The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 1 – LED There be Light

I decided to significantly change the way I treat my garden this year. My goal is to raise as much food as I can and that means a wide variety of crops grown in a wide variety of ways. I am planning to write about the endeavor to maximize my edibles from my huge garden and this is the first post in a series about that.

And although I am cash-strapped, I had to begin by buying some LED-lights. Because I want to grow onions and peppers from seeds,

Onions and peppers need a really long time to germinate and grow in size sufficient enough to be planted outdoors. I tried to sow three types of onion but so far only one started to grow, which bums me out. So far I had very little success with onions in my garden, I hope to change that but preliminarily I have little reason for optimism.

After (if) the onions are big enough to move into the greenhouse, I will use these lights to start my tomatoes, pumpkins, beans, and corn indoors too. I do hope that this way I will get plants big enough to resist slug damage later on. Once the plants are big enough, the slugs should not damage them anymore. I also want to try growing these in a novel-ish way, so stay tuned for that.

When I am not growing anything under the lights, I now have a consistent diffuse light for photographing my handmade products, something that I needed for some time by now.

(sex cells are binary)≠(sex is binary)

It never ceases to baffle me that there still are people who insist that there are only two genders because sex is binary because there are only two types of gamete (in humans, there are life forms with more than just two gametes). I am especially disappointed in Dawkins, a writer whose popular scientific books I really enjoyed and who, as a biologist, really should know better.

Trying to conflate “sex” as it refers to whole persons with “sex” as it refers to gametes is a prime example of a bad kind of scientific reductionism. Just because there is one word – in this case “sex” – does not mean that it means the same thing all the time, everywhere.

Firstly, sex at birth is not assigned according to any kind of gamete that an individual produces, it is assigned as a best guess based on external genitalia at birth. As such, it is mostly right, but there are cases where it cannot be ascribed with confidence and also cases, where it later shows being wrong. And cases where surgery is actually used to shoehorn a person into one of the two boxes.

Secondly, there are a lot of people who never produce any kind of gamete their whole life. What sex do these people belong to? If one decides that sex must be a binary based on the type of gamete produced by an individual, one must then decide that these people do not have any sex whatsoever. This is the exact point where the concept of binary sex when referring to people and not gametes breaks down. There are a lot of further complexities, but this suffices to disprove the idiotic notion that people can be sorted into exactly two categories based on gametes.

And that’s without going into the whole concept of gender, which has nothing to do with just biology. Gender is a linguistic/social construct. Just as gametes are just one criterion in determining a person’s sex, a person’s sex is just one criterion in determining their gender.

So although sex as it pertains to gametes is binary, sex regarding whole people is a bit more complicated. The word sex cannot mean the same thing in both cases and does not need to have the same constraints. Sex, when referring to whole individuals, is not binary but bimodal. Which is similar, but not the same.

Wishing for reality to be simple because one specific language (in this case English) has just two words for gender and wishing to shoehorn everyone into those two words is akin to insisting that the rainbow has a limited number of exactly distinct colors because we have assigned distinct words to some bands of wavelengths.

Russian “Morality”

The almighty algorithm recommended this video to me, and it is really good:

Describing Russia as a pseudo-feudal society with components of a Mafia-esque hierarchy is very interesting and very apt, in my opinion.

And unlike many other people who opine on Russia online, this one cannot be easily dismissed because she is Russian herself.

Gingy Breads – Ree-Sye-Pea

This is the basis for the recipe that my mother uses most for her yearly gingerbread creations. It is not the actual recipe she uses, because she made changes to it that cannot be easily conveyed by text. I will write the changes at the end if you want to experiment, this is what she started with.

Ingredients:

650 g fine flour
240 g powdered sugar
4 whole eggs
100 g honey
50 g of vegetable fat, shortening, butter (ghee), or lard according to taste and availability
1 tablespoon of cinnamon
1 tablespoon of gingerbread spice mixture*
1 teaspoon of baking soda
2-3 tablespoons of cocoa powder if a darker color is desired (optional)

Process:

Put the sieved powdered ingredients and some flour on the rolling board. Add the eggs and molten fat with honey and start adding the rest of the flour. Work from the center of the board towards the edges and knead the dough until it is smooth but firm. A kitchen robot can be used at the start but elbow grease will be needed for finishing the dough because it becomes too firm.

Roll the dough to approximately half the desired thickness of the final product and cut the shapes with a butter knife or forms.

Bake at 170-180°C until the color changes to golden brown (approximately 10 min). Te exact time depends on the actual kitchen equipment available.

If a shiny surface is desired, egg wash can be applied with a pastry brush on hot pieces directly after they are taken out of the oven (my mother does not do this).

For the best taste, they should be left to wait for a few days until they soften up a bit. For decorations and building more complicated structures, like gingerbread houses, you should proceed ASAP while they are rock-hard.

