TGIF but a wet one. Winding down the gardens. Blueberries.

I think we had more rain overnight and may get a bit more today before we get sun.  If it dries out I will collect a few more tomatoes including a couple of the sauce types.  But I am looking at the tangled mess of vines on the west side of the patio that are on the verge of collapsing.  If they do crash they may damage some plants I would rather keep.  So I may try to start pulling them.  They don't have all that many tomatoes any more and I still have two pots of tomatoes still producing the cherry types.  I am also looking at the herbs to see which ones I will repot to bring in for the winter, which I will overwinter in the gardens (and where I will put them), and which I will pull.  Obviously I will take cuttings from and put parts of the current spearmint and peppermint in the large containers overwinter.  My stevia is blooming and when it is done I may cut it back severely and move the pots inside.  I still have five strawberry plants to put in the beds.  They will make a nice start next spring.

I don't know if my second try at growing blueberries will survive.  The problem (I think) is keeping the pH at the right level.  I did use an acid-loving plant food and an acidifier but if checked out the water and found that it is both highly alkaline and very hard.  I am considering ways to deal with that.

As you may gather from what I have written before, I am skeptical of the statistics for how much good food is thrown away.  I don't doubt that consumers, as a group, can be wasteful.  But I don't think the whole problem is consumer behavior.  This article on MarketWatch has some interesting thoughts on the effect of the various "use by," "sell by," and "best by" dates on products.  We do look at them but we take them with a big dose of salt.  We have bought milk that spoiled before the "sell by" date.  We don't throw anything away based only on the dates stamped on the product.

Why am I not surprised by another example of incestuous relations between an industry and a supposedly and neutral "ratings" agency?  I have come to see the whole higher education industry as a con game that scams both the governments that provide education loans and the students who have to pay those loans back.

Right on!! Tina E. at Another Old Woman.  I have no use for the food purists of whatever stripe.  I wish they would shut up and mind their own business.

This is funny! But I had to do some checking because Mom thought both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were associated with the 1940s.  But story checks out.  However, this bit on the Baseball History Blog postulates that Ruth, Gehrig and others agreed to the strike outs so the girl wouldn't be embarrassed.  I wonder though if the male sports writers had to postulate that to salve their male egos.