Ramblings

In spite of the mayhem around it, our garden has been coming through in the veggie department. We've been enjoying the broccoli, which is far better than store-bought; and we should be eating some Cheddar cauliflower (the head is a golden yellow color) pretty soon. We've been eating beet salads, cucumbers and peppers, and the beans will be coming soon. But NO TOMATOES! The plants are big and green (and so are the fruits)-- and that got us wondering. So we did a soil test and found that we overdid the amount of chicken manure--the soil is pretty high in nitrogen. From pillar to post on that one. So we probably will do some pruning on the tomatoes to try to force the fruits into ripening.

Lisa also has been making pickles. Our favorite recipe is here. It's not a "canned" pickle recipe because the pickles are not heated up enough to sterilize them; but with all the vinegar and salt in them, we've never had a problem. And they stay pretty crisp. Speaking of putting food by, we often use recipes from a really great book, titled "The Joy of Pickling", by Linda Ziedrich. We bought the 2nd edition at Costco recently, because it had more recipes in it (we have the 1st edition, too). We used it to make several tomato recipes, including tomato chutney, ketchup, spicy ketchup and chili barbeque sauce. All good stuff--if you have lots of tomatoes around! Maybe not this season....

And now on to the second part of this post: Radon. Several years back we started hearing about high levels of radon in local-area houses. In one case, a fellow died of lung cancer, probably due to radon. The radon comes from granitic rocks and sediment that were brought in by the Missoula Floods. We know for a fact that our area has a number of glacial erratics that were rafted in by the flood so there definitely are reasons for concern. Some local house crawlspaces/basements have tested very high, upwards of 500 pC (pico-Curies). The EPA maximum recommended level is 4 pC, so that's really bad. The disturbing thing is that our area is not well-known for this problem.

As a result, we did some research into Radon mitigation. If you have to do it to an old house, it can be expensive. But putting radon mitigation in while a house is being constructed is relatively trivial. So we're doing it, even though we don't know for certain if we will need it or not. The system includes some active ventilation (under the slab). So we likely will turn the fan off and do a test for Radon to see where we stand. Radon mitigation info can be found here. Basically, you put drain pipe underneath the house, and a layer of plastic between the pipe and slab, so the radon can be diverted outside the house.