May planting

For four days rain and hail pelted Torrey. Then the wind blew. Then it rained a bit more. Once the sun came out, the muddy garden soil took two days to dry enough to support Bob. I didn't trust it for another full day. Bob says I was just being lazy and avoiding all the planting. He may have a point, but don't tell him I said so.

Bob's fabulous irrigation system makes planting so easy. My theory is if anything dies I can blame his lousy irrigation system.


We have 20 tomato plants to put in. The nicest ones are from Will, who gave us heirloom varieties. I immediately lost the nice tags he put in each plant so I don't know what varieties I have. (Will, I'm testing your blog-slogging tenacity here. Are you reading this?) I'm addicted to Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes, so I planted those next. I call 'em "breakfast tomatoes". Here I am beating a tomato cage into submission.



Bob created a little paradise for his asparagus plants. The mail ordered plants resemble little bunches of dead ropey roots. It will be a miracle if they grow.




I'm getting the next pile of weeds ready for a big fire. Linda, bring your blowtorch on the next dry, windy day. Torrey needs some excitement.





Today's garden upgrades included: walking onions, parsnips, radishes, strawberries, and a few things I've already forgotten. Since we don't keep notes or mark our rows we can be surprised when things pop out of the ground. We plan to eat everything that grows,except the hemlock.

Lettuce and carrots and parsnips

Lettuce isn't typically a blogworthy topic. Neither does gardening normally make the evening new or the headlines. But this year is different. A friend who normally considers a bag of Doritos dinner just confessed he's eking out a plot of dirt in his yard to plant -- vegetables.
"What are you going to do with them?" I innocently asked, wondering how Doritos and vegetables could possibly co-exist in his kitchen.
"I don't know, you'll tell me, right?"
The current austerity and self-sufficiency kick won't last, but even if only two percent of these converts stick to gardening and fresh vegetable eating, our culture of crappy food consumption will shift ever so slightly. And maybe my health insurance premiums will go down when Americans stop suffering from Doritos-besity and grease burger-heart disease.


Which leads to this exciting update on -- lettuce. The first tasting last week (from when I thinned the plants) resulted in an underwhelming consensus: bland. Granted, the plants were much too tiny to have developed much flavor, and my comments about infanticide may have negatively skewed the judging. But as the lettuce grows, I can smell the promise of subtle lettuce flavor. I know, Romaine is pretty much flavor-free, but that's beside the point. THIS Romaine will be the most amazing of all, because when your food has that personal connection, it just tastes better.

The carrots are growing especially well (in the center of the container).
Check out how delayed the parsnips are (on the left end of the container). I know the chances of getting actual parsnips are slim, but this is, after all, an experiment. And even if I get only ONE damn parsnip, its taste will be blogworthy.

Lettuce is not boring

Good thing I like lettuce, about 100 seeds germinated in 4 days and will be ready to eat all at the same time. Famine, feast, famine. That's how it is in Torrey, when it comes to fresh produce.

These are Romaine lettuce, which is excellent when eaten young (but not this young). I often forget that the oversized stuff you buy in the supermarket has passed its prime flavor by the time it's harvested.

I'll turn this tray around in a couple days so the seedlings will have a fair shake at growing without contrived political leanings. It's only fair.

This tray has parsnips on the left, radishes in the middle and on the right will be Roma tomatoes and peppers. A bit of overwatering has been corrected, and I hope the seeds didn't rot from the excessive moisture. But considering that these "old" seeds even germinated, I would guess they are not susceptible to my poor gardening skills.

Next update: the CARROTS!

Seeds have sprouted - now I get to eat my words

Day 4 into my seed-starting experiment and my snarky comments have already come back to bite me in the ass.

I left Torrey for a weekend of bicycling in Moab and just received a phone call from Bob. He can barely surpress the delight in telling me the seeds have sprouted. All of them. Even the suspicious ones that probably were, indeed, five years old.

Looks like I'll be serving up my bitter words of suspicion and negativity with that salad of Romaine and radishes.

Bob has promised to send photos so I can post them.

Meanwhile, I'm happy to report that today it is Spring in Moab, and it looks like this:

The Grim Tiller

I dragged this pathetic abandoned rototiller out of its shed today where it has evidently been on sabbatical for a couple years. The story I got was the research it had been doing had suddenly lost its funding, but no one remembered the tiller was still on the job. Now, penniless and decrepit, the forlorn tiller has been waiting for someone (even as witless as me) to appear and save it.

Much to my dismay, it looked much worse than Bob described it to me. Apparently it had deteriorated during its solitary confinement, which I am betting resulted from its refusal to start one day. The bit about its funding drying up was likely a ruse in hopes the Obama administration will come up with some NEA-HHS stimulus funding package for cases like this one.

I naively thought it only needed an air filter, new spark plug and maybe a little carb cleaner, but when I twisted off the gas cap, the fumes nearly knocked me over. I dumped out a few nasty looking quarts of the old gas (in an approved OHSA container, of course) and realized the tank had about an inch of rust in the bottom. Does that mean the carb is full of rusty old gas too? Could I be so naive to hope that naval jelly will save the day? Where can I buy naval jelly in Wayne County, Utah? Do I really want to tackle this icky job?

