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...