Sept. 26-Oct. 2, 2021

Weather | 9/26, 51°, 84° | 9/27, 63°, 87° | 9/28, 56°, 85° | 9/29, 58°, 83° | 9/30, 60°, 82° | 10/1, 56°, 77° | 10/2, 0.08" rain, 65°, 75° |

• Sunday, 9/26: Removing Pickup Spare Tire
  
  • I removed the spare tire from under the pickup. WHAT A CHORE! First, I read online about the horror stories involving the cabled mechanism designed by GM for storing the spare tire under the pickup bed. If it isn't cleaned and lubricated every 3 months, it rusts up and doesn't work. The guy I bought the rims from is a part-time mechanic. He said taking them off with a grinder is the best idea. I did the tricks I read online for lowering the spare tire. That didn't work, so out came the grinder. First, I filled a 5-gallon bucket with water and stretched out the garden hose...a suggestion by Mary. After the first few seconds of grinding, I smelled smoke. Little smolders were in the dry grass under the pickup. A squirt from the hose squelched them quickly. I doused the grass regularly after that. After grinding the cable end off, nothing happened. Next, I ground each side of what's best described as a large wing nut, which fits the center of the rim. Then, I beat one side of the huge wing nut back and forth with a large ball-peen hammer. Next, I grabbed it with vise-grips and bent it back and forth until it broke off. I wedged a spud bar from the ground to the backside of the bumper to keep the tire from falling on me, then did the same procedure to the opposite side of the huge wing nut. With the wing nut wings gone, the spare tire finally dropped. The rim is shot. The tire looks good. I unbolted this horribly-designed gizmo and tossed it in the metal junk pile. The future spare tire will ride in the bed with a bicycle cable lock through the rim and through the steel loop in the bed.
    
  • Mary picked the last of the peppers and some green tomatoes for piccalilli she's making tomorrow. She picked several strawberries and watered the few things left in the garden.
  • Mary did some cross stitch.
  • We ate a wonderful meal of baked chicken, potatoes, sliced tomatoes, and fresh watermelon.
    
  • We heard a woodcock in the west woods as we walked the dogs at night.
    
    
• Monday, 9/27: Making Piccalilli
  
  • Mary made 13 pints of piccalilli. This year, she added more jalapeño peppers. We add this relish to egg dishes, like quiche. It's interesting, because after the ingredients are chopped and combined, it sits for 3 hours and ferments. It actually fizzes. Then, she cans it. Piccalilli is a yummy addition.
    
  • Mary turned the hay she cut down a few days ago. It's drying nicely.
    
  • I called the landfill on the east side of Lewis County (we live on the west side of the county). They take asphalt shingle waste. The minimum cost is $99 per load and a requirement of a hard hat and a safety vest.
    
  • I picked 150 mulberry leaves that I'm drying for making mulberry leaf tea, which is supposed to help control blood sugar levels.
    
  • The mulberry bush grew this summer from the stump of the tree I cut down last fall located just outside the sun room's south windows. Since it started growing in May, it shot upward to completely block sun from entering the south-facing windows. I cut it down today with the small chainsaw and hauled the branches off to a pile SW of the house, where last year's mulberry branches were piled.
  • I also sawed up branches that fell out of the weeping willow tree earlier this summer and stacked the small logs in the woodshed.
  • While walking the lane to get the mail, a young doe walked a few steps toward Bluegill Pond, stopped and watched me walk by. I guess it thinks I'm a regular. It was gone when I walked back home with the mail.
    
    
• Tuesday, 9/28: Salsa Batch #1
  
  • Mary made the first batch of salsa for 2021. She canned 13 quarts and 1 pint of salsa. It's an all-day job.
  • I drove to Quincy and had Sam's Club change tires on the pickup. It now has aluminum rims, instead of rusty steel rims, even on the spare. I waited 2.5 hours, but paid only $38 for the change out, which included getting rid of 6 old tires. The pickup rides smoother with the aluminum rims.
    
