Oct. 1-7, 2023

Weather | 10/1, 61°, 87° | 10/2, 53°, 86° | 10/3, 59°, 85° | 10/4, 63°, 82° | 10/5, 60°, 77° | 10/6, 43°, 57° | 10/7, 38°, 59° | 

• Sunday, 10/1: Chicken Coop Hay is Stored
  
  • Mary picked up hay all afternoon. It was from grass I cut on the trail to Bass Pond. First, she used a pitchfork to put it into mounds. Then, she moved it with a wheelbarrow to the second grain bin, where it is stored until we need it in the chicken coop. We have enough for winter and into next summer.
    
  • I used the small chainsaw and sawed up fallen limbs on the Wood Duck Trail. There was a maple limb next to old hog huts on Bramble hill and a large oak tree top that almost took out the Wood Duck Blind, but landed in front of it. I sawed off other limbs growing into the trail, rose bushes in the way, and a small hickory that fell in front of the Cedar East Woods Deer Blind. I took a hike down the dry creek bed to Wood Duck Pond. I spooked up about a dozen wood ducks when I arrived. Where tadpoles swam this spring is high and dry. The sand on that flat is filled with deer tracks.
    
  • I also whacked grass and weeds down on Wood Duck Trail to just 15 feet away from the opening into the east woods. Occasionally, I took out autumn olive and cedar branches encroaching into the trail.
    
  • Mary and I checked the Bartlett pears. They are yellow, but still hard, so they're not ripe, yet.
    
  • After dark, we watched the 2004 movie, Shrek 2.
  • On the last dog walk, we noticed that Jupiter was right next to the moon.
    
    
• Monday, 10/2: Halloween Tree Is Up
  • Mary washed a bunch of winter coats and vacuumed up spiders hiding in the house.
  • She also picked the last of the hot peppers, although there are still some jalapeño peppers to pick in the garden. Mary watered garden plants.
  • I picked up firewood that I cut yesterday on the Wood Duck Trail. I also nipped several cedar branches intruding into the trail and used the Stihl trimmer to clean out weeds on the trails to the two deer blinds in the east timber. I didn't get all of the firewood. I'll have to get that tomorrow and fix any gaps in my blinds.
  • I haven't seen any movement on yeast that I need for pear wine, so I ordered more from a company in WI. If both orders come in, I can use it all up, because it's a wine yeast I use most frequently.
  • We put up the bare cedar tree and hung Halloween decorations on it. Mary made two new cross stitch ornaments for it (see photos, below).
  • We had cheese and crackers with Granny Smith apples from our tree. Those apples are really good...much better than anything from a grocery store and even better than apples from Edgewood Orchard in Quincy. All of the apple tree fussing I do is really worth it when you taste these apples.
  • We also shared a bottle of 2021 cherry wine. It's really very good and orange in color...a good choice for an orange Halloween drink.

A new Halloween decoration called Raven Moon.

This one is called Nine Lives.

The Halloween Tree with the lights out.

This stick-like Halloween Tree seems fitting.

• Tuesday, 10/3: Readying Deer Stands & Harvesting Squash
  
  • After driving the tractor pulling the trailer to the turn-around spot at the bottom of Bramble Hill, I picked up all the rest of the firewood that I cut near my two easternmost deer blinds,  hauled it to the trailer, then drove it home and stacked it in the woodshed. There is now over a foot of firewood stacked in the woodshed.
  • I cleaned up three deer blinds and one deer tree stand, adding cedar branches for concealment, and nipping weeds or twigs that grew inside the stands. They are ready for deer hunting season, which includes a new three day anterless session that starts this Friday.
  • The forest floor is crispy, crunchy dry. We hope the cigarette smokers don't throw a lit butt in the woods, or we're all goners.
    
  • Mary finished cleaning the upstairs south bedroom.
  • She also cleaned house plants and hauled any that were outside through the summer to inside the house. The predicted low temperature for this weekend is 39°, which is too cold for house plants.
    
  • Mary picked all of the acorn squash that were ready to harvest and brought them inside. It totaled 78. Five squash are still in the garden and not ready to pick. She checked pumpkins. They're ready to go inside when she wants them.
    
    
• Wednesday, 10/4: Racking Apple and Jalapeño Wines
  
  • I racked the apple wine for the third time. It had a lot of fines and is still slightly cloudy. The specific gravity is still 0.999, the reading it had a month ago, giving it an 8.9 percent alcohol content. I think this lower alcohol level helps the taste. After trying the wine, Mary and I think it's quite good, with a very strong apple flavoring. It's tart, too. This is vastly better than last year's apple wine attempt. I put a three-gallon carboy and two 750-ml wine bottles of liquid back in the pantry.
    
  • I racked the jalapeño wine for the second time. The fines of this wine resembled the moon's surface, complete with craters. It came out in chunks. The specific gravity is 0.992, giving it an alcohol content of 11.4 percent. I added 0.6 grams of Kmeta. Remaining liquid filled a three-gallon carboy and a 330-ml beer bottle. After tasting it, Mary and I found this batch of jalapeño wine to have a strong pepper flavor. It was hot, but the pepper taste came through, too. It's a good batch.
    
