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CatsKills

I want to shoot neighborhood cats sooooo bad.

Rewind.

Okay, so I just don’t want cats on my property.  I find this to be a very reasonable request.  Yet, in the internet debate over cats being allowed to roam unrestricted outside, the arguments against this practice focus on the dangers posed to the cats themselves, which is still a self-centered argument, even if it’s on the against side.  It overlooks what should be the prime reason: it’s rude to other people.

Even if letting your cat outside wasn’t inherently dangerous, it’s still pissing and shitting in my vegetable garden and digging things up.  It’s being destructive to my property and hobbies, and potentially passing infectious diseases into the produce I eat.  Under no condition would a rational person consider this okay.

And yet – there they are.

And it turns out that the problem was worse than I thought, revealed to me after my garden camera install.

…And that’s just one day.

But I’ve ranted about roaming cats before.  No need to go through that futile discussion again.  Instead, I decided to find a preventative measure that was more likely than changing a cat owner’s behavior.

Although there are other animals I wish to deter, like this skunk
…and some of the squirrel population (but it was fun to talk to them through the camera).

Instead, I invested in a motion-activated ultrasonic alarm.  I had limited expectations, but I haven’t caught any more cats on camera in the two days since I installed it!  So I bought two more.  It seems feasible that I can at last create a cat-free perimeter.  The 3rd one I’ll run at a higher frequency and see if that does anything to the squirrels.  That’d be a double win after last year’s tomato patch decimation.

And the camera worked for one of its intended purposes.  I love it when a plan comes together.

–Simon

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Winter Carrots

As I mentioned last month, I am on a gardening quest to extend the growing season.

Phenology 2022

In so doing, I’ve cataloged these extended growing times through observation and failure, have been largely successful overall.

Bastard deer couldn’t even finish a whole carrot.

I also mentioned Bambi, amusing in that it was these rampaging ravenous ruminates that forced my winter carrot harvest – probably the last of my phenologic experiments of the prior year.  The goal was to dig them up at the beginning of March, at which point I would then plant onions and radishes in the newly-vacant and opened earth, just before the carrots started growing again and converting their sugar.  If that were successful, I would have closed the gap entirely on the fallow period.

Still, I was close.  I just need to…address the wildlife situation.

And make more stock!

–Simon

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Phenology 2022

As a famous whitetail deer once lamented: “Winter sure is long.”  And here in zone 6a, I would concur.  The last week of April through the last week of October are the only guaranteed growing times for anything not frost-resistant, and even that’s a gamble.  The remaining half of the year is reserved for watching it rain.  It certainly gives the mind some time to contemplate self-harm.

But then I discovered something: Phenology.

In an applied context to gardening, it correlates planting times to what local native plants are doing.  For example, when the crocus blooms, it’s time to plant radishes.

The benefit being, some vegetables can, in theory, be planted ahead of last frost, thereby extending the gardening season.  The practice is entirely anecdotal, as micro-climates are too variable to establish a regional constant.  The information available is therefore crowdsourced, making for nice little community of gardening nerds.

It also made for a fun experiment.  And with a basic internet search providing corollaries to what I planned to grow, I was able to create my own planting guide.  The dates themselves I left blank, as I would fill them in myself, noting whether the incidence was successful or not.  And so, after one year, I have my own vegetable garden planting time reference index, specific to my immediate geography:

Local Phenology 2022.xlsx

I intend to add more items, but for now the greatest revelation was that I could squeeze out a few more weeks’ growing time for peas and root vegetables.  And with the carrots maturing earlier as a result, I was able to plant a winter crop far enough in advance of the hard freeze to yield some impressive roots.

I pulled this out yesterday: 1/17!

So while Suicide Month will remain unchanged, I can at least take comfort in the knowledge that it’s the last month of the season that I can’t plant anything.

–Simon

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It’ll Cost a Bundle

2 years prior, Liz planted garlic.  We then harvested that garlic the following summer.

Peasant Food

This year, that same garlic patch sprouted again.  Apparently, not all of the seed garlic had been harvested.  I’m new to garlic growing, so I’m uncertain if this is expected growing behavior or not.  Regardless, we sure did get a nice bundle, however unexpected:

Maybe the trick is to grow in patches and harvest every 2 years.  Or maybe it’ll come up again on its own.  Dunno.  Plenty of cooking to do in the meantime!

–Simon

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Root Cellar

Last year I mentioned the need for a root cellar.

Staple Solanums

This was predicated upon the expectation of a large potato crop–the results of my hand made potato box.

The final yield was, however, lackluster, and my other root crops, onions and garlic, don’t require root cellar conditions.

But the carrots did exceptionally well, and storing them in a combination of the crisper drawer in the fridge and the garage, well, was annoying.  So I revisited my plans to convert the crawlspace.

All I intended was to add some shelving, but I never got around to it, and my earlier attempts at using it for storing radishes resulted in a box of moldy radishes.  I abandoned the plan.

Then our chest freezer died.  Its thermostat had always been finicky, refusing to settle anywhere between 0 and -30.  And when the power went out, the compressor never clicked back on again.

It always had that busted corner too. Maybe that was part of the problem.

Everyone surely remembers the great toilet paper shortage of COVID.  Faced with a temporary yet inconvenient possibility of having to wait a few days to buy what we wanted immediately, people began stockpiling items they were most afraid of going a day without: food, sanitary products…ammunition…?

You never know when you might need to shoot your neighbor because they bought all the toilet paper.  And apparently that’s going to require a thousand rounds.

Anyway, on this list was deep freezers, to store all this frozen food that you might have to go a day without.  And now, almost a year after the quarantines, they’re apparently still hard to find.  But find one we did, at a former Sear’s warehouse, for too much money.  But it was either that or lose all the steak, and I’ll be damned if I have to go a day without steak.  So we bought it and lugged it home and hooked it up and…at that point I noticed the old freezer had finally clicked back on.

God dammit.

But then I got an idea.  We could take it back, or I could convert the old glitchy one into a root cellar!  Which is essentially just a giant refrigerator.  It’s impossible to keep a dirt cellar 33-40 degrees with 98% humidity anyway.  So while this approach might not be more efficient, it was certainly more effective.

But one problem remained: freezers aren’t refrigerators and aren’t designed to act as such.  Fortunately, that problem had already been addressed.  The market is flooded with thermostatic controller overrides, which turn the power on and off to the external cord independently of the freezer’s wonky and cheap internal thermostat.

That’s right, an override!

So far it’s working pretty well, though I might add some water jugs in there to help regulate.  It tends to turn on and off more frequently than I’d like.  I know compressors don’t like that.

Or I could just add a bunch of beer in there instead…for thermoregulating purposes.

And with one last addition, milk crates, I have stackable storage in there too, which keeps things off the metal liner (hopefully this will also prevent frostbite).  And even though these reduce the usable space, it’s still a ton of storage.  I even thawed a turkey in there last week, so there’s certainly uses beyond just vegetables.

I won’t have to occupy an entire fridge door for a week brining pork belly for bacon, either.  And that’s something I’m unwilling to go a day without!

–Simon