Time to dig out the canning kettle

Or, more accurately, the pressure canner.

The green beans are just about ready to pick, and I always pressure can them. It's odd -- canned green beans are one of the things that food snobs are fond of mocking. I'm not sure why. Must have something do with the idea that if the produce isn't so fresh it still has caterpillars crawling on it it's not any good. I don't know. . . having seen how many cabbage worms can come floating to the surface when I cook fresh broccoli from the garden, I'm fine with vegetables being throughly cooked. If there's going to be any added protein, I'd rather not eat it rare. But, as usual, I digress.

Using the pressure canner is one of those things that makes me a tad nervous. Not as nervous as it used to, not since the top blew off a jar of beets in the canner a couple years ago, but it still makes me nervous. The beets experience, which did involve an interesting noise, demonstrated that even if a jar does blow up, the canner is going to contain the mess. We're not at risk of being hit by shards of glass if we happen to be close to the stove when a jar lets go. So I will can beans, both the bush type and pole, and then divide up however many jars there happen to be between various family members.

Beans are the only thing I'll probably use the pressure canner for this year. The only reason I canned beets a couple years ago is we were given a 5-gallon pail full of them. If I have to buy beets, it'll be for purposes of pickling, and pickled beets can be done in an ordinary canner.

I had decided I wasn't going to do much canning this summer. If we're going to be snowbirds, I don't need the hassle of trying to figure out what to do with multiple cases of home-canned food. On the other hand, I'm going to be dealing with the beans no matter what. . . and if I have to deal with beans, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing to buy some of those Michigan peaches the fruit stand has. They are remarkably good peaches, and it was kind of nice having multiple jars of them on hand when I bought a 1/2 bushel to preserve a couple summers ago. Or, if not actual canned peaches, maybe get at least enough to do some peach jam. And if I'm going to go through the hassle of peeling peaches, how much more work would it be to also think about some roasted garlic and tomatoes pasta sauce? The recipe only makes about 7 pints -- how much space could 7 pint jars possibly take up? And maybe some bread and butter pickles. . . and pickled cauliflower. . . and it's going to be a good year for apples. Surely some apple marmalade and some canned apple pie filling would be nice to have with us, too.

I think I need to buy more lids.

(When that bottle blew in the pressure canner, the most surprising thing was how neatly it did it. The glass broke in a nice, clean line right about where the shoulder of the jar is, the part where it curves in to start forming the neck. It wasn't a straight line all the way around but it was close. And the World War II era graphic intrigues me. I did not realize they were still using zinc lids and wire bale jars in the 1940s.)

Willpower

I have spent an inordinate amount of time volunteering at the museum this summer, far more than I had ever intended to, but a combination of factors -- grant money, an opportunity to take care of deferred maintenance, and the unexpected availability of a fulltime volunteer for a few weeks -- led to my being there several days a week for most of the past 8 weeks. I spent enough time either at the museum or dealing with museum-related stuff, in fact, that I realized yesterday that I'm about a micron away from Burnout.

That realization hit me in the middle of a phone call. We have been dealing, more or less, with an issue that dates back quite a few years, back to way before I got involved with the museum and was not around for any of the project details. However, I'm the unlucky fool who now deals with the museum's various electronic issues: email, Ebay sales, Amazon.com book sales, our desperately-needs-to-be-updated web site, and our Facebook page. Which means that for the past couple of weeks I've been going back and forth via email with a person who doesn't seem to get that (a) I'm a volunteer; (b) I had nothing to do with the original project that she's now asking questions about; (c) I'm not the person who decided verbal agreements were all fine and that documentation was something the historical society didn't need to bother with; (d) did I mention I'm a frelling volunteer? You know, V-O-L-U-N-T-E-E-R. As in a person who does stuff for nothing with no compensation other than an occasional attagirl. Dealing with headaches created by other people a decade ago falls way above my pay grade.

