Basque Day

Every year in July, the Basque block in Boise hosts a Basque festival, the San Inazio Festival to honor St. Ignatius of Loyola, the patron saint of the Basques. St. Ignatius of Loyola was the Spanish founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). He was canonized in 1622 and declared patron of spiritual exercises and retreats by Pius XI. His feast day is July 31.

Late this morning, I decided to check out the Basque festival before it got too hot. Then I came home and watched the film, The Way. I knew The Way was about a pilgrimage, but I had no idea it was a pilgrimage through the Basque country. That was weird.

As intended, I got there in time to watch the kids dance,

The two girls in blue that were closest to me were having a great time, despite wearing all those clothes, hats, stockings, and petticoats in the 90 degree heat. Here are some of the littlest ones taking a water break,

You have to love the hats. The cooks had just finished adding the shrimp to the paella and were now adding mussels,

They said it was about 15 minutes away from being ready and it smelled awesome, but it was too hot to imagine eating any of it. Those Basques seem to know how to cook for a crowd.

Here is last Monday and Friday's harvest,

I had a heck of a time trying to learn about my broccoli, so I think I will save my pictures and write a review. My broccoli is a sprouting broccoli, you mostly see a purple variety, but mine is green. It does not grow compact like the broccoli you see in the store, and the sprouts are big. I found hardly anything to tell me when it is ready to pick. I found something that said I can pick when the outside sprouts are loose, but the center is still compact, which some of mine were, so I decided to just pick a few branches. Maybe once I pick the center sprouts some side ones will grow, otherwise there really is not much to eat on this big plant.

Broccoli is a perfect food, as are tomatoes, but I am not a huge fan. I steamed the broccoli I picked and it really was the best I ever had. So were the bush beans, which look like snap beans to me.

The strawberry plants sprouted the sorriest group of pea sized mangled strawberries in June and I was going to throw out the plant. Then it got another round of flowers, so decided to let it live. Now it has a new collection of berries, much bigger and better than the first round.

The tassel top on my corn seemed to be struggling to be a proper top. My neighbors have shorter corn, but their tassels have been proud tops for weeks. I tried to help mine, which I can barely reach, and all these seeds came down. Hey, corn isn't grown from seeds, corn grows from kernels off the ears. Did you know that one corn stalk is both the male and female plant? The male seeds from the top tassel sprinkle down to the female silk waiting at the base of the leaves, where they meet the stalk. If the tassel springs up and the seeds sprinkle down too soon, no corn. Mine had good timing, I can see at least three ears ready to grow. The female silk must be that same stringy stuff around the outside of the ear after you husk it, the stuff no one likes to have to clean off. Once the tassel sprinkles it's seeds, then it straightens up like a proud father.

Proper farm girls cannot be afraid of bees. They are all over the raspberry, the strawberry, all the vegetable flowers, and I've learned to water, prune, and harvest in harmony with the bees. I've been stung recently enough to remember how much it hurt, but I also know I would not have the bounty of my garden without them. Except maybe corn, corn doesn't need bees.

Garden Status

These are the bush bean flowers, which are pretty, especially against the green, green bush bean leaves. Next is the bush bean,

This is the sage after I cut off the tops, you can see that it then sprouted many more new leaves,

The corn is now taller than the fence, and that is its tassel top trying to peak out,

Mom told me about her friend's potato bag and I think I will get one. There are several kinds, but here is an example,

http://www.amazon.com/Island-Grow-Container-Tomatoes-Potatoes/dp/B0055EQ0E6/ref=wl_mb_hu_m_1_dp

Potatoes do better because they get more air circulation, the ready potatoes are more accessible, and they do not take up space in the garden.

After you bake your own bread for a while, you remember why they invented french toast and croutons. I rarely get through a whole loaf before it starts getting a bit stale. This week, since I am now eating so much salad, I made my own croutons. They are really easy to make and once I figure out the right spices they will be better than the ones in the store.

Another reason for making my own croutons is that the brand I like disappeared from the local grocery store. They now only have one brand of most things, usually their store brand and nothing is ever on sale. Prices seemed to have jumped even more lately. I checked at Target for another Pyrex dish with a lid to take my lunch and it was $10, twice as much as I paid for the last one a few years ago. I didn't buy one. Is anyone buying anything right now except food? I heard a guy on the radio interviewing people about what they've done lately to cut back on their expenses. Cut back lately? I was surprised more people, like me, did not call in telling him they started cutting back years ago and now there was nothing left to cut.

