May 23-29, 2021

Weather | 5/23, 61°, 84° | 5/24, 61°, 85° | 5/25, 0.07" rain, 65°, 75° | 5/26, 60°, 84° | 5/27, 0.24" rain, 63°, 75° | 5/28, 0.36" rain, 46°, 49° | 5/29, 40°, 61° |

• Sunday, 5/23: An Outside Sunday
  
  • Mary moved the houseplants out of the sunroom and the upstairs south bedroom to under the weeping willow tree. They thrive outside, but our sunroom is a bare room in the summer.
  • Mary transplanted her lemon and lime trees to individual pots.
    
  • She started several sweet potato slips from 4 sweet potatoes that have had their toes in water. Mary also cut garlic scapes, completed weeding of the near garden, fertilized the near garden and the strawberries, and sprayed her bay trees with Dawn soap to kill scales.
  • I scuffed up the outside of the new mailbox with 150 grit sandpaper, then spray painted gray auto primer, followed by hand painting the mailbox with sunburst yellow Rust-Oleum paint. The inside bare metal got a coat of silver/aluminum spray paint. The outside will need a 2nd coat of paint.
  • It was calm, today, so I mixed 2 batches of fruit tree spray in the 2-gallon sprayer and covered the apple and cherry trees for their second spray of the season. This batch included the newly brewed EM-1 (essential micronutrients). I used half of what I recently brewed up. The 2 Bartlett pear trees got a 1-gallon batch, minus the neem oil, which defoliates pear leaves. Spraying all fruit trees, and cleanup, afterwards, takes 5 hours. I saw evidence of cedar-apple rust on the Esopus Spitzenburg, Grimes Golden, and 1 of the Stayman Winesap apple trees, along with the large Bartlett pear tree. I think there's also some fire blight in that pear tree. The McIntosh apple tree is the best it's ever been since we've lived here. It just needed care. The sweet cherry tree is thriving. The large Bartlett pear tree is loaded with fruit, as are 2 of the cherry trees, and the McIntosh, Esopus, and one of the Winesap apple trees.
    
  • A family of barn swallows is now taking up residence in the roof of the woodshed.
    
  • Chimney swifts have a keen sense of communication that we humans know nothing about. In the morning, the 2 chimney swifts, that have been with us for almost a month, were flying around all excited. Then, in the late afternoon, 4 more showed up. Somehow, the two that arrived early knew that more of their kind were arriving.
    
  • Mary saw purple martins on the electric line and a great crested flycatcher.
  • Katie walked a trail the includes Potter's Marsh, in Anchorage.
    
    
• Monday, 5/24: Mowing & Post Erecting
  
  • Mary mowed our quarter-mile long lane, which is always a chore, since half of it is uphill, both ways (ha, ha).
  • She also mowed the east yard, between the house and the lane. raked it, and mulched the near garden with those grass clippings. The clippings will hopefully help. A lot of greens are yellow, from too much rain.
    
  • I took the grass trimmer with a blade on it to the area around the mailbox location and whacked down poison ivy, so I could work there. Later in the day, I cleaned more poison ivy about 25-50 feet up our lane from the gravel road.
  • I sawed a treated 4x4" by 8' long post down to 6' long and took it along with post hole digging tools down to the mailbox location. The mail delivery woman came right when I started digging and said she left our mail at the post office, not knowing if we had a mailbox up. She said she'd deliver it tomorrow. 
  • After lunch, I gave the mailbox exterior a 2nd coat of paint, then dug a hole, installed the post, and tamped it into place with layers of gravel and dirt. Near the end of that job, our neighbor came home and I talked with him. He often leaves for work at 3-4 a.m. His young wife is scared living in the trailer, especially when he's at work in the early morning hours. They've had a red pickup drive into their driveway, then back out and leave. I told him I will write down our phone numbers and let them have them...to call us anytime and we'll show up and help. We used to have busy bodies drive up our lane, but they haven't done so since our lane looks like a grown-over cow path the past 5-8 years. The good old boy asses just need to be told to "GIT," like you'd holler loudly to a stray dog. A young Hispanic couple doesn't deserve to be scared by such idiots. We've chewed out more than one for sitting in the middle of our driveway, so there's a reputation to stay off our land.
    
