May 27-June 2, 2024

Weather | 5/27, 0.03" rain, sunny, 54°, 77° | 5/28, 0.10" rain, sunny, 53°, 76° | 5/29, sunny, 47°, 73° | 5/30, sunny, 52°, 78° | 5/31, p. cloudy, 57°, 73° | 6/1, 0.38" rain, cloudy, 60°, 73° | 6/2, cloudy, 59°, 80° |

• Monday, 5/27: Cherries Galore on Mary's Birthday
  
  • It's Mary's birthday, today. She turns 58.
    
  • Katie called. She's doing pet sitting in her spare time. Her vehicle's engine died, so she's looking for new wheels. She and I texted about a potential vehicle after the call.
    
  • Bill and I picked a bunch of cherries. The large cherry tree is really producing fruit. It's loaded with red, ripe cherries...the best year, ever. I picked high on the tree and Bill picked on the ground and from a three-step ladder. We put away a little over six quarts, today. The grand total in the freezer is 19 quarts from this year. There are a lot more cherries still on the tree (see photos, below).
    
  • Mary made a Mississippi Mud cake. It's amazing. 
  • She received a yearly renewal subscription to International Artist magazine from Katie, a unique washers game and a cross stitch project called Black Moon Cat from Bill. She says the cross stitch pattern will be a large ornament. Mary started that project, today.
    
  • The elderberries are already blooming, which is really early in the year.
    
  • Bill helped get TNT on our TV and we watched the Edmonton Oilers/Dallas Stars playoff game. The Stars won 5-3.

Bill's photo looking up the big cherry tree.

The top of the big cherry tree is loaded with fruit!

• Tuesday, 5/28: A Fun Game
  
  • Bill and I picked five quarts of cherries. We now have 24 quarts in the freezer.
    
  • We had a thundershower and more rain later in the afternoon.
  • Katie and I texted back and forth about various vehicles she's looking at.
    
  • Bill, Mary and I played a game of Rummy, enjoyed pots of Yunan loose leaf tea, a very yummy 1.5-liter bottle of 2023 cherry wine, popcorn, and some Mississippi mud cake. Bill wrote down weird things I said while playing the game and rattled them all off after the game was over. We laughed so hard it hurt.
    

• Wednesday, 5/29: Bill Returns to His Apartment
  
  • Bill left for his apartment in the early afternoon.
    
  • Mary mowed between the two sheds and a bit of the west lawn, adding grass clipping mulch to the near garden's south row.
    
  • I picked another five quarts of very ripe cherries from the top of the big cherry tree. There are now 29 quarts of new cherries in the freezer.
    
  • Katie and I had more texted discussions about vehicles.
    
  • I watched the Edmonton Oilers beat the Dallas Stars 5-2. The series is tied at 2-2.
  • We went to bed early for us...normal time for most people. Mary wants to pull all of the garlic tomorrow and I still have gobs of cherries to pick.
    

• Thursday, 5/30: Cherries & Garlic
  
  • I woke up right at daybreak and watched a fat opossum walk by the house on the lane. I'm guessing all of the cicadas are wonderful snacks for an opossum as it crawls along branches in nighttime hours, eating them. I also spotted a small deer crossing the lane just south of the house.
    
  • I picked just over six quarts of cherries. We now have 35 quarts of this year's cherries in the freezer. I used a new method. Two tarp straps secured the tall orchard ladder to the 10-foot step ladder. By carefully slipping branches between the rungs, I'm able to move this ladder combination near the center of the tree and pick ripe fruit in the tree top. These are cherries just donated to the birds in past years. Abundant cicadas are keeping birds away from ripe cherries that I'm able to pick this year. Plus, our cooler springtime temperatures mean the ripe cherries aren't going bad. There are many more ripe cherries left in that tree.
    
  • Mary pulled all six varieties of garlic from the far garden and laid them out to dry in the shade of the pecan trees. This is the best looking garlic that we've ever grown. Nice helpings of our compost prior to planting and sufficient, but not drowning, rains helped produce a great garlic crop. Mary and I hung several bundles of garlic from the rafters of the machine shed, where they'll dry through the summer. Mary says when garlic is all hung to dry, it's a great time of the year.
  • Mary picked two bowls of ripe pie cherries that we ate as dessert, tonight. They're tart, but tasty.
    

• Friday, 5/31: Cherries & Katie's Vehicle
  
  • While walked dogs on their morning outing, I noticed they were keenly aware of something with their noses in the air. Then, a deer snorted at me just a few feet east of us and ran away.
    
