Oct. 6-12, 2025

Weather | 10/6, sunny, 60°, 82° | 10/7, 0.60" rain, cloudy to sun, 55°, 65° | 10/8, sunny, 43°, xx° | 10/9, xx°, xx° | 10/10, xx°, xx° | 10/11, xx°, xx° | 10/12, xx°, xx° |

• Monday, 10/6: Halloween Decorations
  • We heard coyotes howling during our predawn walk with Plato. Coyotes aren't usually howling at that hour.
  • I took the .22 rifle north to the machine shed to blast squirrels first thing in the morning. Two squirrels bounded across that building's tin roof and gave me a quick eyeball look, then spun around and loudly ran away. There's nothing quiet about a squirrel running on a tin roof! I never got a shot off.
  • An American kestrel flew over the yard as I was looking for squirrels this morning. Mary saw it, too.
  • After we let the chickens out and were back inside, I spotted a buck deer between the machine shed and the grain bins. He had a nice rack.
  • I picked up all of the soiled wall calendars and chicken feathers on the dirt floor of the machine shed. In past years, I left this stuff. I'm trying to eliminate feathers that mice stuff into the cracks and crevices of the woodsplitter engine.
  • Mary vacuumed spiders from throughout the house and found 11 Asian lady bugs, so the autumn/winter bug invasion has commenced.
  • I hunted squirrels in the late afternoon while sitting on a stool at the east side of the machine shed. I saw nothing. Then during evening chores I checked and two squirrels were in the tops of trees northeast of the machine shed. I tried a long shot and got another fox squirrel.
  • We put up the Halloween tree and decorations (see photos, below).
  • I finished Alexander Kent's 12th nautical novel, Signal—Close Action!, and started the 13th novel of the series, The Inshore Squadron.
  The fully decorated Halloween tree, this year with blinking lights.
   

  

  New Halloween pumpkin lights over a door in our kitchen.
  

• Tuesday, 10/7: House Plants & Racking Wine
  • We experienced a big rain at 4:30 a.m., when we weren't supposed to get much moisture. It amounted to 0.60 inches. Lightning and thunder got Mary out of bed to unplug appliances. She said rain was pounding on the house roof.
  • Mary cleaned all of the house plants and repotted the bay trees, which were brought inside the house from the woodshed where they were for the summer. She also started three plants, which were the rosemary plant, a ficas tree, and a pothos plant. The rosemary plant is 3-4 foot long and hangs to the floor off an old wooden chair seat. She wants to keep the ficas tree small. The pothos plant grew to about 25 feet long, wrapped around the pot. Once her restarts grow, she'll discard old plants.
  • Mary also cleaned the sunroom.
  • I racked the following two wines:
    
    • Apple - Deep fines meant I lost about a half gallon of liquid from must that was in a 3-gallon carboy and two 1-gallon jugs. The resulting must filled a 3-gallon carboy, a half-gallon jug, and a 750-ml wine bottle. This was the second racking, so I added 0.7 grams of Kmeta. The specific gravity was 1.000 and the pH was 3.0. Mary and I tasted a bit of it. This batch has a very strong apple flavor.
    • Cherry - Fines were much smaller on the third racking of this wine. The resulting liquid filled a 6.5-gallon and a 5-gallon carboy, along with a 750-ml wine bottle. I went directly from carboys to carboys, without adding any additives. The specific gravity was 0.994 and the pH was 3.1. The 500 ml of leftover wine was our before supper treat. It was good, even for a young wine. It will get better with aging.
  • Mary spotted the first duck of the season. It was impossible to identify...a small, dark form against a dim sky.
  • She also heard a big tree fall in the southwest woods. The sound of it falling at first resembled firecrackers. A few seconds later she heard creaking and groaning, followed by a loud crash. We might have future firewood to seek out. It's not far from the west yard.

Sept. 29-Oct. 5, 2025

Weather | 9/29, sunny, 57°, 83° | 9/30, p. cloudy, 56°, 85° | 10/1, p. cloudy, 57°, 80° | 10/2, p. cloudy, 59°, 86° | 10/3, sunny, 60°, 85° | 10/4, sunny, 61°, 83° | 10/5, sunny, 56°, 83° |

• Monday, 9/29: Deer CWD
  • After three very late nights, we're tired.
  • When letting chickens out of the coop this morning, we opened the gate between the south and north yards so that the five new pullets, the hens, and Leo, our rooster, could get to know one another. 
  • I cleaned up chicken butchering stuff. I still need to put away the lights that I set up.
  • I took a nap while Mary watered the gardens, picked tomatoes and a few tomatillos.
  • I took in a Webex session by the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) on deer management. Missouri is one of the better localities in North America at managing Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in whitetail deer. Statewide, less than one percent of the deer herd has CWD. Wisconsin and Alberta have much higher concentrations of the disease. In northwest Arkansas, over 50 percent of the deer have CWD. It's very fatal to deer and takes 1.5 to 2.5 years before a deer dies as the disease slowly attacks the spine and brain. There is no known cure for CWD. The best remedy is to cull deer from areas where an outbreak occurs. MDC works with landowners to cull deer after hunting seasons. Landowners can have the meat of deer culled that don't have CWD, or the meat is donated to the state's Share the Harvest program, in which surplus venison is donated to needy families. We have a good conservation department in this state.

• Tuesday, 9/30: Buying Chicken Feed
  • The cockerels that we butchered ate up two bags of food in just a few days. At the end, we could only get five days out of a 50-pound bag. So, I drove to Quincy to get more hen food. I also picked up a few other items, like another 2.5 gallon container of hydraulic fluid and a swivel coupler for the woodsplitter. Mary gave me a list of a few food items, too. While at Sam's Club, I got my second shingles shot. The pharmacist said, "You're set for life," once he gave me the shot.
  • While I was away, Mary froze more tomatoes from the garden. We now have 9.5 gallons in the freezer.
  • We watched the first Harry Potter movie.
  • While walking Plato at night, we saw a rare moon dog, a rainbow-like feature similar to a sun dog, but created by the moon. It was unique.
  • The soreness of the shingles shot grew more intense so that by bedtime, I took a couple acetaminophen to ease the pain.