With much bravado and false self-esteem I plowed forward with the job. I removed the air filter holder and degreased the engine case and carburetor with a handy bottle of Simple Green. Yes, I used nearly the whole bottle.

But when I started to take the carb and gas tank off I realized I needed Torx wrenches. What the hell was Briggs and Stratton thinking, using Torx screws on this simple engine? That led to a futile search for tools, resulting in a bit of whining, foot stomping and throwing things in Bob's garage. Have I mentioned that he refuses to organize things in the physical world? He does organize his virtual world with outstanding skill, however, this doesn't make me feel any better when I confront the horrifying wasteland he calls "the garage".

In a fit of pique I gathered all the tools I could find (without opening boxes or looking under the scary motorcycle parts stacked everywhere) and dumped them all in an empty toolbox. The, I cleared a swath from the door of the garage to the area where I dumped the tools. This will be completely unhelpful in the long run, but made me feel useful today. Useful in the way a politician feels useful when he or she adds an amendment to a bill which he or she knows won't ever make it out of the committee hearing, but they are proud that now it has a bit of their own handiwork and ego inserted into the morass.

Meanwhile, I need to find a repair and maintenance manual for this engine. I fear that some ciritical parts are missing because I have noticed that a bungee cord is functioning as an aftermarket throttle control or something similar. Maybe the bungee is the governor or part of the safety mechanism?

The engine is a B+S 5.5 hp I/C MOdel #134202.

If anyone has info on this engine, now is the time to share it with me!

Otherwise, I may have to set the whole damn thing on fire tomorrow.

Germinating Test

Today I planted seeds indoors. I used a bunch of seeds that Bob purchased last year or maybe the year before. I guess they could be up to five years old. Yes, I realize the probability of old seeds germinating are lower each year, but if I don't plant them Bob will never throw them away. So they either grow or not; either way I'll get to buy new seeds for next year. Now, are you with me on this diabolical journey?

I really hate taking notes and tracking what I've done. That's why I don't work in a lab and study science. I would rather be out riding my bicycle. But since it's 30 degrees and windy as hell, I might as well make a mess indoors and play in some dirt.

I'm using three separate planting boxes to help test which method of germination works best. Knowing me, I'll never read these notes again and will screw up again next year. But this makes me feel as if I'm trying to succeed, and since I'm unemployed every little success counts double.

I don't have a heating mat, although I suspect that would be good insurance for the seeds to properly germinate. If I could rig up a heating mat with a car battery and and an old floor mat, that would make me happy. Probably burn the house down though. Hey, wait a sec...

In Box #1 I placed peat plugs (which must have a better sounding technical name), and soaked them. Then I planted the following seeds: parsnip, radish, Roma tomatoes, pepper (California wonder), and jalepeno. The peat plugs look disgusting, and a friend who stayed here wondered why Bob was collecting "all those burned marshmallows". Bob saves everything, including the torn off cooking instructions from a box of couscous. Yeah, like he's going to buy bulk couscous and all those fussy ingredients, find the torn off box cover and whip up a feast Truth is, he can whip up a feast without any instructions. He just likes to save things.

In Box #2 I mixed up a bunch of potting soil, garden dirt and peat moss. After saturating the soil with water I planted carrots (Nantes) and parsnips (Harris). I don't have great hope for these seeds, but what the hell.

In Box #3 I planted a ton of lettuce. I used two different varieties from two different packages. After I finished the tedious job of covering up about 100 of the nearly invisible little buggars I read the packages and discovered the seeds are all the same variety. Who buys two packages of Romaine and nothing else? Those leftover seeds are going right in the trash. What I really wanted was a pretty mix of red lettuce, some of that frilly stuff that tastes like licorice and some spicy mustard greens.

Next, I hooked up an automatic drip watering system that Bob bought a couple years ago and never used. I wanted to take a picture of it, but it's not photogenic and is sitting in a place so messy that it would be an exercise in frustration to edit the photo. But it's a pretty cool system made by Claber, called an Oasis. It can be set for 10 to 60 days, depending on how fast you want to blow through 25 liters of water. I set it for 20 days delivering 60 cc of water per dripper per day. If it's all dried out by tomorrow I change it. Then I'll probably hand water the whole thing until the seeds germinate, at which time I usually forget to check them and they shrivel up and die.

Rather than starting seeds I usually buy plants, but now that I'm living in Torrey I can't just run to the store for stuff like that. Heck, I can't even buy groceries in town this time of year. I have to drive 16 miles to Loa for vegetables. And because the produce delivery truck only comes every Tuesday, that's the only day to go, otherwise all you get in the produce section is what a friend fondly calls "the vegetable morgue".

Not much will happen in the seed pots for about 10 days. Then, I'll post photos of the seedlings and have a celebratory beverage of choice. No photos of that, sorry.