Anyway, after about the 17th email asking about nonexistent documentation, I tracked down a person who was around when the original project was done. And as our phone conversation progressed he made the mistake of asking me the same series of unanswerable questions the archivist was asking. That's when I lost it. And vented. A lot.  It's been a frustrating summer -- the volunteer who was on one level a tremendous help was on another a major headache (someone had to find stuff for her to do; that someone was me), we've been in limbo over our heritage grant (the first disbursement was supposed to be July 1; we finally got it this week), we had a donation dropped off where the donors seemed totally self-assured that we were going to put their item of furniture in a prominent place immediately (I am still moderately amazed I managed to keep smiling instead of telling them where to shove that large, awkward item when they gave every sign of expecting me to start pushing stuff around immediately to squeeze the damn thing in),  and we had that weirdness happen with the donor showing up six years after the donation wanting to pick up things we don't remember ever having. None of it's been fun -- and volunteering is supposed to fun. By noon yesterday it hit the point where the Fun Stopped.

That's when I logged out of gmail for the museum and promised myself I won't look at it again until I am physically back at the museum, which will be tomorrow. It's now been over 24 hours and I'm still managing to ignore it.When I do go back to it, I'm going to set up an automatic "out of office" message (assuming such a thing is possible) warning people that they cannot expect instant answers. The museum is 100% volunteers; we do not (and cannot) function with the same mindset as the desk monkeys still trapped in full-time jobs.

I will admit that I'm really, really happy we're going to close for the season soon. Three more weeks and the "open by appointment only" sign goes up on the door, the voice mail gets updated to say "email us. No one ever checks the phone," and I put myself on a schedule of checking emails just often enough to comply with the rules for selling stuff on Amazon and Ebay. We really, really need to increase our membership rolls, and soon because I can tell I'm getting close to walking.

Oh well, maybe a winter wandering around the Southwest in the Guppy will give me the energy to do one more year. Which, now that I think of it, is what I told the S.O. when I joined in 2012: I'll give it five years. This is actually my 5th summer at the museum, but I think I'll go by calendar anniversaries and not the number of seasons. Wish me luck that no other weirdness hits the fan between now and September 2..

Why does the CIA still exist?

I've been reading Ultimate Sacrifice, a book that links the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Central Intelligence Agency, and organized crime (aka the Mafia). I'm not very far into it so can't comment much on the book itself, although it does seem like the authors spend a lot of time hashing over minutiae and don't seem to have much of a clue in terms of following a coherent narrative line. One thing is super clear, though, and that's how useless the CIA was back then.

It's unreal. The CIA apparently had a gazillion people working for them -- their "station" in Miami apparently employed 3,000 people. You read that right. Three thousand! They're in the heart of the Cuban exile community. And guess what? They can't obtain any reliable intelligence from Cuba. They keep trying to plant spies, deep cover agents, inside Cuba and failing. Their would-be spies end up arrested or dead. But does that deter them from plowing ahead with plans to assassinate Castro? Nope. Apparently the CIA higher-ups had the same attitude as the cockroach general in the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics: doesn't matter how many foot soldiers get squashed, there'll always be replacements.

And why is the Castro government so good at catching CIA spies? Because the CIA had already  managed to build a nasty reputation for meddling and murder in Latin America, thanks to activities like engineering the overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government a few years earlier. The CIA trained assassins to target Guatemalan officials and activists. Castro knew what the U.S. government in the form of the CIA was capable of and prepared accordingly.

Guatemala was, of course, a pattern the CIA followed for years, usually with disastrous results for way too many people. Name a decade and you can find a CIA operation that turned out to be a Colossal Blunder. In the 1970s they helped engineer the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chile, which led to years of oppression of the Chilean people by a murderous dictatorship. In the 1980s they supported Bin Ladn and helped create the Taliban in Afghanistan.

What's even more bizarre is that a good deal of the time they were actually working at cross-purposes with the rest of the government. The State Department would be pursuing one option through diplomacy while the CIA was busily doing the exact opposite with its covert operations. They would deliberately undermine the diplomats.

And then when you add in the fact that most of the time the "intelligence" they were supposedly gathering turned out to be wrong. . . Why does that agency still exist?  

