James Montgomery Flagg's iconic image of Uncle Sam turned 96 years old yesterday.
Although most of us know the stern, finger-pointing Uncle Sam from the 1917 U.S. Army recruiting poster, he first appeared on the cover of Leslie's Weekly magazine over the caption, "What Are You Doing for Preparedness?"
Among the artist's other patriotic characters was the distaff Columbia. Flagg's Uncle Sam personified American power, authority and resolve, both at home and abroad, while his Columbia evoked Liberty, industry, unity, complacency -- human qualities, human aspirations, human failings.
In short, Uncle Sam embodied the U.S. government and everything it represents. Columbia stood for the People.
Of Flagg's many propaganda illustrations, perhaps my favorite is a menacing-looking Uncle Sam holding a pistol, from a 1917 Leslie's cover. It was captioned, "Get Off That Throne!"
I'll close with one more American propaganda image from the World War I years. This one was created not by James Montgomery Flagg but by renowned illustrator J.C. Leyendecker, a poster promoting the Boy Scouts of America's 1917 Liberty Loan Campaign.
by John L. Russell, Jr.
What will farms be like 50 years from now? How will the average farmer live? Will there even be farms?
Dr. James Bonner, professor of biology, California Institute of Technology answers yes to the last question.
He says people will still be eating food and plenty of it. They won't be taking their daily supply of energy directly as electrical current nor will they be satisfied with a pink pill.
But of course farming will change radically by the year 2000. The silo, farm house, and the old red barn will be replaced with sleek, modern, streamlined, air-conditioned structures filled with electronic equipment.
Growth regulators will control the rate and type of animal and vegetable produced. Chemistry will make possible producing three-pound broilers in eight weeks instead of 11 and 2,000 pounds of beef will be produced in the same length of time it now takes to make 500.
Frozen sperm irradiated in nuclear reactors will furnish mutation offsprings stronger and better for bigger market prices. Farmyard manure will still be used but will be supplemented with sewage sludge and waste products.
Weeding crops and worrying about diseases or insects will be a thing of the past, and even the weather will be controlled by satellites.
Computer and photo-electric sensing devices and programming on magnetic tapes will allow farmers to plow, sow, cultivate, and reap several fields of crops at the same time. By simply monitoring at the console of a television receiver, robots will do most of the labor.
All timber will be cut electrically to any shape desired by a form of electric charge -- thus cutting out the double processes of sawing and planing. Electricity will be furnished by collector plates that will soak up the sun's heat to provide energy for your own little electric power plant which will operate the many electrical appliances around the farm.
The farmer clothes will be very different 50 years from now. There will be no weaving or knitting. Fabrics will be poured in liquid form from giant pastry tubes or rolled into large sheets and cut in tremendous quantities. But you will be growing the very products from which these new materials are made.
From the central electronic center in your home or office, you will be able to see on your closed circuit TV all that goes on anywhere on the farm without leaving your easy chair. If you want to give orders, you will simply use your intercommunication system or your pocket telephone.
You won't be shipping your goods long distances any more. With the coming of automation there will be no need for people to congregate in big cities. Farmers will tend to "live in" rather than inhabit the countryside; farms will be near their markets in smaller cities of around 10,000 which will be self-sufficient and independent.
No longer will any farmer have to do without city luxuries. The typical farm house of the year 2000, powered from a small local atomic power plant, can have heating and cooling systems, germicidal lamps, water and sewage systems and many other things.
Charles H. Weaver, vice president in charge of atomic power activities for Westinghouse Electric Corporation, and Francis K. McCune, vice president for atomic business development of General Electric Company, both see the typical home 50 years from now with an automatic control center that will take the labor out of housework and provide a very easy and rich living for all.
With a magic wand the furniture can be dusted. Floors and furniture will be scuff-proof and indestructible. You will have wall-sized TV in color and 3-D.
Your electronic oven will prepare food in seconds. Dishes will be washed in a soapless, super-sonic wave cleaning chamber and automatically put away.
