Thumbs up on a Hot Summer Day

It is hot today. 32 C. And the humidity is also quite high. The weather people predicted a possible thunderstorm for tonight and tomorrow. Wonderful! We washed the car yesterday. It never fails.

This morning I picked a big bag full of Swiss Chard. We’ll eat it tonight. Swiss Chard has taken the place of Spinach at our house. We love Spinach, but it doesn’t last long in the garden because of its tendency to bolt when the temperature gets hot. So I’m not growing it anymore. This variety of Swiss Chard I grow is called ‘Bright Lights’. It comes in different colors from yellow to red. My wife strips the leaves from the stems and boils them with onions. We eat it with Soya sauce (actually ‘Maggi’), mashed potatoes, fried eggs, and Wieners. Delicious. Swiss Chard is expensive when you buy it in the store. You need a lot of leaves to make a descent meal. Some people eat Swiss Chard as lettuce, but as far as I'm concerned it tastes awful and the leaves are tough. The way we eat it is the only way for me.

For lunch we had our second cucumber from the garden. It is a new variety I bought this year: Fanfare. The cucumbers are supposed to grow to about 10 inches. This one wasn’t that long. I harvested it to encourage the plant to grow more. I saw other, smaller ones, on the vine. The other variety I have is ‘Sweeter Yet’. Also a producer of large cucumbers. I picked one already a few days ago and it tasted great.

We also had our first serving of lettuce from our garden. There is no comparison with bought lettuce. It can’t get any fresher. I picked some this morning, just enough for lunch. The leaves were so tender and tasty. These last couple of weeks I’ve been adding greens from the red beets for the first time to the salads. I had no idea they tasted so nice. All these years I’ve been throwing them into the composter.

We have quite a few peppers already on the plants, especially the hot Hungarian Peppers. But I like to leave my peppers on the plants until they turn red. I might jus pick some of the banana and gypsy peppers. They grow in abundance and are great stuffed with meat if they grow large.

Garden work can be hard and tedious. Plants need to be watered constantly, fertilized, and pruned. Then there is the monotonous work of pulling the pesky weeds and fighting off the aggressive, hungry mosquitoes, but it is all worthwhile when the harvesting begins. You just can’t beat the fresh lettuce, the tasty cucumbers, the peppers, and the kohlrabi. How can you compare a tomato grown on the wine in your own garden with the tasteless crap you buy in the stores? And then there are the red beets, the carrots and even the potatoes. And everything is grown without the aid of hormones and steroids—I mean pesticides ☺. It can’t get any more organic.

Last week we went fishing for Walleye, but we got skunked. It was too hot and the Walleye didn’t take our offering of night crawlers anymore. We caught perch and Northern Pike, though. It was a beautiful day on the water and that is worth something. It was not a wasted day. We saw quite a few pelicans where we always fish. Perhaps they ate all the fish.

It is difficult to work without a thumb. No, don’t panic, I still have mine. My last injury on my right finger just finished healing. It was a bit of a pain while fishing, because you have to put your hands into the water constantly. This morning I worked on some small unimportant project and managed to cut open my thumb on a piece of sharp metal. It bled quite a bit, but I have good bandages. I hope it will have healed up for my next fishing trip. I need that thumb.

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