It's Mine Now

The End of a Season

The end of the mountain bike season is quickly approaching. The Fall Color festival has passed. WORS is holding its final event on October 11th and WEMS has their Championship event on October 3rd. The Metro Mountain Bikers Fall Social Ride is approaching. Plan now if you can. In Australia The Simpson Desert Classic is on now. I am not sure if it is the beginning of their season down under or the end; if their season runs in the cool or warm season. You have a year to plan for the next.

Broccoli is a cool season plant related to cabbage and I was very satisfied with my experience growing it in the garden. Only one plant produced broccoli over the Summer and I had slim hopes for a harvest. But the others came around and the plants seem to have no enemies. After cutting off the main head of buds, afterwards small offshoots will soon mature and give you quite a secondary bounty. Still you would have to plant a row ten foot long if you really enjoy broccoli to get the most out of your labors. Every part of the plant is edible and we enjoyed cooking up the leaves.

Another end has come. I showed you a pile of wood some time back and promised to let you know what would become of it. I made a wish, clicked my slippers together and it turned into a fine raised planting bed.

First, I cut the wood beginning with the long members; all of each length cut before I cut the next length, making sure each end was square. I offset every length with a five inch block per my design. These were rough sawn red cedar 2x4’s which made them 1-3/4” by 3-3/4” true dimension.

I arrange the pieces by length.

I arranged them by side.

I aligned the pieces for each side and ran a centerline down… the center. Note the altering lengths. The corners will interlock.

I marked where the screws will go and predrilled where the lower screw will go only through the horizontal. I drilled where the upper screw will go at a slight angle through the horizontal and into the vertical member (placed under the horizontals). The angle is to push the horizontal members upward (or forward as it sits)  against the secure blocking to the top of the wall of the planter; even with the top of the vetical.

Major brain spasmatragic attack. I created this wood jig to allow my Kreg jig to drill the angled guide holes. Sometimes my mind get stuck on irrelevant details. The precision of the Kreg jig system is to precisely set screws at corners where precision is absolutely necessary. No precision is required for these angled predrills accept for the holes location for aesthetic reason. So I wasted half of a good afternoon pursuing a solution to a nonexistent problem.

Essentially I made rafts held together by a single central tie.

All four. Make sure you work out the interlock before you cut and assemble. They are upside down.

I used the Kreg jig to predrill the corner connections on the ends of the short members.

Then I drilled precise counter sunk guide holes along the top edge for when I attach the cap made from some cedar decking; not too close to the corners.

I use two drills (see way above). It makes the work go quicker when using the Kreg jig. They have bits that switch out with a snap from drill bit to driver but that cost money. I snapped the Kreg screws with my electric plug-in drill on a previous project. I bought a small cordless drill with torque setting to resolve that problem. If you don’t have a torque setting on your drill, a cordless gives more when hitting resistance and when you take your finger off the trigger, than a power drill plugged into an outlet. So the plug-in drills and the cordless drives.

I clamped this wood into the corners to keep each member in line when connecting the corners. Then I made sure the top and bottom horizontals aligned before I began to secured the corners.

Here it is before the final panel. They all interlocked easily. Cutting each end square with the miter saw nearly ensures it will all be square when assembled.

There it is. Now, after the box is complete, I can measure for the cap.

Measure twice cut once. I should have checked the angle on my miter saw. When swung to the right it is spot on 45 degrees. Not so when swung to the left. A fact I soon learned when trying to make the cap square. I had to trim the angle cut ends.

I checked the fit of the cap and lined the inside of the box with a good quality weed barrier fabric. I thought of using 2x4 PVC board for the bottom rail and the verticals which will be exposed to the earth. PVC lumber is expensive and 2x4’s are not typically stocked.

I used the cap to mark out where the box would set. I sealed the top of the cap before securing it to the box. I could have waited until the very end.

Then I set four bricks on level at each corner. In the end the box will not depend on these bricks to remain level. Dirt will fill in underneath when you fill the box. I set the top of the bricks a bit above grade to protect the bottom rail of the panel.

I secured the cap to the box outdoors. I didn’t want to damage the cap edge carrying the whole assembly up the stairs out of the basement.

