March 4-10, 2024

Weather | 3/4, partly cloudy, 0.15" rain, 45°, 75° | 3/5, cloudy, 39°, 49° | 3/6, sunny, 32°, 57° | 3/7, cloudy to 0.79" rain, 37°, 53° | 3/8, misty, 0.03" rain, 45°, 47° | 3/9, sunny, 27°, 47° | 3/10, sunny, 23°, 51° |

• Monday, 3/4: It Rained!
  
  • Mary watched a bald eagle fly low over the south field near the house this morning.
    
  • Katie texted that she's considering reenlisting in the Alaska National Guard.
  • I took the dogs on a walk around the west field. Mary stayed home, confining herself to inside, due to pollen pouring out of the cedar trees in huge yellow clouds with strong south winds.
    
  • Mary identified a tree we found last year on our property bordering the gravel road that has purple berries (see photo, below). It's called a shad bush, also known as service berries. It's known to make excellent jelly and wine...mmm!!! We hope to propagate this tree into several more, but closer to our house.
    
  • Speaking of tasty things, Mary made a cherry crisp using two packages of our homegrown pie cherries. It's amazing.
    
  • While Mary did some house cleaning, I packaged rags into five cat litter buckets and moved them out into the machine shed. Mice don't chew through those four-gallon buckets, so we can keep rags safely out of the house, giving us more room inside. In the process, I sorted through an UMCO fishing tackle box of Dad's old electrical connections, fitting some of mine into it.
    
  • The survey transit kit that I tried to buy on Facebook Marketplace was cancelled. The old guy in New York selling it thought he was only advertising locally and didn't realize his ad went out nationwide.
    
  • We enjoyed game night while thunderstorms went through and gave us some much-needed rain (we only got 0.30 inch of rain in February). We played Azul while drinking two pots, each, of China Yunnan tea and getting a taste of the cherry crisp. We didn't keep track of scores.

  

  Shad bush or service berry.

• Tuesday, 3/5: Cardboard Box Day
  
  • We experienced a cloudy day.
  • While Mary paid the bills, I balanced our checkbook.
    
  • We took a hike along an old tractor trail deep into the north woods. When it was time to cross the steep banks of a dried up creek, Amber refused, sat down, and watched us climb the opposite hill. I went back and led Amber back up the tractor trail and home. Mary and Plato meandered through the woods and got home later. Mary says, "I never get lost, but I was a bit confused." We noticed the starting leaves of spring beauties pushing through the timber floor.
    
  • I broke down cardboard boxes stored in the machine shed. Some were distorted and dirty, so I burned them, along with other items, such as a bag of Christmas wrapping and four cornstalk baskets that Mary tossed (they burned hot). At dusk, I tied up three large bundles of cardboard that we'll leave at the recycle location in Quincy, tomorrow. There's more cardboard and junk to clean up in the machine shed.
    
  • Bill texted us. He gets weekends off from work, these days. He used to work on Saturday.
  • Mom texted that service berries grew wild where she grew up at Lolo, Montana. Her mother never made anything out of them, because they were bland and without taste. I never tasted ours, since I don't eat anything until I identify it. We got to thinking, since they mature in June, the same time as cherries, and birds really love them, service berries might make a good trap crop for attracting birds away from ripening cherries.
    

• Wednesday, 3/6: A New Mower
  
  • While walking our pups this morning, we watched nine deer cross our lane in front of us, heading west. Plato ran towards them and gave them a "woof, woof" send off.
    
  • We went shopping in Quincy.
    
  • A stop at Farm & Home with my large Stihl chainsaw indicated good news. They didn't have the chainsaw's clutch hub pinion bearing, so they ordered it in. It will only cost $10. The guy who services Stihl chainsaws thought the unknown metal part I shook out the saw was part of the pinion bearing. We bought a Cub Cadet push mower with a Kohler 173 cc engine. Our old mowers had the same size Kohler engines and we feel they're real work horses. An old mower bought in 2010 is shot and the other that was bought 2011 is starting to smoke. We were told this new machine is a professional-type mower.
    
  • After emptying the pickup and doing evening chores, we watched two movies we bought today at the Salvation Army store. They are the 1994 film, The Lion King and the 2016 movie, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. I never saw the first movie, even though Mary and my kids saw it several times when we lived in Circle, MT. The second one is weird, of course, because it's a Tim Burton film, but it is quite good.
    