  • My grafted trees are dying. I now have only 1 that's not with droopy, or dried up leaves. I think we'll buy full-sized sapplings, instead of grafting apple trees. This soggy weather spread diseases that are killing them all.
    
  • The good news is our existing trees looking great, except for bug damage and cedar-apple rust on trees east of the house. A second look at the large Bartlett pear shows frost damage, not fire blight.
    
  • We watched the 1995 HBO movie called Truman. It was good.
    
    
• Tuesday, 5/25: Mailbox Installed
  
  • I brought the new mailbox inside and placed decals on what will be the east side of the box with our name and street address. Then, Mary and I took the mailbox to the end of the lane and installed it on the post (see photo, below). The mailbox bottom is thin and wobbly on the post. I'll have to reinforce it with a treated board sometime soon.
    
  • While we installed the mailbox, the mail delivery lady arrived, apologizing for forgetting to grab the mail from the past several days. 
  • Then Rich showed up. He owns property SW of our property that he hunts on. He retired from his HyVee meat department job, after 40 years, in December. His wife broke her hip and pelvis in 2 places falling off her mother's porch a couple month's ago. Rich's wife's mother is married to Ansel Marquette, another guy who owns land south of us that he hunts on. Ansel is 89 and didn't hunt turkey this year, probably the first time he's missed hunting in his life. Rich left us to go bass fishing.
    
  • Mary cut a bunch more garlic scapes and gave them to me.
    
  • I filled two 5-gallon buckets with comfrey leaves, added the garlic scapes, put a pot of boiling water into each bucket, then filled the rest of the buckets up with water. I'm to let them sit for 7-10 days to make an herbal tea that's sprayed on fruit trees. It's something suggested in Michael Phillips' book The Holistic Orchard.
    
  • Mary started 3 strawberry runners by anchoring their ends into cups filled with potting soil.
    
  • She also replanted onion seeds in bare patches of the near garden.
    
  • Katie continues to work in the Anchorage office for UIC Construction. She texted me the following..."The PM (project manager) that I have been working for told me today that I am performing just as well and have more knowledge about construction processes than project engineers straight out of college with a construction management degree. She said the GM has been asking about my performance." Her flight to Eek, Alaska is on June 1st.

  

  The newly installed mailbox. Neighbor's
  mailbox in background needs replacing.
  

• Wednesday, 5/26: Turkey and Bob White Quail
  
  • I heard a turkey hen calling to her poults in the north field and north woods while moving grafted trees to shade under the Sargent crab apple tree in the morning. Mary and I heard the first Bob White quail call from near Bluegill Pond.
  • I laughed hard when Alison, a Homer High School classmate, saw yesterday's blog and replied with "Nancy Drew and the Case of the Broken Mail Box." I told her the drunks have a new target, and she said, "Indeed. They'll be attracted to it like moths to a flame. And, we know how that works out for the moth!"
  • I sharpened the lawnmower blade, then Mary mowed inside and outside of the far garden, the east yard beyond the lane, under the weeping willow tree, and the west yard under the clothes line. It wore her out.
  • Mary also cut more garlic scapes. I added them to my herbal tree spray brew.
  • After checking the garden, Mary gave me the first ripe strawberry. Wow! It tastes much better than store-bought strawberries.
    
  • With bits of aluminum tape, I added foil to surround exposed areas around the air conditioner in our upstairs bedroom. This keeps water and bugs outside. It involves climbing an extension ladder to the outside of the second-floor window. 
  • I also took apart our oldest air conditioner, a Haier, that we bought in 2009. It's obviously a well-built AC. I cleaned it with a garden hose, then re-assembled it, using new screws to replace rusty ones. Darkness fell before I could install it in the north upstairs bedroom, where Bill will be when he visits in a few days.
  • Katie texted that she got a new-to-her couch that was hardly used for her Anchorage apartment. She also texted about green leaves showing up on trees in Anchorage.
    
