Sept. 13-19, 2020

 

Weather | 9/13, 0.02" rain, 52°, 73° | 9/14, 52°, 73° | 9/15, 53°, 79° | 9/16, 57°, 80° | 9/17, 53°, 74° | 9/18, 49°, 70° | 9/19, 42°, 68° |

• Sunday, 9/13: Today:
  
  • We experienced an electric outage between 5:30-11:09 am, which made us realize we're low on propane for using a campstove and the Coleman lantern.
  • Mary did laundry.
  • She also picked hops, tomatoes, and tomato hornworms.
  • I cleaned filters and inside covers on our 4 air conditioners.
  • I checked autumn olive trees throughout our property. They are ready to be picked, which means our plans for the week are altered. While marching around our property, I spotted a new wild flower, a rough blazing star. I also saw lots of monarch butterflies, and tons of honey bees in the goldenrod flowers that are now blooming.

Freshly picked hops.

A rough blazing star wildflower.

• Monday, 9/14: Yesterday, I couldn't get photos to load correctly, but I got the above photos related to the prior day's blog to load today, so there they are.
  
  Happenings:
  
  • Mary washed 2 loads of laundry and cut another area of tall grass with her scythe, laying it out to dry.
  • I picked autumn olive berries from one tree, then Mary joined me after lunch and together, we picked berries off 3 more trees to give us 7 quarts of autumn olives that we froze.
  • We picked several more tomatoes. Mary found just 1 army worm.
  • Our chicks are 8 weeks old and growing big, fast. We hear several half-baked attempts at crowing from cockerels every morning. We might be butchering at 12 weeks, rather than the normal 14-week stage, due to fast growth.
  • We had bacon, then shallots browned in bacon grease, then over-easy eggs dropped on the shallots, all with fresh tomatoes and toast...a truly amazing meal. It's the first time we've had bacon in about 10 years. We found smoked bacon at Aldi, instead of nitrate-treated bacon, so we gave it a try...the best!
  • Katie called. She is the foreman of her job site, constructing an electrical generation building in Nuiqsut, AK. There are 5 workers, so she does everything. The job superintendent is gone right now, so she's the acting job superintendent, too. Katie's also in charge of maintenance on the 3 Caterpillar generators currently providing electricity for the village. She procures construction items. And, she cleans and disinfects rooms once subcontractors leave. The steel subcontractor arrived today. Steel walls and roofing is going up, soon, with the building enclosed by Oct. 1. She said it was warm today...got into the mid-40s, which she says is about average for there, at this time of the year. It freezes at night. She'll be leaving on Sept. 28 to handle Air Force National Guard drill in Florida, returning to AK on Oct. 14, but her return flight to AK was just cancelled, so she has to figure that out. Her Christmas break is Dec. 18 through Jan. 14, but we don't know, yet, if she'll be visiting us, due to her many travels and this pandemic. While I was on the phone with her, one of her co-workers who also lives in the village gave her 2 boxes full of fresh produce, a rare commodity in Alaska's bush country. She was oohing and aahing over the contents at that moment. Katie told her mother that the villagers are friendly to her.
    


• Tuesday, 9/15: We did the following:
  
  • I went to Quincy and bought chick feed, along with picking up a package of coffee beans that we ordered through Sam's Club.
  • Mary checked an ear of corn that's furthest along in development. It's not ready, yet, but close.
  • She made and canned 9 pints of dill pickle relish (see photo below). She kept one pint out, which would have been the 10th pint, to refrigerate and use. She modified a recipe, adding garlic, extra dried dill, and additional onions. It tastes great. The canning process ended at 11 pm.
  • She also picked tomatoes, froze tomatoes and tomatillos, shredded and froze summer squash, and watered apple rootstocks and strawberry plants.
  
  

  

  Nine pints of dill pickle relish.

• Wednesday, 9/16: There's an inherent advantage to owning several acres of land. We own 160 acres. Probably 60-70 acres are wooded...might be more, because we're letting trees develop on land where pastures once stood. We saw up dead trees for firewood, which is our main heating source. I shoot 1 or 2 deer each hunting season, which adds meat to the freezer. We gather hickory nuts from trees in our timber. We pick raspberries, blackberries, and autumn olive berries every year, that we freeze and make into food and wine. Large gardens give us even more food. Most importantly, our 160-acre land provides home to a wide variety of wildlife that we enjoy anytime we take to the outdoors. Added to that, we enjoy hundreds of wildflowers, feeding thousands of bees (see videos below), native pollinators, and butterflies.
  
