August 19-25, 2024

Weather | 8/19, sunny, 62°, 81° | 8/20, sunny, 56°, 79°| 8/21, 0.03" rain, cloudy, 60°, 76° | 8/22, p. cloudy, 52°, 75° | 8/23, p. cloudy, 52°, 83° | 8/24, cloudy, 67°, 79° | 8/25, sunny, 69°, 92° |

• Monday, 8/19: Tall Thistles
  
  • We have thistles along the path between our gardens that reached eight feet tall (see photo, below). I carefully smelled a thistle flower. It has a wonderful aroma. Mary says it smells of honey.
  • I sharpened Mary's lawnmower blade. It was almost as sharp as a round log!
    
  • Mary and I propped up two fence posts on the southeast corner of the chicken yard. After we both heaved them upright, I drove two steel fence posts in the ground to support the old oak posts originally driven in the ground by Herman in 2008. This only kicks the can down the road until I replace the posts with treated timbers and new chicken wire.
    
  • Mary finished mowing the north yard. She saw small puffballs under the McIntosh apple tree.
    
  • I transplanted strawberry plants started from shoots. One went into a bucket never used when we got the strawberry plants this spring. I filled it with rotten wood bits and soil already mixed with old compost that we had in a garbage can in the machine shed. I also stuck two new strawberry shoots into potting mix, in case we have further plant deaths.
  • Mary picked five strawberries for tomorrow's breakfast.
    
  • I cut tall fox tail grass with hand clippers on a section of the chicken wire fence in the near garden.
    
  • We watched the first day of speeches at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The speeches, including Joe Biden's address, were good. Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock gave the best presentation.

  

  Thistles are 8 feet tall.

• Tuesday, 8/20: New Pickup Tags
  
  • This morning, I watched two great blue herons flying around in circles over Bass Pond while they croaked at one another. They sound like prehistoric dinosaur birds with a very distinctive call.
    
  • Mary searched for tomato hornworms and watered garden plants. There are rows of winter greens emerging in the tubs.
    
  • I got a vehicle inspection for the pickup at Lewistown Tire, then drove to our county seat in Monticello, MO, and got new license plate tags good for two years for the pickup. On the way to the license bureau, a rock flew off a Lewis County Electric Co-op truck and smacked the pickup's windshield, putting a two-inch semicircle crack at eye level just beyond the steering wheel. Luckily, I didn't get that windshield crack prior to the vehicle inspection, because it wouldn't have passed inspection.
    
  • We have shaggy mane mushrooms growing at the edge of the Porter's Perfection apple tree in the west yard (see photos, below). It's quite a classy mushroom.

A mushroom next to Porter's Perfection apple tree.

It's a shaggy mane mushroom.

• Wednesday, 8/21: New Record Player Furniture
  
  • We shopped in Quincy, today, as I tried to give the pickup's growling rear brakes the lightest touch. We picked up a piece of furniture with glass doors and drawers that we'll use for vinyl  and CD music storage. The record player Bill gave us for Christmas can go on top. We only spent $25 for it. We picked up a floor lamp to help me for evening reading. In Menards, we saw a tall monster called Bad Seed that I thought would be perfect for scaring woodpeckers off the apple trees (see video, below). For only $300, I'd have something that would work for maybe three hours.
    
  • On the evening chicken feeding time, I noticed that we have three shaggy mane mushrooms now growing next to the Porter's Perfection apple tree.
    
  • We listened to most of the Democratic National Convention for the third night. It was good.
    
  • While walking the dogs tonight, we heard a screech owl in the west woods. The dogs were both wagging their tails on an odor they defected in the grass along the lane.
  The Bad Seed monster in Menards.
  

• Thursday, 8/22: DNC Finale
  
  • Mary and I brought the record player cabinet inside from the back of the pickup and set it up in the living room. It looks nice. Dogs and cats walked up to it through the day and looked at their reflections off the glass doors.
    
  • After her tomato hornworm patrol, Mary watered the far garden. I helped her water the near garden. We have several acorn squash that are starting to grow. There's a multitude of peppers of all kinds that are developing. All of the strawberry transplants look good.
    