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

Miner's Castle

 It's been an odd summer, one that's kept me from blogging about certain topics in a timely fashion. I should have said something about Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore (aka PIRO) right after we were there in June, but I never quite got around to it. Oh well, better late than never.

PIRO is located on the south shore of Lake Superior between Munising and Grand Marais, Michigan. It's a typical water park -- long but narrow. The enabling legislation for the lakeshore and river parks usually limited just how far away from the water a park could go. End result can be a park that's many, many miles long but only a quarter of a mile wide.The National Park Service as an agency is 100 years old this year; PIRO is exactly half that age -- it was created in 1966. The park includes some spectacular shoreline (sandstone cliffs, sea caves carved by wave action, giant sand dunes) as well as lovely beaches and numerous waterfalls. The area is a favorite with sea kayakers, and tour boat operators do a pretty good business in the summer. One tour operator has glass bottom boats and cruises over a number of shipwrecks, which I'm told are quite interesting.

Pileated woodpecker.

We did not do any boat tours; we stuck to the land and visited places relatively easy to get to, like Munising Falls, the Log Slide, and Miner's Castle (shown above). Although it's not obvious in the photo, there is a paved path leading to Miner's Castle where there's an overlook hiding behind those trees to the right of the rock formation. Miner's Castle used to have a third "turret," but it came tumbling down during a bad storm a number of years ago. Miner's Castle is one of those typical NPS sites: lots of signs up warning people to stay behind the fence and lots of footprints in the dirt providing ample evidence people cannot read. I'm not sure if anyone's managed to kill themselves by clambering around on those rocks for the fun of it, but I do know a guy was convicted of murder a few years ago for shoving his wife off a cliff at PIRO.

The Pickle Barrel house.

In any case, our almost-a-windshield tour consisted of driving from Munising to Grand Marais, having lunch in Grand Marais, and ambling back. Grand Marais, of course, is noted for the Pickle Barrel house, which is now a museum. It wasn't open -- I don't believe I've ever seen it open, come to think of it. I have no idea what its hours are, but they're apparently pretty limited. There are sites within Grand Marais that are part of PIRO, like the old Coast Guard lifesaving station, but the Pickle Barrel isn't one them. We looked at the lifesaving station from the road, said, yep, definitely looks like a Coast Guard facility, and headed for something more interesting: lunch off a food truck.

Sable Falls

I repeat. A food truck. In Grand Marais. Apparently hipster Meals on Wheels are now everywhere. It was not a bad burger. A tad overpriced, but when you've got a food truck in the middle of nowhere your profit margin has to be extremely thin. I was willing to pay a little extra just to support the novelty factor -- although using that logic I should have gone running out to buy a frozen treat when the ice cream cart bicycled through the campground on Saturday. For a brief moment, it was like being back in Atlanta, except there the Mexican entrepreneurs had push carts. I used to wonder just how many miles those guys walked every day. . . but I digress.

Anyway, ambling back to Munising we stopped at Sable Falls. Lots of steps down to the river to admire water running over rocks, and then lots of steps back up to the parking lot. I'm going to say it was worth it. It did actually look like a waterfall, unlike some of the others that were suffering from the dry spring. Munising Falls, for example, looked more like someone had maybe left a garden hose trickling over the edge of the bluff. It was, to be blunt, a tad underwhelming.

Munising Falls

As part of my personal trip down Nostalgia Lane, as we headed west, I pointed out a couple NPS structures I had Determined Ineligible back in 2006. They still look Ineligible, although maybe if they continue standing long enough (they are being used and maintained and are in Good condition) they'll slide into National Register eligibility based on their association with the park's history. One never knows. . .

Nifty resource education

Next stop was the Log Slide. It was interesting on multiple levels. First, there's an open field adjacent to the parking lot. Hiding in a clump of spectacularly overgrown lilac bushes is the remnant of a log cabin. If you look hard, you can spot one corner of the ruin sticking out of the bushes. There is a really nice little wayside explaining the cabin ruin. I was impressed: a structure left to moulder in place and integrated into resource education. The usual approach to an unwanted cabin would have been to remove every trace of it and pretend people never lived there, do the usual creating untrammeled wilderness fantasy. Not this time.

