Got past the urologist unscathed. The regular annual checkup is next month and I’m pretty sure nothing’s going on that an occasional glass of red wine won’t cure. George ended up with two operations but seems to be doing fine. The first operation removed the old pacemaker, hopefully all the surrounding infection, and attached the new pacemaker for external operation. Two days later the second operation installed the new device on the other side of his chest. He should be released early this week. So what started out as a simple checkup, ended up being a 10 day hospital stay and a couple of operations.

Still picking lots of cucumbers, tomatoes, and green peppers and the whole garden remains almost bug free. The jalapenos are particularly nice this year – bigger and more deeply colored than I’ve ever seen. I’m not doing anything differently and suspect that the March freeze we got knocked the critters for a loop. Usually by mid June, we are splitting the harvest with a variety of worms, caterpillars, and leaf eaters but this year they are virtually non existent, at least so far. I’ve seen way more Cardinals flitting around but to the best of my knowledge, they don’t eat bugs. What I’ve noticed is that usually by early May, the garden is alive with small white and yellow butterflies along with the standard monarchs or other black winged varieties and that by late May, the little green or black caterpillars are making their marks eating through the garden. And there’s usually some kind of wasp flitting around that lays eggs in the cucumbers so the larva wakes up in a food hall. This year, very few butterflies and, sure enough, no caterpillars. I’m going out on a limb and planting some pole beans and new cucumbers along the new trellis. I would never expect anything from them prior to this year but maybe I can sneak in a bonus crop. All I’ve got to lose is a few seeds and self respect if fellow gardeners’ question my sanity. On the plus side, even if the veggies never materialize, I’ll get to try out the new trellis before the fall crop and see if any modifications are required.

The kitchen windowsill was full of ripe tomatoes so the first major batch of spaghetti sauce was constructed on Sunday. After that, tomatoes should be flowing in at a high rate – loads and loads of green tomatoes on the vines and once they start turning, it happens fast. We’re eating the cherries as fast as we pick them so they won’t be contributing to the sauce pot. Last night Nancy made a pasta dish using shrimp, corn off the cob, and cherry tomatoes as the main ingredients. Delicious.

Our next door neighbor, George, is back in the hospital. A year ago he had a heart valve replaced and a new pacemaker installed. Yesterday he went back to Miami, where the surgery was done, for a one year check up. They found some infection around the leads of the pacemaker and felt it was critical that the pacemaker be removed immediately, if not sooner. So he arrived for a routine check up at 9AM on Monday and was being prepped for surgery at 4AM on Tuesday. Wow! Assuming no complications, he’ll be there 10 days.

Today is Nancy’s quilting day and, more often that not, I make dinner on those days. I decided on the fresh cherry tomato pizza. You make the topping a day in advance so I was busy last night doing just that. I had seen the recipe on TV and wrote down the major points but decided to deviate a bit by incorporating additional items. I started with a couple handfuls of cherry tomatoes cut in half, chopped in fresh basil, fresh oregano, a green pepper, a small onion, garlic, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes and chunks of mozzarella cheese. The original recipe only had the tomatoes and herbs and spices. You mix all this together in a bowl, add lots of olive oil then cover and let sit overnight. You just pour this on the crust, we use Rustic Tuscan 6 grain crusts, and pop in the oven or Holland grill if you happen to have one. It was really delicious and very different from sauce based pizza. I won’t hesitate to make this again while the cherries are coming on strong.

Picked all the remaining corn on Sunday and cut up the stalks for the compost pile. I split the ears into 3 piles; one for us, one for George and Barbara, and one for Esther’s cows. We’ve been eating corn right out of the garden for a few weeks and got only a dozen ears each at the final picking. I’d say from a quantity standpoint, not so good; but from a quality standpoint, incredible. I’ll grow this variety again but maybe hold off a couple weeks later in the spring to plant the seeds. I’ll also try a different garden location which gets more early morning sun.

The NFL is going to give me a problem this year with Tebow going to New England. Not sure how I’m going to deal with a high profile Gator playing for the enemy.

