May 1-7, 2022

Weather | 5/1, 45°, 62° | 5/2, 38°, 60° | 5/3, 0.81" rain, 47°, 50° | 5/4, 44°, 59° | 5/5, 0.32" rain, 49°, 55° | 5/6, 0.04" rain, 47°, 63° | 5/7, 41°, 68° |

• Sunday, 5/1: Wind, Pizza, & Blossoms
  
  • We had more high winds, but they finally calmed at nightfall.
  • Mary made pizza and cleaned house.
  • I plucked more dandelion petals after enjoying a couple glasses of 2021 dandelion wine. I'm now at 220 grams, with only 50 grams to go to my 270-gram limit. The petal plucking task is less tedious after tasting this delicious wine. It's amazing how an ugly batch of frozen dandelion petals turns into such pretty, golden wine (see photo, below).
  • Bees are busy in cherry and various apple blossoms.
  • We watched the 2011 movie, Larry Crowne, starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. It's a fun one that we'll keep.

  

  Glasses of dandelion wine & a bag of frozen dandelion petals.
  

• Monday, 5/2: First Hummingbird & Last Dandy Plucking
  
  • After waking up early, I saw Venus and Jupiter shining brightly in the eastern sky. There was no wind, so I contemplated spraying fruit trees. However, 24 hours without rain is needed for spraying streptomycin and rain is predicted later in the day. Also, there needs to be a 7-day gap between spraying Immunox and sulfur and I'm too early, today. So, I bagged that idea and walked the dogs. I heard several turkey gobbles from all directions.
    
  • Bees were buzzing away in tree blossoms, today.
    
  • While admiring full bloom on the big pie cherry tree, a female ruby-throated hummingbird darted from blossom to blossom and made a chirping sound while feeding. Mary thought it just arrived.
    
  • Mary dusted books in the sunroom, eliminating 4 spiders and a spider nest.
    
  • Green walnut logs cut to firewood lengths and stacked behind the woodshed fell over. I restacked them in a cross-cross pattern in the north side of the machine shed.
    
  • I finished plucking dandelion petals after reaching the 270-gram level.
    
  • Rain started falling at 4 p.m., as predicted. We started and finished evening chores in the rain.
  • Rice would be a better crop to plant some springs. This is such a year. Before rain started falling today, I heard a tractor just start to run to the NE. It's a first. Most farmers aren't getting into fields, due to continuous wetness. That farmer's work lasted less than an hour. Seeds Mary planted in the near garden 7-10 days ago are yet to sprout. Some of that ground was under water, due to heavy rains. It might be a loss, this year. The rain pounded off the roof as we went to bed.
    
    
• Tuesday, 5/3: Cookies & Dandy Winemaking Start
  
  • Mom texted that we can send rain to eastern Montana, where they need the moisture.
    
  • We've had taco noodles with winter greens yesterday and today (see photo, below). A kale plant that I stripped leaves off, yesterday, and threw on the ground grew new leaves and continues to throw flower buds up into the air. Normally, it would die, but moist weather keeps the bare-root stalk alive.
    
  • Mary made chocolate chip oatmeal cookies...YUM!!!
  • I balanced our checkbook and caught up on the wine and fruit tree records.
  • Mary found Blizzard snow pea sprouts in the garden, so there is hope for our drowned, cold seeds. It's raining flower petals under most fruit trees and the orange-colored cedar apple rust jelly is all over cedar trees.
    
  • I started a 1-gallon batch of dandelion wine by bringing 7 cups of spring water to a boil and pouring it over the 270 grams of dandelion petals I've collected, recently. This sits for 2 days, stirred twice a day, before I add other ingredients.

  

  Taco noodles with kale, spinach leaves, topped with salsa.
  

• Wednesday, 5/4: Mowing & Trimming
  
  • Mary figured our savings accounts and paid the bills.
    
  • While walking bills down to the mailbox, we saw our first Baltimore oriole of the season.
  • Mary made two quiche pies. We ate one for our main meal.
    
  • For several days, a dove flies out from under the large cedar tree that's between the machine shed and the chicken coop. It has a nest on a very low branch. I looked and there are 2 eggs in it. Doves nest in the worst places and on nests that are made with just a few sticks.
    
  • Mary mowed the lane.
    