  Events:
  
  • I picked 3 quarts of autumn olives, mainly from a tree close to the gravel road and opposite from our neighbor's house, about a third of a mile SE of where our house sits. I drove the tractor cross-country on a beeline from there to our house and spotted a couple more autumn olive trees loaded with berries. Some parts I picked from had berries completely surrounding a branch of the tree.
  • After removing a plastic spigot from a glass 1.4-gallon widemouth bubbler fermenter for winemaking, I discovered a crack developing in the glass near the hole cut in the side of this container. I looked it up online and others have experienced this same flaw. I decided I don't want a replacement. It's poorly made, because the glass is too thin. Since I mainly use it to put wine in right before bottling, all I need is a bucket with the spigot installed. Food grade buckets, that were out-of-stock, are now available at Menards. They are $4, versus $20 from brewing suppliers. We decided to go buy 1 or several, tomorrow, since the stock went from 30 to 26 in a few hours at the Quincy Menard's store (obviously a hot commodity).
    
  • Mary did a load of towels.
  • She also picked and husked a big batch of hazelnuts.
  • We had a weenie roast at dusk and into the night. We tried Mary's newly-made dill relish. It's really, really good. When we started, skies were heavy with high-level smoke from fires in the Pacific NW. Clouds arrived and the wind switched to the NW, clearing the skies and allowing stars to twinkle with more brilliance. We finished around 10:30 pm.
  
  

• Thursday, 9/17: Our day:
  
  • We went to Quincy to get food grade buckets at Menards. There were only 2 left. We checked with a store employee. They didn't get the full pallet of buckets as stated on their shipping invoice, and 4 were sold to someone just prior to us arriving. We'll keep looking. 
  • We bought a nice couch for $40 at Salvation Army. They saved it for us, so we can drive the pickup in tomorrow to take it home. Mary bought a large square basket with a lid that originally was a picnic basket. She transformed it into a sewing basket.
  • We picked another bunch of tomatoes. Mary found a hornworm.
    


• Friday, 9/18: Events:
  
  • We drove the pickup to Quincy, bought 4 food grade 5-gallon buckets and 5 Gamma Seal bucket lids at Lowe's, then we picked up our new-to-us couch at the Salvation Army. I picked up another bag of chick feed that I put on top of the couch cushions. It rode very nicely in the pickup bed to home. We also bought 4 extra couch pillows at $2 each from the Salvation Army. With those and the 2 couch pillows that came with the couch, Mary looked like a stuffed pillow hugger on the way home.
  • We moved a cabinet from the living room to the west first-floor bedroom/storage room, moved my old chair to where a dog bed once was in the living room (it's now a chair for a dog), then moved in the couch. It fits perfectly and is more comfortable than the chair.
  • Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg died today.
  • We moved house plants, that are outside all summer, into the wood shed, due to a cold low temperature prediction. It went down to 42° overnight.
    


• Saturday, 9/19: Happenings:
  
  • Mary and I picked 116 pears off the Bartlett pear tree. I used a step ladder and an extended handle fruit picker to get those at the top of the tree. We got all but a couple that were high and above criss-cross branches. Several were quite small, with some so small, we threw them out. I have enough to make a big batch of pear wine after they fully ripen. At night, I wrapped all of them in quarter-sheets of newspaper and put them in 2 drawers of an old chest of drawers on the upstairs landing.
  • Mary picked 16 ears of sweet corn. She processed and froze them after dark.
  • Mary also picked another bunch of tomatoes. She froze more. We now have just over 2 gallons of tomatoes. When we have 5 gallons, she'll make a batch of salsa.
    
  • I picked what amounted to a little over another quart of autumn olive berries for the freezer.
  • Mary picked more hazelnuts and took the husks off. There are still more green hazelnuts on the bushes.
  • When walking to the tractor to go autumn olive picking, the chickens were putting up a stink, so I ran to the chicken yard. I dropped my picking bowls when I saw a Cooper's hawk fly up and then down to a post on the west side of the chicken run. Once I hollered, it flew off into the north woods. All chickens, both young and old, were hiding in the tall weeds that I leave in place in a 3-foot swath next to all fencing. They're smart birds. We didn't lose any, but they were greatly disturbed.
  • Mary saw 30-40 pelicans flying in formation from the west. Once they got over our north woods, they caught updrafts, circled for a bit, then streamed off to the east.