August 13-19, 2023

Weather | 8/13, 0.19" rain, 64°, 71° | 8/14, 0.02" rain, 63°, 75° | 8/15, 61°, 76° | 8/16, 55°, 80° | 8/17, 63°, 79° | 8/18, 54°, 81° | 8/19, 61°, 88° | 

• Sunday, 8/13: Heard of Apple Dumplings...We're in the Apple Dumps!
  
  • We designated today as hobby day. With all of the rain outside, it was a good time to stay indoors.
    
  • Mary did cross stitching on a Halloween "Nine Lives" ornament.
  • I finished tooling on the checkbook cover and looked online at various leatherwork websites. One that's interesting is called Elktracks Studio, started by Jim Linnell, who grew up on a ranch 50 miles from Miles City, MT. He started leatherwork in 1967 as a seventh grader, and now lives in Texas. He was heavily involved with Tandy Leather. Several instructional videos are on this website.
  • We saw five deer in our yard in the morning, including a buck that got too close to the Grimes Golden apple tree (see photos, below). Mary stepped outside and sent him away. When we put the chickens to bed, we watched the twins running around in the west field in playful moods. Mary says they're our wild cows.
    
  • After a tasty chicken dinner, Mary baked eight apples. They were adequate, but Empire apples aren't the best baked apples.

A fawn and a doe deer in the north yard.

A buck deer looking into the near garden.

• Monday, 8/14: Racking Cherry Wine
  
  • Mary picked more garden produce, then froze tomatillos, tomatoes, and hot peppers. She's happy to report no signs of tomato hornworms, or bunnies inside the gardens.
    
  • I racked the cherry wine for the second time. A good half to three-quarter inch of lees were at the bottom of the carboy. I added a gram of Kmeta. It has a strong yeasty/alcohol taste, but there's a faint hint of cherry flavor. Aging will help. The specific gravity was 0.994, which gives it an alcohol level of 10.3 percent, a lower amount that might improve the wine's overall taste. The pH was 3.2, an improvement from 3.0 when I started brewing. The must went into a 5-gallon carboy, a half-gallon jug, and a 330-ml beer bottle. I added distilled water to the bottle to top it up. I cleaned the 6.5-gallon carboy that stored this wine for the past 11 days outside. Subsiding foam dried inside the top of the carboy into an orange/red mess. A garden hose, a bent bottle brush, and Dawn soap cleaned it up nicely.
    
  • We saw the normal amount of deer cattle in our yard.
    
  • Mary cut up four apples and made eight sandwiches for tomorrow's lunch. We went to bed early, because we're going to the Illinois State Fair in Springfield tomorrow.
    
    
• Tuesday, 8/15: Illinois State Fair
  
  • The alarm rang at 5 a.m. and we walked the dogs in faint morning light. After breakfast, letting out chickens, and packing up, we left just after 8:30 a.m., gassed up in Lewistown, then drove to Springfield, IL. Visiting a state fair is something we wanted to do since 2020, but a pandemic got in the way. The Illinois State Fair is closer, at 142 miles. The Missouri State Fair, in Sedalia, is 174 miles away, and the Iowa State Fair, in Des Moines, is 187 miles away.
    
  • We showed up at the fairgrounds around 11:45 a.m. Reduced prices meant we entered two adults and got a parking ticket, all for only $9. They parked us on the half-mile horse racing track. We wandered for a little bit through an edge of the fair until we found a fairgrounds map, then went back to the pickup and ate half our lunch. Then, we ventured through the entire fairgrounds. 
  • We saw the dairy building, with a butter carving of a cow being milked (see photos, below). 
  • Next were miles of horse barns. The fairground buildings are brick structures built in the late 1800s and there are several. Signs in the horse barns indicated they were recently refurbished. Immense, fine-looking Belgium draft horses filled several stalls. They are extremely impressive. There were also Percherons, Clydedales, and Morgan horses. In some stalls were very fancy wagons pulled by these horses. Most of these draft horses came from outside of Illinois...a couple from MO, some from IN, and most were from OH.
    
  • We marched through more miles of dairy cattle barns. There were several Jersey cattle. We heard a group of people enter one barn and say, "Yup, more cows!"
    