Andrea was a nice storm for us. We got less rain than I had hoped for, 3” against the 6” I had hoped for, but zero wind. I spent almost all of Thursday down at the dock watching the lake rise, reading, and listening to the Coffee House on XM. We’re off to a good start for the summer rains, much wetter than last year, so I’ve got my fingers crossed that we may have enough water for swimming and diving off the dock by August. We’ve had about 16” since March and all we need is another 36”.

I always thought that, by definition, any tomato you grew in a container on your patio was a “patio” tomato. If you had asked me if I was growing any patio tomatoes, I would have said yes. They never did as well as those grown in the garden and I attributed that to their confined habitat. Turns out there are varieties that have been engineered specifically to be grown in containers and I bought some of those seeds to try. Dramatic difference. These guys will only grow to about 3’ compared to 5-6’ on standard garden varieties; the stalks are at least twice the thickness and the foliage is more lush and prolific. I have to be pro active staking the garden tomatoes while these are sturdy, standalone plants. I started them much later than the garden tomatoes so they are just now putting out the first blossoms and I don’t expect any fruit until July. I’m getting my hopes up that this experiment is going to be successful because I can grow these year round by rolling them onto the back porch for the few days that get too cold. Last year I planted regular garden tomatoes in the container but they were just too flimsy to move around without branches breaking off. I’m going to try for year round tomatoes and green peppers this year.

I really hate it that it’s June already. June and July are my bad medical months. That’s when I go in for routine, no problem checkups and come out with trips scheduled for operations and such. The first of these is later this week when I get a blood test for PSA and an x-ray procedure called KUB which is to check on how well my kidney stones are doing. I have zero problems but these tests have an uncanny history of finding something. If my bride wasn’t in the loop, I’d use the obvious solution and bypass the whole thing.

I mentioned that this year’s corn is the best I’ve ever tasted. Nancy says the same thing. George and Barbara say the same thing. Honestly, it’s like eating candy. I’ve never grown and clearly never eaten any triple sweet corn before but can assure you, it’ll happen again next season. The variety is named Serendipity. That’s the downside to growing your veggies – some varieties are so much better than anything you can buy, that it sours you on grocery store produce. Not everything but certainly it’s that way with corn, cucumbers, carrots and a few others. Nancy is whipping up a shrimp based dinner that uses cherry tomatoes, corn stripped from the cob, basil, and onions from the garden. Maybe there’s a green pepper involved. There are a few other ingredients but not much. This dish is the reason I planted cherry tomatoes this year and this will be the first meal using them this season.

Funny story with the cherry tomatoes. I planted one plant which has turned out to be a monster and loaded with hundreds and hundreds of the best cherries ever. Very tender skin and very sweet taste. No splitting or any of the other problems typically associated with cherries. None of this should be. The particular variety was highlighted with a full page ad in the Johnny’s Seed catalog and, along with all the fruit accolades, was a statement about being nematode resistant. I was just about to sign up for a pack of seeds when I saw that they cost $7.95 for 10 seeds. Normally I’d expect to pay $2.50 for 25+ seeds. I decided that no cherry tomato was worth that much and that they were over hyping something new. So I picked another variety and moved on. My system is to go through the catalogs and write down the sku numbers of the products I want and then go online to fill out an order form. When the package from Johnny’s arrived a week later I went through it all and noticed that they had sent me the super variety – I assumed by mistake. Wrong! Turns out the mistake was mine. I wrote down the sku of the high dollar seeds. I never mentioned it to Nancy, we don’t normally discuss seeds, until last night when she said that these were the best cherries she had ever eaten – she has trouble with tough skins. My marching orders going forward are to order this variety in the future, no matter what they cost. One other point – the catalog specifically says not to plant for commercial purposes since the tomatoes don’t ship well, too soft.

I got a new chain for the chain saw and am back cutting my way through the forest. It took a few tries before I figured out how to get the new chain installed properly but once I had it, down went 4 more dead bay trees and a few miscellaneous dead oak branches. Who would have thought you could install the chain backwards? About half the trees I’ve cut are dumped onto the lake shore where I’m hoping they make great breeding grounds for minnows and bluegills and hunting territory for specs and bass when the lake comes back to normal.

We’re getting more rain now. A couple of inches last week but the forecast is for this coming week to drop three times that much. A nice, wet June would be just what the doctor ordered with enough rain to let us swim off the dock again.