• Wednesday, 10/1: Shingles Shot is Severe for Me
  • While getting my blood glucose reading, I became so light headed that I passed out in the bathroom. Our bathroom is tiny. The top of my head hit the lower cabinet door with a bang. Mary hollered from upstairs, asking if I was okay. I didn't hear her, because I was out cold. I came to noticing a severe crook in my neck and rolled over to relieve the pain. I sloughed off to the couch and Mary covered me. For much of the rest of the day, I was cold, so I wore extra clothes and slept a lot. The second shingles shot really knocked me for a loop! Mary said it's a good thing I got the shot, because developing shingles might have been devastating for me. She also thought I was low on liquids and as a result, I drank a lot today. By evening, I felt much better and was able to do the evening chores.
  • Mary pulled down all of the garlic from the machine shed rafters, sorted it, and stored the garlic in cardboard boxes. She said that this year's garlic crop was smaller, but of a better quality.
  • She also picked more tomatoes and peppers.
  • We had a taco salad for our midday meal, complete with lettuce and arugula picked from the winter greens tubs, along with ripe tomatoes from the garden. It was really good.

• Thursday, 10/2: Katie News
  • We are very hot and dry. It doesn't feel like October. It's more like August.
  • Mary washed winter coats and dried them on the line. It was an excellent drying day.
  • She also strung hot peppers to dry. The different varieties make for a colorful arrangement (see photo, below).
  • Mary also harvested comfrey leaves and laid them out to dry.
  • Mary watered all of the gardens.
  • She recently took some photos of autumn flowers (see one of them below). 
  • I removed the wall inside the chicken coop that separates the adult hens from the chicks. I swept off all of the boards and studs and stored them in the rafters of the machine shed.
  • I started taking down the lights that we used for chicken butchering in the machine shed.
  • Mary spotted a really giant Carolina wolf spider on the lane that was carrying babies. We have a lot of them on this property. 
  • We ate a Granny Smith apple after I cleaned out bad sections from it. The taste is so different from store-bought apples.
  • After dark, Mary and I enjoyed a bottle of 2023 pumpkin wine. This wine tastes the best when chilled with ice. It's a nice tasty fall drink after a hot autumn day.
  • Katie texted. She spent three weeks of August in Hawaii on a National Guard stint where she was the enlisted person in charge of coordinating small projects for 60 people. In her full-time job, she's starting one project, in the middle of another, and closing out a third. She was in Nome for a day last week and in Barrow Saturday through Tuesday. Snow is on the Chugach Range next to Anchorage and it's winter in Barrow (see photos, below).

Hot peppers hung to dry. They are Ho Chi Mihn (yellow),
Bulgarian carrot (orange), and hot Portugal (red).

A photo taken by Mary of a heath astor.

Termination dust, or snow, covers the Chugach
Mountains south of Anchorage.

It's now winter in Barrow, AK.

• Friday, 10/3: Air Conditioner Mishap
  • As we stepped out in the predawn light to walk Plato, two deer snorted at us and ran away from the south orchard. They stood in the field and looked at us, so I marched into the tall grass until they finally ran away into the west woods.
  • I took down the rest of the lights that were up in the machine shed that we used while butchering chickens. I cleaned them up, along with all of the extension cords, and put them away.
  • While cleaning house, Mary discovered water on the floor below the air conditioner in our bedroom. Condensation from the AC was leaking all over the place. I removed it. The AC was leaking into the channel below the bottom sash, swamping it with water that overflowed into the wall and beyond to the floor. After wiping up water from the window sill, I directed a fan on it to help dry it out. I rinsed out the AC, but Virginia Creeper leaves and what I call "frog snot" was still inside, so I removed the cover and flushed it thoroughly with a high pressure setting from the garden hose. I cut a new 2x4 to length that supports the inside of the AC, since the old one was waterlogged. When I installed the AC in the window, I positioned it more level, since lowering the outside end of the AC downward put the drain hole under the AC's compressor directly above the window channel. I taped it all back up and now condensation drips to the outside, like it's intended to do.
  • Mary picked and froze tomatoes. Even though she's throwing away more tomatoes away than she's keeping, she's still getting several. She started the twelfth gallon of tomatoes in the freezer.
  • Mary also picked and hung more hot peppers to dry.
  • We watched The House with a Clock in Its Walls. It's a fun movie.

• Saturday, 10/4: Cleaning the Coop
  • I cleaned the chicken coop. Several wheelbarrow loads of manure went to the compost bin. I swept loads of cobwebs and three wasp nests from the ceiling and walls. While sweeping the floor, our oldest white hen stuck her head through the south chicken door three times and squawked real loud to me, as if to say, "Hurry up, Buster!" Mary hauled three large wheelbarrow loads of hay and spread it on the coop floor, giving the coop a nice cut hay smell. I built nests in the milk crate nest boxes with some of the hay. 
  • Mary watered the gardens, then mowed part of the north yard. She put mulch on some of the small apple trees in the south orchard.
  • We ate the Roxbury Russet apple. It's a motley looking apple (see photo, below). I let it stay on the tree too long. It was mealy and without much juice, but it tasted very good. Most of the taste was in the skin. Most online sources indicate October as the time to pick this variety. It's not so for us. This apple should be picked in September when grown here.

  

  The Roxbury Russet apple feels fuzzy to the touch. It's tasty.
  

• Sunday, 10/5: Woodsplitter Ready & Acorn Squash Harvest
  • Online agriculture sources show us to be in a moderate drought. Most all ground shows big cracks, due to the dry clay soil.
  • Mary picked and froze tomatoes. She finished the twelfth gallon in the freezer. She also hung hot peppers. She harvested 65 acorn squash (see photo, below). There are still a few unripe squash in the garden, but Mary decided to stop watering squash plants. She watered both gardens, which takes less time with fewer plants.
  • Mary had a speckled kingsnake cross her path between the gardens. She said it's a very pretty snake. It is sometimes called a salt and pepper snake, due to white spots on a black body. HERE's a photo of it. 
  • I cleaned chicken items, such as the hanging feeder, a chick grit dish, and three ceramic eggs that we put in the nests to let young hens know where to lay eggs.
  • I hooked up the last hydraulic hose on the woodsplitter by adding a new swivel coupler. I removed the old hydraulic tank breather, which was nothing more than a 90 degree 1/4 inch black pipe street elbow that a mud dauber filled up with dried mud. I added a new breather that has a bronze screen. I added five gallons of hydraulic fluid and started the splitter's engine. After fully extending and detracting the hydraulic ram three times, I tested the splitter on a piece of apple wood and it split the log just fine. I dumped the old fluid into the empty hydraulic oil containers and discovered I removed 3.5 gallons from the splitter. It means the oil level was low by 1.5 gallons. Right now, the level is at 6 inches in a tank that's 8 inches high, which is about perfect. After checking all fittings, I tightened two to stop slow leaks. The woodsplitter is now ready and 16 years after I first set eyes on it and said that we need to change hoses, it's finally done!
  • In the middle of evening chores, I heard nut shells dropping on the grain bin roof. I grabbed the .22 rifle, snuck into the machine shed, spotted it high near the top of a pecan tree, and shot a big fox squirrel that bounced off the top of the grain bin with a mighty loud thump.
  • We watched the second Harry Potter movie.

