The Old Guy's Garden Record

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Thursday, December 18, 2025

Our snowcover is gone. After a couple of sub-zero (-1.3°, -3.1°F) mornings, several warmer days moved in, gradually melting the snow. Some rain today finished off any remaining snow. With the snow melt and rain, I'm guessing that our property is a muddy mess. Since my lovely wife is making a run to the Post Office to mail packages and Christmas cards, I don't have to go out today.

Before the cold snap, I rescued four mature gloxinias from the sunroom before the really cold weather set in. As it turned out, my max-min thermometer in the sunroom only got down to 32°F. Just the same, the four older gloxinias were ready to come down to our dining room table for their blooming cycle.

As print seed catalogs slowly begin to arrive in the mail, I need to do our annual seed inventory of old seed we keep in frozen storage. Thoroughly drying and freezing seed in a manual defrost freezer allows many varieties to stay good for years and years. My best success with freezing seed was some twenty-five year old Earlirouge tomato seed that still germinated at 50%! Other seed types, especially onion seed, only remain good in the freezer for a year...if I'm lucky.

Friday, December 12, 2025 - Snow

We received around three or four inches of snow overnight. With cold temperatures remaining, not much will melt off soon. The bright sun has, however, melted the snow on our back steps. And our road got plowed this morning, so getting in and out is just a matter of navigating our snow covered driveway. Fortunately, both of our vehicles have four-wheel drive, although we don't have anywhere to go today.

We're expecting another three inches of snow on Saturday. So it's really winter here in west central Indiana.

And you may have heard to word "Indiana" in the news today. Our state senate showed some real wisdom in voting down the redistricting pushed by our President. He reacted with his usual meanness and threats of primarying the twenty-one Republican senators who joined ten Democrats in voting down the stupid measure, 31-19. Now I wish our politicians in Washington would do something to extend ACA healthcare.

Enough politics!

When you get a good snowcover, you wonder if you have enough food laid in for the duration. And of course, our power and heat are still working fine.

Yesterday, Annie had a meeting in Terre Haute and stopped by our local Sam's Club on the way home. She brought home a huge rotisserie chicken, barbecue ribs, steaks, and other goodies. We feasted on the chicken, dressing with gravy, and homegrown green beans for supper last night. This afternoon, I'll be cutting up the chicken, freezing some for future use, and boiling down and boning the skins and carcass.

We obviously are blessed.

Tuesday, December 9, 2025 - Grinding Day

The small load of garlic pieces I had in the dehydrator fooled me and dried overnight. I expected them to take another day. I ground them down to powder and added them to our garlic powder jar. A little disappointed with how much garlic powder I got, I may do another batch this month.

With our old coffee grinder out, I switched to grinding egg shells. We dry our shells and then crush them in a freezer bag. When we get enough frozen egg shells to grind, they get ground down to powder. They’ll be used to give our tomato plants extra calcium.

Note that the coffee grinder used is reserved for grinding only garlic, egg shells, and the like.

Monday, December 8, 2025

I ran a bunch of garlic cloves through our rarely used food processor today. I’d been working at trimming the ends of the garlic cloves and peeling them for a couple of days.

Once chopped, the garlic went onto two trays of our food dehydrator. I usually do enough garlic to cover four trays, but our garlic harvest this time around was a bit light.

The food dehydrator went to the garage, turned on, and set to around 95°F. It will probably take two or three days before the garlic is dry enough to grind for garlic powder.

I tell about making garlic powder in our how-to, Growing Garlic.

Wednesday, December 3, 2025

I put up our Christmas tree today. All that involves is pulling the tree out of a large trash bag and hanging a few ornaments on it. With our kids grown and us no longer hosting Christmas Day, we switched years ago to a very small, tabletop Christmas tree.

The hardest part of putting up the tree was making room for it amongst all of our gloxinias in bloom.

Monday, December 1, 2025

Our two dogs just finished off the last of our Thanksgiving leftovers. It turned out that a three pound boneless Butterball turkey breast made several good meals for Annie and I. Having eaten poultry for four days, I have a small sirloin steak marinating for country fried steak for supper tonight.

We have more snow coming this afternoon. While Saturday's inch of snow melted off pretty quickly, the new snow will probably hang around for awhile, as temperatures are supposed to stay around freezing.

I was pleased to see another gloxinia had come into bloom...this time with red blooms. On closer inspection, I saw that the plant was in a six inch pot, marking it as one of our older gloxinias with a large corm that requires a pot larger than four inches. It usually takes three years for our gloxinia plants to get to that stage.

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