John L. Burns, president of the Radio Corporation of America, foresees the miracle home of tomorrow being run by a pushbutton household electronic center. This center will get you up with the chickens -- if you still want to -- close the windows, start the coffee going, cook the bacon and eggs, and what all else.
Frederick R. Kappel, president of American Telephone and Telegraph Company, predicts you may be able to make cheap phone calls anywhere in the world when satellites begin to take over relays.
Going to town to shop will be unnecessary. The wife will just dial a department store on her TV and a salesperson will hold up the various articles.
You can buy your farm equipment the same way too. After making your decision, just press your charge plate into a machine. An electronic eye then goes into action and the price will be telemetered to central billing at the store's main office located 100 miles away. Central billing will automatically mail you a bill at the end of the month.
Spray washing will be used to clean both people and laundry, eliminating expensive plumbing. A pint of water an hour is all that will be required for the average farm house, and this will evaporate into the air. Sewage will be disposed of chemically on the premises or turned into valuable fertilizer.
All your vehicles, including farm machinery, will be powered by atomic energy. The vehicles will require little maintenance and will need fuel only once a year -- if that often.
With almost totally automatic farms, there will be plenty of time for travel. Supersonic jets and rocket airlines will be popular and cheap to fly by this time, so you can spend the weekends in Europe.
See you down on the farm in 2000 A.D.
["Farming in the 21st Century" appeared in the August/September 1960 issue of The National Future Farmer. John L. Russell, Jr. also wrote The Shape of Things to Come, a book published by the Popular Mechanics Company in June 1960.]
While Mrs. KintlaLake was out of town on business early this week, I gathered two dozen ripe Roma tomatoes, cut them into quarter-inch slices, sprinkled them with Mrs. Dash Extra Spicy Blend and dried them in our new food dehydrator. The process, which took about 36 hours, yielded a marvelously sweet-and-savory result.
For now I've stored them in a wire-bail jar. I'm sure they'll find their way into soups and pasta dishes -- if, that is, I can resist snacking on them as-is.
This morning I picked a pocketful of yellow pear tomatoes, halved them and began drying them as well. I skipped the seasoning for this batch, and I'm anxious to see how they turn out.
I also harvested our first five habanero peppers, along with 15 long green hot peppers. Both got my refrigerator-pickles treatment, the cold brine supplemented with peppercorns and garlic cloves.
Considering the late start, damn, this has been a great season.
Our volunteer gourd vines started dying back a couple of weeks ago, and I finally got 'round to harvesting what they left behind.
Thirty-two "winged" Cucurbita gourds now lay drying on a newspaper-covered table in our basement. They're of various shapes and sizes, the largest measuring over 17 inches long. Most are green, orange and gold, with a few white ones in the bunch.
More than two dozen tomatoes, harvested from the garden yesterday morning, finish ripening on stone windowsills in our kitchen. Over in the fridge there's a tub of chunky salsa fresca, made with home-grown tomatoes and hot peppers, along with a bowl of cucumbers-and-onions salad marinating in red-wine vinegar.
Out back, the garden is a rat's nest of ridiculously productive plants and unreachable (but harmless) weeds. Our cuke vines are withering at the base but still setting fruit, about half of it small and stunted. We'll have a modest crop of peas from a second planting. More long green peppers are on the way and, obviously, three tomato plants are giving us more than we can handle.
As I hoped, we'll have a late-season bounty of habanero peppers.
I don't recall ever being this gratified with a backyard garden. As autumn approaches and takes hold I'll clear some of the beds, prepare the soil and plant wintering crops. The cycle never ends.
Recently I did a different kind of "planting" (so to speak) that'll bear fruit after the Labor Day weekend. Although I didn't mention it here, I took a temporary warehouse job a couple of weeks ago, filling in for four days at the shop my wife manages.
To my surprise, I really enjoyed the work. Apparently I proved my worth to the rest of the crew, too, because the corporate office called Mrs. KintlaLake this week and offered me a full-time position.