  

  65 freshly-picked acorn squash in the wheelbarrow.

  
   

Sept. 22-28, 2025

Weather | 9/22, p. cloudy, 61°, 81° | 9/23, .26" rain, cloudy, 62°, 71° | 9/24, cloudy, 61°, 75° | 9/25, sunny, 53°, 75° | 9/26, sunny, 55°, 81° | 9/27, sunny, 57°, 83° | 9/28, sunny, 57°, 87° |

• Monday, 9/22: Trimming Trails and Freezing Produce
  • I sharpened the steel blade for the Stihl trimmer, then whacked down tall grass and weeds on the trails to the killing cone and to the compost bins. Then I clipped down tall grass around the compost bins. I discovered a large branch that fell out of the pecan tree nearest to the house. The walnut tree next to our killing cone grew a branch that now nearly covers the cone. I'll have to cut it away.
  • I pulled out giant and yellow foxtail that grew inside the compost bins. One clump sunk its roots into about a quarter of the top of the compost. It took a lot of time beating the roots against the sides of the compost bin to get all of the compost to dislodge from the root mass.
  • I mowed the trails from the house to the compost bins and to the machine shed.
  • Mary picked more tomatoes, hot peppers, sweet peppers, and strawberries. She froze all but the strawberries. We now have five gallons of tomatoes in the freezer, which is enough for one batch of salsa. We also have three quarts of hot peppers, enough for three salsa batches. Twenty packages of green peppers went into the freezer today, with a total 49 green pepper packages in the freezer from this year.
  • A walking stick showed up on our screen door (see photo, below).
  • I picked and we ate the two Calville apples for dessert during our midday meal of venison on potatoes. Calville is by far the best tasting apple that we raise.
  • Our chicks, that are now fully grown, are 15 weeks old, today. 

A walking stick insect on our screen door.

Calville...ugly apples, but the best taste.

• Tuesday, 9/23: Rain & Squirrel Hunting
  • Rain was predicted by the afternoon, so Mary picked tomatoes immediately after breakfast and then froze more of them. We now have 5.5 gallons of tomatoes in the freezer.
  • I shoveled leftover compost from the eastern bin to the top of the middle bin and then installed a piece of tin on south side to close it up. Rust holes are forming on the north side, so I got a piece of tin that's half the height of the original tin that I will use to reinforce that side. Rain started falling, which ended my outside work.
  • It rained 3-4 hours with a steady drizzle.
  • While the rain fell, I sat where it was dry in the east end of the machine shed and hunted squirrels in the pecan trees. The little buggers are starting to grab pecan nuts. I got one squirrel. A big and wise fox squirrel spotted me and jumped from tree to tree to zip off to the north.
  • I was scheduled to view a Webex session on monarch butterflies, but forgot about it while hunting squirrels...DAMN! 
  • When we walked Plato in the evening, I went on down the lane to get the mail. When Mary and Plato turned to go back home, there was a yearling deer in middle of lane. The deer stood and looked at Plato and Mary for over a minute. Mary said Plato stood still and calmly looked back at the deer, never barking or stirring. "He was a perfect older gentleman dog," said Mary. 
  • We watched the film, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindewald.

• Wednesday, 9/24: Getting Ready for Chicken Butchering
  • I cut up downed branches with the small Stihl chainsaw. One large branch fell sometime this summer from a pecan tree and covered the trail from the machine shed to the killing cone. I also cut down a walnut branch that grew out and covered the killing cone.
  • I set up lights in the machine shed after backing the 8N Ford tractor until the trailer behind it was just at the edge of the rain drip line on the east end of the building. The lights are needed for nighttime chicken butchering. I also put down old Mid-Rivers wall calendars to catch stuff that drops to the ground while butchering.
  • As I was setting up lights, Mary defrosted the big freezer, then created an empty space for future frozen chickens.
  • I watched a Fine Homebuilding webinar on WRB, or water-resistive barriers used in house construction. It was interesting and very informative.
  • Mary picked more tomatoes, cut ripe ones up, and froze more of them. She is now into the seventh gallon of tomatoes in the freezer.
  • We saw a cooper's hawk while walking the puppy this evening. It floated over the lane and flew off to the east, then disappeared into a cedar tree.
  • I spent a couple minutes at sunset squirrel hunting. I didn't see any, but heard one sassing in the woods to the north of me. A bird started yelling at me from the inside of the machine shed. I think it was some kind of a wren. I kept hearing something moving around on the ground in the woods. When I worked the .22 rifle's lever action to remove the bullet from the chamber, the click of the gun caused a deer to sniff quietly from the woods. It was similar to a deer snort, just a lot softer.

• Thursday, 9/25: More Butchering Prep
  • After a bit of housecleaning, Mary made chocolate chip/oatmeal cookies for treats while we butcher chickens.
  • Everywhere you look outside, you see sulfur butterflies. We're also seeing more monarch butterflies than we've seen in many years.
  • I set up two step ladders with a spud bar between them just east of the machine shed. We hang chickens from the bar prior to skinning them.
  • I added half a tin to the bottom north side of the west compost bin where the current tin shows rusty holes. Then I raked tall grass that I knocked down on the trail from the machine shed to the killing cone and filled up the empty compost bin with grass. Finally, I mowed the trail to the killing cone and put clippings outside of the compost bins to use in the future.
  • I added a few pieces of aluminum tape to the killing cone. I also filled four buckets with water and put them in locations where they will be needed for butchering. These four buckets sat empty next to the outside hydrant all day. By late afternoon, 22 blister beetles collected in the buckets. I'm guessing they liked the yellow/green color of the plastic in these buckets.
  • By 6 p.m., we decided to put off butchering for one more day. I was tired and still needed to sharpen several knives. We'll start tomorrow night.
  • We watched the film, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.
  • We didn't get very far down the lane while walking Plato at night before coyotes howled from our south field. Plato listened for a bit, spun around and headed home in a hurry. He hates coyotes.

