July 25-31, 2021

Weather | 7/25, 70°, 87° | 7/26, 61°, 87° |7/27, 63°, 87° | 7/28, 69°, 91° | 7/29, 0.01" rain, 72°, 93° | 7/30, 69°, 83° | 7/31, 3.46" rain, 62° at 12:30 pm, 68° |

• Sunday, 7/25: Bill Leaves & the Garden is Producing
  
  • We loaded up Bill's cooler with 6 dozen eggs, his 5 quarts of frozen blackberries, and a package of Lalvin RC 212 wine yeast for his future blackberry winemaking project. Before he left for St. Charles, I had Mary take a photo (see below) of Bill and I. She also got a photo of a dragonfly on the Buick's hood ornament (see below).
    
  • Mary picked about 10 pounds of cucumbers, filling 2 plastic grocery shopping bags. Several that were large pickle size yesterday are large cucumber slicing size today. She also placed boards under 11 watermelons, and 17 muskmelons, to protect them from rot and chewy critters creeping up from the ground under them. She counted 13 long pie pumpkins, and 2 Diablo pumpkins. We also have 3 zucchinis growing nicely.
    
  • I picked 2 batches of blackberries...1 to add to tomorrow's breakfast oatmeal and another that we ate as a nighttime snack...33, each, for breakfast and 100, each, for snacks. The dogs joined me for blackberry picking. Amber, who joined Plato as a fellow fruit lover, figured out where the berries were coming from and tried to pull them off the bushes with her teeth. They both loved blackberry picking and the occasional blackberry treat.

My son, Bill, and I.

A dragonfly sits on the Buick's hood ornament.

• Monday, 7/26: Pickle-Making Day
  
  • Mary picked more cucumbers, then cut them up and processed 6 quarts of dill pickles. All of the jars sealed perfectly.
    
  • Mary also ground up 2 zucchinis and froze 2 quarts that will make 2 chocolate zucchini cakes...YUM! The Hamilton Beach food processor has a broken plastic support that holds the shredder blade. I looked it up. Our food processor is considered a vintage one and obviously that piece breaks, because it's not in stock, anywhere. Mary used the chopper blade and it did a better job, so we're not going to worry about getting the plastic piece.
    
  • I used the Stihl grass trimmer and whacked weeds and grass under the electric wires of both the near and far gardens. I revisited areas I cleaned out last Thursday, since weeds were starting to grow, again. You stay in a pretty rigid position operating that trimmer around the inside and outside of both gardens, so muscles get stiff after several hours of running the machine.
    
  • I picked 35 blackberries for my breakfast, tomorrow, with Plato and Amber helping. This evening, Plato gobbled up blackberries I fed him, but Amber ran off and spit the berries into the grass, then tried to dig them out, again. Mary picked 8 nice strawberries from the garden.
  • We watched the 2005 movie, Yours, Mine & Ours.
  • We're not seeing or hearing them, so we figure that the chimney swifts have left us for their winter home in the Amazon.
    
    
• Tuesday, 7/27: Dismal Potato Crop
  • Mary dug up the potatoes. We put a larger volume of potato pieces in the ground than the volume of potatoes that grew. Most were tiny, and in many cases, none grew at all. Mary said several were green and sprouting. She dug a five-foot stretch with not a single potato under the tall plants. We're not wasting our time on planting potatoes, again. We can grow a better crop of sweet potatoes. I think the long stretch of rain swamped the potato plants.
  • Before digging potatoes, Mary killed hundreds of Japanese beetles munching on smart weed growing next to the potato plants. She sprayed 5 bottles of Dawn soap solution on all of the bugs. When she first stepped into the weeds next to the potatoes, she heard a rattling sound. It was from all of the bugs moving about.
    
  • We heard, then spotted a bunch of chimney swifts flying about high in the sky above our house. They weren't the chimney swifts that raised little ones in our chimney, but others flying through.
    
  • I worked on the chicken yard, first by sharpening the blade, installing it on the grass trimmer, and mowing down weeds and grass in the chicken run. I also clipped grass, weeds, and mulberry tree limbs growing through the chicken wire fencing where we enter the yard and along the SE side. I need to put 3-4 metal fence posts in the north end of the yard to stabilize rotting wooden posts and maybe replace chewed up twine holding hardware cloth to the bottom of the chicken wire gate dividing hens and chicks.
    
  • I picked breakfast blackberries in a patch due west of the house and next to the woods with Plato and Amber. The dogs look forward to this evening event. They also like an occasional berry treat.
    
  • I saw where deer nipped a low-hanging winesap apple, so I pulled it, cut off the deer bite, split it into quarters, and Mary and I ate it. It wasn't ripe, yet, bet extremely tasty.
  • We enjoyed a cucumber salad. The Calypso cucumbers we grow aren't bitter and taste great.
    
    
• Wednesday, 7/28: Chicks are Outside
  
  • I solidified the chicken wire fencing in the chicken yard by pounding 3 metal fence posts into the ground and wiring old, leaning wooden posts to the metal posts. One post was covered with several poison ivy vines. I carefully nipped them off using 30-inch long loppers and threw the vines over the fence. After unscrewing the north chicken door, I opened it to let the chicks loose (see photos, below).
  • The temperature was 91° while I was in the chicken run. With humidity, the local radio/TV stations say it feels like 105°. I feel the same way about this as wind chill. Extreme hot and cold is just that...really hot, or really cold. We don't really need to exaggerate it by adding a "feels like" temperature. I've been at 105° in Montana. You feel like you're in a frying pan. Here, you feel like you're in a steamer. Once I came inside, my clothes looked like I took a swim in them. Either way, you're really hot...no need to make sound it even hotter.
  • Mary baked 4 loaves of bread.
  • Mary watered the gardens. All plants are holding up very well, despite the heat.
    