No good deed goes unpunished. I posted last week that we painted the patio set, 6 chairs and a table. That inspired Nancy to go buy a new set of cushions. So my $5 project turned into a $200 one. I have to admit the “new” set has brightened the patio. Now I’m working on the dock set, 4 chairs and a small table, and spent yesterday cleaning off the rust and power washing preparing for most of today painting. I started thinking I had plenty of paint with one quart of forest green rustoleum but when the job was done, there was very little paint left. I doubt I could have gotten one more chair out it. Between the two sets we have 10 old cushions so surely we’ll be able to pick out 4 good ones for the dock and not have to get new ones. Here’s a tip – you know those red plastic party cups? Don’t put paint thinner/mineral spirits in them and expect them to hold together for any length of time. Bad idea.

I picked the first ears of corn and the first jalapeno peppers on Sunday. Both were visually perfect and delicious. The corn is a bi-color, triple sweet variety and is, without a doubt, the sweetest most tender corn we’ve ever eaten. Nancy bought a couple ears from Publix which we ate two nights ago – no comparison. Tonight was another colorful meal with green beans, purple potatoes, bi-color corn, cucumber onion salad and steak.

One plant that’s giving me a little heart burn is the tomatillo. I’m only growing it for Tom so I’m not having cravings or anything. It’s by far the biggest plant in the garden and loaded with blossoms – thousands for sure. The plant is 5’ tall and that big across even considering that I have it staked up. So I know the plant is loving the location. Plenty of bees buzzing around, flitting from blossom to blossom so plenty of pollination. But no fruit, not the first tiny tomatillo has made an appearance. How is that possible? All the tomato plants that hit the garden at the same time are loaded with little green tomatoes so what’s up with these Mexican tomatoes. So I called that Ag Center. Nobody knew anything there so I did an internet search on tomatillo culture and sure enough the first site that popped up was a blog discussing the exact same problem. There were several people adding comments who said you needed two plants which was the first thought that crossed my mind but then there were just as many that insisted one would do the job but that a great deal of patience was needed. Apparently these can take much longer than conventional tomatoes and need high heat and low humidity. I’ve got time and heat but also plenty of humidity so the jury is still out on this crop. I had started 3 plants but two got whacked in that late March freeze we had. I think what I’m going to do is start a few new plants and hope they can handle the summer heat to produce a crop in the fall. My only concern is that the one plant I have has an incredible number of blossoms such that if they all produced fruit, I’d be overloaded. So if I had multiple plants……….. what the hell would I do with them all? You can only make so much salsa and right now, I have no idea what else you can do with them.

Let me get this straight, we’ve stopped droning terrorists and started prosecuting journalists. Chicago rules.

Just finished a really crappy job. Literally. A few months back George and I each picked up a load of cow manure, unprocessed by anything but the cows. The loads were roughly 20 CF each. I was judicially using mine every now and again as a layer on the compost pile and keeping it otherwise covered. George was going to do some container gardening but never got around to it and had never bothered to cover his. The other day he decided that he was never going to get the patio garden going and asked if I could use his stash. It was full of water and took us and his golf cart to drag the container down to the garden where I could use it. It must have weighed several hundred pounds. I dumped it out adjacent to the compost pile and proceeded to move it, a shovel full at a time, to the garden. What a job. I mostly put a shovel full at the base of every plant in the garden and went back the next day to chop each pile up so it would be easily absorbed into the ground. Going to be interesting to see how things progress from this point. I will say that all the plants look great, robust and healthy, prior to adding the cow droppings so it will be hard to give it credit if it stays on the same path. If I over did it………

Generally speaking I’m approaching the whole garden differently this year. I’m planting fewer items and giving each more space and being much more diligent about keeping weeds picked. I’m also scanning each plant daily and removing any leaves that look “off”, removing any critters that don’t belong, and carefully staking and tying off wandering branches rather than let nature take it’s course as I have in the past. It’s too soon to say that all this effort, at least an hour a day, will make any difference but it sure looks good.