I placed the box where I wanted. I tried to set it square to its surrounding but the fence line, the house, the walk and patio are all on a slightly different axis. I pulled it back and dug out where the verticals stab into the ground. Then after getting it set on the bricks I checked the level again and shimmed at the bricks to bring the top of the box to level. Note the garden fabric is pulled out to allow the dirt to fill in underneath. The verticals planted in the ground and the cap should keep the sides from bulging out.

Then I drilled the guide hole into the vertical and put in the second screw for each horizontal. I wanted a tiny bit of play in all the members until I got it all settled where I wanted it.

The dirt. I sifted these rocks out of some crud I had dug out for a previous project. The rocks would take up space at the bottom but what happens if in the future the planter is removed? You’ll have all sorts of obnoxious rocks on your lawn.

This is the sifted dirt. It went in first. Then I took two bushels, seen below, from my composter. I bought three square yards (three bags topsoil one of composted manure) for additional fill. Then I mixed in the compost. I still need some ten square foot more of good garden soil.

Now we’ll see how my design holds up over time. Check out the poker table I built here.

The $116 question: What were my three most favorite WORS races? Keeping the same question. Check out the Charity Jackpot Page link in the sidebar to possibly triple the amount.

Don’t Think That You Can’t

After we worked nearly six hours canning these peaches my wife said: “I’m not giving these to anyone… after all that work!” All that extra syrup will make for some good peach tea. My wife adds it whenever she makes herself a cup of tea.

Summer is over; mere hours gone by. Nothing says the end of Summer and the beginning of Autumn better than the final WORS race in Sheboygan. The sponsor’s name keeps changing but nothing beats the roots and inclines of Quarry View and Evergreen Parks on this renown mountain bike course. The colors are usual fantastic.

Ball is a standard bearer in home canning. They have an automatic home canning system. The advantages of the automatic system are that it has a locked top and is insulated. If someone touches it or if it falls over no human harm done. You can only can small batches but that may be preferred for the home gardener without lots of time. It is $300. We saw one up close at Boston Store in Mayfair Mall. The Container Store just had a grand opening at the mall.

The automated home canning system is the equivalent of canning with a pressure cooker, where the jars need not be covered in water. My mother shakes her head at our water bath canning. I don’t think she trusts it, as her mother always canned with a pressure cooker. My wife bought a rack that fits on the bottom of our pressure cooker so she can use it for canning; it wont fit quarts. You have to keep the jars off the bottom of whatever pot you are using when canning. You must follow proven recipes and they vary by process. Ball or the USDA Canning Guidelines are a good resource.

For half the price of Ball’s automated system you can get their electric water bath canner + multi cooker. You have a greater canning capacity with this appliance and it is more versatile. If I had seen this before we bought our traditional Granite 21.5 quart water bath canner I may have splurged for the electric bath canner. But for $14 and some change that water bath canner was a real deal at Farm and Fleet. (or was it Fleet Farm?) Their adds had the canner marked down. The Internet and price listed on the shelf had it marked down, but they didn’t have any out on the shelves. They got one from the warehouse for me. The price was unusually low.

Then we went to Menards and bought the canning tools for $6.

We made peach jam before we canned the peaches in syrup. I did most all the work on this one, and a whole lot of work on our previous endeavor. Ball makes an automated jam maker appliance. The Cranberry Festival is this weekend if you’re looking for cranberry jam.

Making jam was easier. Of course processing, cutting up, fewer peaches was the biggest difference. When the peaches are heated up in the canner you can see how all the peach pieces rise to the top. A lot of people on YouTube have a problem with the peaches floating; it bothers them. I don’t know why. Only ten half pints fit into the old style Granite water bath canner so we just put the extra in a pint jar. The large bottle we did not can. The peaches did not rise to the top. I do an extra test on the seal. I hit the tops with a back of the spoil. On one jar we got a thud rather than a ting so we put it in the refrigerator with the un-canned pint jar. Or you can freeze it.

I would say, outside of buying new jars, it cost us less than $1 for each of those half pint jars of jam; all other costs including energy included. The jars were something over fifty-cents each. My wife realized she has seen them at Good Will quite often.

Jammin….