My first day is Tuesday.
Such a tape-and-boxes proposition requires a proper knife, of course. I rummaged through the blades I own and didn't find what I was looking for, exactly, so (naturally) I had a good excuse to go shopping.
After surfing KnifeWorks for a while, I picked up a Blade-Tech that fills the bill. The Ratel Lite is inexpensive, small, one-handed and equipped with a pocket clip -- perfect. I'll offer my impressions here once I've used it for a week or two.
Between now and the moment I punch the clock on Tuesday, however, I'll reach down and pick up "the longest continuous thread in the fabric of my life" -- Ohio State football.
It's been a rocky off-season, to say the least, an agonizing time for life-long fans of the Buckeyes. Just yesterday, three more players were suspended for the first game.
Tomorrow, the bullshit will end and football will begin.
Life in Buckeye Nation will get back to normal. Traditions cultivated over 122 years will resume. All will be well once again.
Like a storm leaves the air clear and fresh, scandal may have stripped OSU football to its essence. We have a new coach, an interim coach, a young coach. Expectations for this 2011 team are modest. Critics are likely to be uncharacteristically forgiving.
In other words, the pressure in Columbus is as low as it'll ever get.
This is one football season that everyone should be able to enjoy. Mrs. KintlaLake and I will settle into our seats in The 'Shoe tomorrow at noon, intent on doing just that.
In yesterday's much-ballyhooed (but patently inconsequential) Ames Straw Poll, Rep. Michele Bachmann won a squeaker over Rep. Ron Paul. Stealing a piece of their thunder, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas announced that he, too, wants to be President.
Never mind what you hear from giddy conservatives -- neither development heralds the defeat of Pres. Barack Obama. So far Bachmann and Paul have polled poorly in a hypothetical matchup with the incumbent, and Perry will show that he's incapable of shedding the perception that he's nothing more (or less) than George W. Bush II.
Worse, and despite thumping the "Liberty!" tub, all three of these GOP hopefuls pander shamelessly to (so-called) "social conservatives" -- white evangelical Christians, mostly, whose ideology couldn't be more antithetical to Liberty.
Barely a week before declaring his candidacy, Perry led 30,000 in a "Prayer-Palooza" at a stadium in Houston -- a sitting governor keynoting a camp meeting. Even Paul, arguably dean of the small-government movement, has been sucked into the anti-libertarian abyss on abortion and other issues.
Considering the weak Republican field, this is not good.
"I may not be the gearhead I used to be, but I'm still plenty redneck."
Those aren't my words -- they came from my smiling wife as we sat along a curb in nearby Reynoldsburg last night, joining thousands of others to watch the annual Mopar Nationals "Brice Road Cruise."
The air was thick with tire smoke. Some of the onlookers, many of them children, laid down patches of water on the pavement, hoping to lure a good burnout. Drivers were more than willing to oblige, a token police presence having little effect.
Either you get this sort of thing or you don't. We had a ball, and besides, dropping by the Brice Road Cruise was Mrs. KintlaLake's idea.
I married a redneck gearhead. Somebody pinch me.
Ohio's state flag appears on a new postage stamp, released on Friday. It's part of the "Flags of Our Nation" series and, since I'm a born-and-bred Buckeye, it's a source of pride.
Yet another harvest shot, this haul from midday today -- nine large cukes, five peppers, two Romas and five yellow pear tomatoes.
I'll end this roundup with the way our weekend began -- at the Huntington Park Hoedown, a benefit concert held Friday evening at the home ballpark of the Columbus Clippers.
We arrived at the will-call window just before the gates opened, fetched my media badge and my wife's field pass and made our way to the visitors' dugout to deposit my photo gear. Local solo artist Chris Logsdon took the stage first, followed by Jonalee White and her band. Both treated the crowd to typically great performances.
McGuffey Lane, by far our favorite local band (and the source of our comp passes, by the way), was next on the bill and didn't disappoint. My wife and I adjourned to the parking lot for a smoke after their set.
