Meteors, Corn Sex, Pool Frivolity, and Sunflowers

What a great weekend!  We spent Friday evening floating on the lake with family and friends while we watched for meteors.  I did see a few bright streaks in heavens, but it seemed like other folks were better at keeping an eye on the sky than I was.  I missed lots of good ones, I think, but I didn't miss out on any of the good times.  

Brandon and I spent Saturday at home, recovering from our late night meteor gazing, and catching up on chores.  I did quite a bit of garden gazing and laundry, but Brandon packed his truck full of sculptures in preparation for a solo art exhibition in Illinois that he is installing this week.  

I think the corn I planted is actually going to make some ears of corn!  Corn sex is strange. The tassels at the top of the plants have the small flowers that make the pollen, which the wind knocks loose so it can fall down to the fluffy sprays of silk that have sprouted down below, on the stalk.   

If I look real close at the silk strands, I can see tiny hairs sticking up, which I imagine are helpful for catching tiny pollen grains on the wind.  Once a silk strand catches a pollen grain, it's fertilized and makes a kernel of corn.  I don't have many corn stalks, so I won't know if there's enough pollen grains to fertilize all my silks until the ears develop.  

By Sunday afternoon, we were fully recovered from the late night meteor gazing, Brandon had all his art packed up, and we were ready for friends to join us in breaking in our new pool!  It was just as much fun as I hoped it would be.  Nothing fuels the appetite like swimming, and the food grilled foods and summer garden salads were perfection.   

Getting our pool up so late in the season meant that most of the floats and pool toys that stores have carried all summer are no longer available, as they've been replaced with back to school supplies (boo!).  I did manage to find an inflatable beach ball on the sale rack at the dollar store though, and even though Wendigo helpfully poked a hole in it, we enjoyed hitting the ball back and forth to each other while we were in the water.  Our team record was twenty-nine passes before we let it hit the water!  

Hopefully by next pool season we will have a better way to get in the pool.  Right now, you have to walk down a hill through clumpy grass, step over a ditch, avoid the mud, climb a big ladder, and then cross over the pool wall onto the plastic pool steps.  The steps would be great if they didn't float!  I believe the solution to floating steps is to put bags of sand in the bottom and anchor the steps to a deck with some handy brackets.  Since we didn't have any bags of sand, or a deck, we wrapped a cement block in a chicken feed sack, and placed it on the steps.  It works, sort of, but the steps feel wobbly and the block is in the way.  It's treacherous, and after a few tasty beverages quite challenging! 

The pool water is fantastic though.  Thanks to getting full sun all day, the water is warm enough that it's not painful to get in.  And because it's not close to any tall vegetation, I haven't had to fish out a bunch of leaves and seeds like I had to do with my old pool.  The skimmer and pump with this pool is strong too, so the surface stays mostly bug free.  Even Brandon admits that the pool location we selected is good.  We couldn't admit that when we were laboring to move all that dirt, but now we can. 

It's Growing Fast

I keep taking pictures of the garden to share with you, but the garden is growing faster than I can post them.  Now there are pretty zinnias and sunflowers to admire within in all that green.  

The sunflowers all turn their faces to the sun, so they face east to west.  A friend of mine once said that he could tell who was a hippy because hippies always have sunflowers in their gardens.  My name is Rain, and I grow sunflowers...

On a long drive for work recently, everyone in the car gave accounts of their garden, and we showed off pictures on our phones.  When I went through the list of insects attacking my various plants, I was given some good suggestions on how to manage them, including some easy to use insecticide spray (Seven) that were helping one fella grow the most beautiful green beans I've ever seen.  

My beans look nothing like his tall trellises draped with perfect leaves and beans.  It's tempting to try some bug spray, but I'm going to stick with organic methods if I can bear it.  I did some hand picking and found that if I held a white plastic plate under the bean leaves, when I touched the leaves, the tricky brown beetles would drop onto the plate and I could drown them in my bucket of soapy water.  It required more bending over then spraying would require, I'm sure.  My hope is that as my soil improves, my plants will be strong enough to fight with a little help from me.  We'll see, right?  

The pumpkin vines are really taking off now.  They are getting hit pretty bad by squash bugs (hence the yellow leaves) and I already lost two plants to vine borers.  I expected that, really.  In my old garden I had nearly given up on growing vines because if the borers didn't kill them then a fungus would.  This years garden is sort of experimental, and now I know that if I want to get serious about growing vine fruits, I need to be on guard for borers and maybe use some row covers.  I squished as many squash bugs as I had patience for, and sprinkled some diatomacious earth on the base of the plants.  Will I get a pumpkin before they die?  