  • I picked blackberries for an evening snack and for tomorrow's breakfast. I don't feed berries to Amber, now, because she rummages into low blackberry brambles and eats black and red blackberries right of the plants. There are so many blackberries out there.
    
  • I installed 4 metal fence posts around the Stayman Winesap tree with apples in it and strung 3 lines of 50-pound fish line around the posts (see photos, below). Mary read a blog of a couple in the Houston area that did this as an inexpensive way to prevent deer from eating on apple trees. Deer can't see the fish line, hit it with their nose, can't understand what they're touching, but cannot see, and go away without eating the tree.
    
  • There was an 8.2 earthquake off the Alaskan Peninsula, 29 miles under the ocean's surface after 10 p.m. Alaska Time. Ellie Napoleon, a friend from back when I attended UAF, said on Facebook that she felt it and tsunami alerts were given. Fortunately, the tsunami was only half a foot high. She reported that the Homer Spit was evacuated. News reports indicate there were several aftershocks, some above 6 on the Richter scale. A quake of 8.2 is a big one. Katie never felt it...too far away.

Five-week old chicks leaving the coop.

Chicks chomping up weed leaves.

Fish line fence around Stayman Winesap apple tree.

Fish line fence around apple tree.

• Thursday, 7/29: Dead Animal Morning
  
  • Just after letting the dogs out, Plato got into something near the south of the house. I went to where he just left and found the intestines of a rabbit and a lone barred owl feather. Obviously, an owl killed a bunny and ate most of it. Plato barfed after a bit. Mary took a shovel and got rid of the guts while I washed down the dog puke. Later, while driving on the lane, I spotted something, stopped and looked, and there was a decapitated opossum. I think a raccoon killed it. Mary and I hauled it off and tossed it in the north woods. It was kind of a gruesome morning.
    
  • I texted a woman selling 4 bundles of asphalt shingles for $10, each, on Facebook and lined up buying and picking up the shingles from her on Saturday at 11 a.m.
    
  • Mary cleaned house.
  • I drove the Cadillac to Quincy and bought chick/pet food, along with picking up some items at Aldi.
    
  • Dark, lurking clouds developed in the afternoon. We got some lightning and a couple drops of rain.
    
  • We watched the 2006 movie, The Da Vinci Code, and a second DVD containing all of the extras. You get a good feeling about the movie's director, Ron Howard, and the movie's main actor, Tom Hanks, from the extras.
    
    
• Friday, 7/30: Waffle Friday!
  
  • I made waffles that we had with strawberries and honey. We had a few bad berries in the 2 containers I bought from Aldi, yesterday, so we had to eat most of them up...oh, woe are we!!!
    
  • Mary picked about 1.25 plastic shopping bags of cucumbers, and 2 baseball bat sized zucchini squash. She also put pieces of wood under new melons that started developing.
  • Mary removed carrot plants. All were rotten...just too much moisture.
    
  • I spent several hours and picked 6 gallons little pears off the large Bartlett pear tree to try to save it from breaking branches. Too many pears loaded all of the branches down, making them bow over. Without removing some of the pears, the branches will break. I cannot reach pears high on the tree and those branches might break off.
    
  • After pear removal, I pulled 4 metal fence posts out of the ground related to an old electric fence we once ran around an area west of the chicken yard where we were going to put an orchard. I pounded the fence posts into the ground around the large pear tree and created a 4-strand fish line fence to keep deer from eating pears, leaves, and branches. They've already done some eating.
  • Mary picked 11 strawberries.
  • We enjoyed a cucumber salad and paid attention to thunderstorms arriving from Iowa.
    
    
• Saturday, 7/31: Another Deluge of Rain
  
  • A lot of rain fell after 1:30 a.m. At 10:15 a.m., Mary measured 3.46" in the rain gauge. She added it up and we've received 11.84" of rain for month of July. July and August are usually our driest months.
    
  • I drove to Quincy to purchase 4 bundles of shingles for $40. Our gravel road suffered some erosion. The neighbor farmer east of us tiled his field so that water runoff washes across the gravel, putting 1-foot deep gullies across the gravel road. One part is washed down to mud. Later, on the asphalt-covered Highway 156, a low-lying section of the road near Grassy Creek had about 6-8 inches of water running over the road. I picked up the shingles and drove home.
  • While I was gone, Katie called her mother. Katie was in Houston, and had been flying for about 24 hours. She's on her way to Gulfport, MS. She has to go to Air National Guard drill in FL. Her flight from Venetie, AK took in a stop at another village, way north of Venetie, then to Fairbanks. After that, she had a flight to Anchorage, then a direct flight from Anchorage to Houston. Two of the carpenters on her job took 2 weeks off, so her project is behind. She had to do carpentry work, as well as superintendent duties, to make up for the missing workers. Her boss is on the job, now, while she's gone for 2 weeks. She's tired.
  • I unloaded what amounted to 75 tan architectural shingles. I now have the equivalent of 17.5 bundles of this type of shingles, or nearly 6 squares, or 6,000 square feet. The next chore is to measure the roof to see how many more I need.
  • We checked the gardens. The rain made everything boom with growth. There are some big watermelons and pumpkins growing. Corn is just starting to show tassels. More tomatoes are growing.
    
  • I picked blackberries for tomorrow's breakfast. Amber is a major picker of low-level berries. She eats so many, I may need to curtail bringing her along on blackberry picking forays. Tonight she left a three-berry blackberry arf-up present on the floor.