April 22-28, 2024

Weather | 4/22, p. cloudy, 36°, 67° | 4/23, 0.65" rain, 47°, 67° | 4/24, sunny, 43°, 63° | 4/25, cloudy, 42°, 57° | 4/26, T-storms, 2.13" rain, 41°, 67° | 4/27, cloudy to T-storms, 61°, 79° | 4/28, 2.15" rain, 57°, 67° |

• Monday, 4/22: Mowing, Mowing, Mowing...Keep Those Mowers Rolling!
  
  • Mary and I walked the pups to the Bobcat Deer Blind and around the west field. I took a photo of a hickory leaf shoot (see photo, below). They look like flowers at this stage.
  • We had cool morning temperatures, but no frost. Sometimes a low of the mid-30s can result in spotty frost, especially down our lane.
  • We removed the wood rack from the living room. It's time to get ready for summer.
    
  • Mary and I fired up two mowers. Mary mowed the lane and the west lawn and between the woodshed and the machine shed. I mowed the east and south yards, the south orchard paths, around the near garden, and south of the far garden. I put lawn clipping mulch around two small cherry trees.
    
  • Mary watched a great blue heron dodge a turkey vulture in mid flight. Mary looked it up and the heron has a wingspan 5.5 to 6.6 feet and the vulture has a wingspan of 5.4 to 5.8 feet. The heron didn't want to play chicken with the vulture and veered away.
    
  • I watched the last half of the NHL Stanley Cup playoff game one between the Edmonton Oilers and the LA Kings. The Oilers won 7-4. Connor McDavid got five assists, a new record in any playoff game. Mary went to bed before I did. I was up until 1 a.m.

  

  A hickory leaf bud.

• Tuesday, 4/23: Bottling Garlic Wine
  
  • Heavy rain fell outside as we got out of bed. After breakfast, we heard thunder for about 45 minutes. Radar didn't show the storm's whereabouts, but when it hit around noon, pea-sized hail bounced off the lawn. It proves what we already know, weather radar is pitiful for our area, because a cloud has to be at least 20,000 feet tall to produce hail. Around 1 p.m., rain turned to clear skies.
    
  • Once it was sunny, Mary spotted two chimney swifts circling our house. Later in the afternoon, she saw four of them. We have a Missouri Department of Conservation calendar that announces daily natural events. For today, it states that chimney swifts arrive. Apparently, our birds look at the same calendar.
    
  • I racked and bottled the garlic wine. The specific gravity was 0.995 giving it an alcohol content of 13.75 percent. The pH was 3.2. I added 0.9 grams of Kmeta. I filled three clear wine bottles that I usually use for brewing wine as part of the 25 bottles that I corked, so I didn't have to boil labels off three old bottles. We will use up the wine in those clear bottles, first. The fines were minuscule, so I bottled five gallons, with only 150 milliliters left over. We drank the leftovers and liked the taste of it in a glass for the first time. We usually only use it as a cooking wine. It seems mellower than past garlic wine I've brewed. It might be due to longer brewing time.
    
  • I watched two NHL playoff games, in which the teams I rooted for lost. The Colorado Avalanche beat the Winnipeg Jets, 5-2 and the Nashville Predators defeated the Vancouver Canooks, 4-1...boo, hiss!
    

• Wednesday, 4/24: Spraying for Fire Blight
  
  • I sprayed copper on fruit trees that are susceptible to fire blight, which include the two Bartlett pear trees, and the Calville, Granny Smith, Porter's Perfection, Gold Rush, Empire, and Liberty apple trees. The Sargent crabapple tree can get fire blight, too, but it only had a couple branches infected with it last year, so I didn't spray it, today. Respray time is five to seven days from the last spraying and this was the fifth day.
    
  • Mary mowed parts of the north yard.
  • She also made a delicious chicken noodle soup and drew up a shopping list.
    

• Thursday, 4/25: Book Sale & Shopping Trip
  
  • The Quincy Library's book sale was today, so we attended it and picked up 14 books for $5.75. The highlight was an American Horticultural Society book called Pruning and Training. It's an excellent book.
    