When we returned, the reunited Exile was onstage. Of all the acts, we figured, this was the lone take-or-leave proposition.
Boy, were we wrong.
I don't remember the last time I was as blown away by a performance. I mean, here was an '80s pop-turned-country band showing chops that had the show's other musicians gathering, awestruck, behind the stage. Exile's a capella rendition of "People Get Ready," the Curtis Mayfield classic, had the ballpark so quiet I swear I heard the outfield grass growing.
Seriously, people -- if you have a chance to catch Exile live, with all five of its founding members, do it. I promise you won't regret it.
Hoedown headliner Pure Prairie League, over five hours after their sound check, closed the show with a high-energy set, including three of my favorites: "Early Morning Riser," "Two-Lane Highway" and, of course, "Amie."
Photographically the night had me wishing for faster glass and steadier hands. But incomparable music performed in a great venue, on a clear summer evening that saw a full moon rise over the Columbus skyline behind the stage -- it doesn't get better than that.
It's a damp, overcast morning here at KintlaLake Ranch. Seems like a good time to catalog some unexpected finds.
In one of my Urban Resources posts I surveyed The Other Economy,
that rich source of goods and services operating outside the conventional marketplace. My family and I have been "shopping the roadside" a lot lately, turning up bargain after useful bargain.
I've regretted parting with my Black & Decker Benchtop Workmate since leaving it behind when I moved back to Ohio ten years ago. Introduced in the late 1970s, the Benchtop model eventually was discontinued, so if I wanted to replace it I'd have to explore the secondhand market.
I discovered this one (above) earlier this summer at a garage sale halfway down a narrow alley in our village. Other than a few stains and a little rust, I found it in excellent condition, complete except for a pair of original-issue L-bolts that clamp it to a bench.
The price: just $3.00. Two carriage bolts, two flat washers and two wingnuts, purchased at the local hardware store, put it on my workbench for a grand total of four bucks.
Because a man can never have enough vises (or vices, for that matter), at another garage sale that same day I picked up this "hobby vise" (left) for two dollars. It clamps to the work-surface with a thumbscrew and will come in handy for a variety of small projects.
Speaking of The Other Economy, our village held its annual flea market last weekend. It's not a big event, just a coupla dozen canopied tables piled with household castoffs. My wife and I came home with a three-foot chocolate rabbit (brown plastic, actually) that'll grace our front porch next Easter, and a 1960s-vintage glass-and-chrome teapot. Together, the two items cost us two bucks.
I spent one more dollar, that on an old Boy Scout "contest medal." These awards were introduced in the late 1920s, as I understand it, but they'd been retired by the time I became a Scout myself.
Wanting to get a better fix on this medal's age, yesterday I examined it with a magnifying glass. Other than the word CAMPING cast into the front, the pendant bears no markings. Stamped on the clasp at the top of the ribbon, however, is PAT. NO. 2,795,064. A bit of web-sleuthing unearthed a copy of the original patent for the clasp -- applied for in 1953, granted in 1957.
So the clasp, at least, probably is as old as I am. A buck bought me a keeper and a pleasant exercise in discovery.
I love beer -- and I mean good beer. Sure, I'm willing to throw back my earthly portion of mass-produced barley pop, but I prefer beer that has actual flavor.
In a corner-store lager, for example, I enjoy an ice-cold Rolling Rock. If I had to choose a favorite, without a doubt it'd be Rogue Brewery Dead Guy Ale. And as you might expect, I'm especially partial to small-batch local brews, like those from Columbus Brewing Company.
Recently I learned of Rockmill Brewery, located in nearby Lancaster, and its Belgian-style ales. As the story goes, Rockmill's founder discovered that the well on his family's farm produced water with the same mineral content as that found in Wallonia, Belgium, and that served as the inspiration for four unusual ales.