Logging high wheels and a logging sled

On the way to the Log Slide, we passed a set of logging high wheels on static display. They look to be in reasonably good shape, no doubt because they're sheltered under a roof. They're about the size of the set the museum owns. In looking at them and at the set at Hartwick Pines SP I've realized that the museum's set might be missing a part or two, but odds are no one will ever notice when they're reconstructed and on static display, too.

The Log Slide itself is an area at the edge of the Grand Sable dunes where supposedly logs were once rolled on to a flume and slid down to Lake Superior to be transported to the mills. Idiots Visitors can now experience the thrill (?) of sliding several hundred feet down a giant dune and then hiking back up. Why anyone would want to do it is a mystery to me, but people do. There were half a dozen pairs of shoes and sandals sitting by the sign warning people that it was a quick trip down and a long hot hike back up -- once again, evidence that people either can't read or are stupid.

Note the graphic that accompanies all the cautions. People ignore it, of course. Accidents are what happen to other people.

Personally, after seeing a warning that although you might reach the bottom in under 5 minutes it was going to take you at least an hour to climb back up, I'd be content to just walk to an overlook and admire the view of the Lake. Which is what we did. From the overlook we could see the Au Sable Light Station. I toyed with the idea of doing the hike to it, but the S.O. didn't seem too enthused.

Au Sable Light Station as seen from the Log Slide overlook

And, to be honest, it is a typical Light Station for its time: a clone of the Outer Island Light Station at Apostle Islands and a whole bunch of others with a dime-a-dozen Poe tower and the keeper's quarters with the clipped gable roof line. See one, you've seen them all. And I should know, having seen a bunch of them: 1870's government cookie cutter construction in action. The Log Slide is a nice day use area; there are restrooms and multiple picnic tables which are dispersed in a pattern that prevents it from feeling crowded. It's a good stop for anyone visiting the park.

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore headquarters building.

We hit a few overlooks along the way, concluded that Lake Superior is indeed a large lake and on that particular day a really amazing color, and eventually wound up at Miner's Castle and then in Munising. Our last stop was at Sand Point, which is another former Coast Guard lifesaving station now being used by the National Park Service. It's the Park headquarters. If I was still doing the List of Classified Structures, I'd ding it for maintenance issues. The paint is starting to flake and, you know, I could be wrong but I don't think trees are supposed to grow out of chimneys.

Yes, the tree is growing out of the chimney.

The beach along there is really nice, though, and popular with the locals. It doesn't get quite as much tourist traffic as some of the others in the area. The parking lot was pretty full, but we managed to find a slot. Next time we'll bring lawn chairs like the regulars.

I think I may have figured out what to do with the ruin of a boat the museum owns. Fence it off and let it rot.

Freight cart update

I mentioned a few weeks ago that the museum's Railway Express freight cart was in the process of being rehabbed. This is what it looks like now.

Dave, the guy who worked on it, did an amazing job. I wasn't sure it was actually salvageable when he began because there was so much dry rot. All the boards for the bed of the cart had to be replaced, the wheels were in horrible shape, and in general it was teetering on the cusp of not being worth saving. But Dave pulled it back from the brink.

When the museum closes for the season, we'll move it to a slightly less exposed position under the pavilion roof and put it on jack stands for the winter. I've been wondering it it would be possible to have it shrink-wrapped like a boat. Tarping it won't work. We tried tarping the fire hose cart and failed. The wind ripped the tarp off in record time. I'll have to see if there's anyone in the Baraga area who does shrink-wrapping and just how much it would cost. Given how many hours Dave put into that cart, it would be nice to keep it looking good for more than one season.

