Kelkhoff.com

home

Uncategorized

Early Summer 2025 Gardening Update

For an update on my original Gardening 2025 post…

Flowers

We’ve got 3 Sunflower plants going strong (and I don’t want to say what happened to the fourth…) One is as tall as me, with no blooms quite yet. A second has five or six open flowers! The third has one flower on it so far, and some more coming.

Our 2 Morning Glory hanging baskets are really taking off now, with tendrils going up to the tops of their baskets. I’ve only seen one flower on either of them so far, and it didn’t open up at all, though I did get one picture of it. Then in the back yard we’ve got some pots with Moonflowers, and last night just before bedtime I saw the first bloom on one of them. It was big and beautiful!

But easily my favorites have been the Zinnias. I originally put them in some small pots and set them around our mailbox. But I could tell they were getting root-bound, and since I was feeling a little bit of inspiration, I decided to put some landscape bricks around the mailbox, so I could then transplant them into the soil. Just a few days after I finished that, they really started to take off (although the Miracle Grow may have made a difference for that too).

We are still hopeful that we’ll see some buds on our Canterbury Bells, Wild Flowers, and Painted Daisies. Though I think all of the Five Spots that we put out have sadly passed on…

Veggies

Not quite as beautiful as the flowers – or maybe just as beautiful, but simply less colorful – is the veggie garden. A reminder of what we planted in here:

  • Chives – which barely sprouted, but also, I don’t know what I’d use them for, so thats okay too 🙂
  • Carrots – which are growing like weeds and might be ready to dig up soon
  • Basil – which has made for some good pesto, and added a little flavor to some pizzas
  • Brussels Sprouts – which I’m most looking forward to – but apparently won’t be ready to harvest until the fall??
  • Spinach – which I got 4 or 5 good meals out of
  • Parsley – which I’m not really sure why I planted? I did put a little on some chicken the other night…
  • more Carrots – which are also close
  • Peppermint – which barely sprouted, despite me being told that it was so easy to grow?

  • 2025-06-27
Stream of Consciousness

Gardening 2025

Last Spring I bought a handful of pots of flowers from the grocery store one weekend on a whim. I hung a couple of them on our front porch and sat a few others in the back yard. I was surprised all summer long at how much I loved seeing the beauty that they brought to our home and how much I enjoyed caring for them (which just consisted of watering them about every-other day).

As Spring came along this year, I knew I wanted to do even more gardening. This year I also felt like I wanted to plant some vegetables too. I’m not really sure why, other than just for fun. I mean, I do like to eat veggies, but it’s so easy to get them from the store. I don’t expect that anything I grow will be better, although maybe I’ll be surprised.

It was around the middle of March when I first got the itch to start this project. But, a little bit of research and asking around quickly led me to realize it was too early to actually plant anything outside. So instead, I started down two paths that I could pursue indoors, while waiting for warmer weather.

First I bought 16 different packets of seeds – 8 types of flowers, and 8 vegetables (I let the kids choose the flowers; they let me pick the veggies). Next I ordered 2 different seed trays from amazon (one) (two). A few days later, the kids and I spent a couple hours after supper one night filling the trays with potting soil and planting our seeds.

Our freshly planted seed trays in the kitchen window.
The seed trays as seen from outside the kitchen window.
Vanessa wrote the names of everything we planted in the blue tray on this card that came with it.

The kids had more fun than I would have expected. Other than the fact that they didn’t like getting their hands dirty planting… They also helped with daily watering. And we were all so excited after a week or two, as little seedlings started to emerge.

The first seedling emerges!
Can I really grow my own Brussels Sprouts??
After about a month we had several little green friends ready to get outside

Meanwhile, the second leg of my gardening adventure was to build a raised garden bed. I found a pretty simple design online, picked up some cedar at Home Depot, and, well, then I let it stand in the garage for a few weeks… But eventually I got to work with my mitre saw and drills, and after a few evenings, wouldn’t you know it, I had a raised garden bed to call my very own!