  • I paid off the rest of the Cadillac loan.
  • I dropped off 6 steel rims at the recycling business in West Quincy, MO, and received $30. It was amazing watching their giant magnet on the end of a big crane suck the tire rims out of the bed of my pickup. I watched them jump about 18 inches from my pickup bed to that magnet.
  • I bought three 10-foot long by 2-foot wide sheets of "W" roof valley flashing and six 10-foot long drip edge flashing pieces from Menards, along with some other things.
  • The Menards roofing nails were cheap Chinese crap, so I bought 30 pounds of Vietnamese-made roofing nails from Home Depot for $50.
  • When I left Home Depot, I saw a funny sight in the car parked next to me (see photo, below).
  • I got home with the sun setting. After finishing her salsa-making, Mary picked tomatoes, watered, and hauled garbage to the end of the lane. She was putting chickens away when I arrived.
  • You can see green and white flashing spider eyes in the grass if you wear a bright LED headlamp, I discovered tonight. We have gobs of them in the tall grass on our property. I showed Mary and she thought it was the coolest thing to see.
    

  

  Parked next to me in the Home Depot parking lot.
  

• Wednesday, 9/29: Hay, Salsa, & Compost
  
  • Mary picked up hay that dried on the lawn since Saturday and stacked it along the walls inside the second grain bin. She said we have enough for putting hay down inside the chicken coop throughout this winter and into spring.
  • I washed dishes for Mary while she did hay duties.
  • Mary made another batch of salsa, putting up 14 quarts. With batch number 2, she's halfway through salsa making for the season.
  • I cleaned compost out of our third compost bin, filling eight 4-gallon buckets. I closed off that bin by adding sheet metal to the north and south sides and wiring the two panels onto steel fence posts used as corners of each bin. When we're pulling compost out of a bin, we remove a couple panels for better access. Then, I added the sweet potato vines from the garden, garlic stalks leftover from when Mary processed garlic, and tall grass I cut near the compost bins when I was getting compost for transplanting strawberry plants. I'll add grass cut from mowing a trail to the chicken killing cone, tomorrow. We always move to a new compost bin prior to chicken butchering as a method of composting chicken butchering refuse. After a couple years at the bottom of a compost pile, all that's left are wing and breast bones. Tomorrow night, we start butchering chickens.
    
  • Mary picked 2 New England long pie pumpkins and 22 Table Queen acorn squash. She also picked a basket and a half of hazelnuts.
  • I unloaded roof flashing from the pickup, then ran a 6-foot bicycle cable and combination lock through the spare tire's rim and a steel loop in the pickup bed to lock the spare tire into place.
  • I walked down to get the mail after darkness fell and realized that a big yard light is now shining atop a large electric pole across the gravel road at what we call the middle trailer. Why is the whole world afraid of the dark? Bill recently sent us a video of his old physics professor explaining the effects of light pollution. This processor said right after a 1994 earthquake in LA that caused a widespread power outage, panic set in as 911 calls came in with people asking if the earthquake was caused by the strange silver cloud in the sky. City residents didn't realize they were looking at the Milky Way, because they never see it with all of the city night lights. See this professor's entire presentation for the Missouri Chapter of the International Dark-Sky Association HERE. It's pretty good, and done in front of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.
    
