July 16-22, 2023

Weather | 7/16, 65°, 83° | 7/17, 0.03"rain, 61°, 75° | 7/18, 62°, 85° | 7/19, 63°, 89° | 7/20, 72°, 87° | 7/21, 56°, 81° | 7/22, 0.02" rain, 56°, 85° | 

• Sunday, 7/16: Done Pickin', &We're Grinin'
  
  • Mary and I picked blackberries between the ponds and in the Bramble Hill patches to get a few ounces over the 20 pounds we need for making blackberry wine. We are done!
  • Deer, including our pet mama doe and her two fawns, were in our east yard this morning. A deer left when I let the dogs out for their morning walk. I caught glimpses of it through the brush and think it was a buck. I clapped my hands to send off the doe and her two fawns. One fawn is losing its spots.
  • Smoke is in the air again today.
    
  • We enjoyed inside stuff for the rest of the day. I spent time online while Mary did some cross stitching.
  • To celebrate the end of blackberry picking, we shared a bottle of 2022 Kieffer pear wine (see photo, below). It is six months old from when I bottled it in January. The wine tastes marvelous. It starts out with a real tang on the tongue and the secondary taste is heavy on the pear flavor. This is a very excellent wine and better than Bartlett pear wine.
  • In the evening, I heard the squawk of a great heron. The sound kept getting louder. Then I watched it fly by, going south to north, but kept hearing the heron call further south. Then, a second heron flew by, much lower to the ground. It was squawking at the first heron. Next, I watched the first heron take a 90-degree turn to the east. The second heron followed. I think they spotted Wood Duck Pond and settled there for the night.
    
  • During our nighttime dog walk, distant lightning flashes pulsated through the sky. It involved storms south of us along the I-70 corridor, which is about 100 miles away. It's amazing how far lightning is seen at night.

  

  Kieffer pear wine tastes very good.

• Monday, 7/17: Big Scare With Amber
  
  • Mary and I cleaned house, a neglected activity during the blackberry picking realm.
    
  • We had a scare with Amber. In the afternoon, she suffered an extremely blown up muzzle. She looked like a chow. Large welts were all over her body. She was having an extreme allergy attack. Mary gave her a generic Benedryl tablet hidden in shredded cheese. Mary worked at calming her and at one point Amber wasn't breathing. We got through that. An online search to a vet website indicated Amber could get two Benedryl tablets, based on her weight, so Mary gave her another one. Through the night, she slowly got better. We stayed up with her until 1 a.m., eight hours after her last Benedryl, and gave her two more.
  • In searching the dog bed upstairs, I found an assassin bug in the folds of the blanket. That's what bit Amber and caused her allergic reaction. Amber likes to root the blanket into a big wad and then lay on the mound. We're sure she stuffed her nose right into that bug and got bit. I shook out all blankets and will do so regularly from now on.
    
  • In the waning evening daylight, Mary and I sprayed Japanese beetles eating on apple and cherry tree leaves. We sprayed two gallons of Dawn/water solution and killed a vast number of bugs.
  • We watched the 2018 movie, Christopher Robin. It's a good one. The voice actor for Eeyore is Brad Garrett, who played the really tall brother in the TV show, Everyone Loves Raymond. He has the perfect voice for Eeyore, who both Mary and I find as the best Winnie-the-Pooh character. What does that say for us?!!!
    
    
• Tuesday, 7/18: Amber is Back to Normal
  
  • Canadian smoke left us. We just have the normal July humid air.
  • Amber is back to normal. The only difference is she slept a lot, today, probably due to yesterday's Benedryl. She's back to rolling the dog blanket into a wad and bouncing off the woodwork in her pit bull terrier mode.
    
  • We watched a doe cross the south lawn, near the apple trees, then stop for quite some time and eat clover in our driveway.
  • A quick check of the Antonovka apple trees I have in pots showed they were full of aphids. I brought them inside one at a time and Mary used Dawn/water spray and her fingers to remove them. I set the trees out in the near garden next to future potato plants and Mary watered the soap residue off the leaves.
    
  • Mary watered all garden plants. She saw several signs of rodents and even saw a vole looking at her. She distributed chocolate presents...generic Ex Lax.
    
  • I started the beetle-killing session off by nailing Japanese beetles that were on Porter's Perfection apple leaves. Mary finished it by killing hundreds that were on the apple and cherry trees. She noticed some leaves with a dozen on a single leaf, sometimes piled three or four high. She'd spray and the top beetles would fall off. Then, she'd return to spray the bottom layers of beetles. They're major defoliators.
    
  • I trimmed all vegetation from the 34 strawberry buckets and four tubs. The strawberry plants are old and failing to put on berries. Giant foxtail grass filled each container. I then moved all containers of soil to under the machine shed bench. I need to add soil amendments to all buckets and increase strawberry bucket numbers to 50 buckets for 50 new plants we'll order next spring. I'm discontinuing growing strawberries in tubs. They do better in four-gallon buckets. Thanks to cat litter we buy at Sam's Club, we own an abundance of these buckets. I moved the Antonovka trees to where the strawberry buckets once were located.
    