My mother’s changes:

3 egg yolks and 1 whole egg instead of 4 whole eggs
300 g of honey instead of 100 g
flour is added to the mixture not by weight but until the desired dough consistency is reached so the actual amount of flour used depends on the size of the eggs, the honey consistency, etc.

Gingerbread spice mixture is sold in CZ. Here is the site of the manufacturer (-click-). Ingredients according to Google Translate are: ground cinnamon, ground coriander, ground star anise, ground allspice, ground cloves, ground anise, ground nutmeg, ground mace, and ground fennel.

Gingy Breads 2024 Xmass – Part 3

Aaaand for the third part the gingerbread cottages.

Gingy Breads 2024 Xmass – Part 2

Today a few Christmas trees.

Gingy Breads 2024 Xmass – Part 1

Today just a little teaser of my mother’s creations this year. She made so many gingerbread houses this Christmas that I will have to post them over a few days. I shoulda start two weeks ago but I somehow never got to it.

Aye Maide Some Cutting Boards

I haven’t posted here about crafting for a long time, so I decided to do some posting now. I already made my first cutting boards from jatoba and they are currently tested in three different kitchens. Here are the pictures:

So far they work reasonably well. Jatoba is very hard so whilst the surfaces get scratched by knife blades, the scratches are extremely shallow and since these are end-grain cutting boards, it will take a lot of cutting to wear out some material. Considering that ordinary side-grain boards from beech wood still hold reasonably flat for decades, I think these will last a lifetime. Which means I won’t need new cutting boards, ever.

My mother already forgot the middle-sized one (with slanted rows) on a wet towel and it warped something awful. But after it dried out, it straightened again and the glue held. She put the board on a wet towel so it does not slide on the table and this was not the first wooden board that had warped due to this ill-thought-out practice. From now on, she is using a silicone mat for that purpose, and the problem is solved. I also put a few offcuts in the dishwasher and they performed as I expected – the glue failed.

Currently, I am making jatoba cutting boards for sale. And just like with knives, I will prepare short documents about how to care for them to customers. That is why I am actually glad that my mother did the thing with wet towel because I would not have thought of it and I do need to know all the different ways these can fail.

Although I must say, if someone gives a wooden cutting board in a dishwasher, then they are probably about as smart as an average Trump voter, and thus probably just as resistant to information. Well, c’est la vie.

When making the next cutting board, my drum sander broke. I had to improvipair it and today I got to work on it for several hours. It does indeed have higher power now and thus it functions a lot better. I might be able to flatten boards without the router, as I originally intended. I did flatten this board like that, and it is huge.

It is made from black locust and I made it for myself. Not for the kitchen – it is 60×30 cm, a bit too large for that – but for my workshop for leather work. I expect it to be more cut-resistant than even the very best cutting mat. I love how the black locust grain looks and I am contemplating making kitchen boards from it too.

I am writing about making the boards weekly on the knife blogge but I will write a series of posts here too.

Please Stop Pretending Like You Care About Palestine

The presidential election in the USA is near and what astounds me about it the most is that there are apparently still some people who claim to be on the political left who insist on calling a vote for Harris a “vote for genocide” under the pretense that not voting for her will be better for Palestine.

Please stop saying that nonsense already. We had already one election where Trump won the presidency and we had almost a decade of listening to his speeches (if his incoherent ramblings can be called that) Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows at this point that the next president will be either Harris or Trump and that of those two a vote for Trump is not only a “vote for genocide” but a vote for genocides. And it is also clear, given how the US election works, that not voting for Harris is almost the same as giving a vote to Trump too, because he has an extremely hyped-up and irrational base. Anyone pretending otherwise either denies reality or does not have two brain cells to rub together. I think these people do have functional brains, so why do they knowingly lie and deny reality?

In the real world, there will never be a candidate who can both have a realistic shot at winning the election and agree with everything these people want them to say and do, so there is, in fact, a 100% guarantee that they will disagree with any candidate on something. And from the behavior of some of these people online, I surmise that this is, in fact, what they want. They do not want to make the world better; they want to feel morally superior.

I am generally not someone to kink-shame people but I do consider furiously masturbating in public over your own perceived moral purity unseemly. If you cannot vote for Harris because you are an asshat who wants to see the world burn, at least have the decency to say so.

Pumpkin Mustard

I am taking the vaccination against Covid and flu rather badly this year. The vaccines had to be staggered by a week and a half because the delivery of the flu vaccine was delayed. After each shot, first, my arm hurt for three days like I was kicked by a mule and after that subsided, I was tired, depressed, and had an elevated temperature in the afternoon for over a week. I had a lot of work to do but I managed very little.

