Are you hearing strange noises at night?

And I mean really strange noises, sounds that almost defy description.  You might have noticed them if you are on the east side of Centerpointe or the west side of Oaks of Clear Creek.

They're coming from this (the pipeline, not the dog).  Let me explain.  

The pipeline company working in the nearby Interurban Easement is welding together their new line in the field prior to burying it.  As of last night, they had a continuous segment of between a quarter and a half mile in length.

Well, it's a black-coated pipe and during our hot summer days, it heats up considerably, expanding as it goes.  Then at night, it cools down again and contracts.  It weighs many tons, and is supported by oak dunnage pedestals spaced at regular intervals.  In order to contract, the thing has to overcome a massive force of friction imposed by its own massive weight.  As it shrinks bit by bit, the incrementally-released forces make a bizarre sound somewhere between a loud SNAP and a SPROING, and then the resulting shock wave proceeds to reverberate up and down the entire half-mile length of pipe.  I can't say that I've heard anything quite like it before.  It's a bit unnerving.  

My husband did a back-of-envelope calculation and reckons that it probably needs to shorten itself at night and re-lengthen by day to the tune of 6 to 12 inches because of these temperature changes.  Try sliding a half-mile heavy pipeline over structural supports by that amount of distance - it's going to make some noise.

Furthermore, the workers appear to be welding at break-neck speed such that, by this evening, it could be the better part of a mile long.  Which probably means even more strange noise.

That which was laid out in segments last night is now one continuous length, as they worked through Saturday on it.    

So, note to @LeagueCityPD, if you get any strange noise reports in our area, it's not actually an alien spacecraft landing, which is how some callers might describe it.  It's just a very long pipeline segment going snap, crackle, and pop.

So you think you can't garden, Part 2

My title is not perfectly a propos of my content, but I have to pay homage to the fact that "So you think you can't garden..." ended up on a Swamplot linkpost the other day (insert smilie here).

OK, so maybe you've figured out by now that you can garden.  But harvesting is only half the backyard battle - what do you actually do at that magical moment when you end up with more fruits and vegetables than you ever thought possible?!

You could arrange them in an artistic still life, as I've done here with Japanese eggplant, green peppers, Anaheim peppers, and about a gazillion Sweet Million and Yellow Jellybean tomatoes.  But ultimately, it would be a good idea to actually eat the stuff that you took the trouble to grow.  

Eat it how??  If you are a suburban family of three or four people, how do you deal with the fact that even a micro-garden such as mine is expected to yield five to fifteen pounds per week of fresh fruits and vegetables during harvest time?!  How does anybody eat all that?!

That artistic still life above represents one day's worth of harvest from about 40 square feet of active growing area.  What I'll do below is show you how I route all of that stuff to productive use, and on a short time frame to boot.  It's important to remember that you don't get a long window of opportunity to process home-grown food.  It spoils more quickly than store-bought food because it's not chemically treated, it's not irradiated, it's not waxed, it's not adulterated in any way.  That's good from a health standpoint but it can be a bit of a challenge from a logistical standpoint.

I cook the fresh tomatoes into prepared dishes to the extent possible, many of which I then freeze in mass quantities.  However, there are still too many tomatoes to be used all at once, and therefore I have to freeze some of them.  I do this by sealing them in gallon zipper bags with the air sucked out, freezing them one layer at a time so that they'll freeze as quickly as possible. 

After each layer has frozen solid, they can be stacked up like this for efficient storage.

I had really good luck doing this last year when our entire crop consisted of volunteer tomatoes (because I didn't get to the nursery in time to buy new hybrids).  Cherry tomatoes don't need to be blanched before freezing as many other vegetables do - you can just pop them in the freezer and then take them out to cook later in a wide variety of sauces and stews, using them the same way you'd typically use canned tomatoes.

However, cross-bred cherry and grape volunteers tend to be smaller, less sweet, and have tougher skins than their pure hybrid progenitors.  All of those volunteer characteristics make them ideal candidates for freezing.  I'm a bit worried about my efforts to freeze and use these pure hybrids the same way.  They are larger, which means that they took longer to freeze (which is always bad), resulting in some splitting which you can see in the photo above.  Hopefully they will still work acceptably months down the road in prepared dishes.  There's only one way to find out, and that's to go ahead and try, as I have done here.  

