To The Surbiton Manor Born

  You Can't Beat Beets Monday it will be August already, and we can tell that, in the event of societal collapse, we would starve pretty quickly. Some things are going well this year, many are not. Wildlife is a lot of fun out in the yard. There's a baby bunny that plays with a squirrel almost nightly on the back patio. There's a family of robins (3 chicks in all) ensconced on the light outside our garage. I think that I missed my calling as a wildlife photographer. My kid says, "No, you didn't. Your pictures are terrible." And they're not wrong. Unfortunately, I think that the cute rabbits denuded our blueberry bushes. Speaking of blueberry bushes, the three older ones along the side of the garage - we got them our first season here - are producing nothing. They just do not seem to be thriving.  Similarly, this year we decided to try a new variety of pickling cucumber. We interplanted it with the peas to try to take advantage of two crops out of one bed.

Little Blue in Jasper National Park   The infrastructure for electric cars stinks right now. Having got back from a 3,000 mile road trip to Jasper and Banff National Parks in scenic Alberta, I can say with some certainty that I'm glad I bought the plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) instead of the full electric vehicle (EV). Little Blue, as we call the Kia Niro PHEV in the garage, will run on petrol after it runs out of it's 26 mile electric range. With an EV, we'd probably still be somewhere in Saskatchewan, full of regret. It's nice to get a bit of juice from a public charger when I can. When I commute to my day job, for instance, I can fill up on electricity for free, and not use a drop of gasoline.  The biggest problem, of course, is that there are currently not nearly enough chargers. There are two in the University of Minnesota's largest public lot. Typically, someone with a Tesla and someone else with an Audi eTron are already there when I arrive.  But tha

The peas are in full swing. Unfortunately, we planted the kind with hard, woody shells rather than a snow pea variety. Still - they had pretty purple flowers and they are producing. Pictured above: a tiny handful of raspberries. The plants are producing, but a 4x4 patch with three (now 4 with a runner) bushes is not nearly enough. We need to plant many more next spring. Possibly the small boxes in the lower garden can all be put into raspberry production, as they get partial shade, and they do O.K. without full, full sun.  After some reading on how to care for small apple trees, it turns out that you want to pluck all the fruit off the moment it shows up for the first two years so that they can work on their root system. While I was removing the beginnings of apples, I noticed that some of the leaves had been skeletonized by wretched shiny Japanese beetles. We took immediate action, and sprayed the leaves with a solution of dish soap & water. The beetles are gone, and haven't r

We pulled our first beets yesterday. Today, we make veggie burgers with them & some other stuff. I also planted half a row (4') of new beet seeds over the past weekend. This year, I'm keen to keep things going. A new row of kale went in to the disaster that has been the herb/spice bed. The strawberries seem to be reaching their end. We thought that a 4x8 bed would yield more. A few snacks, and that's about it. There are some ever-bearing berries in there, along with about half June-bearing variety, but it is disappointing. We'd need a lot more space to get to a point where we'd be unable to keep up with eating them. Raspberries - one 4x4 bed, are also disappointing so far. Delicious, but not really enough to speak of. Also, the pea variety we planted this year had a tough shell. We were hoping for something like a snow-pea for stir fries, and ended up with a pea that you need to shell. We did a heavy harvest yesterday. I don't think we'll get many more.