August 5-11, 2024

Weather | 8/5, sunny, 71°, 91° | 8/6, cloudy,71°, 75°| 8/7, p. sunny, 64°, 79° | 8/8, 0.03" rain, cloudy, 60°, 81° | 8/9, p. cloudy, 55°, 73° | 8/10, sunny, 51°, 77° | 8/11, cloudy, 57°, 79° |

• Monday, 8/5: Cataract Assessment
  
  • We heard an eastern wood-peewee for the first time this year as we walked dogs this morning.
    
  • Mary and I went shopping in Quincy, prior to my eye appointment. I found another cooler at the Salvation Army to use for storing wine. Mary found an interesting cookbook called Charlston Receipts Repeats, featuring recipes from South Carolina's Sea Islands.
    
  • I went through my cataract assessment with Dr. Robert Weller at the Quincy Medical Group Eye & Vision Institute. I like him. He was the best at describing astigmatism, of which I have an extreme case. He said a perfect eye lens is spherical, like a baseball. My lens is more like a football. He said I also have oblong eyeballs, which creates my nearsightedness. We agreed to surgically removed cataracts in both eyes and correct my vision for distances. For a lot more money, he could also correct for close-up vision. I have no problem with just going with reading glasses. I have a pre-op visit with him on Sept. 24th. I have left eye surgery on Oct. 1st and right eye surgery on Oct. 8th. My left eye is my dominant eye. They gave me four different eye drops in each eye. Three involved dilating my pupils. One of them gave me a residue that when I washed my face later in the evening, put a bright yellow stain on the washcloth. It's really weird to wipe away a fluorescent yellow color from your face!
  • My eye surgery dates interfere with the first anterless deer season. I can't be hoisting heavy deer during the week after eye surgery. That's fine. It might be too hot to hunt on Oct. 11-13, if temperatures continue like they have through this summer. We will be done with chicken butchering by Oct. 1st, too.
    
  • We got back home by 4:30 p.m. to a happy, bouncing set of puppies. We watered gardens, then put the chickens to bed.
    
  • Most all of the beans popped out of the ground today. Plus, the vines of the acorn squash plants grew three feet in just one day.
    

• Tuesday, 8/6: Processed a Quarter of the Apples
  
  • Mary mowed our quarter-mile lane.
  • I processed 67 Empire apples into course applesauce for winemaking, putting 15 pounds in the freezer. I'm a quarter of the way through the apples. The best knife for cutting apples into quarters (see photo, below) is a long one that looks identical to a knife used by pioneers that we saw in the museum at the St. Louis Arch. It has a very excellent blade.
    
  • We had off-and-on mist throughout the day. Cloud cover kept temperatures low, which was a nice relief from summer heat.
    
  • I dumped apple cores at the edge of the north yard and noticed that all of the McIntosh apples were gone. Squirrels eat them before they develop into decent sized apples. I want to graft buds from that tree onto rootstock I planted south of the house, but I can't do that this year, because rabbits ate the tops of the rootstock saplings. Animals always teach us to adapt and grow things in ways that keep them away from our crops.
    
  • Mary took time in the evening to clean up weeds and encroaching grass in the near garden. She also checked tomatoes, tomatillos, and peppers for tomato horn worms. There were none.

  

  Our old knife with a foot-long ruler.

• Wednesday, 8/7: Halfway Through Apples
  
  • After breakfast, we watched hummingbirds feeding on comfrey flowers out our west living room window. A young bird was going from flower to flower and then it was chased away by an adult hummingbird.
    
  • Mary cross stitched on a project while listening to the end of the audio book entitled George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm, who were cousins and the king of England, and the emperors of Germany and Russia before and during World War I.
    
  • I also listened to her audio book while processing apples. I sliced and ground up six dozen apples, gaining a total of 31 pounds of course applesauce in the freezer. I need roughly 12 pounds to make a gallon of wine. I want to make at least 5-6 gallons of wine, so I need to keep processing apples. I'm halfway through the apples. There are 142 whole apples left in my milk crates, or 71 a day to process in the next two days.
    
  • While walking dogs on the last outing, we saw a strong Milky Way stretching across the nighttime sky.
    

• Thursday, 8/8: Wasp Sting
  
  • Mary mowed the east yard and started to mow the west yard. She mulched next to all bean plants and started filling in mulch around far garden tomato plants. As she was moving grass mulch out of the wheelbarrow, she felt what she thought was a raspberry plant sticker. The feeling got stronger. She looked down to see a wasp pumping venom into the webbing of the thumb on her right hand. She had to fling it off her hand. She came inside in pain. Immediately after rinsing her hand in cold water, she applied baking soda paste, which was soothing. Her hand and wrist swelled. She had to go back outside and finish unloading grass, then put everything away. That wasp sting ended outside activity for a couple days.
    