    
• Thursday, 9/30: First Chicken Butcher Session
  
  • We prepped for chicken butchering, then spent most of the night butchering 9 chickens.
  • I cleaned up junk in the west end of the machine shed, then fit the tractor and trailer in there, out of future rain. I hung lights, laid out buckets, and got the butchering area inside the machine shed ready.
  • Mary baked 2 pumpkin pies for snack purposes during breaks while butchering. She made venison fajitas, watered the garden, and did evening chores.
  • With a late afternoon thunderstorm approaching, I weedwhacked open the trail to the killing cone. The old railroad tie that was once a post as part of a fence, but is now holding up the killing cone, wobbles back and forth in its concrete footing, so I propped 2 metal fence posts against it to stabilize it. Mary nipped back some black walnut branches that were encroaching. I picked up grass I cut with the grass trimmer and put 2 large wheelbarrow loads into the compost bin. The thunderstorm split and went around us. We felt 1 or 2 drops.
  • I sharpened knives. They were so dull that I didn't get them all done after over an hour on the sharpening stone.
  • We started butchering at 8:30 p.m. and ended at 3:15 a.m.  These chickens are 14 weeks, 3 days old. They're not as large as last years' 16-week old birds, but there's less fat, therefore less wasted chicken feed. Overnight temperatures while butchering ranged from 65° to 60°, so we only worked on 3 chickens at a time in order to process them quicker. We took 2 breaks.
  • I heard coyotes 4 different times through the night. 
  • At one point, Mary was looking up into the stars, uttered something and told me to come look. An orange, slow-moving, atmosphere-grazing meteor streaked from the NW to the SE across most of the night sky. A tail of sparks followed it and after it disappeared, there was a visible trail of smoke that lasted for about 45 seconds. It was a once-in-a-lifetime moment.
  • We watched a sliver of a moon rise through clouds to the NE after midnight. Occasional flashes were seen in the northern sky from the lightning storm that went through us, but was in northern Iowa.
  • We got to bed very late, or very early, depending on your perspective. It was 5 a.m. There are 18 more chickens to butcher. UGH!
    
    
• Friday, 10/1: Second Butcher Night
  
  • Up by 9 a.m., we slept for only 4 hours. It was the day of the walking dead around here.
    
  • I cleaned up buckets and other chicken butchering items. 
  • Mary picked tomatoes and watered strawberries, parsnips, and winter greens.
  • After an hour-long nap, I sharpened knives while Mary washed dishes.
  • We started butchering chickens at 7:45 p.m. and finished at 1:30 a.m. From killing a chicken to placing a gallon zippered bag of a cut-up chicken in the freezer, we averaged 30 minutes per bird, and gave ourselves a 15- to 30-minute break between each set of three birds. It worked out perfect, because sometime after we went to bed, rain fell, and we were done by the time it was wet, outside. We now have 18 of this year's chickens in the freezer. Ten chickens remain. One is a pullet that we'll keep with our current egg-laying flock. The other nine go in the freezer. Rain is in the forecast, so we'll see if Mother Nature postpones Saturday night's chicken butchering, or if we finish Sunday night.
    
  • It was barred owl night. I heard them calling all night. At one point, an owl was just outside the machine shed making a racket. Clouds cloaked the stars and the moon. The air was warm and humid, with temps starting at 69° and falling to 67°, when we finished butchering. There were more bugs hovering around the bright lights in the machine shed. It brought out spiders and frogs. Twice, I saw frogs that were less than an inch long hop across the machine shed floor.
    

• Saturday, 10/2: Third Night of Chicken Butchering Rain-Delayed
  
  • My daylight routine was the same...clean up buckets, get ready for another butchering night, sharpen knives, and take a nap for an hour.
  • Mary made a huge batch of popcorn and a big pile of macaroni casserole.
  • We butchered 6 chickens, starting at 7:45, but ending earlier than planned. The larger chickens seem to be the last to get butchered, probably because they're on the top rung of the roost and those lower in the pecking order and on the lower rung, get selected first. It was cloudy, 90% humidity, with rain clouds approaching from the south and showing on the radar after we started the second batch of 3 chickens. We quit at 11:45 p.m. Rain poured off the roof around 12:45 a.m. If we'd proceeded with the final 3 chickens, we would have gotten soaked. Instead, we were bathing and heading for bed. Only another hour and a half and we'll finish chicken butchering for the year, but that will be tomorrow.
  • It was really buggy in the lit up machine shed. At one point, I heard something tinging off the aluminum light fixture, looked up, and saw a half-inch green round bug. You just have to concentrate on skinning the bird and ignore moths and crane flies buzzing by your face. Several glow worms, or next year's lightning bugs, border the trail we walk from the machine shed to the killing cone. With enough moisture, we should see another great lightning bug year next summer.