That super cold storm that has been blasting the mid west and east coast finally got here. Drats. It was a frigid 43 degrees when I got up this morning. One thing is clear, I couldn’t handle living in a cold clime again. The forecast is for two more days with lows in the 40’s and highs only getting to 72 before we get back to temps designed for people. Still no frost or freeze words coming from the weather guy so the tomatoes should be ok for at least another week. Breaking out the lined jeans and flannel shirts. Cheer up folks, winter hasn’t started yet.

I hate to bore you with seed talk but ……… back to the late germinating Chard. I checked the seed pack and noticed that it’s dated 2011. I bet the older a seed gets, at least chard seed, the longer it takes to germinate. Maybe the seed shell gets harder or something.

I also want to expand on my mention of Joey helping clean up around here yesterday. Turns out that may not have been such a good thing. Our gravel driveway and turning circle collect loads of leaves and pine needles, more or less on a constant basis. Every now and again, three or four times a year, I rake them to spread over the parking area, clothes line area, and whatever paths in the jungle need replenishment. That works for me. My rake job isn’t perfect but I kind of like that light leaf covering rustic look. Nature blending in. Joey came up and brought a new, bright shiny gas powered leaf blower and blew the driveway and circle clean in about 20 minutes. It would have taken me several hours/days to rake it and it would not be clean, clean. Now my bride keeps looking out the windows, commenting on how nice the gravel looks. We have an electric leaf blower but it’s kind of a pain dragging the 150’ extension cord and it just doesn’t do the job as well as the gas guy. I could just go buy a gas leaf blower but my experience with any gas machine is that it eventually becomes a problem requiring more work to start it than to actually do the job. I think the solution is for Nancy to lure them back up with promises of pretzel salad to go. I’m also thinking about installing window shades so she can’t keep looking out.

How’s this sound? Collard pesto pasta. One thing we have a long position in is collard greens and I really don’t eat them. I grow them for the neighbors and for trading material, but not to eat. I happened on this recipe and figured if there’s anything good you can do to collards to make them palatable, it would be pasta. I’ll let you know if it’s real or just a wishful thinking.

So let’s see, we’re not supposed to take vitamin supplements now or wash our hands with anti bacterial soap. Once again I’m ahead of the trends and had stopped both about 5 years ago. That sets me up for the news 5 years from now, that body parts will start falling off because I don’t take vitamins or use anti bacterial soap. Last night they announced that what used to be called high blood pressure is now OK. Wonder if they’ll recalibrate all the blood pressure machines at the grocery and drug stores? Wine and coffee were bad for you at one time but are now beneficial. I was ahead of the trend on that one too.

How comes the climatologists waited until Dec 2013 to announce that the coldest day ever recorded on the planet occurred in august 2010? In case you missed the news, it was minus 135 degrees F at the South Pole. This news release slipped past the global warmists until the Edward Snowden of the weather service leaked it.

Here’s another garden factoid to tuck away. Swiss Chard seeds are hard little nugget seeds that can take quite a while to germinate. With most seeds I plant, all of a particular variety germinate within a few days of each other; often within hours, but with Swiss Chard, that’s not the case. I plant multiple seeds in individual styrofoam containers, the wide kind you get when you order a scoop of ice cream. Then after they’ve germinated and put on a couple of true leaves, I gingerly ease them out of the container and into larger quarters, one plant per container. When I’ve removed all the plants from the starting container, there’s usually 90% of the starting soil left in the container which I repopulate later with new, different seeds. I’ve found on several occasions that a chard seed that didn’t germinate the first go around and remained buried in the soil, pops out a month later, maybe along with some broccoli seed or lettuce seed or whatever new seeds I’ve placed in the old container. So I end up with chard plants with widely varying maturity even though the seeds were planted at the same time.