People frequently ask me how big the garden is and when I tell them it’s roughly 1200 SF they say they just don’t have that much space. The picture below may help with that perception. It shows about 20% of the garden, a 12’ x 20’ patch. In it I’ve planted 8 tomato plants, 8 green peppers, 6 cucumbers, 4 eggplants and a basil plant. The row you see that looks empty is where the eggplants are planted. That was a late planting and they’re still quite small but trust me, they’ll fill in that row by next month. If I didn’t have any space other than this, I’d cut back to 4 tomatoes and 4 pepper plants but add some zucchini squash and bush beans. That would be a well balanced summer garden for our tastes and provide most, if not all, of our fresh produce needs. Depending on where you live, you could turn this space over for two different crops. I did that consistently in Utah where I planted cool weather plants in March or April and then summer/fall plants in late May and June. In Florida I run it continuously 12 months a year with deference to particular seasonal crops.

Picked Grace’s beans and cucumbers. She planted those seeds herself when they visited the first week of April, about 8 weeks ago. Tonight’s meal will include purple potatoes, green beans and cucumber salad. By the end of the week I envision a meal of stuffed green peppers and freshly picked corn on the cob. Chris said that the way he cooks the potatoes is to cut them in half, drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper then roast in a 425 oven for 20 minutes. I weighed them at just over 3 pounds. Not a giant crop for sure but not a total wipe out either. Update – we ate the potatoes and they tasted exactly like regular white potatoes. I don’t know whether I expected a grape flavor or what but to my palate, no difference at all. Supposedly they are more nutritious and certainly they are more expensive but so far as taste……….

Learned something I probably shown have known years ago. I pulled out an aloe plant that was growing underneath another bush and was careful to save some roots. I replanted in a container, watered well, fertilized and set it in a nice sunny spot on the deck. Aloe is really a great plant to have around in Florida since it’s the quickest, surest fix for sunburn that I know. After a few days it looked qu and was turning from green to brown. I watered it frequently, whenever it looked dry, but two weeks into it, the plant was looking worse. I decided to move it out of the sun even though it must be a cactus – which I associate with sun loving plants. Within two days, the great green color had returned and the plant seems to be thriving. So if you try to raise an aloe plant, think shade.

Looks like we’re officially in the rainy season with 6”+ last week and over 3 inches so far this week. All the meteorologists on the tube agree that we have rain chances every day this week and that we’re in the “summer pattern”. What that means is the temp range is 65-95 and the rain chance is 20%-50% every day. Maybe we’ll get the lake back! I’m loving monitoring these storms with the weather station Tom got us for Xmas. I can do things like calculate the rate of rainfall, which in a couple of these storms over the last two days, has been 5” per hour. Up until now, I’d think to myself that it was really coming down hard but now I can actually put a number to it. The lake is showing it and is up about a foot so far this month. Light rain doesn’t impact the lake as much as real downpours because of runoff.

How interesting that the IRS is after Conservative groups and the Justice Dept is after Fox News. This has to be putting the lib media in a bit of a quandary.

This was a big week for us – Mother’s day and our 50th wedding anniversary.
We had a great Mother’s Day with the Lake Mary Carbone’s and a big pasta and ribs dinner. We had enough food that it did duty the next night when Joey and Mark came up for dinner. Then on Thursday, we were treated to dinner at Karlings. Tom, Tina, Simon, Julia and Joanne helped us celebrate the day. And now we have a really elegant silver and gold picture frame and a photo in the works to fill it. For me, one of the highlights was that Nancy visited a u-pick blueberry patch on a quilt shop jaunt and picked 3 pounds of fresh blueberries. I’ll be using them with my breakfast cereal for the next couple of months. Of course, next month is the start of black berry season so maybe I’ll hit it big there too.

The pasta dinner used the last of the 2012 season’s tomato sauce. We had made and frozen so much that I wasn’t sure we’d ever work our way through it – but we did. It’s looking as if the first 2013 batch will happen in June and going into the season, it looks possible that we’ll break last year’s record crop.

Simon came up the next day and spent two days here helping me with the garden, grounds, and various tasks around the place that are better done with two people. We worked our little hearts out and really accomplished more than I had expected – including repainting the patio set. I’ve been wanting to do that for a year or so but every time I get close to actually doing it, I decide I can get more time out of it. Si did manage to get a little dock time in to test his new hammock. Seemed to work just fine and will be ready for his summer in the Smokies.