  • I cleaned the exhaust port in the Stihl grass trimmer, then knocked down grass and weeds around apple and cherry trees south and west of the house. I also trimmed grass around the pear trees and the blueberry bushes.
    
  • A few of the first pear blossoms to finish on the big Bartlett tree are now showing tiny  fruit.
  • We saw deer nibbles on a south branch of the big Bartlett pear tree and on an east branch of the McIntosh apple tree.
  • We are going from cool and wet to hot. Record high temperatures above 90 are predicted for next week.
    
    
• Thursday, 5/5: Dandelion Wine While Murky Outside
  
  • Misty cold weather lasted all day. In the newspaper, Mary noted that the only other cities around the country as cold as us were Anchorage and Seattle.
    
  • Katie called, since I've been bugging her asking for the shipper of a gift she got for Mary's birthday. It's DHL. She is in Venetie, AK. Her employer, UIC, got the bid for the second phase of a job on the school at Venetie, where Katie was last year. Katie will be doing work at Point Lay and Point Hope this summer, so another person is handling the Venetie job. Katie was there to help get the project started. She was flying back to Anchorage later in the day.
    
  • I worked on dandelion wine. I shaved pith off peels from 2 lemons, a lime, and an orange. Then I added the fruit peels to the dandelion petals that were soaking for 2 days in water and brought it to a low boil. It boiled an hour while I chopped a pound of golden raisins, a 4-inch stick of ginger and the fruit. After letting the liquid cool, I added the chopped ingredients, a crushed Campden tablet and a teaspoon of yeast nutrient. It sits, now, for 12 hours, overnight.
  • Remarkably, there are still a couple blossoms on the big Bartlett pear and the McIntosh apple trees, despite the wet murky weather we're going through.
  • The headline on the WGEM online weather report today reads, "Are we ever going to see the sun?"
    
    
• Friday, 5/6: Dandy Wine & Shopping Trip
  
  • I added pectic enzyme to the dandelion wine. The must's specific gravity was 1.050 without adding sugar. I added a pound of sugar and it zoomed to 1.115, so I added 2 cups, 2 ounces of water to drop the specific gravity down to 1.086, which is perfect. The pH is 3.55, so no acid blend is needed. I worked up a starter batch of yeast and pitched it 10 hours later.
  • Mary made tortellini soup and dusted books.
  • She also planted tomatoes and tomatillos inside in styrofoam cups. All but one cup of peppers that she planted earlier are up and growing, well.
    
  • I took a trip to Quincy to buy cat litter, a few groceries, and spinosad insecticide to spray on fruit trees.
    
    
• Saturday, 5/7: Tree Spraying & Outdoor Cookout
  
  • We were up at 5 a.m., due to calm winds, so I could spray fruit trees. I put streptomycin on both Bartlett pears, the new Porter's Perfection, and the Sargent crabapple trees. I sprayed Immunox on all cherry, the Liberty and McIntosh apple trees. I mixed a final batch of spray that included sulfur and sprayed the Grimes apple tree, but when I looked at my remaining 3 trees, they were filled with honey bees in blossoms, so I quit until bees were finished at sunset, when I sprayed Esopus, the skinny Liberty, and the Prairie Fire crabapple trees, as darkness fell.
    
  • A check of the dandy wine showed that the specific gravity dropped to 1.069.
  • We enjoyed pork loin roasted around noon hour over an outside fire with a bottle of 2020 pear wine. The wine was nice and mellow and a perfect mix with pork. A hummingbird visited us several times in the top of a mulberry tree, next to the fire. We also watched 3 chimney swifts enjoying the wind currents on a sunny day. A couple hawks circled a few times. It was a wonderful Saturday picnic.
    
  • I took a hike after eating and assessed future hunting blind locations. I spooked a couple deer and a turkey. A little creek I used to jump across to get to the SE deer blind has gutted a deep gorge into the ground, obliterating the trail through the woods to get to that blind. I found a well-worn deer trail through the east woods that goes right be a cedar tree that Mary and I identified as a future potential deer blind location.
    
  • After returning from deer blind prospecting, I discovered several nymph ticks, with a couple biting me. We've found that rubbing alcohol on a cotton ball soaked on these little buggers helps get off easier. They still itch for a few days after they bite.