The fact the freight cart is looking so good once again has me wondering why the historical society put the storage building on the slab backwards. Back in the '90s, about the same time the museum was being built, the historical society had a large concrete slab laid. They needed a place for the high wheels and a few other items -- the plan was that eventually they would build a pavilion to shelter things. The logging high wheels and a few other things sat on the slab for years; no pavilion. Then in about 1999 or 2000, the society was given a one car garage. It was moved to the site and placed on the pavilion. But, as I've noted before, the garage door is on the wrong end. It faces the lake. If it faced the highway, it would really easy to move the small carts indoors for the winter. But nope, it faces the wrong way.

The facing the wrong way might not be quite as much of an annoyance if there wasn't that tractor sitting on the slab next to the storage building. We could roll things down it and around the corner. As it is, having an ancient McCormick Deering with steel wheels parked there makes things a bit awkward. Although maybe now that the pavilion is done, we should consider moving the tractor so it's under the pavilion, too, instead of parked awkwardly out of sight of museum visitors. I doubt that having that tractor sitting where runoff from the storage building roof drips right on to the engine is doing it much good.

I am occasionally tempted to speculate as to why the garage got put on the slab facing in the wrong direction, but given how many odd things I've stumbled across since I began volunteering a garage door in the wrong location is a minor issue. We are able to roll the hose cart around on the grass and get it into the building for the winter, but can't do it with the freight cart because it's more fragile and has one wheel that won't turn. One of these days I'll have to see if we can scare up enough grant money to put a garage door in on the other end -- it would make life a little simpler.

Things that make a person wonder

The Michigan primary election that does stuff like thin out the herd of candidates for Congress was this past Tuesday, the 2nd. The person who's currently the Congress critter from Michigan's First District decided not to run again so there was actually a fair amount of competition. It can be depressing some years to see how an incumbent's decision to run again can stifle the competitive instincts in way too many politicians. Even the opposing parties will look at the incumbent's decision to keep wasting space in Washington and decide not to run anyone against him or her.

In any case, this year there was some competition. Three Republicans and two Democrats were vying for slots on the ballot in November. One of the three Republicans is the useless sack of fecal matter that currently represents this area in the State Senate; turned out I'm not the only person who considers him useless because he finished third. I was hoping this meant we wouldn't be stuck with him much longer, but no such luck -- he's only midway through his state senate term and didn't have to resign that seat in order to run for something else this year. No doubt he'll try for Congress again in 2018 because that's when he'll be term limited out for state office here in Michigan.

Oh well. Can't win 'em all.

But here's what makes me wonder. On Monday, the day before the election, a postcard dropped into our mailbox inviting us to attend a meet and greet with Lon Johnson, one of the Democrats running for Congress. The card said, and I quote, "You're invited to a town hall meeting, meet Lon Johnson - Candidate for Congress." We got the card on August 1, which means it was mailed the previous week. The town hall meeting is scheduled for August 17. The poll numbers must have been looking damn good for Johnson if his campaign staff felt comfortable sending out meet and greet cards almost a full week before he was officially the candidate.

As it turned out, he did win by a large margin -- over 60% of the vote. Not much of a surprise, actually, when he'd had a very active campaign beginning in the spring while his opponent was so low profile we didn't realize he was running until just a couple days before the election. Still, mailing those cards early has to make a person wonder just how much of the election results was determined by whatever is left of the Democratic party machine in Michigan and how much was determined by the voters.

Winter is coming

I am realizing this month just how much planning can go into being a snowbird. The S.O. and I are planning to do some ambling with the Guppy this coming winter. We figure we'd better do it now because we're not going to get any younger. We bought the Guppy so we could travel so that's what we're going to do while we're still hale and hearty enough to hit the road without terrifying other drivers and to survive doing the various tasks involved in setting up and tearing down each time we camp.

Anyway, part of the planning for the travel does entail stuff like thinking about where we're going and maybe making reservations. For at least part of the winter, we intend to just sit in one spot -- Safford, Arizona -- so that meant looking for an RV park that does extended stays. Naturally, the nicer one is already booked full. We're now on a waiting list for it. In the meantime, as a fallback, I'm trying to get us into the other one, the one that's still so new the landscaping consists of concrete slabs and vegetation that's maybe knee-high. The Younger Daughter checked both places out and recommended the one that's been around for a while. She also said the manager warned her they fill fast. Unfortunately, the older park isn't very big, has a significant number of regulars, and the tiny number of vacancies it had two weeks ago are gone now. Hence, we're on a list. But if we don't get into that one, I'm sure we'll find something, although it might not be quite as close to where Tammi lives.