OK, so that's the day's tomatoes taken care of.  Onward...

I roast almost all of our Anaheims on the BBQ in preparation for freezing.  

If you roast until the skin is a golden brown and then let cool, it will be easy to peel off the skin and remove the seeds, leaving the flesh.  

This is very labor-intensive work for a relatively small amount of New Mexico-style green chile, but this stuff adds so much taste to prepared dishes that it's well worth the time.  Italian sauces, Mexican dishes, omelettes, you name it - it does wonders for everything it touches.

To my knowledge, New Mexico-style green chile cannot be bought anywhere in greater Houston (someone please email me if I'm mistaken).  If you want it, you have to make it yourself.  

I freeze this stuff in these little leftover containers that are available at any mainstream g-store.  One container works well in a vegetable omelette.  Two or three containers will do wonders for a batch of chili or spaghetti sauce.  

Next, the eggplant.

I combined those two shown in the initial still life picture with two more I'd harvested the day before.  Japanese eggplant needs to be eaten quickly - it is very perishable.  

Incorporating two of our front-yard onions, one Anaheim, and other ingredients specified in this well-rated recipe, I cooked up a batch of spicy eggplant, most of which we ate on the spot and some of which I froze. 

Last but not least, the green peppers I harvested that day.

I actually combined the green peppers, three of the Anaheims, two of our front yard onions, about a pound of our fresh tomatoes, and two pounds of okra that I'd harvested, blanched, and frozen last September into a shrimp and sausage jambalaya which I then proceeded to also freeze.

I do not recommend that okra be frozen for as long as nine months (three or four months would be preferable), particularly if you plan to re-freeze the resulting dish.  However, it's a hardy vegetable and the age of it did not detract significantly from the resulting jambalaya in this case.  

I actually get exhausted at this time of year because I have to be processing a significant number of fruits and vegetables daily, on top of every other life responsibility.  But the upside to this is that, once the toils of June are completed, I really don't have to do much more cooking until September rolls around.

This is what my freezer looks like right now - crammed to the brim.  As long as we don't get a hurricane-related power outage, we are set for months.  

Incidentally, if you keep up with the daily commercial news, you are probably aware of the intensifying dialog on fat vs. carbohydrates within the context of health, obesity, and heart disease.

This iconic juxtaposition of TIME magazine covers shows how beliefs have about-faced in the past 30 years.  This month's TIME article is paywalled, but their tag line reads "For decades, it has been the most vilified nutrient in the American diet.  But new science reveals fat isn't what's hurting our health."

Magazine covers screengrabbed from Facebook, originator unknown.  

This other nonpaywalled recent article presents some of the strongest arguments to date for eating in a style consistent with what I'm showing in all of my garden-, freezer-, and food-related posts.

Screengrabs above and below from that article.  It's worth reading.  

The obvious question then becomes - how the hell is a person supposed to eat like Grandma's generation did?!  We are not living in 1955 - this is 2014!!

I'm showing one answer here.  Look at that freezer photo above.  There is not one teaspoon of refined sugar anywhere in that freezer.  Not one teaspoon of refined white flour.  Not one teaspoon of corn or soybean oil (I use only animal fats and olive oils, and I use both liberally).  In a perfect world, we'd be able to prepare all of our meals fresh from scratch each day, rather than batching and freezing them for future use like this.  I don't know about you, but I don't live in any such perfect world.  I am the mother in a two-working-parent family.  We simply don't have the kind of kitchen time that both of my non-employed Grandmas had at their disposal.  This is our viable alternative, and it works.

Let's close with a bit of a meme-fest, shall we??  Particularly if I'm going to get linkposted, I'd like as many people as possible to enjoy these gems.  

I embedded Finley's TED talk at the end of this post.  

Garden work-out guide.  

My all-time favorite Libertarian. 

Meme attributed to this site.  

Verdict on The Fresh Market's Webster grocery store

Answer:  One and a half thumbs up.  It's not my favorite grocery business model.  I prefer Whole Foods, which does much of my health-related headwork for me (as opposed to a grocery store which is more gourmet-focused than health-focused).  However, at this juncture, The Fresh Market has one walloping advantage over Whole Foods:

IT'S HERE.

