Dec. 9-15, 2024

Weather | 12/9, cloudy, 35°, 54° | 12/10, sunny, 27°, 39° |12/11, sunny, 27°, 30° | 12/12, cloudy, 15°, 17° | 12/13, p. cloudy, 7°, 31° | 12/14, 1.48" rain, 27°, 43° | 12/15, cloudy, 33°, 43° |

• Monday, 12/9: Making Kindling & Winterizing Strawberry Plants
  
  • Once Plato stepped outside this morning, he immediately barked at a pair of full-sized doe deer that were probably eating on the branches of the apple trees just south of the house. Plato gets all defensive and barks while bouncing up and down on stiffened legs when he sees any deer. I usually get on him to try to discourage him from barking at wildlife, but chasing deer away that were eating on our fruit trees is A-OK in my book.
    
  • We had a sunny beginning, with patchy ground fog, but it turned cloudy for the day starting around 9:30 a.m.
    
  • We vacuumed our normal squadrons of bugs inside the house.
    
  • Mary made kindling by breaking up tree branches that were dried inside the machine shed for several months. They make excellent kindling for starting fires in the woodstove.
    
  • I winterized the strawberry plants by first cutting all of the leaves off the plants. Even though we had temperatures in the single digits just four days ago, most strawberry plants had new leaf sprouts in the centers of the crowns. I then bunched all of the strawberry buckets and tubs into a diamond shape and circled them all with 30-inch high fencing. Finally, I used a pitchfork and raked up three wheelbarrow loads of tall grass that I cut when I cleared the trail to the ponds and put the grass into the tops of the buckets and tubs for insulation. Tomorrow, I'll deepen the grass level to the height of the fence, completely covering all strawberry containers.
    
  • This morning, a female bluebird that was above us in a tree along the lane was singing to us as we walked by with the dogs. Later in the day, we heard a pileated woodpecker banging on an ash tree in the north woods.
    

• Tuesday, 12/10: More Grass Insulation & Kindling Branch Collecting
  
  • I raked more tall grass from trails I cut last month and added it between the strawberry containers and the 30-inch fence circling the containers. It took eight wheelbarrow loads to fill that space. I've got about eight inches from the existing height of the grass to fill to the top of the fence (see photo, below). I think it will provide excellent insulation for the strawberry crowns. Areas where I removed the grass along the edges of the trails showed green grass, whereas out in the open, all of the grass is now brown. I'm keeping the strawberry containers outside in the near garden, because I think they will survive better with moisture from rainfall and snow melt. Plus, with better insulation from the grass, we might see better survival.
    
  • Mary picked up branches that have fallen out of trees in the yard and moved them to inside the machine shed to dry. She left behind green branches that still had dead leaves on them. After about a month of drying, she breaks them up into kindling.
    
  • Mary saw a buck rub on a persimmon sapling in the east yard that is very close to the far garden (see photo, below). She thinks a buck deer put it there within the past 15 days, since it still looks pretty fresh.
  • We watched the 2006 movie, The Holiday. It really is a delightful film.
  • We enjoyed a bottle of 2024 cherry wine. It was bottled on 9/22, so this wine is very young. It tastes marvelous, which is rare for a wine this young. Mary says she likes how the cherry flavor comes out as the wine rolls over your tongue. "It's not an instant flavor, but more of a developing flavor," she said. It has a very red/orange color that is quite attractive. We think this cherry wine is our new favorite.

Strawberry containers are under grass in this enclosure.

Buck rub on a sapling. Far garden is in the background.

• Wednesday, 12/11: Collecting Firewood
  
  • We had strong northwest winds today.
  • Mary put together a shopping list for tomorrow.
    
  • Mary and I took the tractor and wagon east of the far garden and found another dead and standing maple tree that I sawed down. I sawed up several branches into firewood logs. Mary filled the wagon with them. There's more of that tree that I want to saw up tomorrow, if we have time after our shopping trip. We unloaded big pieces into the machine shed and smaller pieces not requiring splitting into the woodshed.
    
  • A big flock of snow geese flew over the house right when we were heading down east for firewood. They were all blues. Some snow geese are white and others are blue.
    

• Thursday, 12/12: Shopping
  
  • The tires on the pickup looked low. I checked and they were all around 22 psi, so I used my mini air compressor and aired them all up to 35 psi, which is the air pressure listed on the driver's side door sticker.
    
  • We shopped in Quincy. It was great. Cool temperatures kept shoppers home and we had wide open aisles almost everywhere. I picked up two more coolers at the Salvation Army to store wine. The upstairs north bedroom is getting so full of wine-storage coolers that pretty soon Bill will have to sleep in the hallway when he visits...just kidding!
  • When we drove over the Memorial Bridge to enter Quincy, Mary saw a flock of bufflehead ducks near the Missouri shoreline of the Mississippi River.
    