Guess the name of the dessert Nancy made. The red one. At Thanksgiving one of Tom and Tina’s guests brought a dessert that really turned me on so she got the recipe. It’s called pretzel salad. Really. Just Google “pretzel salad” to get the recipe. I’d like to think she made it just for me but fact is, Joey and Mark are coming up for dinner and to “deliver” my Christmas present aka fixing the sprinkler system and cleaning the exterior of the house. I can really do the exterior work myself but they do in one afternoon what it would take me 3 days to accomplish and it saves me from having to climb up a ladder to reach the high spots. I’m too old to be working comfortably 15’ up a ladder. It’s also Mark’s birthday and he’s getting the first ever Pretzel Salad Birthday cake.

Obviously the other pic is the first cherry tomato pizza of the fall season. 
Tasted as good as it looks.

Big decision point coming up. The Toyota just turned over 200K miles. It needs tires and is due for a timing belt change. So probably looking at a $600-$700 investment. Should I sink more money in it or just unload it? We certainly don’t need 3 vehicles but my bride is of the opinion that if we drop down to only two, the truck is the one on the chopping block. She doesn’t get that the truck is the only way to move the poke boat so it’s the essential vehicle in the fleet. My plan is to take the Toyota to my trusty mechanic and have him do a detailed assessment of the vehicle and the likelihood it can reach 250K. The inducement to getting to the quarter meg mark is that in the time it will take to put on another 50K, it turns 20 years old and qualifies for antique tags in Florida. So my boat, car, truck,bride and person are all officially antiques.

Couple of garden milestones this week; picked first broccoli, first head of cabbage, probably the last green pepper of the season, and the first radish. We’re also picking a steady stream of cherry tomatoes now, a handful every day with no end in sight. We have so many that I’m making the first cherry tomato pizza of the season.

We made our quarterly Costco run this week. Sure glad I own stock in that place. After my first visit years ago in Salt Lake City and seeing the maximally loaded shopping carts going out and the full parking lot time after time, I decided the stock had to be a good buy. It takes some of the sting out of running up a $700 tab. Aside from the fact that I just don’t like to go shopping, especially in crowds, it’s a 50 mile trek each way and kills almost a full day from start to unloading, repackaging. In addition to the freezer in the refrigerator, we have two external freezers. After the Costco shopping event, there isn’t a cubic inch of unused freezer space.

Finally getting some bass after a long dry spell. No feeding frenzies but at least some action. It has a long way to go before I’d call it decent fishing.

Two reports from Colorado yesterday – one that said Coloradans are the healthiest people with the lowest body mass and the most time spent exercising; the other about another school shooting. Maybe they need to be putting more pasta, mac and cheese, and pizza on the school lunch menu. Sounds like a severe case of carb and sugar deficit.

A couple of weeks back, a friend came over to show us his new phone. I’m not a mobile phone guy but this one caught my attention quickly because I could actually read the screen and see the buttons. I also noticed that he had a strong signal in our house; not all carriers do. He had switched to Consumer Cellular and went on to tell me how much money he was saving, yada, yada, yada. Between Nancy and I, neither one of us can really read the phone screen with any kind of accuracy, especially in high ambient light. We only use a phone for voice so the simplest device and service would be more than adequate. I did a little research, Tom didn’t find any problems and then yesterday there was an article in the WSJ about these new mobile startups. Basically they buy bulk time on the major carriers, wholesale, and resell on a retail basis. In this case, the carrier is AT&T. We looked back for a year and noted that in 10 of the past 12 months, Nancy’s monthly cell phone usage was under 200 minutes and on only two occasions had it gone up to 350. I’ve had a Trac Phone for emergency use for almost 2 years and have accumulated less than 5 minutes over that whole period so I’m not a factor in the equation. Half of those 5 minutes were wrong numbers calling me. The lowest level Consumer plan is 200 minutes costing $15/month; next level is 500 minutes at $20. That’s less than half of what we’ve been paying. You can add texting, internet access and other features for additional fees but we’re just interested in basic voice. The phone itself is $60 for the model that caught my eye but they have several others of different capability levels – even an I-phone coming next month. No contract, month to month only. We could also add another phone to share the minutes for $10 a month. I might eventually do that since the Trac Phone is virtually useless to me because of the small screen characters and micro buttons. Nancy got it for me so that when I’m on the beach and she’s playing bridge, she’ll be able to reach me. That’s happened twice and I think she was just testing to make sure I had it turned on. That’s when I noticed that in the beach sunlight and glare, the screen was totally wiped out for me. Since nobody knows the phone number but Nancy, including me, I knew the call was from her but could never have read it on the screen. Oh yeah, there’s a 5% discount for AARP members so the $20 per month is really $19. You can buy the phone online at the Consumer site or at any Sears store so we decided to check it out the next time we were in Daytona, the closest Sears. Nancy loved it so we closed the deal on the spot. We charged the phone for a couple of hours then called Consumer to do the activation. Since our ATT contract had long since expired, they transferred our old number to the new service in a heartbeat. The other good news was that since we were referred to Consumer by a friend, both of us get a $10 credit on our accounts. So far, no bad news.

