Like a Bug on a Windshield

Last winter I bought a selection of pepper seeds from an online source. One pepper variety I bought on a lark was the Aji Dulce #2. The product description said "Looks just like the fiery red habanero, but without the heat!" I thought it would be fun to pop one in my mouth when I'm at a party at the home of one of my pepper growing friends. Mister Macho eats habaneros without even blinking. The seeds germinated fairly quickly. Peppers are notorious for taking their own sweet time in sprouting. In fact, some hot peppers take weeks and require very specific temperature and moisture levels. This is why I haven't grown any Aji Amarillo peppers yet, though I've tried--Lord how I've tried. The Aji Dulce plants were robust, growing quickly and transplanting easily into the garden. It didn't take long for the plants to reach their full height, about 18 inches. It also didn't take long for the plants to blossom and in what seemed like no time there were

My only restaurant experience was back in high school (see how I avoided the whole "when I was a kid" cliche). The first job was as a dishwasher in a steakhouse. The second job was as a dishwasher in a B-B-Q place. I say B-B-Q because the actual barbeque was made in a factory of some sort down in Wichita Falls and then reheated in our kitchen. While my title at the steakhouse was dishwasher, my duties included cutting steaks, cutting up chickens, cutting up sides of beef into chunks and grinding those into ground beef, making salads, cutting french fries, fetching supplies from the storeroom for the cook, and of course washing dishes. Around here I do a lot of the meal planning, shopping and cooking. I would say "most," but then someone would prove me wrong and make me start keeping a time sheet. The thing is, I really like working in the kitchen. Oh, and cutting up onions is entirely my job. I enjoy doing it and onions don't make me tear up, so Patrick alwa

It's that time of year again when I start seed shopping online. By that time of year I mean any month between January and December. Seed shopping is a bit of an obsession. It takes the form of "what if I do this next year instead of that?" A friend gave me some fairly hot heirloom peppers that he gets from one of his friends every year. I don't know exactly what they are, but they look like small red jalapenos. I used them to make hot sauce, really great hot sauce, and it spurred my imagination. I started cruising every online heirloom seed catalog I could find, considering possibilities for making hot sauce next year. Heat is not the issue. Jalapenos are hot enough, I'm not even going to consider habaneros or ghost peppers or anything like that. I'm thinking about buying tabasco seeds and then I'll use the patented Tabasco process of fermenting and aging the sauce. Or I'll get some serrano seeds and make a nice garlic hot sauce and steep it in t

Over the past two weeks I've read several reviews of the new Fox Television series The Orville. One writer said it was "just awful." When I was a kid (there's that phrase again), television was a brand new thing. We had a black and white Zenith, a big black cube with a 17 inch diagonal screen. My dad controlled the TV and we watched what he watched or we read and did kid-type stuff, like build models, in our rooms. The big weekly television event for us kids was when Dad let us watch The Twilight Zone. It was science-fiction-y and futuristic and we loved it. Then one day, Star Trek came on and things changed forever. Unfortunately, Star Trek only lasted three years and we had nothing to replace it--until it came back in syndication. Over the years since then, I was an avid fan of the Star Trek movies, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager. I watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but it was mostly set on a space station--kind of like Star Trek: Shoppi

Irma is still whipping parts of Florida with wind and rain and making her presence known in Georgia and the Carolinas. Things could have been worse--Irma could have been slower moving, like Harvey. We still don't have much in the way of video and reports from the Keys and Miami. It seems like the news cameras grab five minutes of film and those are the images we see over and over again for days. Harvey is kind of old news, yet much of the flooding persists and the damage reports are generic at best. Port Aransas is a complete loss, as far as I can tell. I've done some Googling, but photos are scarce. Rockport is in bad shape and the thousands of acres of cotton in the hurricane's path are at least a ninety percent loss. Agriculturally, we won't begin to know the extent of the damage to Florida for quite some time. I don't know what crops are planted when, so I wouldn't even hazard a guess. Texas lost quite a few cattle and the grass they feed on to the extre

During our time out here in the woods we've gotten used to the variety of night sounds. We hear owls. Not just hoot owls, but screech owls, caterwauling barred owls and something we haven't identified yet. We hear a variety of frogs, toads, crickets, katydids, cicadas and all kinds of insects we haven't identified yet. Oh, and don't forget that annoying mosquito that comes whining up to my ear over and over and over. And the ringing in my ear from swatting at it. Smaller night birds are not as frequent, but we have a few whip-poor-wills and mockingbirds. Barking dogs are common everywhere, but there are many more dogs in our neighborhood and we all depend on them to notify us of intruders--and imagined intruders. There's a donkey at a nearby farm who brays occasionally at night, and a cow or two who low in the dark (low is country talk for moo). During most of the year we hear coyotes yipping and howling in the distance. Sometimes not too distant. Several times

Recently I've subscribed to about a dozen newsletters. Email newsletters. Newsletters that I find really interesting. The older people in the audience may remember when email was a brand new thing and almost everybody had AOL dial-up. I started getting people's email addresses and I would email them. And then I would check my email a dozen times a day to see if I'd gotten a response. After a time, email was like a primitive form of Facebook. Then somebody invented spam and email got even more like a primitive form of Facebook. Pretty soon I started getting into arguments and misunderstandings and finally people started to troll me and email became exactly like Facebook only without so many pictures. And I kept on checking it. But then I didn't. I discovered websites that interested me. I could pursue my hobbies and interests online, learning more, finding sources for materials, or whatever. Some of the websites had discussion boards and that became an obsession, wai

It has been a tough year for gardeners, homesteaders and farmers. A lack of pollinators has resulted in smaller crops and even crop failures in some areas. Just this morning I read about the sad state of Maine blueberries. Harvests had been increasing and prices dropping, but this year a combination of mummy berry disease and lack of pollinators has reduced harvest as much as 36%. Several homesteaders I keep up with online have mentioned smaller harvests of crops dependent on pollinators. In my own garden it seems I have problems with lack of pollination.  I haven't seen any honey bees at all this year, but I have seen a few bumblebees and smaller pollinators that I might not have noticed before. Crop failures and reduced harvests have been occurring worldwide this year. Corn and wheat don't depend on pollinators, but weather patterns have taken a toll. Fungal diseases such as mummy berry mentioned above can thrive in unusually wet weather and warmer winters. Future food