Other than two tobacco horn worms, which did some substantial trimming, the tomato plants are growing like gangbusters without any bug problems.  I never put them in cages, so I've lost a few of the ripe tomatoes because they were laying on the ground and I couldn't see them due to the tangle of leaves.  In my garden fantasies, I prune the branches and have tall tidy plants.   

Some of the corn has tassels!

The corn is visited by solid black bumble bees.  They have large yellow pollen sacs on their back legs.  

I'm still amazed by the difference in the plants growing where the turkey was buried (in the back of the photo), which are tall and dark green, and the pale version growing where there was just smothered sod.  Just imagine how well the garden will grow once I incorporate organic matter into the entire thing!

The seeds I spread on the long soil pile that was generated from the pool excavation have had better success than I originally expected.  Mostly the buckwheat is flourishing, and has hundreds of honeybees visiting it each day.  A pair of cardinals spend their time eating the ripe seeds too.  

There are a few sunflowers that managed to grow, and some zinnias and some kind of vining gourds.  I think the tall green plants that look like corn are grain sorghum, which will make good chicken food.  

It's time now to pull up the carpet between the rows and plant some fall crops, if I'm going to do it.  Maybe this will be the weekend that I make it happen!  

Or maybe I'll spend the weekend playing with our dirty puppy and swimming in the pool!

POOOOOL!!!!

Finally, the POOL IS OPEN!!  We did it.  We got the pool put together and filled with water, and oh boy, was it a big job.  All the youtube videos we watched used three or four men to install a pool, but Brandon and I managed to do it ourselves.  It took us two days of hard labor and a day or regular labor, but still, we did it.  We don't ever want to do that again, but we did it!

A giant truck arrived before eight in the morning, and dumped four tons of sand into the hole we've been chiseling for the pool.  Four tons of sand is heavy.  My shoulders and arms were tired from raking it smooth before the sun even burned away the morning mist.  

Wendigo thought we invented the best game ever, and kept us entertained as she played king of the mountain on the sand pile.  Why she wanted to eat so much of the sand, I don't know.

The pool wall is a long piece of metal that unrolls and slips into the meal track that was leveled along the bottom.   

We figured out to put the heavy roll on a piece of plywood so I could spin it and feed out the wall while Brandon put it in the track.  This is the part where the videos said to have people there to hold the wall in place as you work.  Instead of people, we pounded in fence posts and used clamps and bungee cords to hold it in place.  We named one fence post Jamie, and one fence post Joe.  But even with all the help from Jamie and Joe, we still had trouble getting the wall to all fit in the track all at the same time.  So frustrating!  And heavy!

We were so glad to get that part over.  Little did we know, that wasn't even the hardest part.  Then, more raking to get the bottom smooth and to pile sand along the bottom edge.     

After Brandon finished installing the vertical rails along the outside, and the metal piece that fit along the top of the wall, he looked so sweaty and exhausted that I had to take his picture.  He looks like he just crawled out of a mine!  There's just enough room between the pool wall and the embankment to walk, but it's not enough room to move freely when you have to get down on the ground and fit big pieces together with screws.  I heard lots of grumbles coming from the other side of the wall while I raked sand.  

Um.., Brandon, I think we were supposed to put the liner in first before you put those on... Doh!  It's been years since we took the pool down when it was given to us, so we had to do some guessing about how the pieces fit together.  This meant that everything we did, we did it at least three times before we figure out how it should go.  And, of course, we did it in hot and humid weather.  If only we'd had a pool to keep us cool while we worked, right? 

The liner was a beast to install.  I'm not sure if the pool isn't exactly round or what, but when we measured the over lap all the way around, it didn't work like it was supposed to.  Youtube said to make sure not to get it too tight, or the pool wall could collapse, but not to get it too loose, or it would be all wrinkly.   How do we know? We pulled and kicked and struggled with it for hours before we gave up got it right and turned on the hose.  

The whole time I'm kicking wrinkles out of the bottom, I have to wear these stylish foam pieces on my shoes so I don't leave foot prints in the sand.  The backs of my legs are sore in places I didn't realize could get sore from doing an awkward backwards scooting hop over and over.  

Even though we have the liner that was in the pool when we took it down, and it looked to be in good shape, we decided we would never get the holes lined up with the skimmer and the inlet pipe, so Brandon made a run to a pool store for a new liner, pump, and various other hoses, chemicals, and pieces.  

