Giant Puffball

Please let me know if any of you see a giant puffball mushroom around Kalamazoo. I have not seen a single one in my lawn or woods, though usually I have dozens. Perhaps it was the dry weather we had earlier this summer. If you see a nice white one, email me or call me immediately, as they can turn brown rather suddenly. I do not know if I can survive an autumn without at least one giant puffball in me.

There's a new posting on the Screen Porch blog: http://screenporchlit.blogspot.com/

Canning Tomatoes

I’ve processed just two batches of tomatoes this year. I’m in the mood, though, so I should go grab all the split tomatoes off Kellee’s plants and steal some of Susanna’s and go to town. My San Marzano Romas are good this year (if dry), and the other tomatoes I caged well above the ground are fine, but any tomato that touched the ground has been partially devoured by whatever is living in the six inches of hay mulch I put down instead of rototilling. There’s always a learning curve for any new theory or practice in gardening. Also, since putting down the hay mulch, I don't see snakes in my garden--not sure what that means.

Anyhow, the USDA has changed their tune in the last few years (maybe it’s been decades, but new farm knowledge is slow to sink in), tells us we can no longer cold pack our tomatoes as I’ve always done (and mom and granny and granny’s mom and granny), but must put boiling liquid into the jars before sealing and processing. Lena Anken Sexton writes in Mother Earth News:

"Granted, botulism poisoning from canned tomatoes is relatively rare—but when you're talking about a disease that destroys human life, rare isn't enough. I have seen the ravages of the deadly Clostridium botulinum . It is an insidious killer, for it reveals no clues to its presence: no mold, no odor, no color or taste change. It will grow and thrive in a perfectly sealed (but insufficiently heated) canning jar." More about safely canning tomatoes at: http://www.motherearthnews.com/DIY/1985-07-01/Can-Your-Tomatoes-Carefully.aspx

Any change in method requires adjustment. For boiling the tomatoes I’m using a big cheap tin pan, and the wall of the pan is so thin that the tomatoes burn on the bottom. So until I procure the right heavy-walled pan for this job, all my otherwise lovely quarts and pints of canned tomatoes have black specks in them. So please forgive this imperfection if you are to receive any of these jars.

One Fish

I just cleaned out the donkey water tank, something I've been meaning to do all summer. You know how a container of water gets when it sits out all year? That's why we put fish in the tank, to eat some of the mosquito larvae and the green stuff that forms in the tank. There's only one fish in the tank right now, because that one fish ate all the other fish, and he's gotten to be as big as blue gill. He's seventeen years old. Susanna named him Orange Peel, but he's big enough to be a chunk of pumpkin rind. Chris calls him One Fish from the Dr. Seuss book. His presence makes cleaning out the tank harder because I have to catch him and hold him in a bucket while I scrub the tank with bleach. After I got him in a bucket with the thickest sludge at the bottom of the tank, I put the hose in to freshen the water and he sort of slid up the hose out and landed in the dirt. I picked him up and then dropped him again in the sand---he's slimy. Anyway, so I scrubbed the tank with bleach, worked for quite a while on the black mold at the bottom, and then put him back in there, along with a new metal shade to protect him from the sun. At first he was very sluggish, and I wondered if I had done him in by dropping him, or by disturbing his slime coat---I mean, seventeen is old for a fish, isn't it? However, the next day he looked lively, and I could see, strewn across the bottom of the tank, about twelve inches of fish shit, something like silly string. Yuck. That was just one day's installment. I'll try to clean it out more often.