It’s official, Tommy Jr. got a job with Tribune Corp in Chicago. He finishes up with the Grand Forks Herald at the end of the month and starts his new job 3 days later. He’ll be working on the 19th floor of the Trib building. He’s been wanting to move to Chicago and was prepared to set out this summer, job or no job so it all worked out perfectly. I think he may find the weather worse in Chicago than Grand Forks but we’ll see. Certainly better food and music.

Bumper sticker – “I love cats, they taste like chicken.”

Nancy had her biopsy – nothing exciting about that but afterwards……………… We stopped at a mall so she could return an item purchased earlier. I just stayed in the car and she was back in about 3 minutes. In that 3 minutes the battery in the Toyota crashed. I mean dead, dead, dead – not even enough juice to turn over the solenoid. Batteries used to have the courtesy to get weaker gradually so you knew it was coming but the new generation just gives it up with no warning at all. A passerby was kind enough to give me a jump start and we were only a short distance to an Advanced Auto so 15 minutes and $100 later, we were back on the road. We decided we deserved a nice breakfast so went to Big Rig where I ordered the breakfast special of the day, a Red Neck Grilled Cheese sandwich. That’s a grilled cheese sandwich stuffed with a Denver omelette on Texas toast. Delicious.

Picked the season’s first green beans. I have 3 double rows planted side by side, two weeks apart so we should have beans steadily now through June. The middle row was planted by our great great niece, Grace, and those are starting to blossom at the same time we’re making this first pick so the timing is looking good. The timing is also working out just right on green peppers. Small fruit are appearing on 8 bushes just at the time Nancy is using the last of the ones frozen from last season. Usually there’s a gap but last year we had a longer than usual, warmer than usual winter so we didn’t lose the pepper plants to frost until January. I was actually starting seeds indoors for the current plants while harvesting last season’s.

The current working batch of compost is going to be particularly interesting. George cleans out his Koi ponds once a year and they are loaded with organic material, mostly dead oak leaves. All of it will end up in the compost pile or directly transferred to the garden.

Can you have too many tomatoes? We’ll be able to answer that question this season. I usually plant quite a few in anticipation of fall out as the season progresses. So far the fall out is zero so I can see us ending up with 20 plants.

Before the rain this past week, the lake level was the lowest I’ve seen. The water was about 6” below the last rung on the dock ladder. After the rain, it’s maybe an inch or so above the last rung so about 10 more weeks like that should do it. If I hadn’t got a few loads of lake bottom muck last week, I wouldn’t have any.

This week is turning out to be the perfect weather week to get my bean trellis up and all other hard labor kinds of jobs. The daytime temps are in the low 80’s, the humidity is in the 30%’s, there’s a nice breeze and the sun is shining. If I wait a week to start the job, I’ll be working in the 90’s – that’s temps and humidity. I wasn’t sure I could do it all myself but worked up a plan to do so just in case George was out of the program again. Turns out I did about 90% of it myself and am fairly certain I could have completed it but George saw me starting to hang the wire and came to my rescue. To calibrate you with the picture, the poles are 8’ landscape timbers sunk 18” in the soil on 7’ centers. The wire mesh is 48” and starts 18” above ground. I have a couple hours more work to do on the planting rows but definitely on the downside of the job now. I’m really happy with the way it turned out and have lots of way to use it envisioned. Nancy took advantage of the great weather by breaking out the floor scrubber and did her thing on the tile floors followed by a steam cleaning. She then attacked the windows and did an all house window cleaning. So we were busy bees.

I noticed that the purple potato plants were dying off one at a time so I decided to dig one up to see what was going on. Lots of small, very small, potatoes but also lots of ants. The ants were basically eating the plants. I’ve had ant problems from time to time and maybe purple potatoes are something not meant to be here. I really wanted this crop to be a big success since Chris had gone to all the trouble of bringing me down the sprouted seed potatoes from Jersey. I’ve quit on Okra because of ants too. Certain crops attract them.

Looks like our timing is working out nicely on the tomatoes this year. We are down to the last couple of containers of last years spaghetti sauce and pizza sauce and, as if by magic, there are green tomatoes on several plants. Lots of things can happen between now and when the next batch of ripe tomatoes hits the blender but so far, so good.