Our friends stayed in the garden in their trays for a few days to get acclimiated to being outside

Finally, we just had to wait for the weather to get warm enough, and a pocket of time to open up, where we could transplant all our little flower seedlings into pots and other spots around the yard, and into the garden for the veggies.

I need some more hooks for these baskets…

We’ll see what happens next. I went ahead and bought a few more store-grown flower pots for the front porch, just to add some color while we’re waiting to see if any of these guys bloom. But, I think I achieved my real goals already: Lots of fun, and some good new memories with the kiddos.

  • 2025-05-13
Stream of Consciousness

90º Charger

The other day, one of my kids was having problems with a USB charging cable in their bedroom. Their devices wouldn’t charge, despite being plugged in on both ends. As it turns out, on the wall-side, the cable was plugged in to a typical little USB wall wart that stuck out about an inch, and then had the cable sticking straight out of it, then bending down at an uncomfortable angle, because the whole works was behind a piece of furniture, which, even with the unfortunate bend in the cable, was still further out from the wall than we’d have liked it to have been (like say 3 or 4 inches total).

As an aside, I know some people think that all furniture belongs in the middle of rooms, not against walls… We will save that discussion for another time.

Anyway, I’m assuming that it was the somewhat sharp bend in the cable that was causing the failure. So, I got a different cable (from my super-well organized bin of labeled bags of USB cables (no snark!)), replaced the bent one, and pulled the dresser another inch or two out, so it wouldn’t stress the cable so much, and all was working fine.

But I realized then and there, that what we needed was a charger that let the cable come straight down, e.g., at a 90º angle, or parallel to the wall. There may be better ones available (though I failed to find any from the normal accessory brands I use (Anker, Belkin)), but I went with this one (with a standard-issue amazon product name):

65W GaN USB C Charger,2 Port Flat USB Wall Charger,flodable Plug for Travel, with PD3.0&PPS for MacBook,Laptops,Tablets,for iPhone,iPad Pro,S22,XPS,with 3.28ft 100W Charging Cable, White

It is super thin – just over half an inch, and I like that it has both a USB-A and USB-C port, because we are still in that transition period between A & C (and probably will be for another decade, honestly). At 65W, that’s fairly high power I take it, which is nice too.

I’ve just ordered my second one of these and can see more in the future any time I need a charger behind something.

  • 2025-01-18
Stream of Consciousness

Winter Wonder Week

We got about six inches of snow on Sunday, 1/5/25. That was enough to cancel school on Monday through Wednesday, which meant extending the kids’ Christmas vacation for three extra days!

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get my snow blower to start… I’m guessing the issue is a combination of trying to use old gas, and/or its carburetor being, I don’t know, dirty or gummed up, or something. I don’t know if I have any real reasons to suspect that, but it’s what I’m going to go with. So, I’m going to try to replace the carburetor. I have YouTube videos that show how to take it off and put it back on, and ordered a replacement on Amazon for only $18, so I figure it’s worth a try. I’m choosing to view it as a fun project.

In the meantime, without a machine to clear our driveway (and no teenagers who knock on doors and offer to do it for us), I had to do it by hand. Well, by shovel. Despite losing a lot of weight last year, I didn’t necessarily gain much strength or muscle, so it was a pretty exhausting experience. I did wisely (if I do say so myself) split the task up into four batches, about 30-45 minutes each, so that made it overall fairly tolerable.

By Thursday they reopened school, but drop off and pickup lines were both quite a bit slower than usual. Then, overnight and in to Friday morning, another round of snow came, this one delivering another couple of inches, and cancelling school yet again!

However, now that we live in the future, our school district only permits three actual snow days per year, which meant that Friday was our first virtual school day since the good ole days of COVID-19. It went fine for everyone, with one special highlight: for FACS, my 7th grader got to bake brownies 🙂

  • 2025-01-11
Stream of Consciousness

The Old Adage about Shut Off Valves…

The old adage proved true again this morning for me: Any time you have a plumbing project that starts by turning off a shut off valve, that you actually have two plumbing projects, the first of which is, replacing a leaking shut off valve…

Off to Home Depot 🙂

  • 2024-12-30