My garden and my training class keep my mind active and keep me learning, but it is the baking that I do when I am scared. The last few weeks of news scared me and I now have home-style bread, cheese bread, and pita in the freezer. I was going to make some walnut raisin bread this weekend, but thought I was getting carried away.

People can say that we've had times as bad as these before, but then we did not have chemical weapons or see militants destroying sacred temples. It was Malian Islamists destroying the door to the Sidi Yahya mosque in Timbuktu that set me off. This door was not to be opened until the end of the world. The militants wanted to prove that it was really not the end of the world, but it seems to me that it proved that it was, at least the end of the world as we know it.

Not many understand that these times are about character. At the end of Orwell's 1984, the main character faces his worst fear and betrays love, and therefore, his soul. We see this over and over again now, people are confronted with fear and they crack, they shoot their entire family and then themselves, or they open fire on a movie theater and kill 12 strangers. The anti-gun lobby immediately moves in and promotes their cause, further emphasizing that we can no longer hold individuals accountable for their actions, we need to blame a piece of hardware. The ability to face fear starts with the ability to take personal responsibility and the ability to take personal responsibility is something most people no longer have.

If people are unable to face losing their job, or their house, or failing in school, how in the world are they going to deal with the economic collapse right around the corner?

Refereeing Cats

In A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle says he's lived with many Zen Masters, all of them cats. Spit is a Zen Master, Cruiser is more of a Zen student. Cruiser is on a diet and very unhappy. Both cats used to share a small can of wet food for breakfast and dinner, but Cruiser was gobbling most of his half and then muscling his way through Spit's food and then going back and finishing his own. This means Spit eats more dry food and stays trim, while Cruiser stays really chubby. This week I reduced the canned food and stood between the cats keeping Cruiser from muscling Spit. Between the heat and the reduced canned food, Cruiser has been a whiney brat, howling as if he is starving to death, and I am tempted to let him prowl the neighborhood again, but that was unsuccessful last year. Instead, I try to model Spit, who just looks patiently at him or finds a quiet place to sleep.

It has been a week of temperatures over 100 degrees. Thursday's high was 108. Last weekend's thunderstorms set off fires all around Boise and this week's inversion layer kept the smoke trapped in the valley. Wednesday night I got up to open my bedroom window and was hit by a blast of smoke as strong as if I was camping and sitting next to a bonfire. After a hot hazy day yesterday, we finally got thunderstorms with rain late in the day and a double rainbow,

The broccoli is just showing it's ruffly crown and I am hoping that it hurries up and grows enough for me to harvest soon, since it is taking over my small planter. It is also getting aphids, which I washed off with soapy water a few times this week, until yesterday when I bought a marigold. I put the marigold in a pot and set it next to the broccoli. Marigolds are supposed to repel aphids, we will see how they work.

The tomato I did not mean to plant is taking over the other half of the planter. I am pruning it so that it will grow more up than out and so far I am rewarded with two plants covered with small green tomatoes. People here use these wire frames to hold in their tomatoes, but you have to place these when the plants are small, so I am reusing the tall bamboo stakes I used for the snow pea trellis. The broccoli is crowding the bush beans, but they still have flowers and budding beans. The tomato is also crowding the pod peas, so I am thinking of moving them to the broccoli spot when the broccoli is done.

The thunderstorm wind blew around the corn and I had to stake it. It seems to me no one usually has to stake corn, I see fields of it with no supports, so I wonder if corn does better in a large group, where the plants protect each other and create their own windbreak.

The basil, thyme, and oregano are doing so well that I am harvesting leaves and drying them. You do not want to let these shoot up and flower, like I let my cilantro do last year, cut off the flowing tops and you will get fuller plants with more leaves. Did you know that coriander comes from the flowers of the cilantro plant? I never did get the parsley or the dill to grow. I don't know if that is due to the seeds or due to the growing conditions in Idaho. I bought a parsley, but it is indoors and staying really small.

The lawn is recovering well from it's fungus treatment and I started to cut back on my watering. I am a bit nervous about the cost of all of this water, in addition to the cost of all of the air conditioning this week. I usually keep the house pretty warm with the windows open, but this last week it was still hot at 10 pm and I just couldn't sleep without air conditioning.