It's not a very large store but it doesn't have to be.  Once you eliminate all the highly-processed carb- and grease-loaded crap that no self-respecting human being should be eating anyway, you don't need very much space to house a well-rounded selection of actual food.    

No stranger to leafy lamentation, late last year I published a post titled "Groceries in Clear Lake:  More ugly pictorial truth" in which I canonized a baby bok choy as the patron seasonal saint of everything that has been wrong with our local grocery market.

Screengrabbed from that post.  I was afraid that I might draw the ire of corporate attorneys if I photographed the offending produce within the stores themselves, so in the interest of public service, I purchased representative (i.e., perfectly awful) vegetable examples and brought them home for portraiture such as this.  And then I promptly threw them into my composter.  

So of course in evaluating any g-store successor, there's no question that the bok choy would have to be evaluated as the freshness flagship, the ultimate litmus test of store viability.

Bok choy in the Webster Fresh Market, Saturday June 7, 2014.  Pretty much perfect produce.  Bok choy doesn't get any better than this, at least not in the retail arena.  And this stuff is organic to boot. 

I can guess the question on every reader's mind:  "But how expensive is Fresh Market?!"

You can expect any store like this to be more expensive than the common chains because (duh) they have higher-quality stuff.  But I did not find the prices to be unreasonable.  When evaluating the overall mark-ups, it's always instructive to look at the staples.  Milk was decidedly more expensive than what lower-end chain stores offer, but inflated prices did not seem to be across the board.  For instance, you would be hard pressed to do better than this for organic whole wheat spaghetti.  

If you are a long-suffering Clear Lake foodie, welcome to your new Nirvana.

Pierogis?!  You've got to be kidding me!!  Is there anyone in Clear Lake besides myself who has even heard of pierogis??

Which brings me around to my next observation.  As promising as this store is, The Fresh Market got a couple of things wrong here, in my opinion.

The number one mistake is the floor.  Unfortunately, they installed a wood-looking porcelain tile.  What that means is that you constantly have to listen to the annoying THWACK-THWACK-THWACK-THWACK of your cart wheels pounding across the grout lines.  It kinda negates the soothing effect of the classical music that is piped throughout the store.

Remember the floor in the produce department of the Randall's at Clear Lake City Blvd. and Space Center Blvd.?  OMG, it was horrible!!! At some point in the early 1990's (??), they ripped out the original generic vinyl floor tile and installed brick-dimension ceramic tile in its place.  You couldn't even hear yourself think in there for all the bumpy noise of the cart wheels!  As soon as they made that mistake, I figured they'd come to their senses and promptly take it back out again.  But they did not - they left it in place for many years, maybe even contributing to the decline of Randall's as a chain because I, for one, would not put up with the annoyance of it - I'd shop elsewhere.  This issue didn't get resolved until they remodeled yet again just a few years ago, and re-installed a smooth, sensible quiet floor.

In this case shown above, the grout lines are not as deep so the effect is not as severe as in the Randall's case, but it's still an unnecessary annoyance. 

The number two mistake that I think The Fresh Market is making is that they've adopted a standalone store model.  If they were wise, they'd snag some of that vacant retail square footage next to them and develop cooking classes analogous to Central Market's well-known foodie fare.  Because, let's face it - of the quarter million or so greater Clear Lake residents, there are probably only five or six people who would actually know how to cook properly with ingredients such as white truffle oil (I'm not one of them).  And if people don't know how to use it, they won't buy it, and that doesn't bode well for the success of the store.  

I've always wanted to take some of Central Market's cooking classes but the time and driving distance commitments are just too great.  If someone set up shop in the Baybrook area, I'd definitely participate.

My qualified 1.5 thumbs up verdict isn't shared by everyone.

One of the early Google reviews, screengrabbed from this site.  