While he was gone, I lined up all the rocks that were generated by our excavations which were piled near the pool hole, hoping to create a visual barrier that will keep us from forgetting to be cautious around the top of the embankment.  We have thoughts and plans about vegetation and decking that would cover the embankment and make access to the pool easier, but that's a project for later.  

By Sunday evening, the pool was full of water, the filter and pump leaks were under control, and we finally got to swim.  Ahhh.... it was definitely worth all that work.  If you are looking for me during the remainder of the summer - you can find me at the pool!

Pickle Dreams and a Fence to Keep A Donkey at Bay

I've always wanted to try making fermented pickles, and now that our good neighbor has a cucumber patch that's producing faster than he can eat, my pickle dreams are coming true.   

Once again, our little kitchen was a cool oasis on a hot summer day.  An oasis filled with piles of overgrown cucumbers!

The fermented pickle instruction that I found on-line said to use grape or oak leaves in the brine to add tannin to preserve crunchiness.  I picked a few wild grape leaves, but most of them have been devoured by Japanese beetles, so I added a handful of green oak leaves from our big oak tree.  The leaves had lots of spots.  I hope oak leaf spots don't taste funny.  

Most of the cucumbers are much bigger than the average pickle, but I put the smallest ones into some cold water to soak for a while before I put them in a big glass jar with the leaves, some little onions from the garden, a few spoonfuls of dried dill, and some really salty water.  After the first day, little bubbles started to form along the top of the jar, so I knew there was some bacterial action.  On the second day we tasted the first one, and it was pretty good!  Crispy, and salty.  On the third day we tried another, and it was a little more bitter and made my tongue feel tingly.  Still crunchy though.  At some point I need to put them in the refrigerator to calm the bacteria so they don't go soggy.  

In my quest to figure out how we can use more of our cucumber hoard, I stumbled upon several references to cucumber water.  How fancy!  I loaded a jar full of ice, cucumber slices and water and took it to Brandon, who was outside working on the fence where it was sweltering.   

He was so hot I probably could have handed him ice water with old banana peals floating in it and he would have drank it, but after a big gulp of cucumber water he said "Hey, I like that!"  We've been having cucumber slices in water ever since.  Cold cucumber slices are a nice snack once the water is gone too.  And, they feel nice on my eyelids when I want to pretend I'm at a comfy spa instead of a hot barn yard.  

Even Wendigo likes to munch a cold slice.  

Can you see how Brandon is tying the corners and braces together with wire?  The wire it attached to hardware pieces that ratchet it really tight.  This is one intense fence - the posts are braced and then tied tight together with wire.  Surely, as our neighbor said, it will keep a miniature donkey at bay!

The fence officially has four complete sides now.  The longest side was no problem with the fence pulling method we are using, which employs to hand wenches to get the top and bottom of the fence really tight.  Because the ground on the long side had a slight dip, once the fence was pulled tight, I had to stand on it to bring it back to the ground so we could attach it to the posts.  The next step before the fence is done is to install some gates.  Once the gates are in place, this fence with be donkey capable!

Freezing Bountiful Corn

Even though our own garden is less than bountiful with human food so far, thanks to generous friends and gardeners, we've been gifted a bounty of corn and cucumbers.  

Brandon and I were having grilled corn for as many meals as we could, but we weren't making much of a dent in our pile of cobs.  Time to test out my new kitchen for bulk food preservation!  Exciting, right?  

The cats were very interested in my pile of husks, and couldn't understand why I didn't do that messy job outside.  I've never loved my air conditioner as much as I have for the past two weeks.  It's so hot outside, and humid!  Like a sweaty jungle.  The windows are dripping with moisture every morning.  It rains a little every day, and sometimes the sun glares while it's raining!  It's steamy out there, cats, so I'm husking corn in the air conditioning and watching the jungle grow through the windows.  

I remember my father-in-law cutting corn from the cob and cooking it with margarine before filling freezer bags.  

I cooked mine briefly with some butter and a few onions and a red pepper.  If I remember, my father-in-law's corn was creamier, I think, but this corn is very tasty.  Maybe I was stingy with the butter?  

I've been sneaking corn into all our meals.  Even adding it to soups, beans, or just as a side dish to sandwiches.  All sandwiches get cucumber slices these days!

I froze the corn in pint sized freezer bags.  Now I can thaw, heat, and serve - how handy!  The kitchen handled this messy food preservation task with ease.  Next up - pickles.