My training got much more intense this week and between that and the heat, I have been lazy and unmotivated. For the first time, I miss cable TV. I finally joined Netflix instead and am catching up on Mad Men. Might as well enjoy electronics while I can.

The Joys of Summer

This is my harvest from yesterday,

That is the last of the snow peas. I pulled out the plants after I harvested the last few peas. I've eaten just about all of the lettuce and the carrots, just in time for the broccoli to start taking over,

The broccoli was staked for a while because we had more big wind. This is Mr. Dragonfly on the stake admiring the broccoli,

How does broccoli grow? Does it get one head of green florets on one plant? Or several bunches? It seems like a lot of plant for one bunch, but it also seems like if I get several bunches I am going to be eating an awful lot of broccoli.

The heat wave hit Boise today, and the TV was flashing red flag warnings. They neglect to tell you on TV what red flag means, so I had to look it up on-line. It is a lightning warning. With everything so dry here already, lightning can be very bad and start fires all over the place. Yahoo! Weather right now shows thunderstorms for Boise with an ominous black sky. The cats and I have been indoors almost all day along with the rest of the neighborhood and after a noisy 4th I am glad the heat drove everyone indoors.

This is the first 4th of July I truly disliked. Someone with bombs started Tuesday night circling the neighborhood until 3 am Wednesday morning. Everyone in the neighborhood had their own fireworks, and my newer neighbor two doors down was lighting fireworks in the street for her 5 year old with her baby on her hip like a tragedy waiting to happen. After the fireworks ended at the park down the street, the bomber came back. I felt like I was living in a war zone. I don't remember it being anything like this last year. I did get a break and the Harley rider and the Karaoke singer have been gone all week.

Yesterday was the end of my third week of training for my new job and yesterday I decided that I am really going to like it. Four of the six people in the training class are new to the agency and I cannot imagine trying to learn this job without the year I spent at the agency in a clerical job. As painful as it was, I learned who does what, how work flows, how to navigate around in the software, and today I am grateful for it. Last week I got a better picture of what the job will be. It is like law, it is forming an educated opinion based on certain steps, gathering evidence to support your opinion, and then writing your decision, citing your reasons, and listing your evidence. My favorite class in my Master's program was Administrative Law. I always find it interesting that personality tests that recommend jobs always list lawyer with the creative jobs, like artist and writer.

I may have a green thumb with the garden, but I do not with the lawn. After some research, I decided my lawn has a fungus and I bought some fungus treatment. I do not like chemicals in the yard, I don't use weed killer anymore, but I don't like wasting money watering a half dead looking lawn either. The lawn treatment is toxic to animals, so I let Sarah know what I was doing. I also had brown water suddenly coming out of the hot water tap, I figured I would ask her how her hot water was doing and if maybe this was occasionally normal.

After talking about fungus and brown water and our raspberry and blueberry harvests, Sarah remarked, ah, the joys of summer, but it is so short here, in a few months when it is cold and dark we will be looking back saying, remember just a few months ago when we were treating for fungus and worrying about brown water? Those were the good old days.

How do you kill a wasp nest?

Every experienced farm girl knows to check the house and surrounding areas for wasp nests in the spring, not in early summer after you just faced a swarm of them. I saw one, then a few days later I was in my backyard and was surrounded by 5 or 6. They seemed to be interested in the underside of the patio table. I take a look. There it is, an almost empty nest.

How do you kill a wasp nest? Too late in the day to go out and get spray. Not to worry, you can kill them with soapy water. Soapy water? Why would I buy spray, then? I tried some suggested home-made trap first,

That is an empty Gatorade bottle, cut off the top third and turn the top over so the narrow top spout is now inside the bottle, fill the bottle with soapy water and put something sweet (like honey) down in the spout. The idea is that the wasp will be lured into the trap, can't get out, and drowns. Here is a wikiHow version,

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Wasp-Trap

The trap must take more patience than I have. An hour later and the wasps are still crawling around the outside of my trap. The wasps are slowing down, which they do at night, so I filled a spray bottle and sprayed them with soapy water and watched them slowly die. Then I sprayed the nest and dislodged it, oops, more wasps, I sprayed them too. I have to say they were moving pretty slow, not flying at me, so it wasn't so scarey to spray them.

Now I know, check for wasp nests in spring and dislodge them before the wasps hatch, if you can't reach them, then they are probably not anywhere where they will hurt anyone, so leave them alone, they are good for the garden.

