The Day Everything Broke

Today, so close to Halloween, offered up a share of tricks.

Last week, we cruised in our 1968 Chevy truck to go to an apple orchard. I rewarded the truck by putting it on the lift and changing the oil. Afterward, it would not start.

I was not quite ready  to curse. When our John Deere 1250 backhoe would not start, I cursed plenty. I needed it for digging holes to plant some bushes and trees.

I cursed in private, then recalled my recent lessons about turning frustration into gratitude.

So I got serious about diagnosis. The truck? I'd flooded it trying to start it by the throttle under the hood instead of the gas pedal. Solution: pull the spark plugs (due for a change anyway) and let it sit on the lift (for whose repair I'm thankful) and try  again when the new plugs come from Amazon (than you, Jeff Bezos: our local auto-parts store was clueless). While I was at it, I prepared to update everything to an electronic ignition: an invisible and relatively cheap (under $400) upgrade that makes starting an antique vehicle vastly easier.

The backhoe? I spent about $150 for a new battery (being thankful that I had diagnosed the starting problem) but after the beast ran for 5 minutes, it quit. Would I curse more?

A little. I cursed once or twice, until I recalled how my talented brother-in-law Joe fixed a similar problem on a different diesel: a small fuel leak made that tractor stall after a few minutes, as the fuel system pressurized.

I checked the lines on our backhoe. Sure enough, a plastic bowl that separates water from fuel had cracked, and fuel leaked out, starving the big Yanmar motor as it warmed up. A bit of epoxy provided a quick repair, lasting long enough to move the tractor and dig one hole in the ground for a shrub.

A new fuel bowl is on its way. 

By the way, I recalled how my father-in-law pinned himself under the rear tire of that selfsame backhoe, when he did something in haste. He survived, a miracle, but was never the same again. Life is short: make haste slowly, or festina lente, as the Ancients Romans said.

Let's face it: machines are easier to fix (and break) than humans, at least if you know something about machines. Yet some of these same Tractorpunk ideas might help with a difficult, even broken, human.

But first, let's dig some big holes in the ground and burn some rubber!

Gleaning Time

This word will be a good one for my workplace blog, where I propose a Word of the Week and Metaphor of the Month.

On the farm, or even in a small garden, gleaning has a strong purpose of connecting us with the final turn of the season of warmth to the colder, darker months ahead. I tend to glean--gather whatever remains from my final heavy harvest--on the day of first frosts. That would be tonight and tomorrow night in Central Virginia!

I filled a bushel basket with some summer squash, a lone cucumber, a few tomatoes, and many, many hot peppers bound for chopping and fermenting. It sounds sad, this last picking of fruits, but really it's a fun way to say "thank you" to the garden beds and "hello!" to fall plantings: broccoli, lettuce, kale, garlic and onions mostly. 

Nan and I then put heavy row cover on the smallest seedlings and trucked giant piles of dying weeds and garden debris to our two compost piles (a long-term one for weeds, a shorter-term pile for soil amendments, leaves, and kitchen scraps).  We spread fresh straw around the new plants we have for fall (Kale appeared just as the basil finished up) and continued to glean lessons from a rather bad year in the garden. Mostly that was my fault: late start, travel in May, laziness in July and August.

 Next year we will change how we manage our raised beds and mowing our paths, and remove any remaining weed-block fabric. We will rotate basil more mindfully (black spot appeared on it at season's end, so it cannot be composted).  We also gleaned some good ideas about planting a second crop of squash in late August, to beat the squash-bug cycle.  One lesson we gleaned involved herbicides: sadly, we cannot manage 300' of fence-line without some judicious application. With a good deal of that fence now covered in thick vines, we'll cut, spray, and maintain it better to keep weeds out and the sun on our garden. We lost a lot of produce to the shade this year. 

That all said, I managed to put up a gallon of tomato sauce in pint jars, nearly that much Blackberry and Fig jam, and get a fair onion crop. The garlic did not get harvested in time, so it sprouted. I gleaned all that; the soft-neck variety will be trimmed and pickled; the hard-necks went right back into a new bed. Next year, hard-necks will be our speciality as they keep so well.

I hope the lessons you gleaned from your gardens help in 2023.

Better Safe Than...Botulism

When my weirdo friend Gary and I were little, as precocious little boys with a love of reading do, we would say the names of ailments and diseases. We would then laugh like busy pint-sized demons.

Leprosy!
Jungle Rot!
Hernia! (This one we thought should be a first name)
Rickets!
Malaria! (Also a name)
Botulism!

Not so funny now, and we've lost Gary (to none of those listed).  For my part, I want to avoid Botulism if I can. When I can. During canning.

I put up a fair quantity of my Middle-Eastern tomato sauce this year, using my typical recipe and adding lemon juice to each jar, as today's varieties are not as acidic as those our grannies grew.

And being stupid, I canned them in a water bath, as I have long recommended at this site. All the jars sealed, but today I'm going to pop the lids, empty the jars, re-sterilize them, add more lemon, reheat the sauce, refill and can the jars in my pressure-cooker canner.

Why all that work? One, I love that sauce. Two, the jury is out on water-bath canning or pressure-cooker canning for tomato sauces, with my canner's manual recommending boiling water for salsa (is my recipe that?) and the National Center for Home Food Preservation (yay academia!) recommending pressure-cooker canning for spaghetti sauces without meat. Here is their FAQ page. They wisely advise on that page "The specific recipe, and sometimes preparation method, will determine if a salsa can be processed in a boiling water canner or a pressure canner. A process must be scientifically determined for each recipe."

So let's call my sauce vegetarian spaghetti  (without even one meatball and therefore, no bread. Google that one). And I will use the pressure-cooker method the National Center recommends, since it guarantees that food reaches 240 degrees. That will kill off any bacteria that can cause botulism. 

Boiling water is not hot enough.

Friends, do not trust all the homesteading and DIY-bloggers on this matter. Go with the scientists, and good luck with your late-season food prep.