Strawberry Harvest

I have no words.  Only awe, appreciation, and gratitude for nature’s beauty, a perfect harvest, and strawberry juice on my chin.

My New Workbench

I am gearing up to do some major projects at my father’s house this summer, mostly related to remodeling the basement.  There is a lot of organizing and cleaning out to do everywhere, and considering both Dr. Sam and I have a crap ton of stuff, the first and logical place to start was the garage, so we would have some place to store things as everything gets shuffled around and moved in and out as I work in different areas of the house.

I don’t think I can accurately convey the magnitude of this endeavor.  Let me just say that my father has not thrown anything away in… well, ever.  It just so happened that my spring break coincided with deciding to undertake this project so with a week of free days and a roll of contractor garbage bags, I dove in.  Rather literally, often reaching shoulder deep into piles of stuff or wadding knee deep is more stuff.  I pulled everything – absolutely everything – out of the garage covering the driveway and yard with 30 years of a crazy man’s crazy stuff.  I found a lot of interesting random things such as a window escape ladder, more lawn and garden fertilizer than even my green thumb knows what to do with, a lifetime supply of car washing soap, every travel mug my father has ever owned, ice cream maker (a curiosity given that my father doesn’t eat ice cream), and much, much more.  I found tons of nice tools, a lot of useless junk that was forgotten in the corners, and several nice pieces of 2-by-4’s and plywood.

It took me four days to clean out, sort, organize, and fill more garbage bags than I care to remember.  I power-washed the walls and floor and put a coat of white paint on the walls and ceiling, and bam! it was a whole new garage!  It was about the time I was moving everything back into the garage and finding permanent homes for the select number of items I was allowing my dad to keep, that I considered the wood.  I inherited, abet not as severely, my father aversion to throwing things away, particularly if they could still be useful.  And being both crafty and handy, I’m pretty darn good at making things useful.  So while I tried a few times to throw the miscellaneous 2-by-4’s and plywood away, even moved them into the garbage pile, twice, they were 2-by-4’s!  That’s what you build everything out of.  I couldn’t do it.  But I also couldn’t justify keeping the wood if I wasn’t going to use it.

So what did my newly clean and organized garage, full of Dr. Sam’s collection of really nice tools need?  A work bench.  That’s what.  It was the perfect project to complete the garage makeover, and given my general handiness, my proclivity for gardening, and Pretty Boy’s motorbikes, we could really make use of a workbench.  When I told my father, he ask why I didn’t just buy a bench from Costco.  My cousin, a professional contractor, had an appropriate response: people who buy work benches from Costco don’t deserve them.

I found instructions for building a workbench, decided on the modifications I wanted for my bench (no top shelf, bench top flush with the front 2-by-4 instead of flush with the legs), and started considering the wood I had.  Well, plywood wasn’t a problems.  I had three big sheets of that.  But I was a little short on 2-by-4’s.  My contractor cousin came to my rescue with a lovely selection of 2-by-4’s not quite nice enough for his projects, but perfect for my workbench.  I made the measurements and marked all the cuts and got out the power tools.

Now I’m not shy around power tools or machinery in general.  I’ve used a drill and a reciprocating saw and even a pole saw and chain saw.  But I’ve never used a circular saw, which is what was in the garage for cutting wood.  I always like to be careful and have someone with me when I’m learning how to use new power tools for the first time, so when I had prepared everything else for the project and was ready to start making cuts and Pretty Boy still wasn’t there, I hesitated.  I was just about to put on my big girl pants and have at it, when Pretty Boy arrived and promptly commandeered my project.  I was a little disappointed that I missed a chance to learn how to use a new power tool, but my tired muscles were happy for the help.  He cut all the wood in a matter of minutes and we were assembling the frame.  Pretty Boy quickly discovered a few of the 2-by-4’s donated to our project were cut from particularly hard wood, and made driving screws a little difficult.  Dr. Sam came out at this point to hover over Pretty Boy and repeat obvious suggestions as the final screws were driven in.  They flipped the frame over and I thought it was beautiful.

The piece of plywood for the bench top needed to be cut down and working together, Pretty Boy and Dr. Sam came up with a pretty ingenious way of accomplishing the task.  Pretty Boy attached the plywood to the frame with the excess hanging off one ends.  They clamped a piece of scrap wood along the length of the end of plywood being cut, and offset it from the cut so the wall of the circular saw casing could run along the 2-by-4 as the cut was being made.  Pretty Boy zipped the saw along the 2-by-4 and made a nice straight cut.  I was so proud of my menfolk working together.  The bottom shelf plywood was cut in a similar manner, attached and the project was done.