  • While we were quietly shopping, some nitwit stole a large FedEx delivery van in Quincy and drove it almost to Palmyra, MO, before getting apprehended. Katie sent us a link via Facebook to an image of this occurrence. HERE is a link to a news story about it.
  • We watched two movies. They were Sleepless in Seattle and While You Were Sleeping. Maybe we were tired and unconsciously selected these titles.
    

• Friday, 12/13: Moving Hay & Firewood
  
  • In the early morning hours, while checking the thermometer, I heard a barred owl somewhere just outside our door, hooting away. Mary had a pair of red-shouldered hawks circle above her as she did a firewood search. We also spotted a bald eagle circling high above our property.
    
  • I moved four more wheelbarrow loads of hay to the strawberry plants. The fence enclosure needs even more, but I had to quit so we could get another load of firewood. Rain is predicted for tomorrow, so firewood collection is of utmost importance, today.
    
  • Mary moved a little more hay to chicken coop.
    
  • Then, she looked for a silver tree. A silver tree is a standing dead tree in which the bark falls off and the remaining wood turns to a gray/silver color. It usually signifies dry wood. She found such a tree, an ash that toppled onto several cedar trees and branches, keeping most of the wood above ground.
    
  • Mary and I drove the tractor and wagon to that dead ash tree, located east of the old cow barn, and cut most of it up into firewood. It is extremely hard wood that dulled the chains on both of my Stihl chainsaws. I didn't quite finish cutting up the trunk. We came away with a full trailer load of firewood.
    
  • Mary and I stacked big firewood chunks into the machine shed. Mary progressed into evening chores while I emptied the trailer and stacked smaller firewood pieces into the woodshed.
    
  • It was too cold and windy outside, so I cleaned the chainsaws inside after we had our nighttime meal.
    
  • I noticed an issue with the small chainsaw where some of the guides of the chain won't go into the slide along the edge of the bar. I looked it up online. It's due to burrs that develop on the guides that make the chainsaw flip the chain off the bar, which occurred today. I just need to file the burrs off these guides.
  • The new ash firewood was super nice in tonight's woodstove. It burns very hot and the fire lasts for a much longer time, compared to maple firewood.
    

• Saturday, 12/14: A Quiet Rainy Day
  
  • Mary woke around 6:30 and looked out the north window to see rain falling and ice on a Virginia creeper vine. At that point it was 27° and we had freezing rain, so she went right back to bed. We didn't get up until 9 a.m. and by then there was no more freezing rain. 
  • Throughout the day we saw rain. Freezing rain was just one county north of us and into Iowa. We're lucky. By nighttime, we had nearly 1.5 inches of rain.
  • After several days of outside work, we hibernated inside today next to the nice heat of the woodstove.
  • I now know why ash wood gets its name. After burning ash firewood, you're left with an abundance of ashes.
    
  • Mary wrapped all of the Christmas gifts, while I vacuumed up bugs. One of the detriments of warm outside temperatures is an increase in bugs crawling on windows inside our house.

• Sunday, 12/15: Racking & Bottling Jalapeño Wine
  • A couple of the guns we inherited from Mary's Uncle Herman have very dirty bores through the inside of their barrels, due to a lack of proper cleaning. I looked online and found some advice on ways to clean such a dirty bore. I found a website of a Columbia, MO company that sells gun supplies around the country that I can order from, which is relatively close to us. After the holiday season, I'll order a few things.
  • I walked our dogs on the trail to the ponds. At a point in the middle of the north field, Plato stopped dead in his tracks and wouldn't go any further. I suspect he smelled a coyote. I respected his nose, so we turned around and headed home.
  • Mary made a venison General Tso dish and used a new-to-us Krupp steamer to cook the rice. We bought it used (essentially brand new) from the Salvation Army store in Quincy, IL. Mary says it has some quirks. The timer zooms through some of its settings, then slows down in other parts. Plus, you have to watch to add water several times during the steaming process to a plastic inlet when it runs low. On the plus side, it perfectly cooked rice in 45 minutes, whereas the old Black & Decker steamer took 72 minutes to cook brown rice, which is what we eat. The heating element on the old steamer was failing, so recently cooked rice was rather crunchy. The venison in today's meal came from this year's doe. The meat was tender and quite good.
  • I racked the jalapeño wine for the fifth time and bottled it. A tiny bit of fines was hardly detectable in the bottom of the 3-gallon carboy, but once I poured the liquid into a measuring cup, the remaining wine was cloudy. The ending specific gravity was 0.992, giving it an 11.27 percent alcohol content. The pH was 3.2. I corked 15 wine bottles and we drank the remaining 300 ml of leftover wine. It contains a dark amber color and is mild in the heat department. It has a good summer pepper taste.
    
  • While I did my winemaking chores, Mary handstitched binding around the edge of a Christmas tree skirt, made from a tablecloth.
  • By today's dusk, Missouri comes to the end of all regular rifle hunting seasons, so we can quit wearing blaze orange clothing while outside. Yahoo!!! We wear blaze orange during rifle seasons, even in our yard, in case some trespassing hunter ventures onto our land.