• Friday, 9/26: Butchering Chickens Commences
  • At noon while walking Plato, a big prairie kingsnake was in the middle of the lane near the Sargent crabapple tree.
  • Mary picked and froze tomatoes. She started gallon bag number eight of tomatoes in the freezer. She also picked a few strawberries.
  • I sharpened knives for butchering chickens, plus one dull paring knife Mary uses. It totaled nine knives.
  • I attended to last minute butchering details when I found a big plains leopard frog sitting at the bottom of a bucket of water (see photos, below). I dumped it out and got new water.
  • We butchering eight cockerel chickens, starting at 7:45 p.m. and ending around 2 a.m. Around 11 p.m., coyotes howled to the south and southeast. I heard a couple barred owls early in the nighttime. Stargazing was amazing, as the Milky Way crossed the clear nighttime sky. As the celestial sky rotated around Polaris, we watched Gemini, Pleiades, and then Orion rise above the eastern horizon. I saw dozens of spider eyes shining in the grass as they reflected light back from my hat light. Mary, who walked behind me in the dark, noticed several glow worms giving off their whitish, green luminosity. Life is truly magical at night. We have two more nights of chicken butchering ahead of us. 

A plains leopard frog in a bucket of water.

The same frog, but with sky and leaves reflecting off the water's surface.

• Saturday, 9/27: Butchering Night 2
  • Mary picked more tomatoes and is close to finishing up the eighth gallon bag in the freezer. She also watered garden plants.
  • I cleaned up chicken butchering items.
  • After a midday meal of waffles, we napped in the late afternoon.
  • We went through another 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. chicken butchering session and handled eight more cockerels. Wild animals were busy. After a coffee and cookie break midway through the birds, I spotted eyes glowing back at me from the northwest edge of the far garden. I spotted them, again, about 20 feet north of the original spotting. Based on the swift and silent movement and the fact that the eyes were somewhat low to the ground, we think it was a fox. Mice did calisthenics in the machine shed, making noise and zipping all around. At one point, I caught a glimpse of something larger than a mouse...it might have been a mink, since they're nocturnal hunters. I heard coyotes howl a couple times, lots of barred owls, and the chirp sound of a flying squirrel in the pecan trees east of the machine shed. The stars were amazing on another clear night. 
  • During the coffee and cookie break, I finished Alexander Kent's eleventh nautical fiction novel, Form Line of Battle and started the twelfth book entitled Signal—Close Action!

• Sunday, 9/28: Butchering Is Done!!!
  • This morning we watched a turkey vulture at the top of a dead tree in the west woods soak up the heat from the morning sun. It spread its wings so that it looked like a thunderbird at the top of a totem pole. It probably overnighted in that tree and after we spotted it, the bird was probably there for another hour.
  • Mary picked more tomatoes while I cleaned up chicken butchering items.
  • We repeated yesterday by taking afternoon naps...a little longer today.
  • During our final night of chicken butchering we noticed how much more mature the birds were compared to just two days earlier. One barred rock cockerel was big, feisty, and extremely tough to skin and cut up. He was so big that Mary had to set meat pieces sideways in order to fit the cut-up bird into a one-gallon bag for the freezer. We decided that 15.5 weeks is the outermost limit of growing time before we need to butcher chickens. Tomorrow, these birds would have turned 16 weeks old. The eight birds left tonight were too mature. We took an extra half hour to complete tonight's butchering session, due to tougher chickens. Thank goodness it's all done! Mary and I look forward to a full night's sleep.
  • Barred owls were really talking a lot throughout the night. I also heard flying squirrels in the pecan trees several times. The stars were really amazing. I didn't hear coyotes, but when Mary walked Plato around midnight, he didn't get far before he spun around to go home, indicating coyotes were there, but not howling. 

Sept. 15-21, 2025

Weather | 9/15, p. cloudy to thunderstorm, 0.64" rain, 67°, 89° | 9/16, p. cloudy, 60°, 87° | 9/17, sunny, 60°, 89° | 9/18, cloudy to thunderstorms, 0.81" rain, 64°, 81° | 9/19, morning fog, p. cloudy, 0.01" rain, 59°, 79° | 9/20, cloudy, 0.15" rain, 64°, 69° | 9/21, morning fog, cloudy, 0.15" rain, 60°, 78° |

• Monday, 9/15: Nice Rain...YAHOO!!!
  • We finally witnessed a nice rain of about 3/4". The last time we had anywhere near this amount of rainfall was on August 9th, over a month ago, when we got 0.59". A front stalled over us and gave us a couple significant thunderstorms. We even walked through water puddles after the rain.
  • I added 2 grams of diammonium phosphate (DAP) to the apple wine brew bucket and worked up a starter batch of Red Star Côte des Blancs yeast throughout the day. I pitched the yeast into the brew bucket prior to bedtime. The specific gravity was 1.057, a 17-point drop from yesterday's reading of 1.074. This indicates that wild yeast from the apples was already working down the sugar content. There was a slight vinegar odor coming from the wild yeast fermentation. As soon as I dumped in my yeast starter, a familiar wine yeast smell filled the air.
  • Mary picked a full four-gallon bucket of hazelnuts.
  • While she was picking these nuts, she heard a tree frog calling. It sensed rain when no weather forecast called for rain. We need to pay attention to tree frogs. 
  • Mary and I husked all of the hazelnuts during the thunderstorms (see photo, below).
  • We both picked tomatoes and hot peppers before the thunderstorms hit. After dark, Mary sorted ripe tomatoes from unripe ones and froze ripe tomatoes and hot peppers.
  • Mary startled a covey of Bob White quail from under the walnut trees on our lane while doing evening chores.
  • The doorknob on the chicken coop quit working. It was an old-fashioned knob. The screws holding the device together were buried under rosette, or the cover just beyond the knob handle. I sawed the inside and outside knobs off with a hacksaw, then unscrewed other parts. Hens on the roost just inside the door hated the sound of my hacksaw on metal. It was getting dark, so I leaned a metal fence post against the outside of the chicken coop door to keep it shut. I'll have to install a used doorknob on that door, tomorrow.
  • I heard two great horned owls calling to one another as I finished evening chores.
  • After dark, while Mary and I were reading, a pack of coyotes howled from our west yard, which is just steps away from the chicken yard and our house. After we walked Plato, I went to check the chicken coop door to make sure it was secure (it was fine) and coyotes howled from just south of the house. I walked to the south orchard and shined my flashlight south into the fog. The coyotes shut up once the flashlight lit up the fog. This morning (9/16), Mary found coyote scat under the east side of the clothesline.