The sweet peas are about done. I harvested enough this year to actually cook some peas. It wasn't that I planted more, I only planted one more this year, but because I could plant them on time, they sprouted more peas. Once the sweet peas are done, I can rip out the plants and make some room for the cucumber and the beans.

Here are the bean plants,

The cucumber has flowers,

Take a look at the huge broccoli,

This is only a week after the picture I have up top. I did not mean to plant tomatoes and they are taking up more room than I planned, but still I am amazed at how I had tiny plants surrounded by dirt only a few weeks ago and now I am pretty much out of room. The other big leaf plant is the cauliflower, which is supposed to be difficult to grow, but I had another one that I had to pull out, not enough room. I'm having the same problem with the regular peas, two plants finally came up and I really only have room for one.

A few days after I took this I harvested my first hand full of raspberries,

Raspberries already? It is still June! I dare you to be unhappy picking raspberries.

The property manager called, seems the owner is coming to view his properties in the next few weeks. The property manager hasn't done one thing I asked him to in almost two years, now, quick, he wants to know if there are any issues he should deal with. There isn't much really, and my expectations of the property manger are nonexistent, but I have some of my own cleaning up to do so the owner can see I am a dream tenant and not think about raising my rent.

Watching Blueberries Turn Blue

If you thought I was kidding about how fast things can grow here, here are the peas and the blueberries less than 12 hours after I harvested all the peas and there were no blue blueberries,





It felt like I actually watched the blueberries turn blue. Blueberries are not as easy to harvest as raspberries. Raspberries pull off easily when they are ready, but blueberries pull off the same, ready or not. Blueberries should be blue all over with no reddish spots, which is hard to tell when they grow in big bunches. I've tried a few and the ones that are really ready are sweet, the too early ones are a bit sour.

What I thought were carrots growing in the middle of the vegetable planter are tomatoes. You would think I would know the difference, but I know I did not plant tomatoes. Either I did by mistake, or one of my seed packages is mismarked. The tops of my carrots are really tall and Sarah taught me how to tell if the carrot is ready. You dig around the base of the carrot to see the top of the carrot and how wide in diameter it is. I checked a few of mine, which were still fairly small, but I pulled them to help make room for more carrots too close by,



These are heirlooms that are different colors and one of them ran out of soft soil and started to grow sideways. Even small, carrots still taste the same and are crunchy. That is my third harvested head of lettuce and I've eaten three salads with my home grown lettuce this week.

Someone moved in next door. When the house went up for sale there was a steady stream of people driving or stopping by the house for a few days and then nothing for a few months. My new neighbor moved in about a week ago and quickly replaced the front yard left over cement decoration with flowers. It appears to be a single woman with a rabbit, no dog, yay! She moved in just in time to look at the flooded alley,





I think that is the karaoke singer bossing some guy digging in the hole. They have since filled up the hole, but left orange tape and cones on each side, and there is still flooding water. Water is a big deal here and standing water is a big deal everywhere. Every house in Boise has a backflow prevention assembly, which is used to protect the water supply from contamination or pollution due to backflowing water.

Backflow is the reversal in the flow of water from a potential source of contamination back to the potable (or clean) water supply. An example is having a garden hose in a bucket of soapy water at your home, and having backflow event occur causing that soapy water to "backflow" into the drinking water portion of your home.

From Wikipedia:

"A backflow prevention assembly is used to protect water supplies from contamination or pollution due to backflow.

In water supply systems, water is normally maintained at a significant pressure to enable water to flow from the tap, shower etc. When pressure fails or is reduced as may happen if a water main bursts, pipes freeze or there is unexpectedly high demand on the water system, the pressure in the pipe may be reduced and may allow contaminated water from the ground, from storage or from other sources to be drawn into the system.

Back pressure is another way that an undesirable contaminant may enter potable water piping. Sources of back pressure may be pumps in the water distribution system, boilers, heat exchanging equipment, or power washing equipment. In these cases there may be an almost constant risk of overcoming the static water pressure in the piping. To reduce the risk of contamination, a backflow preventer can be fitted. A backflow preventer is also important when chemicals are used, for instance for commercial/industrial descaling (boilers) or when bleaches are used for residential power washing.

