live on.

poem of Jonatan Reuter, Drommarna, from the accentus CD North

A good winter poem.

Homemade beer

This stuff has quite a head!

Uncle Collin's brewing gene had been tugging at me, so last summer I bought a 3 gallon carboy and eventually figured the rest out: Yorkshire Bitter mix, airlock, pitching yeast, and so forth. I sterilized everything with hydrogen peroxide, and used fair trade sugar instead of corn sugar, and despite all that the result has been drinkable. It helps that we don't drink much beer so wouldn't necessarily know good from bad. Made about 30 bottles, and most weekends we drink one.

Thanks, Paige, for blog-posting inspiration!

Orthodontics begins

Yesterday I had spacers inserted between my 3 back teeth, both sides, top and bottom. By evening I was very sore, couldn't chew on anything, and felt groggy and a bit inflamed. So I'm back on liquids: pureed split pea and ham soup for dinner with extra broth. I think I'm already adjusting though. So, another milestone: the start of the orthodontic treatment. My crowns are all repaired with lab processed temps made to last about 2 years, until everything's straightened out.

I still have trouble imagining the orthodontic process though: teeth move? Roots travel about? Like a tree taking a walk through rocky soil?

Back to the Spot

This is a photo of goldenrod leaves, cleaver seeds, and all that shimmer is spider web. It's very hard to get a camera to focus on spider web and spider. Here's another try -- if you look hard you might find the spider:

A few sit spot postings

I've been busy, away, etc so haven't been to my sit spot much. But, here it is:

Thurs Jun 25. 9:45 AM. Been a month mostly of clouds mist and some rain. Today continues. But the clouds I hear are off the ocean and it's in the upper 60s, and everything smells good. Lots of birds this morning, maybe 6 different calls? Hard to sort out. The bedstraw and bittercress/plant X have gone to seed. The bedstraw climbs the bittercress. The bittercress, like celandine, produces long thin upright seedpods in ranks off a main stem, so it makes a half decent trellis. Its leaves are dying back. Some cleavers are flowering. The grass seems less present, the creeper, bittercress and bedstraw most prevalant in the immediate surroundings. The bedstraw has very cute little round seeds or seedpods that come in green pairs, covered with little white hairs or bristles. Each about 1/2 inch across. A little further away patches of goldenrod are hip high now, and a lone aster flower has appeared, as well as some fleabane further along. The quince is sending out new shoots of leaves, they're fuzzy to the touch, and its rather copious fruit is about 1.5 inches across now. A lone wisteria leaf pops out a few feet in front of me. A fly with a very black shiny body and butt lands. A spider is weaving on a bittercress stalk. Some tiny bugs are floating about. One mosquito. A steady drone from somewhere nearby. A sort of moth on the underside of a leaf. A few clunks from the bull frogs. Crickets.

Tues Jun 9th, Just went and stood for a few minutes in the drippy world. Wasn't actually raining. No mosquitos. No trillers. A few plunks from the bull frogs. Got 1/3 inch rain the previous night and rather misty and cool, in the 50s. Peonies blooming despite being choked by weeds. Also the late lilac. Some beech leaves are convex, some concave.

Mon Jun 8th. Went down in the dusk with long sleeves, gloves, mosquito net on head. Lots of mosquitos. Looked up and saw probably 100s of small flying insects silouhetted against the sky. Here and there big chubby insects were flying about, perhaps fireflies. Something else droned by. It's a 3 dimensional world! The sky was cloudy, high clouds, some cirrus. Small gusts of wind here and there. Looked up the triller frog: it's a grey tree frog. Another sunny hot day, mid to upper 70s.

Sit Spot Jun 7

Sun June 7th, 8:30 pm. Within a minute of sitting down (less) 10 - 20 mosquitos appeared. Warm evening, cloudy. little wind, occasional light rain. After a sunny hot day. Friday it threatened rain all day and seemed to rain for a while in the evening, but it was another .1 inches to show for it. Fri eve I sat, and Sat at almost 10 pm in the dark, and now this evening. I retreat into the beech tree, climb up 8 or 10 feet and the mosquitos are gone for quite a while. I can see the hay, very high now, we venture into it rarely. Last time it was up to my shoulders in places. The pond is thick with water lilies, with patches of open water here and there, but small ones. Tonight there're no peepers, an occasional chuck or call of the bull frog, and mostly the strident ones, or trillers, I haven't discovered their name. The beech leaves are a very deep purple brown, papery to touch, and slightly concave as though to carry a little water. There are 1 inch patches of lichen on the trunk. On the way out I discover a vine is working its way up a stick into the lower branches: divided leaflets. Wisteria. (really). Where I usually sit the Virginia Creeper has formed a little forest with a canopy and, underneath, the wild basil here and there. The grass, cleavers, bedstraw, goldenrod and golden alexander surmount it. The grasses are moving through their flowering and setting seed, some of the heads have separated, some show anthers and will release a cloud of pollen if brushed. I've been contentedly sitting with the huge old dictionary and learning grass vocabulary before I go on identifying them: lemma. caespitate. obtuse. terete. awn. branching distally at nodes. viscid. distichous.

Great documentary

This is a really good documentary, both visually pleasing and an excellent overview of some questions and answers facing our local farms. 48 minutes, well worth it.

Farms for the Future