  

  Nearly a full basket of husked hazelnuts.
  

• Tuesday, 9/16: Junk Box Isn't So Junky
  • I checked old door knobs with the current door on the chicken coop and they don't fit with the holes in that door. The door knob I cut out with a hacksaw was smaller. I'll probably go with some kind of a latch system like we currently use on the chicken doors.
  • The apple wine yeast is humming right along. Twelve hours after I poured in the yeast, the specific gravity was five points lower at 1.052. Before bedtime, it dropped another nine points to 1.043. I might be racking it tomorrow. 
  • While trying to find a latch for the human door in the chicken coop, I grabbed a cardboard box that we call the "junk box" and decided to clean it out. It weighed a ton. Most of the weight was due to tools. I moved tools out of a small yellow toolbox, cleaned it out, and designated it as our house toolbox. All of those tools went into that toolbox. I tossed a bunch of outdated things from the junk box, such as old keys (we had three pairs of keys to the 1984 Suburban in there), and bagged several like items. It's very much lighter, now.
  • I attended a Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) Webex session dedicated to Missouri reptiles, which was very interesting.
  • Mary picked more tomatoes and hot peppers, then froze them. She also picked a few strawberries. The ground under all garden plants was damp and there was no need for watering. That is a nice break.
  • We experienced more coyotes howling at night while walking Plato. One yipped from just south of the house, while others howled from just north of us. I shined the flashlight into the south orchard trees and waved the light around. That coyote immediately shut up and probably moved on. I'm guessing we have a lot of bunnies near the house and that's attracting coyotes.

• Wednesday, 9/17: Sweet Potato Harvest
  • I checked the apple wine twice during the day, getting a specific gravity of 1.037 the first time and 1.031 the second time. Each time that I checked this wine, I squeezed the three nylon mesh bags to release more liquid. The contents in each bag is reducing as more liquid leaves the apple pulp. Racking this wine for the first time will definitely occur tomorrow.
  • Mary dug up the sweet potatoes. After 16 years of putting down grass mulch, she was able to search out the sweet potatoes with her bare hand, instead of with a shovel or trowel, because the soil is now nice and soft. The numbers of sweet potatoes weren't as good as last year, but were still respectable. After laying them out to dry (see photo, below), she stored them in two milk crates in the back porch closet.
  • Mary and I watered the gardens. The task is quicker now that there are fewer plants to water.
  • While putting the chickens to bed, we noticed huge cracks in the ground in the north chicken yard, due to very dry soil. Mary stuck a stick a foot down into one of the cracks. Our clay soil cracks a lot when dry.
  • I cut the bad parts out of an apple that fell off the Granny Smith apple tree that we ate. It was very delicious.

  

  This year's sweet potato harvest set out to dry.
  

• Thursday, 9/18: A Tree Frog's Rain Prediction
  • I checked the apple wine twice, today. During the morning check, the specific gravity was 1.023, so I left it. Then after dark, the specific gravity was 1.021. It hardly moved. I checked the specific gravity with a different hydrometer and got similar results. I decided that the yeast in the wine ran out of sugar, so I added a quarter pound of sugar, which raised the specific gravity to 1.022. I racked the wine into a three gallon carboy and two 1-gallon jugs. From a two gallon recipe I got four gallons after squeezing the three nylon mesh bags. There was a lot of juice in that applesauce.
  • During the day, I cleaned the middle of the east end of the machine shed to make room for a place to park the riding mower. Since I bought it, the mower was parked right behind the 8N Ford tractor and trailer. I removed all burnable trash and several dozen empty dog and cat food bags, sunflower seed bags, and chicken food bags. I restacked cat litter buckets in an orderly fashion and had lots of room for the riding mower. Then I swept off all feed bags and rolled them up into three bundles.
  • I watched a Missouri Department of Conservation fly tying Webex session detailing how to treat and save wild bird skins to use as feather material for tying flies.
  • Mary picked and husked a full four-gallon bucket of hazelnuts. I helped her at the end.
  • She also picked and froze tomatoes and hot peppers. We now have 2.66 gallons of frozen tomatoes.
  • She picked a small bowl of strawberries destined for tomorrow's waffles. 
  • Mary brought the Halloween tree, which is an old dried up cedar tree, from out of the woods and stored in the machine shed.
  • Mary watered the gardens, but with a smaller amount of water, because a tree frog told her it was about to rain by croaking, briefly. The frog was right. The U.S. Weather Service only gave us a 20 percent chance of rain.
  • Thunderstorms brought heavy rain after dark. We got under an inch of rain.

• Friday, 9/19: Hornworms Still Chomping Tomato Leaves
  • Mary hung the same laundry on the line twice, today. While she hung it the first time, looming clouds started appearing southwest and west of us. She went inside, looked on the radar, and saw that a storm was tracking right for us, so she took down the partially dry laundry. We had a little shower and then she hung them back up an hour later.
  • Mary picked and froze tomatoes and hot peppers. There are now 3.33 gallon bags of tomatoes in the freezer, along with 2.5 quart bags of hot peppers.
  • I took in a Missouri Department of Conservation webinar about sowing wildflower seeds. It was a yawner...very basic and elementary information.
  • I installed three handles on the human door of the chicken coop. These are cabinet handles that we once bought as replacements in our kitchen, but never used. With the thought of building a new home, we are no longer interested in using them. Two are now on the inside of the coop door and one is on the outside to help us open and shut the door. Next, I'll cover the old door knob holes and add a simple wooden swivel latch to hold the door shut from the outside.
  • Mary searched the gardens with a UV flashlight and found 32 worms after dark. Most of the worms are tobacco hornworms. Earlier in the summer, they were mostly tomato hornworms. Usually, there is a mix of both types.
  • While she was searching for worms, a fledgling barred owl was sounding off from a nearby tree sapling just east of the far garden. This was after she saw an adult barred owl fly by to the north of the garden. The baby squawked for several minutes before flying off to the southeast.
  • I finished reading Alexander Kent's tenth novel, Enemy In Sight! and started the eleventh in the series entitled, The Flag Captain. I read these two novels as a high school kid in Homer, AK. They're still a great read over 50 years later.