To prevent contamination due to back pressure, some regulatory regimes require an air gap or mechanical backflow prevention assembly between the delivery point of mains water and local storage or use.[1] Where submerged mains inflow is permitted a backflow prevention assembly is required, which protects the potable water system from contamination hazards."

This just happened in Boise recently, where polluted water from an empty house made the neighbors sick. So, I think I have to call the water company and report the broken pipe, who knows if my neighbors have a working assembly or if they are polluting the neighborhood water. And in case you were wondering, the karaoke singer never shut up the entire time the guy was digging.

If I was my new neighbor, besides not buying a house with a backyard looking at my neighbor's outdoor stage, I would have planted a row of fast growing trees between my house and the alley. Because she planted flowers right away, I figure she must be an owner, not a renter.

The temple down the street is having "Deli Days" this weekend. Boise is short on deli food, not very many Jewish people, unlike the San Fernando Valley where I grew up, so I think I will walk over today and have a corned beef on rye. You can only eat so much salad.

The Abundance of Summer

The growing season is short here, but some things just suddenly take off, one day there are just flowers and the next day there are full grown vegetables.



I harvested the first round of sweet peas, by the time they are done that corn stalk will be really tall and the cucumber in front will start to take over and have cucumbers. I read that you can grow corn and let the sweet peas use it as a trellis, but it seemed to me that means you have to plant the corn too early.



The broccoli is getting big and some of the lettuce is about ready. Around the broccoli is some of those heirloom carrots, which are supposed to be colors besides orange, that Sarah gave me. I pulled up one of them too early (I need to learn some patience with seeds and underground vegetables) and it was two inches long and purple. Sarah said her broccoli got buggy and she pulled it up, and I figure the cauliflower may have the same problem, but they sure look good now.



In front of the bare spot in the vegetable planter are two cauliflower, I will probably lose one that broke at the base of the stem, I blame Cruiser and I think he laid down on it. Besides the attraction of that nice warm dirt, the cats like to play with earthworms, which are abundant in this planter. The bare spot is where I planted peas that did not come up. Behind the broccoli are bush beans that are a few inches high and in the middle are a row of another carrot, which for a long time I thought might be a weed. So far I have had no luck with peas, parsley, and dill seeds and just planted my second try with these. Now that the first round of carrots and lettuce are close to ready, I also planted another round of these.

Can you find the blueberry turning blue?



Now I can really tell how many raspberries I can look forward to,



Half of the herbs are on the windowsill and half are outside. I had good luck with the oregano and now have an overabundance in three pots even though I already harvested some for tomato sauce. The other pots have sage and the basil and thyme are outside. If the dill and the parsley ever come up, I will do some pot rearranging, since the idea of the little pots was that I could keep a variety of herbs indoors for winter. I do not need three pots of oregano.



Sarah gave me a cherry tomato seedling that sprouted from her prolific cherry tomato and I put it in a pot and set it with the herbs outside. Most other vegetables do not like tomatoes. The seedling just sat there the same for a few weeks and just in the last week decided to grow, making me think that you can start plants indoors, but they will not grow until the time in the season that they should.

I am finally recovered from the week of crazy weather and the power outage. I'm guessing that the wide barometer swings were too much for me because I had a week of headaches, sick to my stomach, dizziness, and no energy. Summer officially starts next week, but here it looks like it starts this weekend and we just had a week of perfect warm, clear weather.

My sixteen weeks of training for my new job starts Monday. I sat in my old job last week and wondered how I endured that kind of boredom for a year and hoped the boredom did not kill off too many brain cells. I moved my handful of stuff into my new office with a door. No more spinning top every day! I will miss Alyssa. I really did enjoy seeing her every morning and appreciated how well she understood that I need to ease into my workday.

I understand the sixteen weeks of training is intense and Monday we start with medical terminology. As someone who never liked science class and has not taken a science class since high school, I am intimidated. I'm trying to remind myself that it has only been a few years since I earned my Master's degree and I must still be capable of learning something completely new, but I have some new memory and concentration issues that I blame on menopause.

This weekend I am resting my brain and arming myself with brain food, like dark chocolate and blueberries and salmon. A guy at work wants a mural in his laundromat, so I also need to do some sketches for him. He wants one thing, his wife wants another, poor guy looks harried over it. I told him I would do sketches for a few ideas and they could both look at them and decide, maybe he can sell his idea better with a visual example. I'm not sure if doing a mural during intense training will be too much or a welcome relief.