    
• Thursday, 5/27: Mary's Birthday
  • Mary turns 55 today. I made her a waffle breakfast and showed Mary her ecard on my laptop. In the evening, we enjoyed the last bottle of 2020 blackberry wine. More is in a 4-gallon carboy to be bottled. She got a Book-of-the-Month yearly subscription from Katie and a Barnes & Noble gift card that came with a birthday card from my mother in today's mail. The last of her birthday gifts ordered days ago came in yesterday's mail, after sitting in the local post office while we put up a new mailbox. She had a good, relaxing birthday, today.
  • Weather reports predict a low of 42° in a couple days, which means it will probably be 39° on our hilltop, so Mary brought in all of her house plants that she thought were outside for the summer. There is a good side to not planting the entire garden, yet!
  • I installed the north bedroom AC (even though we won't need it for the next couple days), placing packing taped on inside gaps around the AC, then putting aluminum foil and aluminum tape on outside gaps around it. There's just 1 more air conditioner left to clean and install.
  • It rained off and on throughout the day.
  • We watched the 2017 movie, Beauty and the Beast. 
  • Katie called to wish her mother a happy birthday. She's working only a few hours tomorrow, since she's helped the project manager get totally caught up and there's no more work for Katie. Monday is a holiday and Kate flies to Eek, AK on Tuesday, June 1. She has applied to Indiana State for a construction management degree.
  • Mom texted back to Mary, after Mary thanked her for the cards, that Mom won the $500 prize at Mid-Rivers Telephone Cooperative's annual meeting in Miles City. I worked for Mid-Rivers for 13 years. She also said Karen (my sister) and Lynn (Karen's husband) are visiting.
    
    
• Friday, 5/28: Misty Day
  • After heavy rains overnight, north winds blew low clouds through that dropped mist throughout the day. 
  • Mary did major housecleaning ahead of Bill's visit, tomorrow. She also picked garlic scapes.
    
  • I raked grass inside and outside of the far garden and put clippings on garden rows.
  • Mary ordered 2 books from Barnes & Noble, using the gift card Mom sent Mary. One is The great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet, involving the 1964 Alaskan earthquake. It was printed in 2017.
    
    
• Saturday, 5/29: Bill Arrives
  
  • Bill, our son, showed up around 11 a.m. He handed Mary a gift bag for her birthday. It contained a bottle of French wine, a nice double-hinge corkscrew, and a DVD of the TV series, Star Trek: Picard.
  • It's official. My apple tree grafting skills are garbage. The last graft that showed promise is wilting and dying. Out of 10 grafts, I had 6 that sprouted, looked good for a couple weeks, then died. As Forrest Gump said, "That's all I'm gonna say about that!"
    
  • Mary made flour tortillas, did some laundry, and cut garlic scapes.
  • I raked the east yard and added mulch to a far garden row.
  • We all went fishing in the late afternoon at Swim Pond. The water was high and real murky, from all of our recent rains. Together, we kept 7 larger bass. Bill tried a new lure he bought, a Tasmanian Devil. He was catching a fish on every cast of that lure. I remember that Dad owned that same lure. Bill's version is made of plastic. Mary caught fish on a Sonic, a chartreuse grub, and a red Walmart lure (what we call a Walmart Special). I caught the most fish on natural-colored Rapala minnows. We threw several small bass back into the pond. It was really fun.
  • After fishing, Bill and I filleted the fish, while Mary did evening chores. Then, Mary pan-fried the fish. There is nothing better than fresh bass.
  • Bill pulled off 15 seed ticks. Mary, who bathed in bug spray, didn't have any. Bill pulled a tick off my hat while I filleted fish. I wore coveralls, which helped.
  • After eating, washing dishes, and bathing, we watched the 1995 movie, Nine Months, a movie that Bill selected. I was snoring at one point, but was awake through the best, funny scenes.
  • Mary heard a wild turkey flew off from the west yard's persimmon tree thicket. We heard coyotes close, to the east, while with the dogs on their late-night walk.