March 26-April 1, 2023

Weather | 3/26, 35°, 55° | 3/27, 28°, 49° | 3/28, light snow, 34°, 51° | 3/29, 31°, 49° | 3/30, 30°, 70° | 3/31, 0.21" rain, 56°, 71° | 4/1, 34°, 51° |

• Sunday, 3/26: Chainsaw Chaps Saved My Thigh
  
  • We enjoyed a mostly sunny day.
    
  • On the morning dog walk down the lane, we heard a wild turkey gobbling to the east.
  • Asian ladybugs marched en masse today. While Mary made two quiche egg pies, I vacuumed continuously in the kitchen. Mary vacuumed the entire house several times. I emptied the vacuum in the afternoon. We must have millions of bugs packed under the vinyl siding of this house through the winter. Several hundred, or thousands venture inside each day. A new home built tight would help.
  • While emptying the shop vac, I saw a bat sunning itself on the east side of the house. It saw me and crawled under a piece of vinyl siding, which indicates how tight this house is built!
  • I went into the north woods and collected two more buckets of rotten wood, this time from a rotting hickory branch. Roots from surrounding bushes seek out the nutrients in the decaying wood. Some of it is pure black.
    
  • I watched a deer run off to the west right after I entered the north woods.
  • Mary and I hiked the dogs on the north trail that is filled with deer tracks. Mary spotted a big buck deer track and showed it to me. It was on the east side of the north woods.
    
  • I cut down persimmon trees near the Bartlett pear trees in order to give us space for a trail accessing the west field and to give us room for fencing around the pear trees and blueberry plants.
    
  • While operating the big chainsaw to cut down these small trees, I got the saw too close to my left thigh. It touched and cut a 3-inch slice in the chainsaw protective chaps I wear while using the saw. It's a good thing I wear the chaps. That mistake would have cut into my leg muscle without the chaps. They're made of nine layers of Avertic, a type of Kevlar manufactured in Sweden, that snags the chain and stops it. I had what looked like fiberglass fibers on the chain. Afterwards, I had to remove the chainsaw's sprocket to unwind the fibers wrapped around the sprocket shaft. I need to get a new pair of chaps. Once they're cut, you toss them. They're very, very worth wearing when running a chainsaw.
  • I saw two Vs of snow geese flying east while doing chores this evening. They are late! Migrating snow geese are usually done by the first day of spring.
    
    
• Monday, 3/27: Spraying Dormant Oil
  • A barred rock hen got over the chicken yard fence. I chased her out of the east side of the chicken yard. Instead of going in the gate, she roared past Mary and zipped down the west side. Mary chased her back, where she hid behind a blackberry thicket. Mary clapped her hands loudly and the hen went south and ran through the gate. Then Mary picked blackberry stickers out of her clothes.
    
  • Mary weeded the asparagus bed. She added compost. It's too early for shoots to appear.
    
  • Mary and I poured a 40-pound bag of sunflower seeds and a 50-pound bag of oyster shell into buckets and took them out to the chicken coop.
    
  • I mixed up two tank loads of dormant oil and sprayed the small Bartlett, the large pie cherry, five small pie cherry, the sweet cherry, the Porter's Perfection crabapple, the Liberty apple, Empire apple, Granny Smith apple, Grimes Golden apple, and the Prairie Fire crab apple trees. I ran out of spray on the second tank on the trunk of the Esopus Spitzenburg apple tree.
    
  • We watched the 2009 movie, The Blind Side.
    
    
• Tuesday, 3/28: Dormant Oil Spraying Finished
  
  • We woke to light rain that turned to snow, but there wasn't enough to register in the rain gauge. The sky cleared around 10 a.m.
    
  • We watched five deer cross the lane when we walked the dogs this morning.
    
  • Mary vacuumed bugs a couple times.
    
  • Mary and I pruned the old McIntosh apple tree. Last year I took out the dead branches and had a big stack. This year, we pruned away live branches and came away with another large stack. There's more breathing room in the middle of the old tree, now.
    
  • I mixed two tankfuls of dormant oil and sprayed the McIntosh and Esopus Spitzenburg apple trees, along with the large Bartlett pear tree. All dormant oil spraying is done.
    
  • Mary did the evening chores while I finished spraying.
    
    
• Wednesday, 3/29: Mother Nature Isn't Always Kind
  
  • After checking the Antonovka apple seeds I have in the fridge, I found a seed growing a root and planted my second apple seed.
    
  • Plato found a rabbit laying on the ground in front of the Buick's driver side tire. It was breathing, but died later that morning. We spotted rabbit fur north of the car. Something happened. We're guessing it was two rabbits fighting. I took it to the middle of the north woods.
    
