I’m A Bloomsday Prepper And You Should Be One Too!

Are you as tired of bad news as I am? There is just no shortage of bad news related to the 8 billion humans now living on this planet, and it’s kind of our fault. We go to the news sites and click on the worst, most alarming headlines first – and it’s not a new phenomenon. The term “if it bleeds, it leads” is not a new concept. So it’s not a surprise that the news media focuses on bad news – a flood in the Democratic Republic Of Congo gets more attention since it killed about 140 people than an announcement of new housing for the homeless being funded in Saint Louis.

So, fear abounds in a time of relative, by-historical-standards prosperous time, which has given rise to the doomsday prepper movement that is increasingly well-known as one crisis after another goose steps across our collective screens. I’ve been observing this movement, from a distance, for quite a few years and have found some of their work to be fascinating, to the point that I’ve tried to learn about how I might incorporate some of the techniques into my life, but for rather different reasons.

I think it’s a really good idea to be more prepared for loss of expected goods and services – like food, electricity, water, etc. I have mostly just expected those things to be easily accessible and they more or less have been, with a few notable exceptions. Things are changing, as usual, and prudence dictates that I change my habits to adapt. I’m trying to grow more food, produce more of the energy I consume, and learn how to thrive when the supplies I’m used to having aren’t available.

Being more prepared to be able to be resilient in the face of crisis is what I’m calling a bloomsday prepper because I think that we’re all in this together, and we’re stronger together. I have enough food for a couple weeks, some ways to generate electricity, ways to cook without the grid being up, water catchment, some basic medical supplies and relationships. I can run some electrical devices from the battery packs in our electric vehicles. What resources do you have? Look around, assess what you have and add a few things over time. You, too, can be a bloomsday prepper!

The Thrill Of Vacuuming Varmints

In the pictures above you can see my current hydroponic empire – a Tupperware container in the upper drawer of an old file cabinet – and yes, I should do a separate blog post on that. One of the big benefits of having this hydroponic setup in a file cabinet is the complete lack of pests even though I’ve been growing food in there for more than 6 months and have had serious pest problems when growing food in other parts of the house. A couple weeks ago I noticed really tiny black bugs were crawling around in my lettuce empire, and I was quite surprised – how could they have gotten there?? I got that answer about a week later when I suddenly had a large contingent of tiny flying black bugs rise up like a dark cloud when I opened the file cabinet drawer to inspect the crop. I tried killing them by hand, which had a pretty low success rate, and then I remembered the vacuum that I had purchased for squash bugs. Voila! Victory over diabolical bugs was swift with my vacuum! What a feeling of satisfaction; not something I feel all that often related to gardening.

I bought this lightweight vacuum off of Amazon.com but it’s probably available from a lot of places. At only about a pound and a half in weight this vacuum is super easy to use even with my arthritic hands. This is the first time I’ve used it to murder my enemies, but it sure worked well with this first try.

Solar That Survives Hurricanes? An Update.

60 Minutes did a report on how the Bahamas are upgrading their electrical grid to better handle the increasingly violent and increasingly frequent hurricanes hitting their low-lying islands. I was very concerned about Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands installing solar panels, because of my concern about whether the solar panel installations would survive the brutal hurricanes that roll through that region fairly often. Well, hurricane Fiona just provided a data point – and the legacy electrical grid failed spectacularly, while the solar installations seem to have weathered the storm fairly well. I have to admit that I’m a bit surprised. I’ll wait for more information as the years go by, but this is good news for the hurricane-plagued Caribbean region. The non-profit organization Casa Pueblo says that their solar PV installation is helping the residents of Puerto Rico today, as usual, even after a hurricane. Here’s a link to a tiktok video talking about how solar panels are being installed, albeit slowly, in one town in Puerto Rico, and how the businesses who got solar panels installed by a foundation (presumably at no charge to them? Not sure) are charging themselves for the energy produced and re-investing that money into the community, to help residents. That’s good solar news all around! Solar panels are a superior choice even in regions with frequent severe weather. 🙂

Lock Your Doors. It’s Zucchini Season.