Not sure how much more college football my heart can take!!!! I don’t recall another season with so many come from behind, last minute wins. Good news is that none of them involved the Gators. In the end, the national championship will be either a team from the SEC or a team from Florida-as it should be.

Our weather is absolutely perfect and is forecast to remain that way for the next 10 days. By perfect I mean in the low 80’s during the day and mid 60’s at night; mostly sunny with enough cloud cover to keep the garden from cooking. Perfect fishing weather. Doors and windows open, dress code – shorts and Tee shirt. I check the weather at other US locations that I care about on a daily basis and try to envision what I’d be doing if I were there. Still in Bountiful – hiding in bed under a mountain of quilts; ditto Denver and Chicago. In Jersey City, I might venture outside but not for too long. South Carolina, out and about enjoying the warmth. If I golfed, which I don’t, get in a few rounds. Arcadia, out and about but wearing a warm jacket and lined jeans.

Lot’s of stuttering from the meteorologists as the hurricane season officially ends and what had been predicted to be the worst season ever turned out to be one of the mildest ever. That’s not just a “miss” but a ballpark problem. Kind of like that 747 that recently landed at the wrong airport. Of course, in hindsight, they have plenty of reasons why it happened, such as too much dry air but the fact is the prediction model they use is flawed. To me it’s the same as all things globally environmental – way too complex, way too many variables to develop really accurate models. We also had the mildest sunspot activity year in a long time – wonder if they’re trying to figure out how to plug that into the equation? I also saw something about sand and dust blowing off the coast of Africa – another partial to the model equation??? Personally, I don’t understand why they even try to forecast the season – it provides zero information – misinformation actually. Are we supposed to do something different if they say the season’s going to be mild, average, or ferocious? I’m happy they can forecast a path and intensity reasonably well after a storm materializes. Other than that, give us a break and keep the predictions for the lab pool.

I have to report a blunder that will certainly reset your clock. A few posts back I mentioned that parsnip tops look exactly like tomato plants. Erase that. They were renegade tomatoes that had popped up exactly where I had planted parsnip seeds and just so happen to sit in a straight row. I knew that parsnips had a long germination period, but that was nearly a month ago so I was quite surprised when the real seeds finally germinated. Instead of tomatoes or carrots, I would liken these to celery tops – at least so far. I decided yesterday to plant another patch of parsnips and decided to soak the seeds 24 hours before planting so I’m still determined to learn something about growing them this year. It usually takes a couple of seasons to home in on the right spot in the garden.

Other than that, picking cherry tomatoes and butternut squash, the start of the former, the end of the latter. Have a head of broccoli ready by the end of the week. Also picked a few kale leaves to add some green to a pizza last night.