Mrs. KintlaLake and I savored a bottle of Rockmill Dubbel over a plate of summer sausage, sharp cheese and apple slices (this isn't a beer one serves with nachos), and we came away truly amazed. It's strong (6% to 8% ABM), full-bodied and fruity, as well as pricey ($16 for a 22-ounce bottle) -- and worth every penny.
Great beer, brewed barely a stone's throw from home -- that's as good as it gets. There's a bottle of high-octane Rockmill Tripel in my fridge, and I can't wait to pop the cork.
Finally, of course, our vegetable garden offers up discoveries almost every day -- take this green-and-yellow beauty (below) that sprang from one of the "volunteer" vines I mentioned last week. At about 12 inches long, it's the largest gourd that's set (so far). Our unintentional crop continues to spread, so there will be more.
Around 6pm today I emerged from the humble KintlaLake vegetable garden with our first two Roma tomatoes, six yellow pear tomatoes, more than a dozen carrots, ten long green hot peppers and another monster cucumber, this one found hiding among the carrot greens.
I've been sending a photo like that one to Mrs. KintlaLake almost every morning these days. By the time it shows up in her e-mailbox she's been at work for an hour or two, and she looks forward to my sharing what I've discovered in the garden that day.
Today's bounty: four cucumbers, bringing the harvest (so far) to nearly four dozen; and 24 carrots, some quite tiny but all sweet as sugar.
Like many of my fellow citizens, I've spent a lot of time recently tracking the progress (or lack thereof) of debt-ceiling discussions -- more about that in Part II. First, I want to hit a few other topics.
Foreshadowing
The U.S. has more than its share of white, Christian, right-wing nutjobs who prefer that anyone who doesn't profess the same xenophobia be exterminated. So when I heard that a likewise-addled Norwegian murdered 78 innocents on July 22, I didn't wonder if such a massacre could happen here -- I pondered how soon it will happen here.
Hot as a pumpkin patch
I'm not handling the heat well this summer. The last time I felt this way was in mid-September, when a day of pickin' punkins kicked my aging, out-of-shape ass.
Truth is, I've become way too accustomed to air conditioning. And strangely enough, the fix for my heat-intolerance is to spend more time working outside. That's easier said than done, considering, but I'm working on it.
Our garden grows...and grows...and grows...
The aforementioned bounty of cucumbers is taking over our small garden plot, threatening to take over my life. Now three tomato plants are trying my patience -- and I was warned.
A while back, my neighbor told me of a spring morning many years ago, when she witnessed our home's previous owner, standing on a stepladder in his garden, setting ten-foot stakes. When asked why, he replied politely that this was especially fertile soil, insisting that the absurdly tall stakes were quite necessary to support his tomatoes.
Later that summer, according to my neighbor, the optimistic old gardener was proven right.
This season's tomatoes are following the same path skyward, today nearly eight feet tall, so heavy with fruit that they're pulling their cages from the ground. I've supplemented the leaning wire enclosures with six-foot bamboo stakes and string. I'm not sure that'll be enough.
I'm also having a love-hate relationship with some "volunteer" vines -- gourds or pumpkins, I think -- which sprouted from seeds that survived composting. I've pulled hundreds of seedlings from our raised beds since May, choosing to leave a few that came up outside the fence. Now, despite my pruning, they cover a hundred square feet of lawn.
Fertile soil, indeed. We haven't used a speck of chemical herbicide, pesticide or fertilizer, by the way -- nothing but hand-weeding and home-cooked compost.
Sneak peek
I'm dropping a placeholder here for the next installment of my Urban Resources series.
If there's one resource that most of us take for granted and mismanage horribly, it's water. I've become particularly aware of it this summer, partly through gardening and partly because every month I have to pay the village for what I use. I've been exploring ways to conserve, extend and even harvest water -- stay tuned.
After the circus leaves town
A couple of flatbed trucks rumbled up the street late yesterday afternoon, carrying rolls of canvas and aluminum poles -- the last remnants of our village's annual festival.