  • Mary watered the garden.
  • We put the chickens in the coop early, due to dark clouds to the northwest, but we never saw a drop of rain. It's going to take a major rain event before we feel dampness.
    
  • As Mary picked tomatoes to eat with our evening dinner, she heard snow geese flying south. The last time we had snow geese flying overhead was March 5th.
    
    
• Thursday, 10/5: Cleaning Out Garden and Chimney
  
  • Most of the garden is harvested. Mary clipped off the two pumpkins, the rest of the jalapeño peppers that she's keeping, and a pitifully small number of sweet potatoes (20). Voles ate most of the sweet potato roots and small bunnies ate the sweet potato greens. Gardening was a struggle in 2023, but some plants, like snow peas and tomatoes, did great. The garden is down to a row of tomatoes, three apple tree rootstocks, and parsnips.
    
  • Mary picked half a bucket of hazelnuts.
  • I drove to Lewistown and bought a tube of stove and gasket cement. Partway to town, I saw four combines running in a field, kicking up an amazing dust cloud. This summer's drought creates a huge dusting every time a farmer harvests a crop.
    
  • I cleaned the chimney and the woodstove pipe. There was less soot in the chimney this year, compared to other years. A chimney swift nest and three desiccated nestlings were on the top of the soot pile. The chimney swift adults left early and now we see why they didn't stick around.
    
  • We watched the 1998 movie, Practical Magic.
    
    
• Friday, 10/6: One Shot, One Button Buck
  
  • Today is the first day of a new anterless three-day deer season that was added to Missouri's hunting calendar. The coolest nighttime low of this weekend is tonight, so we decided that I'll hunt this evening, because tonight will be the best time to process venison meat.
    
  • I sharpened seven knives, and moved lights to the machine shed.
    
  • I whacked down weeds in the south chicken yard. Some were above our heads. Once the weeds were gone, chickens, especially the three young ones, won't hide in weeds and hinder getting them into the coop at night. It needed to be done with me gone hunting, so Mary can get them inside by herself.
    
  • I went hunting at 4 p.m. A strong northwest wind blew, with gusts above 30 mph. I crawled into the cozy Wood Duck Deer Blind. Around 4:45, I saw two does walk east to the south of me. They were probably going to eat corn in the neighbor's field. I didn't have a good shot, so I stayed silent. Just before 6, a deer walked into view in front of me. It was munching on brush, then walked closer to me. For several minutes, it was behind trees. Many times, I had it in view, but it was facing me, which would prove to be a potential gut shot that I will not take. Then it walked up an incline and stood sideways to me. One right-handed shot and it went down instantly. All of those misses at squirrels with the .22 rifle paid off. This shot was right on target. It was a young button buck (see photo, below).
  • Mary and I field dressed the deer after I walked home and returned with the tractor and trailer. It fell in the dry creek bed, so we moved it a few feet to get it off the sand. Once dressed, we hauled it through the woods and put it in the trailer. After driving it home, we washed it thoroughly with the garden hose and hung it in the machine shed.
    
  • I installed lights, we ate supper, then we butchered the deer in the cool of the night. Temps reached 43° when we finished. There exists a genetic deer variety that lives here with long black hair. They always have long bodies. This button buck belonged to that family. They look skinny, but their long muscles add up to quite a bit of meat. We froze 30 packages of venison. Granted, they not big packages of meat, but just perfect for recipes like venison General Tso, or venison stroganoff. We put away the last venison package and cleaned up around 2 a.m.
  • According to Mary's calculations, we only need another like this deer, or bigger, to have enough venison in the freezer for another year.
    
  • I won't be hunting anymore this weekend. You can only take one deer during this early anterless season. Nobody was hunting nearby. The only shots we heard were very distantly to the north.

  

  A button buck deer, or tasty venison meat.

• Saturday, 10/7: Feels Like Fall
  
  • The outside temperatures are significantly cooler, so it feels more like autumn.
  • I moved the deer carcass to the north woods. Just as I suspected, yellow jackets were having a heyday. Butchering deer during daylight hours would have been really tough. I'm glad we did it in the dark, even though we're both very tired, today. I was surprised that nothing was gnawed on after leaving the hide and throw-away meat and fat bits in back of the trailer. Last night, I heard rustling on the other side of the corrugated steel panel of the machine shed's south wall while I was skinning the deer. I walked around the corner, saw yellow eyes gleaming up at me, shining from my hat light, and I said to the opossum, "I thought you were there." It spun around and ran away.
    
  • I pieced the stovepipe back together between the woodstove and the chimney, complete with furnace cement on all of the joints. We lit off a small fire in the stove, opened the windows, and let the smoke dissipate as oil burned off the sections of stovepipe. Then, we enjoyed an evening of wood heat. There's no more thorough warmth than heat coming off a woodstove.
    
  • Mary picked up branches that have fallen under the pecan trees and turned them into kindling. She also brought the firewood rack in from the machine shed, along with the kindling box, and hauled firewood into the house.
  • Katie sent videos and photos of getting out and about while on a visit to Beaufort, SC, to see her Uncle Don Orsen, and his family.