  • We watched the final day of the Democratic National Convention. Upon reflecting on other past conventions that I've seen, this was the most entertaining, with the most speakers. There are good people who are young who will have big impacts in the future. We watched it via the DNC website. It was so much better, because we didn't endure network dips telling us what to think. After four days of watching, Mary asked if she could read books and stay away from TV for a long time. We aren't used to gluing ourselves to a television for four long evenings.
  • Mary and I enjoyed a 2021 pear wine. Wow! It has a very nice pear flavor and aroma with an extreme golden color. This is a very good wine.
    

• Friday, 8/23: A Catch Up Day
  
  • Today was a day to catch up on things.
  • Mary scrubbed up the new cabinet and moved vinyl records into it, while putting the record player on top. It looks perfect in the corner of our living room.
  • I caught the checkbook up-to-date, cleaned air conditioning filters, and assembled the new reading light. I removed one of the three tubes to shorten its height so it shines directly on books I'm reading while sitting on my couch in the living room. I used it this evening and it works perfectly.
    
  • Hops cones are forming vines all around the outside of our house. We live in a hoppy house!
  • The woodpeckers won. The Granny Smith apple tree grew only a handful of apples this year. I noticed today that the last nice looking apple on that tree now has a woodpecker hole in it.
  • The shaggy mane mushrooms near the Porter's Perfection apple tree grew and now resemble the wide-brimmed hats sometimes worn by Asians.
  • We noticed that the electric fencer unit was down to only two red lights showing when we walked the dogs on their last outing, so I checked garden electric fence wires. Five wires on the northwest corner of the far garden fence were wrapped up. A rabbit, opossum, or a raccoon really got shocked. Two wires near the bottom were wrapped around each other about 10 times and then those wires were wrapped around the bottom wire. Above that, two more wires were wrapped up. Undoing all that mess took up quite a bit of time, in the dark, while holding a flashlight.
    

• Saturday, 8/24: Watering & Whacking
  
  • We experienced clouds all day, so the predicted high of 90 was never reached...yahoo!
    
  • With anticipated temperatures in the high 90s in upcoming days, Mary picked the most ripe green peppers. We had some in our midday meal of fajitas.
    
  • I weedwhacked under just over half of the electric fence wires in the far garden. As a way to keep down dust, I watered the ground just prior to running the string trimmer. It was effective. One two-gallon watering can full of water moistened the soil for about the distance between two or three fence posts. It's much better than eating dust while doing this job.
    
  • I helped Mary water gardens. The vine plants...cucumbers, squash, and sweet potatoes...are inching toward fences. We have several cucumbers and squash developing. We continue to get a handful of strawberries every day. They're a tasty addition to our morning oatmeal or waffles.
    
  • Every morning we hear more and more crowing from our developing cockerel chickens (see photo, below). This is the calmest group we've ever raised. They are a cinch to round up and herd back into the coop every evening.

  

  11-week old chickens. All but the front white one are cockerels.
  We will add her to our flock of hens.

• Sunday, 8/25: Helping Plants in the Heat
  
  • I mowed a little piece of grass around my winter greens, then used the clippings to mulch a thin layer of grass around the sprouts in each tub. The idea is to keep the ground cool around the winter greens during midday heat. I also installed a white lacy drape over top of the plants to lessen the afternoon sun.
    
  • I weedwhacked the rest of the far garden electric fence. It was hot, so long cooling breaks inside were necessary. We destroyed a gallon of iced tea in just a half a day.
    
  • Toward the end of my weedwhacking and after doing some serious housecleaning, Mary did a deep watering job on both gardens and picked worms and worm eggs. The huge acorn squash leaves showed signs of heat stress and were wilting prior to receiving water.
    
  • Since Mary suspected a greater worm infestation in the gardens, we went out after dark with an ultraviolet light flashlight to look for more worms. Besides the three she found during daylight hours, we discovered six more worms at night. They show up as brilliant green under a UV light.
  • A waning moon and Jupiter added to stars of the Milky Way after we finished.