I mentioned in January that any new grocery entry into our market is going to have to compete with the twin juggernauts of HEB Clear Lake Market and HEB Bay Colony.  Experience-wise, I see a couple of advantages to a store like The Fresh Market:

1. Find me a bok choy in any of our other local grocery stores that looks as good as the ones shown above.  Email me a picture because I'd have to see it to believe it. 
2. While HEB sells plenty of good stuff, their stores are also chock full of the usual American avalanche of highly-processed junk food products that I would never eat.  I very often feel like I'm hunting for a needle in a haystack when I shop at HEB (and every other local chain) because I won't consider buying literally 95% of what they have for sale.  It's a pleasant experience to walk into a grocery store and not have to struggle with that kind of inefficiency.
3. Both of our local HEB stores are constantly mobbed.  I feel like I'm running a gauntlet every time I walk into one of them.  Particularly if I'm planning a special meal, I would like to walk into a grocery store and have the luxury of being able to relax and concentrate on making my selections, rather than spending all of my time negotiating for physical access to the shelves (many of which are chronically under-stocked) and jockeying for safe passage down the aisles.  

Anyway, white truffle oil notwithstanding, I'm looking forward to seeing what I can accomplish recipe-wise with this new local resource. 

Besides bok choy, the other good litmus test for any higher-end grocery store is the quality of the in-store bakery.  This product above is called "old world sprouted grain bread".  In my opinion, while it is not as good as Whole Foods bread, it's not bad.  I've had much worse.

Disclaimer:  As always, this is a noncommercial blog expressing personal opinions only.  I accept no compensation from any source.  

Rain barrels, Part 3: Epic fail

In the spring of 2011, I published a post titled "Rain barrels:  What's hype and what's helpful".  In that post, I cited the main drawbacks to using barrels.  By simple mathematics, they are highly unlikely to "save you money on your water bill", as many vendors and municipalities claim in their promotional language.  Furthermore, they are not very "green" for the simple reason that many brands leak so badly that they quickly become useless and must be tossed out with the trash.

I got my first rain barrel, a Systern model, during a City of Houston distribution campaign a few years ago (I lived in Houston before moving to League City).  It appeared to be well-made, but it quickly developed this huge stress fracture in the front of it.  The City of Houston actually replaced it for me free of charge (and did so for other folks whose barrels had also failed), but my replacement began leaking even more quickly than the first one had.

So rather than conserving water, many of these barrels instead waste peoples' money and proceed to take up space in landfills.  In so doing, they tend to serve as an overall public deterrent to water conservation in accordance with the "once bitten, twice shy" principle.  Any consumer who has gone to the expense and trouble to install a rain barrel only to have it leak like a sieve is not going to be very open to future conservation measures-in-kind.  And I don't blame them one bit.  

The City of League City recently undertook its own rain barrel campaign which saw about 200 takers, according to Galveston County Daily News (paywalled).  I am not familiar with this brand but I sure hope that those 200 buyers have better luck with their barrels than I've had with mine.  

In my original hype vs. helpful post, I also enumerated the positives to owning a rain barrel.  They can be convenient for spot-watering in certain scenarios and, as long as you can somehow keep them from leaking for a number of years, consistent use will at least allow you to recoup your expenditure on the barrel itself, even if you don't see a positive impact on your water bill.

But that's a really, really big "IF".  What I'm going to do below is show you a series of photos that tell a brand new rain barrel story with a surprise ending.  If you're a regular reader of this blog, you must think that my entire life is one endless procession of rainbows and butterflies because every home improvement project that I lay my hands to magically turns out to yield a benefit that is ten times worth the effort I put into it.  Well, I'm here to tell you that ain't true, and this story will illustrate it in spades.

I was inspired to install a new rain barrel in this central alcove of our front yard for the sake of convenience.  Because we have a four-car lateral attached garage (three spaces across and two spaces deep in the middle), our house is a full 60 feet wide.  While we had the foresight to order the builder to install garden hose faucets on each of the front corners (east and west), we didn't think to order one for the middle. Therefore, I must unroll 30 feet of hose in order to water my front-bed flowers.  And when I'm finished, I must roll 30 feet of hose back up again.  I spend more time unrolling and rolling hose than I spend watering the flowers.  It's a ridiculous waste of time and energy that could be avoided by keeping a barrel of water right here where it's needed.  