In showing off my new workbench, a major design flaw was pointed out to me: all of the weigh of the bench top and anything sitting on it would be supported by the screws if the legs into the bench top in shear. And that could be a lot for the screws to support.  As an engineering student, whose taken classes on these types of stresses, I’m rather embarrassed to say I didn’t catch this.  Both the bench top and bottom shelf were supported in this way.  I reenforced the junctions with L-brackets and would caution anyone using the design to either 1) be aware of this design limitation and limit the weight on the bench or 2) reenforce the junctions like I did or 3) just find a better design.

Since finishing the garage and moving on to cleaning out the basement, the garage has served the exact function I’d projected: a perfect storage spot for things on their way out or on the way to a new permanent home in Dr. Sam’s house.  The bench has come in handy since I find a few more tools in every new pile of stuff I start going through in the basement.  Every so often, as I continue to work on this huge project that is Dr. Sam’s basement, I have to go out into the garage and just stand in the presence of a successful, mostly complete aspect of the project, to help me not get overwhelmed by the rest of the house and stay motivated to keep working.  My father’s beaming, happy face when he looks at the garage helps too!

The Harvest

My garden this year is embarrassing.  A rough, cold, wet spring killed of a number of my plants and prevented even more from ever sprouting.  Along with that, I never went back out to replant what had died or not sprouted.  And then the grass shoot up, some wild creeping cucumber like vine (read nasty weed) took over, and my garden was in a poor state.

Having a bad start, I never quite caught up with the general maintenance of my eight garden bed and perennial food bearing plants outside the beds.  Which is why this is a happy story: three weeks ago, I harvested what had grown and given how bad it seemed my garden had gotten, I was pleasantly surprised by the results!

I started with my sweet potatoes.  I cover the ground around my sweet potatoes with black plastic to keep them toasty but this also keeps the weeds away.  The only major concern then, for taking care of them is watering which I was able to handle.  I’ve been attempting to grow sweet potatoes for four years now and this is only the second year there have actually been potatoes to harvest.  This year the potatoes were bigger and sweeter than last year!  I hope a trend is developing.

I start harvesting sweet potatoes by cutting off all the potatoes’ vines and digging with a hand spade around the roots to find the ones that grew into potatoes.  It is a labor intensive process and I still manage to slice a few little guys in half but it is satisfactory and effective.  I saved all of the root shoots this year, even the ones that are way to small to eat in the hopes I can properly cure them and replant them next year.

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There were also green beans, tomatoes, jalapeno, a kohlrabi, and a carrot to harvest.  The jalapeno were the biggest surprise given the weather.  I planted four rows of carrots early in the spring.  It was so cold that only a few sprouted and only one grew to an actual carrot.  I love carrots out of my garden!  There is something particularly tasty about home ground carrots and I am sad I didn’t get more but grateful there was even one.

I spent a good portion of the afternoon out in my garden, happy the sun was shining while I dug my hands in the dirt.  It had been in 40 deg in the mornings the week prior to my harvest (including an overnight frost warning).  Two years ago, I waited until the first frost hit and ran out to harvest the sweet potatoes as soon as I woke up the next morning.  It was cold.  And unpleasant.  I felt like I picked a good time to harvest this year, threat of frost looming but not so close that harvesting was super unpleasant.  Little did I know that an 80 deg October week was on its way that might have bulked up a few more of my potatoes.  Oh, well.  I’m still eating the sweet potatoes I harvested.

The night of my harvest, I cooked a harvest dinner including roasted sweet potatoes, sautéed sweet potatoes green, fried green tomatoes and steamed green beans.  It was the first time I’d eaten sweet potato greens.  Having heard they were a lot like spinach, I saved some this year to try.  They are indeed a lot like spinach.  I love spinach and after trying them, I love sweet potato greens as well.  Had I known how much I would like them, I would have saved the entire bed of greens (of which there was a lot) and made enough frozen sweet potato greens to last all winter!  Alas, it was not so, but I will attempt it next year.

The sweet potatoes, as homegrown and heirloom varieties tend to be, were not as sweet as store-bought sweet potatoes.  I grew three different heirloom varieties that I get from Sandhill Preservation in Calamus, IA: Forkleaf, Indiana Gold, and Carver.  Forkleaf had the best yield and Indiana Gold seemed sweet, but the differences in flavor between the three were very subtle.

It was a lovely meal shared with Pretty Boy and the Mojo Monster.  Special because of the company; special because of the beautiful autumn day; and special because my work (abet not as hard as in other year but still notable) that yielded produce from my backyard garden.