  • I collected six buckets of soil by leveling off mounds dug up from moles in our yard. The soil close to the house is better than the pure clay soil elsewhere on our property. Today's work takes out hills that make mowing the lawn difficult and gives us good soil to help build up the areas where we'll plant apple trees. By mounding up the earth, the new tree roots stay above soggy soil during wet times, giving new trees a better chance for survival.
    
  • Mary planted pepper (both hot and sweet bell peppers) and sage seeds.
  • She also weeded the garlic beds and added fish fertilizer. Despite not much snow for winter insulation, Mary reports that the garlic plants are vibrant and green. Only tips are burned by freezing. It looks like 98 percent of the bulbs grew leaves.
    
  • We walked the dogs to Wood Duck Pond and back. On the way home, we stopped at Bass Pond. Both ponds were calm and peaceful. Bass Pond's water has turned over. We saw a couple ripples in the middle from some large fish, which might have been a grass carp or catfish.
    
  • Down at Wood Duck, Mary spotted the tail of a fish that was recently eaten. It looked like the tail of a bluegill. We're guessing it was possible caught and eaten by an otter. Nearby, we spotted a squirrel jaw. We thought this was the work of some raptor.
    
  • I moved three cow panels to the three spots were we'll plant new apple trees. Two were surrounding the sweet cherry tree and one came from the Grimes Golden apple tree. The sweet cherry never produces much, so we decided not to worry if deer eat branches from it. The Grimes tree has a dwarf rootstock that hates our clay soil. I'm saving it so I can graft branches from it onto better rootstock. It had two cow panels around it, one of which I removed. I added strands of wire to close off the semi circle created by removing the cow panel and added four fence stiffeners. This should keep munching deer at bay until I can do some grafting, hopefully after my Antonovka seeds grow into saplings large enough to be rootstocks.
    
    
• Thursday, 3/30: The Broken Record Call of the Asian Ladybug
  
  • The Asian ladybugs never end. We remove them with a shop vac several times every single day. There must be millions and millions packed into the walls of this house. It's exhausting and very old.
  • Mary swept and mopped the floors and dusted. She also made flour tortillas.
  • I mowed eight-foot wide circles in the three areas where we'll plant new trees. We received a notice from FedEx that the trees shipped today from Fedco in Maine.
  • I noticed that the narcissus plants are sprouting near the Empire apple tree. I also saw that the hyacinths are poking through the ground north of the machine shed.
    
  • I mowed up leaves under the pecan trees and filled up the compost bin to add organic matter.
    
  • I moved all of the branches I pruned off the McIntosh apple tree into the north woods. Old growth apple branches are extremely crooked and grab onto every nearby branch, weed, and leaf.
  • We enjoyed a bottle of 2021 pear wine to celebrate "Indictment" day, or as the brilliant genius wrote in his Truth Social account that he was "indicated." The wine has a deep gold color and a strong pear taste. It's very good.
    
    
• Friday, 3/31: Just Hail Here
  
  • Schools in our county closed today, due to weather predictions. Our western side of the county was under a Level 4 severe weather advisory, while eastern Lewis County was in a Level 5 advisory, the highest. Tornadoes failed to touch down here, but we did see pea and marble-size hail (see photos, below). Our geography seems to always divert the worst weather around us. We're grateful for that. Storms that went through our area grew in size and developed tornadoes in Iowa and Illinois.
  • Mary watched weather throughout the day. She set up the weather radio. It has a new alarm when a nearby weather alert initiates that sounds like a police siren.
  • I vacuumed bugs all day. Mary gets bad sinus issues and a bad headache when vacuuming bugs, so I'm taking over the chore as mush as possible. I hope they leave and get back to the woods, where they belong.
  • Mary heard a brown thrasher in the cedar trees in our east yard, the first of the season.
  • The first Antonovka apple seed that I planted sprouted.
     

Hail in front of our east porch.

Hail under the forsythia bush.

• Saturday, 4/1: Bill Arrives for Weekend
  
  • High winds, up to almost 50 mph, dominated the day.
    
  • Mary made two pizzas for our midday meal.
    
  • Bill showed up around noon. He said it was interesting driving north in a car that is basically the same weight as balsa wood.
  • While Mary cross stitched, Bill and I racked, then corked 23 bottles of persimmon wine (see photo, below). The specific gravity is 0.990, unchanged from a little over a month ago. The pH is 3.2. We drank leftovers. This wine is very unique and quite good. It has a brown sugar flavor, yet a fruity taste. I think it's a wine I'll want to continue to make. The color of the finished wine is amazingly clear, considering the murky, burnt orange color of the actual fruit. For the first time in months, we have no wine brewing in the pantry.
    
  • Bill picked out two movies he has never seen that we watched. They were Crazy Rich Asians, and Wonder Woman.

  

  Newly bottled persimmon wine.