But that isn't the only sort of planning one ends up doing when thinking about snowbirding. Right now it's canning season. It's the time of year when I'd normally be assembling the various supplies, checking to make sure there were enough lids on hand, replenishing the vinegar and sugar stashes, and flipping through various recipes. Except there's a problem with planning on canning: if we're going to be snowbirds, we're going to winterize the house. You know, disconnect the water, drain the system, and turn off the heat. That means we can't leave anything here that would be damaged by freezing. Like canned goods. They freeze, they expand, seals get broken, stuff rots. Or will rot once it gets to be spring and things thaw out. So how much canning do I want to do if it means I have to take everything and divide it up between the Older Daughter, the Grandson, and the storage space under the bench seat in the Guppy? I already know I'm going to be pressure canning a lot of green beans -- that's one thing that's doing really well in the garden this summer -- so just how many jars of pickles and relishes and jam do I want to deal with, too? Not to mention blueberry jam, canned apple pie filling, and a few other things. Just how well-traveled do I want my apple marmalade to be?

And, speaking of stuff freezing, what do I do with the houseplants? I don't have many, but I have a hunch that they're going to feel like there's a lot more if they all get transferred to the Guppy in a few months. Guess that's something I'll have to figure out before summer's over. I know there are people who travel with plants -- I've seen them in campgrounds -- but I'm not sure I want to be one of them. 

Okay. Who's been stuffing the ballot box?

The election is several months away, but we've already been experiencing shenanigans at the museum. We have a temporary exhibit this summer, Politics and Voting, and just for the heck of it we decided to put some milk bottles on a table labeled with the four best known candidates' names: Clinton, Trump, Johnson (Libertarian), and Stein (Green Party). The sign tells people to "vote" with their spare change -- in other words, make a tiny donation to the museum.

Knowing that people aren't inclined to toss coins into a totally empty bottle, I salted all four. Each milk jug had $1.50 in assorted coins in it when we opened for the season. I noticed that the level seemed to be climbing fastest in Trump's bottle (something I consider an ominous sign, but that's not the subject of this post). I decided to check to see just what was happening.

As I feared, Trump's bottle had the most coins in it. Both Johnson and Stein had received a few votes, too. But Clinton? This is where shenanigans come in. Not only has no one voted for her, someone's been stealing the "ballots" that were there. She started off with $1.50. As of this afternoon, there's only $1. Not only is she not gaining any votes, she's going backwards.

What is it with Fox News and anger?

As I've mentioned before, one of my long-time hobbies is pen palling. I've got pals I've been corresponding with for over 40 years now. Several of my pals have mentioned that since they slid into the golden years their now-retired spouses have become addicted to cable news programs.

I know the feeling. Back in Atlanta when I was working but the S.O. was a man of leisure, he developed this bizarre addiction to CNN. I don't think he had it on all day, but it did seem like he watched way more Wolf Blitzer than any normal human should. In retrospect, I guess it could have been worse. He could have drifted into watching Fox News. Not likely, because we've been calling it Faux News for years, but you never know. A number of my pals are themselves pretty moderate in their political views, basically right in the middle or even slightly to the left in their leanings, as were their spouses, but somehow the men in their lives got seduced by Fox. Maybe it's the lure of all those young, female, blonde news readers. . .

Anyway, it's become apparent that sooner or later if you're a die hard Fox News viewer you slide into being permanently angry. You're pissed off all the time about everything. In the past few years I've gotten a number of letters in which pals describe just how hard it is to live with someone they thought they knew but who has now become a contender in the World's Angriest Man contest. And, as one pal described her significant other's descent into the abyss, it's like the more they watch, the more they have to watch. Her husband used to have hobbies. He golfed. He fished. He puttered around in a workshop. Now he sits, watches Fox News, and rants.

