Pictures From Our Sunday Drive.

More money than sense, we saw this huge metal sculpture of a raptor on a pole. It needs some landscaping, or something.

A second beautiful, blue day with low humidity is today. It is a day where I don't have to be anywhere in particular. Yesterday, my Handsome Son and I took a Sunday drive, although he cautioned me about the wisdom of such a quaint action given gas prices at nearly $4.00 a gallon.

These are pictures from our drive.

You can tell my son is from Wisconsin; he is the King of Cheesy Expressions. I've asked him when he will shave and get a haircut. He replied, "The cows don't care Mom." He's working this summer milking cows for my Dad.

The covered bridge in the background was built over the Pine River to replace a cement bridge in 1997 by my father and other volunteers from the town of Springwater.

This is a better picture of the Springwater Volunteer Covered Bridge.

People with much more money than I built many houses like this the last decade around our beautiful lakes.

The property values around our lakes belie the high unemployment, low wages, and aging population of the rest of our counties here. It is difficult to find well-paying jobs without traveling 50 miles or more. This year driving around and seeing the crispy, brown lawns, and dying trees outside the oasis of my watered yard and the family garden, I feel worse times coming. Times where a lot of the cattle herds and animals will be sold off. Family pets will be sold because people can no longer fed them (I saw a small herd of Tibetian yaks listed on the Appleton, WI Craigslist on Saturday, as well as a beautiful black Arabian mare.)

The high temperatures, almost more than the drought, have been oppressive this summer. And this morning, a mutual friend's friend FB entry told of the suicide of the husband of a childhood neighbor's husband.

My father asked, "Was he a farmer?"

Everything I Touch is Broken

It's a bit frustrating ...okay, a LOT frustrating.

Everything I need to use seems to be broken. I don't know if it is frustrating because I have deep-seated control issues or because that insane earworm song from my childhood about a hole in my bucket and why don't I fix it?

I think this inexplicable phase of my summer started a week ago Sunday. My son had been playing basketball with varied results. The team has had a somewhat variable performance this year, unlike last year where we dusted the courts with all-comers. One, the team lost three senior starters. Because we have had a good, if not great team, the last three-years running, much better teams have been willing to play us.

The boys who are seniors have been very dedicated to a dream of getting to state. They and their parents have dedicated a lot of time to pursuit of that dream. With the disappointing end to last season and the lack of dedication of the incoming juniors, the team is struggling to find its way. Many games this summer the team totaled 5 or 6 seniors. We lost games against good teams with a bench of 10-12 players simply because the boys were exhausted.

So Sunday after one of these exhausting basketball marathons with only 5 boys playing 11 games in 4 days, we both came home exhausted (me mentally, sometimes its been hard to watch, and my son physically).

I decided to make supper, carbs for him, a salad picked from the garden for me. I live in the village so it is never really dark, but colors lose their hues. I have a lot of different greens available to me: chard, cabbage and broccoli leaves, spinach, mustard, beets, head and leaf lettuce. I remember seeing a seedling of an euphorbia 'Snow on the Mountain'. When it is juvenile, the leaves lack the showy white margins. I remember thinking I should weed it out, because it is poisonous, but I was just too tired.

A side note here, cows can and will eat euphorbias. Hey, they have four stomachs! Reputedly, Abe Lincoln's mother died from drinking the milk from cows that ingested euphorbia. Every time she started to feel better they gave her some milk, thinking it was the most nutritious thing she could get, and they continued to poison her in small doses.

I washed my lettuce leaf by leaf. I chopped it up and put it in a bowl. About six to eight hours later, I was vomiting up my supper. My stomach obviously knows what is good for me and those couple small leaves of euphobia were not about to pass. I spent the night and part of the next day on the cool tile floor of my bathroom.

So from bad basketball, to bad salad, I move right along to rusty rims on my Ford truck. I have decent tires on my truck, but rusty rims. They don't always hold air. I travel with a tire gage and know all the places with air pumps. Generally, not a big deal, nuisance only. Being sick two days, put my tire inflating schedule out of whack. Result: a flat tire.

So, I task my son to haul my dad's air compressor out freom the farm, so I can pump up my tires. Unknown to me, he transports it on its side rather than upright. We start it up, it doesn't build pressure. I grill him, as I am checking various things on the compressor. Transport position come out. I decide to leave it upright in the back of the truck and come back to this problem in a day. Same problem. So what got broke? Maybe a gasket or the intake value, but it is beyond my knowledge. I am sure my dad and brother will rain down bad karma on me for the broken air compressor, but that bird has not roosted yet.