    
• Wednesday, 7/19: A Bunny Fortress
  
  • Mary blasted water down the hose we connect to the clothes washer we use as a drain. It was clogged full of lint. Clothes didn't come out as clean as desired on the last washing. Mary was concerned the washer was failing...not the case. She ran three small washes through without clothes and more material came out. This made her late getting to laundry. Three loads went out on the line, but didn't dry all the way on this very humid day.
    
  • I built an anti-bunny fortress in the south end of the far garden. I added an additional two feet of chicken wire, making for a four-foot high fence. It involved four steel posts and five fence stiffeners. I used an inch long nail to twist chicken fence wires every 4-5 inches to join the two pieces of two-foot high chicken wire together. I also pulled up chicken wire fencing all around that part of the garden. I've watched one particular pole vaulting bunny take a run at that fence and easily clear a scrunched down two-foot high chicken wire. Now that dastardly bunny is going to twang off the fence...ha, ha, ha!
    
  • Mary watered all garden plants.
    
  • A biplane crop duster worked a field east of us. This guy flew in from the east and didn't use the airport at the dairy, which is west of us. Obviously, there is competition in the works. Conditions were perfect with no wind, for administering herbicides. The other crop duster sprays in high winds and even with thunder clapping nearby. He's probably losing business, due to his poor practices. There's less aerial crop dusting this year. I'm seeing more signs of farmers working their own fields with sprayers pulled behind tractors.
    
  • Mary sprayed Japanese beetles while I finished evening chores. She almost hugged a doe deer at the blueberry bushes. She turned the corner at the end of the chicken run and there it was, right in front of her. Mary also watched a pair of yellow-crowned night-herons fly overhead after they were spooked from the south by our redneck neighbors at the house across the road shouting at each other.
    
    
• Thursday, 7/20: Mulching & Beetle Killing
  
  • A northwest breeze helped on a very hot day.
    
  • Mary mowed the east lawn between the house and the lane, putting mulch along the beans and on other plants that had bare ground surrounding them.
    
  • I nipped down persimmon trees in the far garden, then pulled up the rest of the chicken wire fencing to extend it to its fullest height. Sweet potato plants once chewed by our pole vaulting rabbit are coming back quickly.
    
  • I went into a combat beetle killing mode. Using a bucket filled with Dawn and water, I tapped Japanese beetle laden branches downward into the bucket, dropping hundreds of beetles to their death. By evening, fruit trees were mostly free of beetles. A multiflora rose at the electric fencer was loaded with beetles at sunset. Mary squirted them with Dawn/water solution.
  • Mary finished a shopping list for our trip to Quincy, tomorrow.
    
    
• Friday, 7/21: Shopping Trip
  
  • Quincy, IL, shopping highlights:
  • At Salvation Army, Mary got two jeans, two shirts and a book on the 1964 Alaska earthquake. I got two long-sleeve shirts.
  • I bought Carhartt suspenders and a Stihl trimmer double standard harness at Farm & Home.
  • We picked up a bunch of groceries between those two stops.
  •  After returning home, we emptied the pickup. Mary put food away.
    
  • When I opened the pickup's hood, the passenger hinge fell down and the hood wouldn't stay up. I used a stick to prop it open and found the bolt and nut that unscrewed and fell beneath the hood's hinge. I now need to figure out how to get it back in place, because the hinge spring is too strong to push it into place by hand.
  • Mary and I killed more Japanese beetles. There weren't as many on the apple trees, but they were thick on two cherry trees and on the same rose bush near the electric fence energizer.
    
    
• Saturday, 7/22: Pumpkin Wine's 3rd Racking
  
  • The west yard is full of catbirds every morning. They're probably a bunch of fledglings bathing in the morning dew and eating elderberries growing amongst the lilac bushes.
  • I racked the pumpkin wine for the third time. In a little over a month, quite a bit of fines settled out of the wine (see photos, below). The specific gravity was 0.995 and the pH was 3.5, exactly the same as a month ago. The alcohol level is 12.7 percent. It tasted harsh...too much of a strong alcoholic sulfuric fines taste. If that taste persists, I might have to run it through a tube filled with copper wool a month from now. The liquid went into a five-gallon carboy and a three-gallon carboy.
    
  • Mary finished the moon on a cross stitch project that shows a raven in front of a full moon.
    
  • We both watered garden plants.
    
  • We both killed Japanese beetles. Our sacrificial multiflora rose bush in front of the electric fence energizer is almost completely defoliated, but it makes for great beetle bait. Mary kills hundreds of these demons every evening as they fill that bush.

After 3rd racking of the pumpkin wine.

The leftover fines after pulling off the good stuff.