  • We went shopping. Crowds were small, so shopping went well.
    
  • In the evening, we heard and saw a great blue heron fly away from the pond across the gravel road from us after it was startled by a bald eagle that was flying nearby.
    

• Friday, 4/26: Heavy Rain & Devil Crayfish
  
  • We experienced thunderstorms and heavy rain all morning long. The rain gauge indicated over two inches. Maybe our drought is over. I'm glad we didn't get hail and tornadoes that went through northwest of us. Omaha, Nebraska and Des Moines, Iowa saw tornado destruction.
    
  • While walking down to get today's mail after the rain quit falling, I spotted a big crayfish walking down the lane (see video and photo, below). Turn up your sound and at the end of the video, you hear the chirping call of chimney swifts that were flying overhead. The crayfish was a female that carried babies. She turned right and headed to Bluegill Pond to release her youngsters. Mary looked it up and it's a devil crayfish that lives underground. HERE is a link describing it. This was the largest crayfish we've seen on our property.
    
  • We enjoyed a bottle of 2023 apple cider. We liked it very much and found it matched well with cheese and crackers. It's light colored and light tasting, with just a hint of apple flavor. We're betting that as more apple varieties develop fruit, I'll be able to make more flavorful apple cider. It probably will be a good drink on a hot summer day.

  

  A huge female devil crayfish.
  

  
  
  A devil crayfish walking on our lane.
  

• Saturday, 4/27: Cleaning Up Garden & Heavy Rain
  
  • I walked the dogs to the northeast and back. It took longer removing ticks off the dogs after walking them than it took to give them a walk. I took 27 ticks off Amber and 16 off Plato, and we found more, later.
    
  • Mary made a venison General Tso meal. She also finished dusting and rearranging sunroom books.
  • I used the Stihl trimmer with the metal blade to whack down tall grass in the near garden. Before using the trimmer, I replaced the spark plug with a new one. A tankful of gas allowed me to clean up about two-thirds of that garden. I raked the grass and dumped five wheelbarrow loads into the compost bin.
    
  • Thunderstorms rolled in after dark. For the longest time, we could see on weather radar that storms were nearby, but we weren't hearing thunder. These same storms were intense further west, but dwindled as they approached us. Around 9:30, a strong wind gust shook the house, followed by heavy rain that lasted for hours (rain was still falling the next morning). Some rain dripped through the ceiling on the north addition to the house. When I reshingled the south-facing roof in 2021, I noticed at the peak that instead of running tar paper horizontally on the north-facing roof, it was put on vertically on a shallow sloping roof. That's why we get drips, occasionally...it wasn't installed correctly.
    

• Sunday, 4/28: Hockey, Hockey, Hockey
  
  • I listened to three NHL playoff games through the radio link on nhl.com throughout the day. I find the play-by-play radio announcers better at covering the game. ESPN announcers are the worst, because they always need to tell a story, instead of announcing the action of the game. The first game I listened to was a 5-1 Colorado win over Winnipeg...boo, hiss! The second was an amazing come-from-behind overtime 4-3 win for Vancouver over Nashville, when the Canucks scored three goals in 3:50 minutes, including overtime. They tied it at 3-3 with only eight seconds left in the game. The third game was a 1-0 win by Edmonton over L.A. After bathing, I got to bed at 1 a.m.
  • I labeled the garlic wine and after rearranging other wine bottles, I got them all stored in coolers in the upstairs north bedroom. 
  • We woke to rain that fell all night. By afternoon, rain quit, but very small showers came through. Rain started falling again after dark. Paths are full of water and pond levels are way up. Local news sources report several small road bridge collapses and culvert washouts.
  • I walked the dogs to Bass Pond and back. While crossing the north field, I saw a turkey running west to east, north of us. At Bass Pond, I saw holes in the south bank that I think are there from a muskrat.
  • Mary cross stitched all day across the room the the NHL rat with earphones on his head, listening to hockey.