• Saturday, 9/20: Chicken Human Door Finished
  • We experienced small episodes of rain throughout the day.
  • I finished working on the human door of the chicken coop between the rains. I cut three pieces of lauan plywood and screwed them on the door to cover the old doorknob holes and countersunk holes left when I screwed in the handles. I cut a piece of half-inch oriented strand board and screwed it onto the door so that it was level with the wall of the chicken coop. I found a metal safety hasp and installed that on the door. I also installed a magnet door catch to hold the hasp open when not in use, so it won't accidentally swing over the door when we are inside the coop. I found a small carabiner and put it through the hasp to hold it in place during the night when the door is shut.
  • At one point while working on the coop door, I saw a buff orpington cockerel chasing another white cockerel all around the north chicken yard. After several continual laps by that chicken, I walked into the north yard and intercepted the charging buff orpington. Then several chickens ran to the north end of the yard and clucked vigorously. We need to get our butchering chicken chore accomplished. The cockerels are getting too mature!
  • There are some wild grapes at the entrance to the south chicken yard. Mary and I tasted a couple. They are very dark, sweet, and tasty. You only get a small taste. They are very tiny.
  • We watched the movie, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

• Sunday, 9/21: Sandwich Bags of Apple Slush
  • Back when I was making apple bits in the food processor for future apple wine and mentioning how wonderful it tasted, Mary got the idea to create one-person portions of that crude applesauce in the freezer to use in our morning oatmeal. It's easier to process, the skins can be kept on (which cannot be done when processing slices of apples that are blanched and frozen), plus individual portions can be frozen in sandwich bags. Today we sliced up, then ground up all of the Liberty and Porter's Perfection apples that Bill and I picked 10 days ago. Mary sliced several while I washed and scrubbed them with a brush. She switched to running the food processor and bagging what she called apple slush into one-portion sandwich bags. Twelve of these bags went into a quart bag for the freezer. I cut off poor sections of the bad apples and sliced them. We froze 58 portions of apples. We still have Granny Smith and Goldrush apples to process the same way. 
  • Mary picked tomatoes and hot peppers from the far garden. 
  • Thunder rumbled south of us while we finished evening chores. Rain started falling in earnest as I washed the chicken waterers, then it really set in after we were done with chores. We need the rain, but the daily showers are slowing our start of chicken butchering.

Sept. 8-14, 2025

Weather | 9/8, sunny, 48°, 75° | 9/9, p. cloudy, 51°, 79° | 9/10, sunny, 52°, 83° | 9/11, sunny, 59°, 86° | 9/12, p. cloudy, 60°, 91° | 9/13, p. cloudy, 67°, 93° | 9/14, sunny, 66°, 93° |

• Monday, 9/8: Tasting Apples
  • Mary used her scythe and cut down hay in the east yard. We should have plenty of hay with this cutting.
  • I got the photos transferred to my new phone and downloaded several apps.
  • Mary took a photo on her new phone of goldenrod (see below). The new camera takes wonderful photos. 
  • I mowed the lane. Small yellow foxtail grass was hard to cut, since it's tough and dry.
  • Mary watered all of the gardens, while I watered small trees and blueberries.
  • We saw a large number of monarch butterflies and large dragonflies migrating through all day. It's the most monarchs we've seen in a number of years.
  • Boneset is blooming now and all of the pollinators love it.
  • We ate a wonderful evening meal of caramelized shallots and over-easy eggs. The shallots gave the eggs a great taste. 
  • We tried a Liberty apple and two Goldrush apples. The Liberty apples are deep red, almost purple color. The Liberty apple was firm and juicy with a slight tart taste. It doesn't have a complex taste as some of the other apples, such as Calville, Roxbury Russet, or Goldrush. Seeds in the Liberty apple are black, so it's time to pick apples from that tree.

  

  Goldenrod: A photo taken by Mary.
  

• Tuesday, 9/9: First Hazelnuts Harvested
  • I worked on Mary's new phone to get all of her photos to show from iCloud. I also installed the Cornell Ornithology Lab's Merlin app, and got her reading list to show. 
  • Mary spread out the hay in the east yard.
  • She also watered all garden plants.
  • I took measurements of diameters and lengths of all five woodsplitter hydraulic hoses. Fortunately, one of the hoses connected to the hydraulic ram had writing on it, identifying it as a 3/8" inside diameter. All but two hoses have the same sized diameters. The other two seem to have an inside diameter of 3/4". I sawed the return hose to the tank in half to measure that diameter.
  • Mary picked hazelnuts and strawberries. Some of the hazelnut husks dried during our last heat spell and are impossible to remove. After washing chicken waterers, I helped her husk the remaining hazelnuts as darkness approached.
  • We ate the good half of a Granny Smith apple that fell off the tree. I tasted wonderful and significantly better than store-bought Granny apples.
  • A pair of Eurasian collared doves recently started perching in cedar trees between the machine shed and the chicken coop. Mary says that they sound like a tired whoopee cushion.
  • Mary heard a barred owl calling from the Kieffer pear tree while she was sitting in the living room tonight.
  • I finished reading Form Line of Battle by Alexander Kent, which is the ninth book of the series.

• Wednesday, 9/10: New Splitter Hoses & Phone Plan Change
  • I went to Quincy and bought hydraulic hoses and fittings at Farm & Home for the wood splitter. Now I hope everything fits and works correctly. 
  • I also paid outright for the new cell phones and removed us from the "upgraded" four phone numbers that enabled us to get our "free" phones. We don't need our old phones active on their own new phone numbers...we're done with them. When I added up the monthly charge of the three-year contract to get the supposedly free phones, we would have been paying more than double the original cost of those phones. Yet, I had to tell the U.S. Cellular store manager three times that the free phones weren't free at all and I insisted on a change back to just two, instead of four, phone numbers. I got my way. I also took off the device protection plan on the internet router, since the damn thing sits on the shelf and the only way it would move is if we had an earthquake.
  • Mary watered all garden plants. When she was done, she picked a hornworm off her shoelace.
  • After dark, Mary used the UV flashlight and collected 49 hornworms off the tomato and tomatillo plants, which is a record for this year. Most of them were big. She wasn't looking for hornworms with the recent cooler temperatures, but cold didn't stop hornworms from eating and growing.

