Another Job

I found out yesterday that I'm being hired back at Sendik's, which is a higher-end grocery store here in the Milwaukee area. I'll be making $9 an hour, 4o hours a week. Yeah, big load off my mind. I've been watching our savings steadily decline while waitressing and was really starting to get worried. Crisis averted!

Anyhoo, I did my fall seed-starting. Well, some of it anyway. I found seeds for kale, lettuce, and swiss chard. I still need peas and spinach, plus some new containers and dirt (I didn't plan that out very well.) Here's hoping that we'll have some lovely fresh greens right up until the frost gets bad enough to kill them all off! In other news, my pole beans are flourishing. Every couple of days I go out there and pull off a good handful of deliciously snappy beans. I've been mostly eating them raw rather than cooking them. They're good in salads.

The tomatoes have been struck with blossom-end rot, unfortunately. I'll still have a few decent ones but all the biggest ones are rotting. This is another lesson learned: Forget relying on commercial feed. I've been using Miracle-Gro for them, but apparently they don't put enough (or any) calcium in it, which has led to a calcium deficiency in my plants which causes blossom-end rot. Next year I'm going to do some composting out on the porch and ditch the Miracle-Gro (it's owned by Monsanto anyway and they're not getting another dime of my money if I can help it.)

Not sure what's up with my big pepper, either. It's not getting any bigger and I assumed it just needed to ripen, so far it's still green but it's shriveling in the middle. Dunno if that's normal or not, I'll keep an eye on it. There are more tiny peppers starting to develop on there too, and still plenty of flower buds to open yet.

My strawberries... well, I think they're a bust too. They seem to have Verticillium Wilt. I've already lost two plants, and the others are showing signs of having it, even the little baby runners. I mowed the big ones down to ground level to interrupt the disease cycle, we'll see if they last much longer. Either way I think I might go ahead and yank them and dispose of the soil and bleach the hell out of the containers. At least then I can reuse them for my lettuce and stuff. I'm thinking strawberries might take up too much space for so little yield anyhow. I might ditch them in next year's garden and wait until I can put a big patch in the ground to grow them. Next year when it comes down to jam-making time I'll probably just hit up a U-pick farm.

I bought some new books, including one called "Almost Vegetarian". We're trying to cut back on the amount of red meat we eat, so the books I bought should help towards that goal. Tomorrow I'll go to the Farmer's Market and stock up, today I think I'll take whatever scraps I have left and make pork or chicken fried rice using this method. Maybe even shrimp, although I don't much care for shrimp.

Oh look, it's 10 AM! I Love Lucy is on. Toodles!