Yes, I heard even the permafrost in Svalbard is giving in. The international samples of seeds are starting to thaw and rot. They where supposed go be safe for hundereds of years.
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Not good.
The real sleeping bear in that story is that the permafrost contains more frozen carbon than all of our fossil fuel emissions, enough to over double atmospheric CO2. And now it is liberating…
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You can make a puree out of summer squash and freeze it for the winter. It is a great broth for soup. I will have to see if I can find the recipe I used in the past. Basically it was summer squash and onions boiled and spiced with pepper and garlic and ginger garlic. Then when I want I vegetable soup in the winter I just grab a bag of that plus the vegetables I want and it has the spices and makes a great base.
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Actually I am more worried by the methane and mercury in the permafrost. There is more mercury locked up in the artic then the rest of the world combined releasing that will contaminate untold water resources. We still can’t eat alot of the fresh water fish in lakes here because of the mercury that was painted on the ends of logs back in the 30s as standard practice for floating them down river. Too many logs sank in the lakes and rivers and the fish have high levels of mercury almost a century later.
I am sure our children and grandchildren will live in a different world then we grew up in. I guess the only good news is when I look at my nephews in their 20s I realize just how much of this they find as normal and not as stress full as we find it. Maybe there is something to be said for the old saying ignorance is blist. That said I do feel bad for the world we are leaving them it is a mess in so many ways I feel like the last half a century has done more harm then good in alot of respects.
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Yup, that’s a lot of zucchini. Around here you don’t dare leave your window down when you go to the store. You will find a bag of zucchini put on the fount seat when you come out of the store.
I do love zucchini.
Bob
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we will sometimes grind summer squash and can it to use as a thickener in spaghetti sauce etc.
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Well the summer has been pretty good for haying here. I have put up about 2000 bales and taken a small break do to stormy weather. But we could really use the rain here.
Been making some jelly
Mulberry raspberry and choke cherry jelly. The garden grew up to weeds as I got a nasty cut on my hand haying trying to clear a jam and reached in somewhere I knew better then to put my hand. But it was only a big flesh wound so it is healing. For a while I sure didn’t want to play in the dirt and risk infection by the time that risk has pastes the garden was pretty much gone I will get some pepper and some tomatoes a few onions and that will probably be about it this year. Oh well some years are better then others.
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Billy how do you can it? From what I read the acid content was too low. I have read you can chunk punkin or winter squash but even that was questionable about storage. Ofcourse I do think the modern canning books are paranoid about the risk of spoilage.
Bob I am on the Maine NH border and that has always been the long running joke about going to Maine in the summer. I always found it funny when my grandfather would say that made it sound like people in Maine where more generous to me. Lol
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the world has gone safety crazy…
pints 55 min @ 10 lbs
quarts 90 min @ 10 lbs
puree with some water
leave some water so squash doesn’t mush up together.
a little salt
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Agreed about the safety craze.
Pressure canned as you describe there are 2 additional safety features - the jars are vacuum sealed, so if anything went wrong, the seal will be broken. Bubbles or pressure in canned food, don’t eat. 2, the foodstuff is meant to be cooked upon opening, boiling destroys botulin toxin.
That’s why the older folks heated everything in a can, just good common sense / survival insurance.
As for acidity, adding some vinegar wouldn’t hurt. Even yellow tomatoes aren’t acid enough to be completely safe.
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It essentially cyanide bonded to a sugar group like in apple seeds. There is also sambucine and a few other alkaloids which can do some damage if not cooked. I am a bit disappointed. I thought we had some, but I can’t find it. And quite possibly my dad got rid of it so the dogs didn’t get into it.
This is actually a really good short article on Elderberry.
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If you ever get bored with measuring things normally, why not go down to the dollar store, and pick up a nice Chinese mini carpenter’s square?
I thought I was finally ready for reading glasses, but then realized there really are 3/12ths to a quarter, and no 8ths. Just in case you wanted a different level of precision. 
I wonder if they have drill bit sets to match?
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Good points. They say there’s enough organic mercury tied up in permafrost to double ocean levels. The rise is already measurable in northern rivers as they reach the sea, thus confirming permafrost loss.
Not as great a practical worry about the fish contamination, as it’s projected global ocean stocks will largely be commercially extinct by around 2040, so we have a built in protection… 
The methane is / should be a worry, being at least 40 times stronger as a greenhouse gas than CO2. In this hot weather you can smell it now, the peat bottoms of millenial bogs and ponds are becoming active, starting to produce vast amounts of methane. And this will be across all the north around the world. Change is coming.
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I saw a video a long time back now where someone was on a lake in Alaska the water was bubbling and the person collected the bubbles in a bag and burned them to prove it was methane but I think it scares me more when people tell me you can just smell it up there.
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It would be no challenge to put a poly sheet on the bottom of a pond with a float in the middle, probably supply all your cooking gas that way, maybe even generator fuel with enough collector area.
It’s very disturbing, but we will just get to watch, and live with the consequences.
Gary watch out for the Taiwan rulers…
When I was in Taiwan we asked for some 4 inch npt to Japanese pipe adapters. The next day the guy from the machine shop was so proud you could tell he had stayed up all night turning out 6 sets of these for us when we had just asked for 1 set to make sure they where correct before doing the rest. Well they used a Taiwan inch not an imperial inch. Turns out there are 10 Taiwanese inches to the foot so these fitting where closer to 5 inches then 4. Ironically we had just stopped at the hardware store on the way in to work and I bought a ruler with both on it because I thought it was a funny mistake. So as my boss is loosing it on the machinist about how it wouldn’t fit and showing them where he needed to use it I walked over with the ruler and measured it for him. I thought his head would explode as he was looking at the 4 “inches” on one side of the ruler and the local was nodding in excitement yes see 4. Then I flipped the ruler over and said 4 inch usa and the guy almost started to cry knowing what he had done wrong. At which point my boss figured it out and he started laughing.
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Wow maybe you have found a new local solution to power you could pressurize it and drive on that easy enough… I would be happy to see people collect what is leaking out of the ground.
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OMG!
That’s crazy. The poor machinist, I have sympathy for that poor guy, having done that work before. They probably ended up using the fittings for a ten inch per foot local customer. How on earth would they have come up with a measuring system like that, yet get the foot measure correct? Would that have something to do with using abacus, and poor fraction abilities?
Methane unfortunately isn’t efficiently compressible. The case is better than for wood gas, more energy dense, but compression losses are still significant.
It sure would be better to burn it at source, but the emissions are so diffuse and largely in uninhabited areas it will just disperse. Very attractive backwoods energy source though…
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