• Thursday, 9/11: Bill is Visiting Us
  • Bill arrived here around 11 am. He's visiting us until Sunday afternoon. Plato is super happy!
  • Bill and I picked all of the apples off the Liberty and Porter's Perfection trees. The Liberty apples turn to a maroon/red color (see photo, below). We got 57 apples off the Liberty tree and threw one away. That's pretty good for the first year of producing fruit. We got 19 apples off the Porter's tree and tossed five. We were a little late at picking apples off Porter.
  • Mary picked a few tomatoes and hot peppers from plants in the far garden, including two large-sized tomatoes. She also picked hazelnuts and husked them.
  • Mary watered garden plants while I watered small trees and blueberries. While we watered, Bill found nine hornworms on tomato plants.
  • We watched the BBC movie, North and South.

  

  Liberty apples before we picked them off the tree.
  

• Friday, 9/12: Heat, Hay, & Hoses
  • High heat has returned to us with a high of 91°. Mary read online that our location is in what is termed as a flash drought, where extreme drying occurs quickly. It enhances the chance of wildfires, so we hope recent dove hunters are careful while in the woods.
  • Mary picked up and stored the hay into the second bin. It amounted to 11 large wheelbarrow loads. The bin is now stacked almost to the ceiling with hay, which is good. We should have plenty for overwintering chickens in the coop. 
  • Mary watered gardens while Bill found nine worms in the tomato and tomatillo plants. 
  • I installed the new hydraulic hoses onto the wood splitter. I didn't pay attention to the fact that I needed one more swivel coupler for one end of the six-foot hose that runs from the pump under the engine to the directional valve above the splitter. So, I left one connection loose until I buy that coupler.
  • Mary took Bill on an after dark hornworm safari in the far garden to show him how the UV flashlight works. They found 13 more worms.
  • Bill picked out Men in Black 3 and we watched it.

• Saturday, 9/13: Making Apple Wine
  • A red-shouldered hawk flew across the south field as we walked Plato down the lane this morning. It landed in a tree on the edge of the woods and blue jays had fit because of the hawk.
  • Mary picked some tomatoes and a few hot peppers. She started gallon bag number two in the freezer. We have one gallon and need 14 more gallons of tomatoes. Hopefully, the autumn freeze holds off until all of the tomatoes are ripe.
  • Bill and I racked the peapod wine for the fourth time. It has a weird greenish yellow color. The specific gravity was 0.993 and the pH was 3.0. I accidentally spilled some of the wine when I first started transferring the liquid to a new gallon jug. Since the wine's level needs to be topped up in order for it to stay in good shape, we added a couple ounces of water. This water also contained 0.2 grams of Kmeta. The wine sits for another month.
  • Bill and I also made a two gallon batch of apple wine. I bet this will get to be 3-4 gallons once liquid comes off all of the applesauce. Five bags of Empire applesauce easily thawed in today's outdoor heat. It totaled 36 pounds, 8.1 ounces. I put it in three nylon mesh bags. Added to the brew bucket was 2 quarts, 2 cups of water, 0.4 grams of Kmeta, a cup of strong tea made with 2 teabags, and 2 pounds of sugar to yield a specific gravity of 1.074. It sits overnight in the pantry, covered with a flour sack towel.
  • Mary watered gardens. The cucumber vines dried with this second stint of intense heat, so Mary quit watering them. She's also considering digging up sweet potatoes, because those plants are drying up. I'm watering the Seckel pear tree every day, but I don't know if it will make it through this recent bout of blast furnace weather. 
  • Mary made pizza and we played Night Sky Monopoly. Mary won. Bill came in second. I was in last place. I traded property with Mary that put her at a solid advantage. We shared a big bottle of 2024 cherry wine, which was very nice.

• Sunday, 9/14: Crunchy Brown Walnut Leaves
  • We found a spring peeper frog in the netting that covers the winter greens. Frogs seek out the tubs housing the winter greens, due to the daily watering that the plants get. It's moisture in a very dry world.
  • The walnut leaves in the trees arching over the lane near our house are turning brown and falling onto lane, crunching under our boots. Usually, walnut leaves turn yellow, but not so much this year. They're just drying up in the crispy air.
  • I added 2 tablespoons and a teaspoon of pectic enzyme to the apple wine brew bucket and stirred it slightly. The pH is 3.2, which is perfect. I'm letting it sit another day for the pectic enzyme to help release liquid from the chopped up apples.
  • Bill left in the afternoon for his apartment in St. Charles.
  • Mary watered gardens while I filled watering cans. Watering goes quicker when I help Mary.
  • I'm concerned about the Seckel pear tree. Its leaves are drying up with this second bout of heat. I hope it survives. I water it daily. 
  • We have four Eurasian collared doves that visit us each evening. They look at us from the electric line. Before it gets dark, they fly into the cedar trees and perch there for the night.

Sept. 1-7, 2025

 Weather | 9/1, p. cloudy, 60°, 78° | 9/2, sunny, 54°, 79° | 9/3, cloudy, 0.11" rain, 56°, 77° | 9/4, sunny, 47°, 71° | 9/5, cloudy, 55°, 68° | 9/6, sunny, 45°, 72° | 9/7, sunny, 40°, 69° |

• Monday, 9/1: Labor Day
  • Today is Labor Day and the first day of dove season. We never heard a single shotgun go off, so the doves are safe in this neighborhood.
  • I found two more apples under the Porter's Perfection tree that I cleaned up and put in the fridge. They are tart and tasty.
  • While Mary watered the far garden, I watered small fruit trees and blueberries. They seem to be doing better from my twice-per-week watering. I helped Mary with the very end of watering the far garden and watering the near garden.
  • I picked a small handful of strawberries. Since Mary has all of the zucchinis that she needs, I picked three medium zucs, chopped them up, and fed them to the hens. By the end of the day, they devoured everything, including the skins. 
  • Mary picked a few tomatoes and some cucumbers. She made a cucumber salad. We probably won't get enough cucumbers for making pickles. 
  • Our water pressure at the kitchen faucet was so low last week that I called the water district about it. Then, we noticed plenty of water pressure at the bathroom faucet and outside at the hydrant. I removed the aerator fitting at the end of the kitchen faucet's spout. I removed a tiny decayed valve ahead of the aerator. Upon opening it up a second time this weekend, Mary noticed that pieces of a plastic screen broke and fell into the water outlet, significantly blocking water flow. She removed the plastic pieces with tweezers and our flow increased. Today, we noticed an even stronger flow of water, so the water district also fixed a leak to boost the pressure.
  • Ben Woodruff, who owns property west of us, leaves his home in St. Louis and shows up with his kids every holiday. They roar around on four-wheelers, making loud noise, usually in the evenings. We always know when these city morons are here, because the internet slows to a snail's pace, as his kids download movies and eat up bandwidth coming off cell towers. By tonight, after they left for home, the internet was back to normal.