• Thursday, 3/7: Katie Makes History
  
  • Katie sent the below photo yesterday morning, stating she took part in an historical moment with the following information: "I got to go to the first USAF/RSAF women’s engagement event. Women have been allowed in RSAF for less than three years. The women pictured are the first “CE” women; they are technical engineers (similar to PMs)." 
  • I walked the dogs on an east loop. There were no deer tracks in the sand of the dry creek bed.
  • I downloaded the Kohler service manual for our newly purchased lawn mower. This engine has an oil filter similar to those on motor vehicles, plus an air filter and a prefilter. It's built to last. The best oil for it is 10w50. The only place selling that is O'Reilly Auto Parts in Quincy at a mere $12-13 a quart. I'll stick with the label on the engine, which calls for 10w30 oil, that I can get a whole lot cheaper.
    
  • We experienced a really nice rain that started right after we did evening chores, which we did around mid afternoon, due to the weather forecast. A steady rain fell until after we went to bed.

  

  Katie with her female Saudi Arabian cohorts.

• Friday, 3/8: Income Taxes & Splitting Firewood
  
  • It was a dark and misty day. Sometimes there were clouds of mist floating by on the wind.
    
  • Mary saw an eastern phoebe in the early afternoon, the first of the year. It was parked in mulberry bush just outside sunroom window.
  • I did the federal and state income taxes and sent them in, electronically. They were both accepted within just a couple hours.
    
  • I ordered 25 chicks from Cackle Hatchery. We'll get them in the mail between June 11-13.
    
  • I split the equivalent of two wagon loads of firewood and sorted the split wood into dry, wet, and green piles. Ash is much easier to split when it's green.
    
  • We saw our resident deer moving around in the west field in the morning. In the evening, the twin deer born last summer were at the edge of the woods west of the house.
  • Coyotes were howling close to us while we walked the dogs for their final outing of the night.
    

• Saturday, 3/9: Pruning Small Trees
  
  • This morning, Mary ran back to the house with our two pups while walking the dogs, because she heard baying hounds approaching through the southwest woods. Then, while letting the chickens out for the day, four large hounds that were probably sniffing out coyotes, ran right past the chicken yard. Mary hollered for them to leave, which they did. Locals don't have any problem with letting their hounds run all over your land.
  • I moved firewood into one pile in the woodshed, then cleaned up bark and scraps of wood from the floor and dumped them around two small trees south of the house.
    
  • Mary pruned small trees, while I applied Tree Kote on all newly cut surfaces. Flower buds are already appearing on the small Bartlett pear. We found some small Prairie Fire crabapple starts under the parent tree. I want to transplant them closer to some of our other apple trees so they can enhance pollination. A strong northwest wind blew, so pruning big trees was out of the question.
    
  • Grass is greening up everywhere...good thing we got a new lawnmower!br />

• Sunday, 3/10: Pruning the Empire Tree
  
  • We enjoyed a perfectly sunny day.
  • Red dust in the center of cherry wood resembles wetness, so when I split this wood two days ago, I stacked it all in the wet pile. Today while moving firewood to the woodshed, I realized my mistake. Besides a nice start of firewood for next fall/winter/spring, I got halfway through a cross-cross stack of green ash firewood on the inside north wall of the machine shed.
  • Mary and I pruned the Empire apple tree. She pruned branches reachable from the ground while I painted cut surfaces with Tree Kote. Then I pruned and painted top branches atop a step ladder. Last year, we didn't use Tree Kote, a latex wound covering, because the "experts" say it's not good for trees. Unfortunately, we saw fire blight damage like never before, due to open pruning cuts on trees. We aren't making that mistake, again.
    
  • We saw a big flock of snow geese glide by to the west, very high in the sky, while pruning the tree.
    
  • After the sun set, we watched 13 deer meander across the south meadow. It's the most deer we've ever seen at one time. Mary watched three separate occasions when a deer would lay its ears all the way back and raise the tail halfway up with all white hair sticking straight out. It would raise up and strike another deer with its forelegs. This was the first time she's ever seen a deer get angry at another deer. Below is a photo of one of the 13 deer that was close to the house.

  

  One of the 13 deer roaming the south meadow.