For four days we'd been treated to heavy traffic on the street and sidewalk in front of our house. The sounds of live music, some great and some absolutely awful, drifted over our yard from the big concert stage. There were carnival rides and games-of-chance, fair food and a beer garden, a classic-car show and, naturally, a parade.
No fireworks this year, though. Budget cuts, don'tcha know.
We made the three-minute walk to the festival grounds on Wednesday evening, again on Saturday afternoon for a funnel-cake fix, and finally on Saturday night for the traditional closing concert -- a performance by a gray-haired pop star that festival organizers can get cheap.
It may be a weenie little festival, but this is home. We like it fine.
(As I type this, the outdoor temperature here in our village is 95°F. Coupled with 64% relative humidity and a dew point of 81°F, the "feels like" temp -- that new-fangled "heat index" popular with TV meteorologists -- is a brain-broiling 117°F, and we haven't yet seen the hottest part of the day. Time to focus on something cooler.)
In last Saturday's post, I waxed righteous about re-using a vintage Ball canning jar. I've put up three more quarts of pickles since then, each in a jar left behind by our home's previous owner. I've also done a bit of sleuthing about their pedigrees.
That clear Kerr Self-Sealing Wide Mouth jar (above) arguably is the least interesting of the four. It offers no clues as to its age but, judging by the other jars we found, it probably was made in the 1960s in Sand Springs, Oklahoma.
The quaint-looking Mom's Mason jar was made in nearby Columbus by Home Products. a division of Ohio Container, in the mid-1970s.
This blue Atlas Strong Shoulder Mason was made in Wheeling, West Virginia by Hazel-Atlas, which ceased production in 1964. I suspect that this jar may date to the 1940s or 1950s -- but that wouldn't make it the oldest jar rescued from our basement shelf.
Nope, that distinction (so far) belongs to the blue Ball Perfect Mason mentioned on Saturday. Its markings testify that it was made between 1923 and 1933.
These vintage canning jars aren't just worth keeping -- they're damned well worth using.
One of the five raised beds in our vegetable garden hosts a tomato plant, two sweet basil plants, two hot pepper plants, four cucumber vines and a spearmint plant -- all in just 25 square feet.
To say that it's a prolific patch would be an understatement. The tomato has passed the six-foot mark and is loaded with fruit. The basils are nearly three feet tall and lush. Everything is healthy and producing, especially the cucumbers. Witness this example, picked early this morning after I'd finished the day's watering.
The vital statistics: length 9.5 inches, girth 8 inches. I don't know what this backyard monster weighs, but I found it under a particularly dense section of canopy. Ready late last week, probably, it managed to elude me for several days, and thus it grew.
Again, it came from a 25-square-foot bed.
There are so many solutions to the problem of limited space -- intensive gardening and container gardening, to name two -- that there's really no good reason (including stoopid city ordinances) not to practice sustenance-gardening skills. With a little planning, good soil preparation and regular watering, it can be done almost anywhere.
When we moved into these digs last year, our discoveries included a basement shelf lined with empty glass jars -- three dozen vintage Ball, Kerr and Atlas canning jars, hinting that the previous occupant was typical of her generation.
This afternoon I put up the season's first refrigerator pickles. And although I have plenty of my own jars, I went down to the basement and cast my eyes over the old ones, ultimately choosing a quart-size Ball "Perfect Mason" in blue glass.
It seemed fitting.
We're carrying on a tradition of preserving food grown on this modest patch of land, using a vessel first employed perhaps four decades ago.
If I have to explain why that feels just right, you wouldn't understand.
Ok, so it's been a while. I've been busy.
Well, that's not quite accurate. Although there's been lots happening around the KintlaLake household, more than once over the last six weeks I made a conscious decision to walk past my computer in favor of doing something productive. Often I went two or three days without logging on.
A much-anticipated visit from out-of-town family over the July 4th weekend never materialized, but we spent the months of May and June throwing ourselves into getting our place ready -- light fixtures to landscaping, painting interior walls to preparing the tiny guest room. It was all-consuming and ultimately, visitors or not, rewarding.