Those issues notwithstanding, I would like to share a recipe for pumpkin mustard, one of those things I have done with this year’s insane harvest. I did use one of the hokkaido squash that I wrote about previously. Hokkaido has firm flesh with a rich yellow color and is thus superbly suitable for this.

I put the following ingredients into the pot:

2 kg of finely grated pumpkin flesh
2 finely minced white peppers (for spicier mustard one can use hot peppers, goat horn peppers, or even chillis if you feel suicidal)
100 ml of vinegar
250 ml of cooking oil (in my case sunflower oil)
120 g of sugar
60 g of salt
1 teaspoon of white pepper (added because it is milder in taste than black pepper and also is not visible in the finished product, optional)
5 tablespoons of soy sauce
2 tablespoons of fresh shroomce (optional, 1 spoon of Worchester sauce can be used for spicier taste, I don’t like Worchester sauce that much)

I started to slow cook it under the lid until all the pumpkin pieces softened and started to break apart. Once that happened I added three 180 g glasses of storebought french mustard and mixed and shredded it thoroughly with food mixer into a smooth paste. If you are hardcore on self-made, you can use mustard seeds and not mustard.

I did mix it really thoroughly until it was smooth. I then carefully and slowly evaporated some water until it had an appropriate consistency when cooled. It did not take too long, hokkaido pumpkin is not too watery.

I put the finished product into small screw-top jars which I subsequently sterilized at 80°C for 20 minutes and then opened and closed when hot to form a proper vacuum seal. I made enough mustard to last me for several years, and from experience I know that it can last for several years in the cellar.

Since this is a rather special product as far as I am concerned, I went through the trouble of designing and printing labels. One glass failed to form a proper vacuum seal so I put it in the refrigerator for immediate consumption. It is delicious, although I will add a little bit more spices next time, possibly more white pepper and maybe a touch more vinegar. That is a long way off though, like I said, this batch should last for at least two years.

Just Beets

I do not like pickled red beets, and neither does my father. But my mother likes them so I sown two packets of seed into one bed about 3×1,5 m. They did not look like much for most of the summer but like the pumpkins, they took off in August rather spectacularly. I was expecting a harvest of about 6 kg, I got 18.

There were some impressive specimens in there, but there was also a lot of vole damage. About half the roots were gnawed on, some almost completely eaten. I would prefer if those fuckers were at least systematic in their damage and ate the whole root before starting to nibble on another. It is a lot more work to process a damaged root.

Even so, the harvest was significant and I just spent three whole days mostly working on this. We only have one pressure cooker and some beets were so big that they took up most of the space inside so it was almost non-stop boiling. My mother then peeled them and chopped them up to her preferred size and we canned them.

It was a lot of work for little financial gain since pickled beets are fairly cheap. Financially, we would be actually losing money on this if I had better use of my time. But I don’t so my mother now has two-years worth of beets to snack when she wants to.

This does bring up a thing that has been on my mind a lot lately. I looked up some gardening things on YouTube and as it is, the algorithm started to recommend a lot of gardening videos all of a sudden. Some of them are good and I am always happy to learn, some are entertaining but not worth much, and some are downright fraudulent and/or stoopid (like pretending to grow a banana plant from banana peel).

It seems that there is a big fad going around about self-sufficiency and sustainability and these beets are a prime example of why that is simply not possible for most people.

I have over thirty years of experience in gardening and I have a huge garden (over 1500 ㎡). I also have very poor and rocky soil in my garden, and slugs, and water voles. But even if I had the best chernozem there is, and ideal pest control (cats, btw, do not usually hunt water voles, though their presence does deter them a bit), I could not be self-sufficient even if I did nothing else. Because whilst I can pull sometimes really impressive harvests even with the poor soil I have, and I could have rabbits, a goat, and/or poultry to eat the non-edible parts of plants and grass and slugs, etc. there is still one thing that can throw a stick into the spokes that is completely unpredictable and uncontrollable – the weather.

I wrote about how bad things looked in the summer this year. Some crops bounced back, some didn’t – very little onions and garlic, almost no strawberries (although that was intentional), no nuts, and no tree fruit whatsoever. And that is how things always go in small-scale growing. I can grow in a good year enough of some specific crop to last more than one year, but never the full spectrum and if it can’t be reliably preserved, it is waste anyway. To grow a full, balanced diet reliably, large-scale growing and, more importantly, trade over large-ish distances, are necessary.

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The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 1 – LED There be Light

Like this:

(sex cells are binary)≠(sex is binary)

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Russian “Morality”

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Gingy Breads – Ree-Sye-Pea

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Gingy Breads 2024 Xmass – Part 3

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Gingy Breads 2024 Xmass – Part 2

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Gingy Breads 2024 Xmass – Part 1

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Aye Maide Some Cutting Boards

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Please Stop Pretending Like You Care About Palestine

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Pumpkin Mustard

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Just Beets

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