  • I picked more cherries. We're running low on quart freezer bags. I checked Dollar General online, since that's the only grocery store in Lewistown, and discovered that 19 bags in a box costs $5, which is insanely high. So, I'm opening existing bags from the freezer and stuffing them to maximum capacity. I probably picked the equivalent of another five quarts. Some cherries are becoming too ripe.
    
  • Mary made pizza and did all of the evening chores while I pitted cherries.
    
  • Katie bought a used vehicle (see photo, below). HERE is the Marketplace listing of it, which is a 2010 Mazda CX-9. She negotiated the price down by $500. It is an AWD, which should help in the winter. It's powered by a Ford 3.7-liter V6 engine, built by Mazda. Owners give it high marks. Katie needed wheels, since her Jeep's engine died.
    
  • I watched Game 5 of the Oilers/Stars NHL series. Edmonton won 3-1.
  • Mary watched the Beauty and the Beast film while I watched hockey.

  

  Katie's new wheels, a 2010 Mazda CX-9.

• Saturday, 6/1: All Day Picking Cherries
  
  • Rain fell overnight. We woke to light mist that turned to a cloudy day.
  • After deciding this was the last day for picking cherries, I picked all day and stored bowlfuls of unpitted cherries in the fridge. There are still cherries in the top center of the big cherry tree that I'll let birds eat. Or, I'll grab some to eat out-of-hand. After an evening meal, I pitted cherries until 3 a.m. At the end of pitting cherries, I was eating a bunch of them, just so I could get through them faster. The extra ripe ones are real yummy. Since I'm filling formally frozen bags to a stuffed capacity, I don't know exactly how much I picked today, but I'm guessing it was 10-12 quarts. That puts us at 50+ quarts of this year's cherries, which is a new record. The best year in the past was 2020, when we froze 29 quarts.
    
  • Mary noticed that a brown thrasher and a catbird are sharing nursery duties in the forsythia bush outside our east door. She said the catbird enters from the top of the bush and the brown thrasher enters from bottom.
    
  • Mary performed an egg experiment. She sprayed cooking spray in a 12-cup muffin tin, placed an egg into each individual cup, dropped a pinch of salt on top and stirred each egg gently, then froze the tin of eggs. Our eggs are larger than most, so freezing expanded them up and slightly out of the cups. Plus, the muffin tin tilted slightly, since our chest freezers contain mounds of frozen food. Consequently, it was a bit messy. After three hours, she popped each one out by pushing on one edge with a spoon, put them in a gallon freezer bag and ran them back into the freezer. This might be a way to store eggs, now that we have an abundance of them, so we have some through winter months, when egg output is low. Frozen like this, they are only good for baking or scrambled eggs.
    
  • I answered an ad in Marketplace from someone who lives two counties west of us and is asking for old mowers, tillers, and trimmers with motors. We have nine items that fit this category that we want out of here and I said he can have them for free. He's showing up late Monday morning with a trailer to haul them away. It will be nice to clear up room in the machine shed, which often seems like a collection of old junk.
    

• Sunday, 6/2: Collecting Junk & Picking Raspberries
  
  • While filling waterers prior to letting the chickens out of the coop, we spotted a baby bird walking around under the forsythia bush and along the house foundation. It had absolutely no fear of us and was eating greens. Mary looked it up and it was a wild turkey baby. We think it was lost, but was hopefully found by its mother, since we didn't see it later on.
    
  • Mary heard chimney swift nestlings in our chimney while sitting in the living room this morning.
    
  • I pulled out old mowers, tillers, etc., swept them off, and lined them up just inside the machine shed openings. I put air in the tires of Uncle Herman's riding mower and rolled it near the east opening. Next to it went the old Gravely mower, which is too heavy to maneuver. Getting rid of nine pieces of junk opened up a lot of space inside the building.
    
  • Mary found several wild black raspberries and picked a little over a quart. They look and smell amazing.
    
  • While picking raspberries, Mary found a bunch of cherry pits on the ground just north of the Kieffer pear tree. She thinks the summer tanager picks them off the big cherry tree, flies to his favorite perch and eats them. There goes my notion that birds aren't eating cherries!
  • I picked some ripe cherries, but this time, I ate them.
    
  • In the evening, I watched the Edmonton Oilers beat the Dallas Stars 2-1 and advance to the Stanley Cup Finals. They play the Florida Panthers to try to win the cup.