When it comes to greenery, my wife is in charge of ornamentals. I manage the edibles, and my carefully tended vegetable garden has started to offer its bounty.
This morning's "harvest" was eight cucumbers, a pepper and a bowl of peas. That does it for our first crop of peas; likewise, the early-summer radishes are in. Carrots will be next to mature, I think.
My plum-tomato plants have grown to over five feet tall and the "garden salsa" peppers -- I swear, I thought they were jalapeños -- are producing nicely. The habanero plants, as usual, are making me cranky, but I remain optimistic about a late-summer harvest. All of our herbs are ridiculously healthy, save one dill plant lost to parsley worms. And after picking cukes today, I counted fifty more blossoms.
Either I need to come up with more cucumber recipes, or we're gonna have enough refrigerator pickles to last us 'til next Christmas.
A week ago we celebrated Independence Day, perhaps my favorite holiday. As is my custom, I began this Fourth of July by reading the Declaration of Independence -- aloud, alone -- to remind myself of my great good fortune to have been born an American. Later my family and I, along with a half-dozen friends, set up folding chairs along the curb in front of our house for the village parade.
For us, this parade is much more than a procession. We take the opportunity to shout our gratitude to each and every firefighter, law-enforcement officer and military veteran who passes by. Last Monday we stepped into the street to shake hands with the county sheriff, and we personally thanked our state senator for sponsoring pro-Second Amendment legislation recently signed into law by Ohio's governor.
Afterward the group returned to the patio for a cookout -- pot luck, good eats -- and as darkness fell we carted our chairs to the edge of our back yard to enjoy the traditional fireworks display.
Unlike thousands of revelers who pack the village's festival grounds for the show, we have a front-row seat. See, the shells launch from the city park behind our house, so we pull our chairs right up to the line of yellow police tape marking the edge of the safety zone and watch the fireworks explode almost directly over our heads.
I mean, it's like having our very own personal show.
When this year's display was over -- it was absolutely spectacular, by the way -- we cheered, brushed ash from our hair and, smiling out loud, walked back to the house. We love our humble home, but we love it most on Independence Day.
So all's well here. And after an unannounced hiatus, KintlaLake Blog is back. Stay tuned.
Wetter-than-usual weather has played hell with spring planting in this part of the country. Farmers haven't been able to get into sodden fields to till the earth, never mind sow their seeds. Yields will be down and prices are sure to rise, even if the first frost comes late.
I finally fenced our vegetable garden last weekend and (optimistically) began putting in our own "crops" late Sunday and Monday afternoon. First I set a variety of nursery-grown plants -- jalapeño and habanero peppers, Roma tomatoes, basil, Italian and curly parsley, oregano, dill, rosemary, cilantro, and chives. Next I sowed rows of peas, radishes, carrots and spinach from seed.
Last I planted several bushes -- raspberry, blackberry and blueberry -- in a new bed behind the garage, just a few steps from our vegetables-and-herbs plot. The soil in that area is wretched, pudding-like clay, and it took some serious work (plus quite a bit of "borrowing" from the vegetable garden) to make it usable.
Everything appears to be doing well so far. This morning I was greeted by radish seedlings, the first sprouts to break the surface.
Ours is a garden of favorites -- that is, we grow what we like. And while it's not a sustenance garden, per se, it allows us to hone our senses and practice the skills required for true sustenance gardening.
That's the big payoff.
We expect to double the size of our garden next year and experiment with other crops. Part of our garage will become a "hothouse" for starting saved and store-bought seeds well before the last frost.
That's a long way off, though. Right now, I think I'll go pick up a few cucumber plants and put 'em in later today.
Although most of us know the stern, finger-pointing Uncle Sam from the 1917 U.S. Army recruiting poster, he first appeared on the cover of Leslie's Weekly magazine over the caption, "What Are You Doing for Preparedness?"