Thanksgiving went well. It started out in the upper 30’s (note the pic showing the covered tomato bushes) but by mid afternoon was close to 70 so the festivities, which were mostly outside on the porch, were just fine. There was plenty of food, plenty of friends and family, and a jug or two of decent red wine. The highlight for me was avoiding the traditional Black Friday late night shopping event. I really don’t know why it didn’t happen but it worked out for me.

Even so, our $$ joined those millions of Black Friday shoppers in an unplanned way. I was out working the garden when Nancy called out that she had a problem and needed some help. The problem was a dead TV. I played with it long enough to verify that it was indeed dead and figured that if it had to go, this was a day of good sales on all things electronic, especially TV’s. I called Tom to have him do a quick search and steer me to the best place to go. He came through with a suggestion to order on-line from Amazon and it could be delivered next day. So far very painless. I am hoping it gets here before the Alabama-Auburn game. Update – it did and was on the game within about 30 minutes of being delivered. These new sets are sure light compared to those tube monsters. I pretty much handled a 46” Samsung by myself and I remember vividly George and I wrestling with a 32” Sony and nearly killing ourselves.

The garden is rapidly filling up with plants and fish carcasses. At this point I only have one row left to plant and by this time next week, that area will be home to 10 cauliflowers and at least that many speckled perch remains. Then it becomes a game of waiting for the freeze to kill off the tomatoes to free up some new space. Typically that first freeze happens by mid December. That row will be home to more celery that has yet to germinate in the guest bedroom.

The jungle is not finished with us yet. I was working in the garden this morning and heard the familiar “Joe, something is wrong” call. There was no panic in the call so I knew it wasn’t a kitchen fire or something requiring a dash to the rescue. No, or very little, water pressure. I have enough experience with that symptom to head immediately for the well and remove the cover from the contactors. When I removed the cover, the well turned on and I could see a fried, baby lizard mixed up in the power wiring. I took a pair of well insulated, long nose pliers and gently removed the body. The pump turned on and brought the pressure up to 50 PSI.

It started raining early this morning so I checked the electronic rain gauge to see how much had already accumulated but it was reading zero. That’s like having a finger cut off (for me) so I went out in the rain to see if it had clogged or had dead batteries. I picked it up and only then learned that some wasps had taken up residence underneath and built a nest which was blocking the transmitter. I managed to put it down in a few microseconds but not before one nailed me on a finger tip. I got some cortizone and ice on it quickly but it still swelled substantially within just a few minutes. Then a little light went on in my brain. I had noticed for the past few days that occasionally, not very often, the TV signal broke up. In fact, last night watching the late news it did the pixel thing a few times. I recalled that the last time this happened it was a wasp nest around the outside TV signal amplifier so I put it on my mental “to do” list to check. So after the rain gauge incident, I went around to the TV pole and checked for wasp nests. None in the power box where the problem was last time. I looked then for the amplifier box itself and didn’t see it. I visually tracked the cable and immediately saw that where the box should have been, was a giant fire ant mound. It was very close to where I had been working on the sprinklers yesterday and I had very carefully avoided it and sprinkled it liberally with fire ant poison. What I didn’t put together was that the ants had built the mound over the amplifier itself so it was buried at least 6” into the mound. In a couple of days, when I’m absolutely certain that the last of the ants is dead, I’m going to rig up some kind of protective box. To recap the last few days – I found a dead lizard and lizard eggs inside the sprinkler control box, a full functioning wasps nest inside the rain gauge, and a fire ant mound encapsulating the TV signal amplifier. The jungle strikes back.

Nancy was tasked to, among other things, bring a dish of Brussels Sprouts for Thanksgiving at Tom’s house. I’m not a giant Sprouts fan but there’s always plenty of other goodies to munch on so I was OK with it. She cast about to fellow cooks for a good recipe and decided to test run those on me. I don’t know which one will make the cut but I can tell you for sure that I am Brusseled out and will double up on carrots or whatever else appears. I made a large bowl of fresh cranberry sauce and am responsible for grilling the turkey on the Holland grill. I think we’re also bringing a cake.