My brother told me years ago that someone told him that people in their small town didn’t lock the doors on their cars except in August. My brother said “why do people lock their car doors in August?” to which the reply was something like “because that’s when the zucchinis are ripe and if your car door is unlocked you might come back to a car full of zucchini”.

I can’t grow useful crops very much or for long, but boy, is it zuchini season in our middle east* raised bed! It was certifiably hotter than hades yesterday so I didn’t go outside, and you see the result above.

I also harvested some stevia, basil and mint to dry for later use. Being able to process fresh-from-the-garden food is critical to making a garden really useful. My garden doesn’t produce on demand – it’s not providing basil in December, for instance – so learning the best way to preserve food such that it provides sustenance when needed is critical. I suck at that too, but hopefully am learning.

Something else I learned is that the person who told me that stevia is hard to grow from seed wasn’t kidding. I saved a bunch of stevia seeds from my plants last year and planted them all this year – which netted me exactly zero stevia plants. I did a germination test beforehand and a fair number of those seeds germinated, but the overall germination rate seemed quite low – maybe 10% – 20% or so? It’s kind of hard to tell the seeds from the other fluff that grew around them, so maybe some of those specks weren’t actually seeds, meaning that the actual germination rate was higher? I’ll try again next year, focusing more on keeping the seeds in damp conditions until well after germination.

So if no stevia seeds germinated, how was I able to harvest some stevia for the picture above, you ask. I hedged my bets – I bought a couple stevia seedlings and planted those in a container, where they are doing just fine. It’s always a good thing to have a backup.

*We have 6 raised beds and we refer to them as either east or west, and top, middle or bottom, hence one bed is the middle east one.

Did I Do All This Work Just To Be Murdered By Vinegar?

I have been hearing so much from the interwebs about the benefits of fermented foods that I decided to buy some equipment (spending money is always the first step, right??) and give it a try. I bought a Mason Jar Fermentation kit like this (I don’t have any affiliate relationship with anybody, so wouldn’t make money from somebody clicking on that link) and put the parts I cut off of a pineapple – peels, mostly – into these jars and waited. I probably waited months (kind of forgot about them in the dark cabinet where I had parked these jars) and now I’m afraid to actually consume them. How do I know this stuff is safe to eat?

Stacy says it’s probably ok, as does Sandor, but I didn’t follow directions carefully. I let this ferment much longer than any recipe suggests. Based on their descriptions of kahm yeast, I think that’s what’s growing on these jars of fermented pineapple scraps. But there’s an old saying related to food in a questionable state : “when in doubt, throw it out”. I just let this stuff sit too long in an unrefrigerated cabinet so I’m tossing this batch, and will try again with the next pineapple, hopefully following directions a little better.

I think people share as well as they can in youtube videos to help others in learning new skills, but often there are a lot of questions left unanswered, and people like me, just picking stuff up on the internet, need to proceed with caution.

I Lost Almost My Entire Annual Stevia Crop Over One Mistake!

Talk about heart-breaking! 2021 was the first year that I grew Stevia, and I was really looking forward to being able to provide this to my husband, since he uses a lot of stevia for tea! But alas, my stevia-dreams died due to a weird mistake.

During Thanksgiving dinner my sister knocked a small, thin-walled glass pumpkin ornament to the floor, where it shattered. The mess was swept up and thrown away. Long story you don’t care about, but most of my stevia crop – the leaves from our several plants – ended up being swept up off of the floor about a week later, using the same broom and dustpan. Not by me, of course. After drying the leaves completely, I started to grind the leaves up into a powder, and noticed some tiny glass shards in the mix!! It was a couple tiny pieces of that shattered glass pumpkin, which got into the stevia leaves somehow during that sweeping up process. It’s just not safe to keep any of that stevia, since I can’t tell if there’s any glass still in there.

There’s no moral to this story, just sharing a bad mistake. Though maybe if I had included a certain someone much more in the progress of this plant, they might not have swept this stuff up with a contaminated broom & dust pan?

Fresh Tomatoes In December in Missouri, Locally Grown And Organic!

Full disclosure – I suck as a farmer.