  • We took in the show ring in the hog barn. It was interesting to note that the judge was built similar to the animals he was judging.
  • In the sheep barn, another show ring was in action.
  • We looked for 4-H work, but nothing was there. 4-Hers must have exhibited earlier in the fair. The home economics building is abandoned, needing refurbishing. 
  • We walked to the conservation area. A huge aquarium showcased game fish.
  • While walking back, we spotted a hummingbird in blue salvia flowers. There were mobs of people walking through, but nobody else noticed this little bird. It's amazing the blindness of the human race.
  • The coliseum on the fairgrounds is in the middle of reconstruction. Built in 1901, it's beautiful.
  • Mary laughed when we heard a mother tell her kids, "Your father is standing around talking, because that's just what he does."
  • After returning back to the pickup, we sat on the tailgate and ate apples.
  • The drive to and from Springfield is nice, on a pretty smooth I-72 interstate.
  • We picked up a couple items in Quincy.
    
  • We arrived back home with the sun still in the western sky, but close to setting. After chores, we sat down to big drinks of tea.
    
  • There are lot's of people to dodge at a state fair. It was nice to get back to the peace and quiet of our place. To paraphrase Ron Weasely in Harry Potter, "It isn't much, but it's home."

A dairy cow carved out of butter.

There's even a person milking the cow.

The fine details of the cow's tail, in butter.

A separate butter carving of a child with a calf.

This Belgian horse dwarfs its stall.

Glistening Belgians inside a horse barn.

Beautiful horse-drawn wagon.

A junior showman with overall reserve champion hog.

Two sheep in the sheep barn.

This 1901 building is being refurbished.

• Wednesday, 8/16: Mowing & Tomatoes
  
  • I sharpened the lawn mower blade. It's a cheap Chinese knock-off from Home Depot that looks like shredded tin foil after mowing just grass. We need to spend more money and get an authentic one from a Husqvarna dealer.
  • I mowed the north lawn. Tall chicory stalks and hidden mounds of mole dirt made for tough work. Damp soil and wet weeds combined to build up a thick layer of green cement under the mower deck. I cleaned that off with a putty knife and collected a partial wheelbarrow load for the compost pile.
    
  • Mary picked tomatoes. They're starting to pour into the house. She also watered plants. It looks like we're getting one, maybe two, pumpkins after all.
    
  • Mary found the first tomato hornworm of the season. It was a monster at three inches long. Stalks remain on one tomato plant where the beast was munching.
    
    
• Thursday, 8/17: More Mushrooms
  • About a week ago, we started seeing white oyster mushroom buds on the box of three boxes involving a mushroom kit Katie gave me for Father's Day. It was the last variety to show any signs of life. They grew quickly. We harvested them today, cooked them, and ate them (see photos, below). They were really good, especially with sliced garlic and garlic wine. A second batch of pink oyster mushrooms are now growing. The lion's mane mushrooms are brown and don't look edible.
    
  • Mary and I handed off the mower and mowed the north reaches of the north yard. We filled the gas tank three times and accomplished a bunch of mowing.
    
  • Mary picked more tomatoes and froze them. Just over two gallons are in the freezer.
  • She also raked some of yesterday's mowed grass and put mulch on the Porter's Perfection apple tree.
  • While doing chores, I saw a woodpecker in the top of the Esopus tree, probably pecking apples. I don't care. That tree is history come this fall or winter, due to fire blight in the trunk.

White oyster mushrooms ready for harvest.

Cutting up mushrooms. Garlic is in the foreground.

• Friday, 8/18: Peppers Picked
  
  • Mary mowed grass north of the near garden to give her a spot to stretch out the hose for watering gardens. Mary and I mowed the lane, handing the mower off to give each other a break. We wanted to get the lane mowed while outside temperatures were relatively tame. Later in the afternoon, I mowed the west yard.
  • Hot temperatures into the 100-degree range are predicted next week, so Mary picked all large peppers, or those on tops of plants that will suffer sun scald if left in intense heat. It amounted to a full four-gallon bucket of peppers.
    
  • Mary watered all gardens. I helped her after I finished mowing the west yard.
  • Karen and I texted back and forth. I wanted to know how she liked the Subaru Outbacks she once leased.
    
    
• Saturday, 8/19: Freezing Sweet Peppers
  
  • Mary washed and sliced up a bunch of sweet peppers (see photo, below) and froze 19 packages. She needs 20 packages. There are several more peppers in the garden.
    
  • Mary also picked a number of tomatoes.
  • I mowed the east yard immediately next to the house. I cleaned tall grass and sedges from around two of the three small apple trees we planted this spring and put a deep thickness of grass mulch around them.
    
  • Bill called in the evening. He ordered a sweatshirt from Warroad for a statewide Minnesota hockey event that will be held there in January. They sent it to his billing address, which is us, instead of to his mailing address. We'll save it here for him to pick up on his next visit. He took in an art festival, today.

  

  Large sweet peppers from the garden.