Insert 4 days with heat indexes up to 115 degrees F and record-breaking temperatures where just thinking of going outdoors breaks a sweat.

Yesterday, the dew point fell into the mid-60s and the temperatures were only in the upper 80s and low 90s. It felt like a spring day with a gentle breeze.

So truck has one badly flat tire, and I decide that fix a flat stuff in a can might allow me enough pressure to limp over to the gas station a couple blocks from me. It gives me nothing. Unless that tire stem is at the 6 o'clock potion, you can forget that stuff. It just doesn't work right (two experiences now). Trying to get the wheel in that position, the tire comes off the rim.

Ugh!

So now I am changing a tire. My son and my Ex will tell you, I am a very capable tire-changing person. My dad would not allow me to get my license until I could check and change the oil and change a flat tire. (Funny, how times change. I never change my own oil; environmentally, disposal is such a hassle, and rightfully so. And for safety, I generally do not drive my tires to failure, I spend too much time on the road, often with poor driving conditions.)

So, the Ford is a rust bucket, a rust bucket with new decent leaf spring so I can safely carry the loads I do. I tried four different places on the frame in attempt to jack it up high enough that the leaf springs are not compensating. No luck. I can not get the truck wheel off the ground. (And yes, with leverage (my weight bouncing on my wrench, I have managed to loosen all the nuts on the wheels so once I do get it off the ground that wheel will be coming off.

So I ran out to the farm for some 4x4s, and a couple a cement block and will attempt to jack it up by jacking up the axle, not my preferred jacking point, given that I have to be partially under the truck to do it.

And, did I mention the Mantis tiller is not starting again?

But the daylilies are in bloom and some are simply gorgeous.

Harvesting Basil and What High Temperatures Mean for Gardeners

Basil leaves being held in a canning jar.


Yesterday, my thermometer on the south side of my house read 100 degrees. Now, official highest temperature anywhere in Wisconsin was 97 in Waupaca, where the family garden is located. That 100 might be accurate. With the high dew point that's a 117 degree "feels like" temperature. That's about 50 degrees hotter than my preferred temperature of about 65 degrees!

Plants don't feel temperatures the same way we do. The high humidity actually works for plants lessening the amount of moisture a plant gives up to the air. As the skies have been overcast without beating sun, although it is dry, it is not like our plants are experiencing this heat dome as we are. Our plants are growing fast and a little extra moisture will go a long way now. I watered extensively on Friday and Saturday to build up moisture in the soil.

For those of you considering planting fall and winter veggies, with this heat, I would hold off on that plan. Seed germination drops off dramatically at temperatures above 80 degrees for many of these vegetables. If you feel you are loosing too many days, I would water the soil amply the night before and then mulch liberally with a couple inches of finely shredded straw or shredded paper after seeding with a plan to remove it within about 10 days.

This is probably not a good time to transplant or plant perennials or shrubs, but if you must, water well, water foliage to keep transpiration levels low, mulch, and consider trimming back as much top growth as you feel you can.

Lastly, these temperatures have forced me indoors and to play in the kitchen. I thought I would pass these tips along for storing and using basil. Basil is one of my favorite herbs. I plant a lot of it, grown, from seed each year, and almost always run out.

Basil likes it hot. Keep basil flowering tips picked off. When it flowers, the flavor and the texture changes, so keep it picked back. Harvest it down growing tips to about a quarter inch above each joint. When using always discard the stems and any flowers, use just the leaves. Try to pick early in the day if you are storing any quantities, but picking as close to using it is always preferable.

Basil does not like temperatures below 40 degrees. Resist the urge to store basil in your fridge. Temperatures below 40 degrees will brown your basil as if it has been touched by frost. Storing the clean leaves in a container in a dark space maintains moisture content and color for many days with very little wilting.

I have had good results (good color and shelf life), drying basil by placing in an oven on a cookie sheet at 145 degrees for an hour and leaving them in the oven (my oven has a standing pilot and is probably always between 90-110 degrees) for a couple days to finish drying. I then store them in a Mason jar.

Enjoy the heat, if you can. If not, pick basil...