I’ve mentioned the numerous dead bay trees that I’ve cut down or have left for future action. Those are coming down on their own, sometimes in dramatic fashion. Every time we get a storm with substantial wind, the tops of trees or large, dead overhanging branches crash down. I’ve cut down everything that could hit the house or dock so I think generally it’s safe. Yesterday while sitting at the computer a couple of really large branches came down directly in my line of vision. That’s actually the second time that I’ve just happened to be looking when a tree top or branch broke off. I took a couple of pictures to give you an idea of the size branches involved. One pic shows the remaining trunk which will also fall eventually. I knew these particular branches were ready to go and would have cut them off if I could have reached them. The view to the lake is much improved now.

Disaster. I walked up to the mail box this morning and noticed that the sprinkler system had turned on. It’s been off since May, when the rainy season kicked off. I checked the control box and noticed some ants inside but other than that, everything was off. I unscrewed the cover on the box to see exactly what the ants had done and was surprised to find a dead lizard and several lizard eggs. Lizard eggs are white spherical balls about a half inch in diameter. I also noticed that when I threw the electrical breaker that controlled the whole sprinkler system, that particular line of sprinklers didn’t turn off. I suspected that somehow the lizard had caused the line of sprinklers to turn on but resetting the system didn’t turn it off. The valves on each of the three sprinkler lines has an independent manual turn off so I figured I’d just turn off that particular line and probably replace the valve. It was then that I learned that when we installed the sprinkler system, we didn’t install a turn off valve to isolate the sprinkler system from the house so the only way to work on the system is to shut off the water to the house, up at the well and pump. I was able to close the valve on the bad string but it was leaking. I turned off the whole water system since Nancy was gone and spent the rest of the day digging up around the valves. I then turned the main water back on and learned that the leaky valve was leaking enough to fill all I had dug up in about half an hour. Before it totally submerged I scoped the plumbing and saw that this simple valve change was going to be a big deal and take at least a whole day of muddy work. Of course all this was on Sunday so the hardware store was closed and my neighbor with all the parts and pieces was spending the day at church. I decided to just cut the line to the sprinkler system and cap it or put in a manual turn off valve before tackling the bad valve. Joey and Mark had installed the system originally so I need to check the warranty papers and see if they’ll come up to the lake and fix it. If not warranty, how about my Christmas present.

I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to try to grow parsnips. On the off chance that you haven’t ever grown them yourself, a few words. I was expecting them to pop out and resemble carrots but instead they pop out and resemble tomatoes. The first few sets of leaves are a dead ringer for tomato plant leaves. If I didn’t know exactly where I planted them, I’d be pulling them out as renegade tomatoes. Nancy mentioned to one of her bridge friends that we are growing parsnips and she offered an interesting anecdote. Her family loved parsnips so her father decided to grow them. They turned out really good but her father learned that he had an intense allergy to the leaves. When he picked them the first time his hands broke out and swelled up enough to visit a doctor for relief med’s. I’ll be cautious, just in case.

Uh oh, the weather guys are using the “F” word for Thursday. My tomatoes and a couple pepper plants are vulnerable but everything else should be ok. The pepper plants are small and easily covered but you saw the picture of the tomato plants – not so easy to cover. I picked the first few cherry tomatoes just today and would really hate to lose the rest. I really don’t expect us to get much below 40 because we’re so close to the lake and these weather forecasters like to throw their weight around. I also think they’re forgetting my ace in the hole – global warming.

Planted the Chinese cabbage, 9 of 12 starts, and 6 more speckled perch carcasses. I’m holding back on the last 3 as spares to cover any that crash in the next few days. If they all make it, Nancy has a quilting buddy with a garden mostly populated with my spares. And in case you’re wondering why there’s been no fish pictures – I’m catching plenty of fish but none worth a single picture.