One of my goals these days is create more fresh food during the winter, which is not easy or common here in Missouri. Really knowledgeable farmers have been doing this for a long time, but one thing you learn quickly is that the weather is unpredictable, and you can lose a whole lot of plants that you put a lot of time and effort into with just one hard freeze. It happened to me about 2 weeks ago. I thought I had more time to get these tomato plants (being grown in containers) inside and onto the sun porch, but mother nature had other ideas. So, in the picture above on the right, you will see a very dead tomato plant which still has ripening tomatoes on it. My poor husband dragged this container in because I had hoped that the plant wasn’t ALL the way dead, but alas, it is deader than a doornail. The tomatoes on the plant were completely green when the plants were hauled inside a couple weeks ago, but have been basically hanging in the sun since then, and have ripened. SO, first batch of December tomatoes.

In the picture on the left (above) are a bunch of tomatoes which were completely green and had been on the plant for two nights of hard freezing temperatures in the garden. I hauled them inside, set them on a south-facing sunny window sill and they ripened up also. They’re Cherokee Purple tomatoes, which produced surprisingly well for us. This is the first time I’ve grown them, and I intend to keep growing them, if I’m able to harvest and correctly save their seed.

Stay tuned for more winter gardening adventures!

Butter Turkeys For Thanksgiving!

I like to entertain almost as much as I liked to be entertained, and I like to do something different on the holidays – something to make the event more memorable. Something simple and cheap to do is to make butter turkeys. We had a really great set of turkey molds a decade or so ago, until somebody (not naming names but it wasn’t me) put them into the dishwasher, which ruined them. I ended up in a candy-making-supplies store a couple years ago buying these small molds, usually used for making candy, and have been using them since then. And if the butter molded into turkeys don’t all get used – no problem, just smush (is that a word??) into a container and use as needed – butter don’t care what it’s shape is. 🙂

Mint Orange Tea, Made From Scratch, Doesn’t Taste Or Smell Like Either Mint Or Orange. :(

Granted, I spend WAY too much time on youtube, but after watching some videos praising homemade teas, specifically orange tea and mint tea, I decided to give it a go for myself. Doesn’t mint orange tea sound delightful?? It did to me. We raise plenty of organic mint in our garden, and we buy organic oranges (when we can find them!), so I grated the zest of a bunch of organic oranges, picked a bunch of mint, and dried it all. Made tea in the usual way, by putting a couple teaspoons of zest and dried mint in a tea strainer, made tea with great anticipation, and was mightily disappointed. I won’t drag you through my various experiments, but eventually even the large amounts of mint and orange zest shown in the pictures above didn’t make the tea as aromatic as initially hoped. I’m just guessing, but they probably do provide some health benefits when brewed? I can’t prove that, of course. I’m going to keep adding mint and orange zest to my tea along with some black tea, heavy cream and homegrown stevia, in the hope of deriving some health benefit.

Sweet Potato Sprouting : Do You Have To Put The Fat end Down? Maybe Not.

I watched a number of videos on how to grow sweet potatoes (Click this , for instance) and heard that you had to put the sweet potato fat end down in the water, so I decided to test this suggestion, and it looks like it might not be true. I selected two seemingly-similar sweet potatoes and put them both in jars with water covering the bottom 2 inches or so (fat end down) of the sweet potatoes, then set them on a sunny windowsill in late January of 2021. One sweet potato failed to grow any ‘slips’ (new vines) so I thought maybe it was a dud and almost composted it. Instead, I cut the dud spud in half and put both the fat end and the narrow end in their own jars, cut side down. It took weeks longer, but the cut potato parts ended up sprouting vigorously also, just like the whole potato with the fat end down. Being in zone 6B, I had plenty of time to wait (since I started this in January), so the fact that the cut potatoes took longer to create slips wasn’t a problem. It’s April 22 now and I have lots of slips, which will probably be getting planted in a couple weeks. It’s really hard to wait until Mother’s day to plant these summer crops! Some of my leftover winter crops, like kale and swiss chard, are still doing well.

I can’t conclude too much from this experiment, but it looks like a few more slips were generated from cutting the sweet potato in half and putting the halves into water than just setting the whole sweet potato in a jar of water. Both ways seem to have worked, in that slips were produced via both methods. You Choose!