I can understand the news media lying, either through omission (the stories that never get covered) or on purpose. The news media in this country has been doing both for as long as the United States has existed. The idea that the news media are supposed to objective is a fairly recent fantasy. What I don't understand is slanting the news in a way that seems designed to trigger rage on the scale that Fox News does.

Maybe it's just coincidence. Maybe the angry Fox viewer already leaned towards xenophobia, misogyny, and irrational anger and it just took time for that side of their personality to come out. Maybe the spouses were jerks all along, but my pals never noticed during the decades they were both busy with work. Retirement arrives, they're together 24/7, and suddenly it's holy wah, I'm married to a Bill O'Reilly fan!

I don't know. It's another of life's little mysteries. I do know that every time I read one of those letters from a pal wondering what's wrong with her spouse -- is Fox viewing a warning sign for the onset of senile dementia? Does she need to start looking into nursing homes that specialize in memory care? -- I'm relieved my biggest complaint about the S.O. is he's not a morning person.

Gardening

Potato plant

I finally managed to get into the garden to do some serious weeding yesterday. I started off by pulling the remaining radishes -- they're going to seed so it's time to remove them -- and then went looking for the cucumber plants. The weeds had gotten tall enough to pretty much hide the vines, but turned out they are there, growing fairly vigorously, and starting to bloom. I may actually get enough cukes to make pickles without having to resort to buying some from the fruit stand this year.

It would be nice -- last year the chipmunks wiped out most of the plants just as they started to sprout, and the year before that I think it was drought. Or maybe poor soil. We have one area in the garden where it seems like no matter what we do to it -- compost worked in, commercial fertilizer, treatments to correct the pH, you name it -- nothing wants to grow particularly well. I'm thinking seriously about marking that space off, planting clover there, and letting it stay fallow for a couple years.

I also finally got my baby rhubarb plants set out. Last summer I saved a lot of rhubarb seeds just for the heck of it. You know, almost no one grows rhubarb from seed. The usual method is to divide up an existing clump. That's how all of our rhubarb wound up where it is. We either transplanted existing rhubarb or bought live plants. But when one of the rhubarb plants bloomed last year, I decided to let it go all the way. Usually we cut the flower stalks off, the theory being that you always want the plant to put its energy into its roots and not into seeding, but last year I ignored the nascent stalks, let them flower and seeds form, and then bagged a bunch of the seeds.

Back in May, I planted about a dozen seeds in peat pots with two seeds to a pot. Of all the stuff I started from seed, the rhubarb took the longest to sprout and had the lowest germination rate: only two pots had any seedlings appear. In contrast, when I started zucchini, the rate was 6 out of 6. This helps explain why although the rhubarb plants will have a gazillion seeds, all of which look like they'd travel on the wind pretty good, a person doesn't look around and see our yard being taken over by rhubarb the way oregano and chives have overrun everything (every time we mow the lawn by the Woman Cave I find myself craving Italian food).

Oregano in bloom. Bees love it.

In any case, there was an empty space in our row of rhubarb so yesterday I planted the two little tiny baby rhubarb plants in that area. Rain was predicted so I figured it would be good to get them in the ground before it rained, not after. I put a marker by each so we won't accidentally smother them when we mulch around the other plants. Now all I have to do is hope they survive. Because we have both kinds of rhubarb in the garden -- red and green -- and both kinds flowered, I'm a little curious to see what the plants end up being. With cross pollination, either is possible.

Rhubarb seeds

The rhubarb, incidentally, is our one gardening success story. Back when the S.O. was young, the rhubarb was in the orchard, and that's where it stayed for many years. It seemed to be fading into nothingness there, though, so we tried moving it a couple times. It did a little better, but not by much. Finally, maybe 10 years or so ago, we moved it to its present location. It loves it there. We went from feeling lucky if we got enough to bake one pie to having enough of a surplus that I can give quite a bit away and still have a dozen quarts or more of frozen rhubarb stashed for use throughout the year. If the rest of the garden ever did as well as the rhubarb does, I'd be a happy camper.