  • I processed another quarter of the apples, or about 72 of them. A total of just over 44 pounds of course applesauce is frozen. Last year, a two-gallon batch from 24 pounds gave me four gallons of liquid and resulted in three gallons for bottling. I'll just double that for six gallons to bottle. So, I only need four more pounds of applesauce, but I'll probably have a little more than that. I saved 12 Grade A quality apples out to eat. We also ate two in the evening. I'll probably save out a few more. They're tasty.
  • We experienced a little rain at 5 p.m. It started raining right as I reached the mailbox. I jogged home...haven't done that in awhile. All I had was two pieces of wet junk mail.
  • Chicory is very adaptive. We continue to cut it where it grows on our lane, so since it can't send up tall shoots to flower on, it instead flowers just under the cut height of the grass. Every morning we see several deep blue, almost purple, chicory flowers in the middle part of the lane. By afternoon, they've turned pale blue to almost white. It's a daily occurrence.
    

• Friday, 8/9: Empire Apple Processing Finished
  
  • Mary's wasp-bitten hand is swollen  and itchy, today. Her respite is a frozen bag of popcorn seeds. Cold water from the tap also helps. If she lets it fall to her side, it throbs. She mostly stayed inside.
    
  • I chopped and ground up apples for the last of what I need for apple wine. I have 51 pounds, 10.5 ounces of course applesauce in the freezer in seven one-gallon zippered bags. I made sure to use up imperfect apples, giving me 43 good apples to eat. Eight apples I saved out for us to eat tonight and 35 really nice apples are now in the fridge.
    
  • We watered all gardens. All plants are kicking butt!!!
  • Mary found luna moth wings in the lane next to the near garden gate. Something ate it.
  • She also spotted a wood frog in the sweet potato patch of the near garden. It was tan, like the mulch. Looking close at it, she saw it's back was starting to turn green to match the sweet potato vines. It appeared moldy at that moment.
    
  • Mary baked eight apples. She said they were very juicy when she cored them. They were amazingly good. Last year, the same variety of apples, baked, tasted bland. We believe these apples are fresher. Plus, they were picked just ahead of being ripe...a little on the tart side. It makes a big difference in their taste.
  • We watched the 2022 movie, Marry Me.
    

• Saturday, 8/10: Transplanting Strawberries
  
  • This morning, after letting out the chicks, we heard a cockerel crow for the first time. They will be nine weeks old on Monday, 8/12. Chickens grew up very quickly.
    
  • I transplanted four strawberry shoots that I placed into cups full of potting soil a few weeks ago. They are now nice looking plants, so they went into their own buckets. I also started two more shoots that will finish all needed new plants to replace locations where a few strawberry plants died.
    
  • I mowed on both sides of the near garden electric fence and mowed inside that garden. Mulch went under the Empire apple tree.
  • Blossoms are showing on the acorn squash and cucumber plants.
    
  • Mary stayed inside. Her hand is better, but more time is needed to get it fully recovered from the wasp sting. She now sports a small black hole on her right hand where the wasp's stinger went through the skin.
  • We each ate two sliced up Empire apples as an after evening meal dessert. They sure are delicious.
    

• Sunday, 8/11: Mowing & Mulching Fools
  
  • Mary and I both mowed and mulched. Mary mowed the west yard and finished mulching the near far garden. I mowed inside and outside of the far garden electrical fence, the inside of the near far garden and the area between the far garden and around the compost bins. More than half of inside the drip line under the Empire apple tree has new mulch.
  • The grass next to the compost bins was tall and juicy, so much so that my mower just wadded it up into gooey green gobs of mush. I'd dump grass globs out of the lawnmower bag, then lift the heavy goo-balls out of the wheelbarrow. It was easy smashing down weeds and grass under the Empire tree with these grass cannon balls.
  • One weed I cut out growing into Empire was a monster-sized poke berry plant. I opened the loppers as wide as they'd go and cut a 2.5- to 3-inch poke berry stalk and then hauled that poke berry "tree" away.
  • Mary and I saw frogs hopping away from the mowers. They're all over the place.
  • I lit an outdoor fire that we used to roast hotdogs. We heard a juvenile barred owl, which sorted sounded like a high-pitched cat meow. We saw one lone lightning bug and a bat.
  • After eating, we enjoyed a bottle of last year's perry. This pear cider is good. With a hint of cinnamon in it, perry reminds us that autumn is around the corner.