Category: Garden

Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.

Post #G21-047: Canning lid shortage revisited mid-August 2021

This post is about the ongoing shorting of lids for home canning in the U.S.  The only value-added here is that I’ve been tracking this for a while, so I can give some perspective on how things are evolving.

Briefly, U.S.-made disposable lids are much harder to find now than they were when I posted on this back in May.  In my area, I found one retailer (Tractor Supply) that would ship them to store for pickup.  On-line, they are still available from Amazon, but almost nowhere else.  On-line prices appear unchanged to up slightly.

By contrast, there is no on-line shortage of foreign- (i.e., Chinese-) made lids.  Prices appear to be falling, with some Amazon offers now in the $0.15-$0.22 per lid range, for lids in bulk.  That’s down from about $0.30 when I checked back in May 2021.

U.S.-made re-usable lids (Tattler, Harvest Guard) are unchanged in price, but only the more expensive ones (Tattler, about $1 per lid) are freely available.  The less-expensive Harvest Guard lids appear to be back-ordered by about a month. Continue reading Post #G21-047: Canning lid shortage revisited mid-August 2021

Post #G21-046: The carbon footprint of home-made tomato sauce

In this post, I estimate the carbon footprint of my home-made spaghetti sauce.

You’ll hear people casually assert that home-canned food is good for the environment.  The idea is that it avoids (among other things) the fossil-fuel use associated with transporting food.

But as an economist, I guess it’s my lot in life to point out that nothing is free.  Home canning uses a significant amount of fossil fuels.  Home-canning of foods with relative low energy content leads to a significant amount of fossil fuel consumed per edible calorie preserved (see Post #G22).  It can also generate a non-neglible carbon footprint, owing to the fossil fuels used.

Each quart of sauce I make generates a bit over two pounds of C02 emissions.  But that is heavily dependent on a couple of things. Continue reading Post #G21-046: The carbon footprint of home-made tomato sauce

Post #G21-045: Embracing my inner rutabaga.

Part 1:  A farewell to squash

I pulled up my summer squash plants yesterday morning.  These plants held up well and produced a reasonable yield, but their time had come.  And so I called an end to summer squash season.

The members of my family took the bad news remarkably well.  If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think they were tired of eating summer squash.  Continue reading Post #G21-045: Embracing my inner rutabaga.

Post #G21-044: Stealth mildew and a farewell to squash

Squash vine borer, and an observation.

Source:  U Wisconsin Vegetable Entomology.

As was the case last year, the squash vine borer season has been slowly tapering off.  My last sighting of a squash vine borer was a lone female about six days ago, or circa 7/23/2021.

I’m calling that the end of the season, unless I see another one. Continue reading Post #G21-044: Stealth mildew and a farewell to squash

Post #G21-043: A model of a rain barrel system based on historical weather data

 

If you use rain barrels to water your garden, you will eventually realize that you don’t have enough of them. 

This post tells you that you never will.  But that’s OK.  Most of the benefit you will get from using rain barrels, you will get with the first few you install.

This post isn’t nearly as folksy as the introduction implies.  To write this, I first created as reasonably sophisticated model of rain barrels and gardens using four decades of daily weather data for Sterling, VA.  While the results of that model really only apply to my local climate, I think the more general lessons about rain barrels apply broadly to well-watered temperate climates such as the climate of Virginia.

Continue reading Post #G21-043: A model of a rain barrel system based on historical weather data

Post #G21-041, Lack of male squash blossoms solved, squash vine borer gone?

No male squash blossoms

I seem to have solved my problem of having no male squash blossoms (Post #G21-040).  I’m going to write that up because, as far as I can tell, there’s no useful advice on internet on how to deal with the problem.

By way of background, I’m pretty sure that my mature male squash flower buds are being eaten by birds.  Mostly they are being eaten whole, leaving just the stalk, but sometimes I find one that’s just had a large, clean bite taken out of it.

Regardless of the true culprit, putting physical protection around the immature blossoms has protected them so far, from whatever-it-is that was eating them.  The ones that I’ve caged/bagged are surviving.  Those left to fend for themselves continue to be decapitated or torn to bits. Continue reading Post #G21-041, Lack of male squash blossoms solved, squash vine borer gone?