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Saturday, Aug. 31, 2002 - 12:36 p.m. Lease made it back yesterday from Hillbilly country in near-record time. They left around noon local time, and she pulled into our driveway at 5:30. I wasn�t even ready for her at that time. I had already taken my shower (being covered with sweat and grime from canning salsa and cleaning the house), but I was in the process of sweeping the carpets. Clean carpets were not what Lease had in mind. They will get swept some other time�. I met her halfway between the front door and the van, and she leapt into my arms. Not trying to sound like one of those cheesy romance novels, but that�s what happened��. Carryout Chinese food and Krekels hamburgers for dinner last night. She didn�t want to get into the car and drive anywhere, and I didn�t want to cook after making all the salsa I did yesterday. How much salsa? I had so many ripe tomatoes, I had enough to fill my 16 quart stock pot almost to the rim. I ended up canning the salsa in two batches; due to the fact my canning pot only holds 11 pints. I just left the extra salsa simmering on the back burner while the first batch processed on the front. The second batch was a little thinner than I like, but that is what happens when it cooks for that long. That batch will be good for cooking Spanish rice and such, but not very good for dipping corn chips. So I ended up with 22 sealed jars, and I still had another 4 pints of salsa left. That just went into clean jars, and it now sits on the second shelf of our refrigerator. I will hand it out to someone next week. This batch was made especially hot, and it was done on purpose. I had made 4 batches before yesterday (54 pints), and all of these were mild. Lease prefers salsa that way, and whenever we cook with the hotter batches she doesn�t enjoy the outcome as much as if it was made with the milder blend. You can always add Tabasco� sauce to my meal to make it hotter, but you can�t take the heat out of a jar of hot salsa. The tomatoes used in yesterday�s batch were almost all heirloom varieties. I had almost 5 gallons of these tasty fruits, most of which were the variety �Brandywine�. This made for a flavorful, juicy mix. The old-fashioned tomatoes take longer to ripen than the newer hybrids (80-100 days as opposed to 65-80 for hybrids), but for what they lack in speed they make up for in taste. If there is one thing that I always recommend to new gardeners, it�s that if they love tomatoes, they have to grow a few of the older varieties. If you just plant nursery-grown plants you will have good tomatoes, but if you start a few seeds (very easy to do) of �Cherokee Purple� or �Mortgage Breaker�, you will have great tomatoes. I did take the time yesterday morning to get a little fishing in before the sun got to high in the sky. I didn�t have the time to travel to the local state lakes, so I settled on the short drive to Lake Mohall. I went there with the intention of catching and releasing a few White Bass. Since September is just around the corner, which means that it�s time for these fighters to move close to the bank. They do this every fall to gorge themselves on Gizzard Shad. This fattens them up for the long winter months, helping them survive the lower activity that comes with the cold. One problem yesterday. They weren�t in the shallows. I didn�t see one break the surface, even though I saw several large schools of the shad. But the time spent did come with some good news: I caught a couple dozen small White Crappie. Theyw ere only 2 and 3-year-old fish, so none were near keeper size. But the fact that they were there, and were quite healthy and fat for their size was great news. Lake Mohall�s Crappie fishery has been on a serious decline for over a decade. In the past 3 years, I had given up on even fishing for them. The main problem (I feel) was what I call �Meat Fishermen�. These �sportsmen� go out to fill their livewells, and size doesn�t matter. They will keep ANY fish they catch, and in the process they damage the population of the species they prey on. The D.N.R. put strict limits (9�, 15 fish on the power plant lake, 10�, 10 fish on the flood-control lake) about ten years ago to stop this practice on those lakes. Both had been huge Crappie lakes since the early 1970�s, but had been in decline for years. The regulations have helped bring those lakes back to better fishing. The only problem was the �Meat Fishermen� had to go somewhere else or face stiff fines for keeping undersized fish. So Lake Mohall became their lake of choice. It had been a good, steady Crappie lake for decades. In just a matter of a few years, these idiots had removed so many fish that the lake couldn�t replace the removed fish fast enough. That brought the Crappie in the lake to near-extinction. But Lake Mohall now has it�s own strict limits (10�, 10 fish). That means no more over harvest, and a chance for these great fish to bounce back. In another year or two, the lake might be worth seriously fishing again����
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