You need no longer simmer the lids in very hot but not boiling water. We do anyway, not really really hot water but warm, because our first attempt at canning the peach relish was minimally successful. There are many YouTube videos about canning. A large percentage are put out by preppers. And when a prepper finds a change in canning lids… you can be sure many more videos are due to follow.

There are over forty peaches in that box. Those and the smaller ones in the basket I picked yesterday. There are still a dozen or so on the tree but I will not need the ladder to reach those. I picked them all; just some more examples of the work I don’t do, or rather money I am not making. It’s not work if no ones paying you to do it. A sad commentary on modern society?

We lost two branches. The fruit from the first, which never quite completely ripen we made into peach relish. We cooked up some brats with the relish and it was delicious. The apple cider vinegar was a bit strong. I should have used the white vinegar the original recipe called for and it would have been to die for. The peach flavor really comes out nicely when you cook the peach relish with the meat.

Much of the fruit from the second broken branch did ripen and we are turning that into jam. More to come. The better of those we canned just as peaches in sugar syrup.

We will be giving away and eating the best tree ripened fruit. With all the losses I think I can safely say we harvested two-hundred peaches that will end up being consumed by humans in one fashion or another.

Our tree is a “resilient peach” tree. It should grow fine if you’re not to far from the lake and it is shielded from the north wind.

Some are frightened by the supposed dangers in canning your own food. Well, if you fear the dangers of riding your own bike you can get $25,000 of riding insurance covering thousands of fun rides across the country with a $50 annual ride membership to U.S. Cycling.

I receive no financial benefit for mentioning or linking to any of the products I may mention in my posts. If you’d like to support this and my other blogs, or simply my family in general feel free to purchase one of these books. If you should choose to buy one or more of my books, then the years of effort I put in writing them will cease to be years of sloth and will be transformed into a whole lot of hard work.

The Saris Gala is this Friday in Madison. There will be a live auction and Gary Fischer, always the best dressed, will be there.

The $115 question: What were my three most favorite WORS races? Keeping the same question. Check out the Charity Jackpot Page link in the sidebar to possibly triple the amount.

Corrections

Before I get to my corrections here are a few worthy and/or worthwhile events you may be interested in. North Texas Giving Day begins today, the 17th. You can find a mountain bike related cause here. For the fitness and family minded The Fall Color Festival is just around the corner or you have Adventure Fest for those who feel travel makes it all the more worthwhile. A new race is on the WORS Schedule for September 27th; plan now. The Hixon Forest Epic is the race and that beautiful area of La Crosse is the place. I believe I participated in a WEMS race on those trails way back. I may be mistaken though if I am a correction will not follow. Switchbacks, I remember switchbacks. I enjoy switchbacks. I wish I was in shape.

The Morning Glories…

My first correction; our waffle iron. My wife, an ardent reader of my blog, reminded me that I did not give her our waffle iron, my older brother and his wife did. Which leads to a partial correction. My older brother and his family (I have one) don’t re-gift our Christmas gifts to them back to us, only my younger brothers (I have four) and sometimes my parents do.

And about making the perfect waffle. Watching a Divas Can Cook video via our Roku I discovered the secret. The Diva, though she didn’t explain why, whipped up the egg whites and folded them in. Now when you search “whipping egg whites for your waffles”, then you receive many search results. Waffle enthusiasts may enjoy this article. The gist of making light fluffy waffles; use warm ingredients with your baking powder/soda mix and/or whip up your egg whites and fold them in.

I am not sure if I ever mentioned this on any of my blogs, but I am sure I have told several people that I went to school with Mark Murphy of the Green Bay Packers. This is not correct. My final grade school class (I went to four grade schools) had a reunion recently and the Mark Murphy of our class, four out of five classmates agree, would look exactly like the Packer’s Mark Murphy …if he put on sixty more pounds. That would be sixty pounds of more muscle than the more contemporary form of bulk.

I have to conclude that seeing people you haven’t seen for decades is good for the brain. It really makes the old cells get their exercise as you try to recall people who look just so familiar. I was raised not to stare at others but had to until the old brain kicked in and I said, “Oh Yeah!” It’s like a foreign language you haven’t used in years; you’re completely lost when someone starts speaking it to you, but fifteen minutes in it all comes back.