However this is our front yard I'm talking about, and so whatever I install here has to have maximum attractiveness.  I fell in love with this Sam's Club offering (left side of photo).  It has a nice textured surface, the color coordinates perfectly with our brick, and there's a planter in the top of it so that you can put plants that will grow and cascade over the side and disguise the fact that the rain barrel is even present.  

Tap to expand.  Basically this is a reference to the fact that POAs and HOAs cannot prohibit residential rainwater harvesting in Texas.  However, it is within their authority to place limits on how homeowners design their systems, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they're going to want to see installations that are as attractive as possible.  And I can't blame them for that.

Screengrabbed from this Texas Water Development Board site.  

Dry fit, before I created a stable base.  With screening plantings and whatnot, you can see that this barrel could be made to be inconspicuous.  

Let me walk you through creation of the base and downspout diversion.  Most people don't realize how heavy rain barrels are (including manufacturers who under-engineer them for the stress loads they must bear).  When full of water, this barrel will weigh almost 500 pounds!!  (65 gallons x 7.5 lbs/gallon).  That requires a stable base or it could become a safety hazard (what if it tipped over and fell on a child?).

I started by removing one of our foundation shrubs.  

Then I scraped off the mulch to expose the sand layer emplaced by the builder.  I used a tamper to compact it.  

Soil compaction is good exercise for the core and arms.  

Addition of limestone gravel to help with under-drainage.  Also compacted.  

On top of the limestone, a layer of decomposed granite and then cinder blocks on top of that, making sure to keep everything absolutely level.  

12" x 12" caps on top of the cinder blocks.  

This basically creates a robust 2' x 2' pad.  And the open sides of the cinder blocks can serve as toad houses.  

Except in my case, I blocked off the toad-house holes so that the surrounding soil and mulch would not spill into them.  

Now for the barrel preparation.  This one needed an overflow hole to be drilled.  Very important because excess water needs to be conveyed away from your slab.  

A rain barrel is, indeed, a good idea - but only if it is properly designed, constructed, and installed.  

Overflow port successfully drilled.  

Some simple fittings from the hardware store for the overflow tube.    

You can pick up these white plastic flex pieces for about a buck and a half at hardware store.  Here you can see the top planter in the barrel.  

We simply re-routed the existing downspout. If I were keeping this assemblage, I would paint the white plastic piece to match the downspout so that it looks cohesive and inconspicuous. 

And then the blue overflow hose is tucked into the existing flex tube that the downspout had originally been placed in.

It's not too ugly, is it??  You can tell that, when re-mulched and when trimmed out with screening vegetation, it would not be an eyesore.  

Now for the fatal flaw in this otherwise-exemplary home improvement story.

In order to test the final configuration, we (sigh) unrolled 30 feet of garden hose and ran the water into the rain gutter to simulate rainwater run-off.  

And guess what happened next??  

No rainbows and butterflies today!!!

It was only upon testing in situ that we discovered that this barrel is badly defective.  The side seams were not welded properly.  An uncountable number of pin-hole leaks down the sides immediately made themselves apparent.  

OMG, somebody shoot me - it never occurred to me that this barrel might leak badly right from the moment that it rolled off the assembly line.  It never occurred to me to test the barrel for water-tightness even before I took the store labels off.  I'm used to rain barrels failing 3 to 12 months into their operation.  This doesn't even rise to the level of infant mortality - this damned thing was stillborn.

Wikipedia's explanation of the bathtub curve, which describes the nature of engineering failures. Apparently many would beg to differ with me on my essential distinction between "infant mortality" and "stillborn".  

Sigh.  My bad, obviously.  And obviously, I do not recommend that you purchase this particular rain barrel.

Out of stock?  Really?  And how many other hapless would-be-greenie consumers in our local area have experienced what I've shown above??

Screengrabbed  on June 8, 2014 from this site. 

So I am now the proud owner of three (count 'em) non-working rain barrels.  I've begun to turn my attention to ways in which I might somehow retrofit or otherwise adapt one or more of them in order to recoup some measure of functionality (liners? structural supports? internal coatings?  some combination of the above?).  If I figure out what these things are good for other than disposal in a landfill, I'll publish a follow-up post.

Meanwhile, best wishes to the 200 of you who recently purchased rain barrels from the City of League City.  May you have better luck with your barrels than I have had with all of mine.