Good news and bad in the garden. The good news is that the parsnip seeds have finally germinated. I planted those a couple of weeks back and basically had given up on them. We’ve had two days of on and off rain which must have triggered something because there was two nice rows of plants where I had put in the seed. The bad news is that something dug up one of the mudfish I had buried in the garden. I wouldn’t normally be concerned about that but in the process of getting at the fish they uprooted 6-8 celery plants.

Here’s a pic of those tomato plants mentioned in the previous post. I got Nancy to pose to give some perspective. I’m convinced these are the largest, strongest tomato plants I’ve ever grown. The other pic shows pre-garden cole slaw plants. The larger set is Chinese cabbage, the other is Jersey Wakefield. I’ll plant those in the garden next week. These are January table toppings.

We had an unusually wet couple of days for November and I’m declaring the lake officially full. The definition of full is that while swimming you can access your drink on the dock. November is the driest month of the year but we picked up 2” this week with prospects for more before month’s end. Maybe because of the higher water level, the spec fishing continues to improve. I went out for an hour and a half today and caught 20 fish, about twice the number last week in about the same amount of fishing time. I kept 4 large enough to eat but they are still running small.

At one point during the rain, I went down to the dock to make sure my new egret was doing ok and just to get out of the house. While sitting down there I saw something unusual, a flock of anhingas landed a couple of hundred feet from me. I counted 25 birds. Anhingas are similar to cormorants and it’s not at all unusual to see them around the lake but normally as singles or perhaps in pairs. This is the first time I’ve ever seen so many in one place and clearly behaving as a group.

We took our annual fall trip to Gainesville on Sunday. There’s an arts and crafts show that we’ve attended with Simon and Julia for the past three years. We had a great time and restocked Simon’s larder from here, from Trader Joe’s and from Fresh Market. He’ll have enough stuff to almost last through this semester. They took us to their new favorite Mexican restaurant and I have to admit, it’s one of the best I’ve seen. They have exotics on the menu like you’ve never seen – how about tacos that include pulled goat, beef cheek, or cactus. At the craft show there’s been one booth that has lured me in every year but has never hooked me enough to pull the trigger on a purchase. Since this may be the last year we attend, I just couldn’t resist. Check out the new dock tenant, an egret made of PVC pipe. I sure hope it holds up in the weather. That’s the reason I passed on it last year.

Dove into the thinning task in the garden. Finished the carrots and beets and got a decent start on the lettuce. If even half the lettuce survives we will be in an extremely long position before the end of the year. After two days, it looks closer to 100% survival for the lettuce also. That’s true for cabbage as well. It looks like I got 100% germination on the Jersey Wakefield and the Chinese cabbage which means about 20 more cabbages to be transplanted to the garden in the next couple of weeks. At the same time I planted the cabbage seed, I planted seeds for orange (cheddar) colored cauliflower. It was older seed, I think about 3 years old, and it looks like zero germination. That’s not unexpected and I’ll just replant with another cauliflower variant that is a cross between cauliflower and broccoli. I successfully grew that last year and suspect the seed is not too old. It’s also looking like the spinach seed I planted directly in the garden a couple weeks back was also too old. I’ve got some new seed so no big deal.

When I went out to the garden today there was a crowd of people around the tomato plants oooing and ahhhhing and unanimously announcing that they had never seen plants like these. These were friends of my neighbor, bikers, so not necessarily a group of visiting agronomists but I’m calling them keen observers. I have to admit that, for whatever reason, the tomato plants that I planted in September are the biggest, strongest looking plants I’ve ever grown. I really didn’t do anything different so it must just be the combination of an ever improving soil and near perfect weather conditions. If we can go another month with no frost, there should be plenty of ripe tomatoes coming to go with all that lettuce mentioned above.

Still catching plenty of speckled perch but still too small to keep. The way it works is that the smaller males come into the area where the larger females will eventually congregate to lay eggs. Apparently the females are still out cruising in the deep water and not ready to become moms.