My third correction or rather recommendation: those finish washers I used on my raspberry trellis don’t create the most stable result. It doesn’t matter since I notched the members into each other but counter sinking will create a more rigid connection. Of course I can just tighten up the screws as needed. Also the finish washers need to be glued where they guide the wire. A sleeve would work much better.

Roll out you’re wire, straighten it, before running it through your trellis. It’s easier if there are two of you. Don’t let kinks form.

I tied up everything up and tight with a light rope before I started the completion of my trellis. Note the solar post cap lights. I bought those at Menards on sale; 6 lumens. I didn’t purchase them on Amazon because I could not find any information on their brightness; lumens. I then found  a slew of yard solar lighting products at Blain’s Farm and Fleet in Waukesha when I went to purchase some canning equipment.

These clamps were useful when stringing the wire through the trellis. I ran some old conduit through first as a general guide through the bramble. I weaved fifty plus feet through the lower bars and repeated the process above.

I tried to pull everything as tight as possible (on a 90 degree day) and put in these thing-a-ma-jigs to deal with the expansion and contraction outdoor temperatures force. I decided after the fact that getting the wire as tight as possible may not be the best strategy. After a year of seasonal movements I will wire the runs together perpendicular, tying them together at fixed distances, creating a net, to keep the wire from sagging out to much. I will only do that on the upper, as I don’t want any exposed sharp wire ends at a level the dog explores at.

I lost another branch on the peach tree, though it was resting on the garage. The peaches were just about there and are ripening in a bag. One peach for every six inches of branch is the general guide line for keeping your peach tree from ripping itself apart. I’ll have to be more serious on that point though I find it hard to remove what should become perfectly good fruit; food. Still plenty of large juicy peaches hanging on our tree. When peaches smell like peaches, they are just about there. A perfect fruit?

You need to keep raspberries away from peach trees. Marigolds are a good companion for your tomatoes.

The $114 question: What were my three most favorite WORS races? Keeping the same question. Check out the Charity Jackpot Page link in the sidebar to possibly triple the amount.

Go Brewers

More than any other form of entertainment, we enjoy going to a baseball game the most. We had empty seats beside us and in front of us which made it all that more enjoyable. Otherwise we were surrounded by Pittsburg Pirates’ fans. They were very nice fans. Obviously more civilized than those obnoxious near toxic Chicago Cubs’ fans or perhaps they simply know how to hold their liquor.

Jonathan Lucroy ignited the first scoring rally. I wonder how many more seats stadiums would have without those giant screens. Few of the fans captured on camera actually understand where the camera is. There they are on the screen for all to see waving off into nothingness. The Pirates’ fans around us received calls from their friends that they saw them on television. Then their friends sent them pictures of them on television. I guess they have rewind features on their cable box.

The pitcher got his first hit in his professional career and set up the next scoring rally. The pitching management was perfect and could have been the difference in the game. The Brewers won.

The garden is producing. I didn’t think we were going to get any broccoli but suddenly it started coming along. You can eat the broccoli leaves (and turnip leaves). They actually sell broccoli leaves in the grocery store in Japan. My wife fried them up in a stir fry with bacon. She was afraid they were too bitter. I didn’t think so. I never ate greens before mostly because they always look so soggy. The peaches I left on the broken branches are ripening. We searched for recipes for unripe or green peaches and saw a few for pickling them. I searched “peach relish recipes” and the flood gates opened up. Yes there are uses for green peaches (a pepper, sweet onion salt and vinegar, and if they are really green you might want to add sugar). Add “unripe” to your search if you have green peaches. We are going to do some canning for the first time.

No time to fit Treadfest into your holiday weekend? Not interested in gravel runs and the glorious beauty of the La Crosse area? Well, there is another gravel ride as part of the Bicycle Times Adventure Fest in October, if you are one incapable of acting on the spur of the moment. Of course you’ll have to drive (or ride) to Pennsylvania; home of the Pittsburg Pirates.

The $113 question: What were my three most favorite WORS races? Keeping the same question. Check out the Charity Jackpot Page link in the sidebar to possibly triple the amount.