• Tuesday, 9/2: Watering & Woodsplitter Engine Maintenance
  • Mary made some very yummy venison stew and biscuits for our midday meal.
  • She also watered all gardens. We're in a dry cycle, where garden plants require daily watering.
  • I cleaned the woodsplitter's engine crevices that were filled with oil-soaked chicken feathers and nut shells that mice moved into place. What an absolute mess! With various sized screwdrivers and needle nose pliers, I removed a ton of junk. There were times when I wondered how on earth a hickory or pecan nut got wedged between the fins of that eight horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine. I changed the spark plug, tightened the spring in the pull start so the pull cord returns correctly, lubed it and the throttle cable with WD-40, and sprayed carb cleaner on the throttle and governor springs to clean them. I put everything together and fired up the engine. It sounds better. From the engine numbers I determined that it was built in 1989. At night, I ordered the following parts for the engine: gas filter, air cleaner foam, and a magneto armature (coil). The last part includes a spark plug wire, which is badly chewed by mice right now. 
  • We ate four of the five Porter's Perfection apples that were in the fridge. They're very bitter. In the description of this apple on Fedco's website, it indicates that the apple is not for eating, but best for enhancing apple cider flavor. We're weird, because we like eating it, anyway.
  • I finished reading Alexander Kent's With All Despatch, his eighth in the series of British Navy novels.

• Wednesday, 9/3: First Rain in Almost a Month!
  • While viewing online images of the engine that we have in our log splitter, I noticed that I didn't assemble the parts of the rope pull start mechanism correctly, so I took it apart and put the parts in the right way. Then I changed oil in that engine. It was black. I need to do a better job at changing oil in that machine.
  • Mary watered garden plants. We just don't trust the forecast for rain. I helped her with watering the near garden. She also picked some tomatoes and cucumbers.
  • Mary took photos of a swallowtail butterfly larvae in the parsnips (see photo, below). They love parsnip leaves.
  • We had rain for the first time in nearly a month when a thunderstorm rumbled through. We were outside putting the chickens to bed when the only two lightning strikes hit nearby. It made us move quickly for the protection of the house.
  • I found two apples under trees after wind knocked them out of trees during the thunderstorm. One was a Roxbury Russet and the other was a Goldrush apple.
  • I started Form Line of Battle, Alexander Kent's ninth book of the series. These last two books we purchased at the Quincy Library Book Sale for 50 cents an inch.

  

  A swallowtail butterfly caterpillar in parsnip leaves.
  

• Thursday, 9/4: Shopping Trip, New Phones
  • While walking Plato on the lane this morning, we spotted a turkey poult at the curve of the lane near Bluegill Pond. It is nearly adult size.
  • I cut out bad parts and we ate the two apples I found that I found yesterday in our morning oatmeal breakfast. The Roxbury Russet apple tastes excellent after cooking with the oatmeal. It will be a great baking apple in the future.
  • We shopped in Quincy. Farm & Home has a sale going on and we got extra bags of hen and cat food, two more pairs of rubber boots, AA and AAA batteries, and a big thermometer for inside the chicken coop. Mary bought a couple books at Salvation Army and Goodwill. They are Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America's Most Notorious Pirates, and The Illustrated History of Canada. Then, we spent two hours at US Cellular and got two new iPhone 16s.
  • While looking west from Quincy, we could see smoke in the air. When we crossed the Mississippi River while going home, we really noticed the smokey air. On Plato's final walk before going to bed, the moon was orange, due to the smoke.

• Friday, 9/5: Another Day Without Rain
  • After letting out the chickens this morning, we looked up after closing the gate and saw our resident deer family munching on grass in the east yard. It's a doe and twin fawns. Her kids are pretty big.
  • When Mary picked tomatoes, she saw a mouse staring up at her from the tomato patch. She tapped it gently on the rump to get it to move out of the way. It moved a couple inches and stopped, again. Mary tapped it a second time to get it to move on. It was rather tame. 
  • It was watering day, again, because even though clouds looked like rain many times today, we never received a drop. Mary watered gardens and I watered small trees and blueberry bushes.
  • I found a Goldrush apple under that tree. I cut out bad parts and we ate it. Goldrush apples are very tasty. 
  • Mary cut up and froze two pork loins that we picked up yesterday while shopping in Quincy. They were on sale at Niemann's for $1.77 a pound. Mary also froze tomatoes. We have half a gallon of tomatoes in the freezer. We need 15 gallons to make the three batches of salsa that Mary wants to make, so we have a long ways to go to reach her goal.
  • The wood splitter engine parts that I ordered on Tuesday arrived in today's mail. The online Briggs & Stratton store is in Florida, but the order came from Iowa, which was nice.
  • We watched a movie we picked up yesterday. It's a 2009 film called New in Town, which was filmed in Winnipeg in the winter to depict life in Minnesota. In the extras after the movie we learned that some of the nighttime filming took place when temperatures were -57° F. The movie was predictable, but we liked it for the northern cold aspect and some of the Minnesota lingo bantered about by the actors. The film stars Renée Zellweger and Harry Connick Jr.

• Saturday, 9/6: Cool Temperatures
  • We're experiencing really nice cool temperatures. The U.S. Weather Service says we're 10 degrees colder than normal, which is fine with us. Unfortunately, the forecast for the upcoming week gets temperatures into the lower 90s...double YUCK!
  • Mary cleaned house and washed furniture covers and blankets, which includes a small red plaid fuzzy blanket that we got on our last shopping trip with Gandalf in mind. He was on it for the first time tonight. He purred as he kneaded the blanket with this claws. He likes it.
  • I installed the new parts in the wood splitter's engine. First, I put in the new fuel filter. Next, I tossed the old foam air filter, cleaned the air filter housing and parts, oiled the new foam and installed it. Finally, I removed the old coil, loosened two bolts to slide the new coil's ground wire through a loop in the engine housing cover, retightened those bolts and the nut on the ground wire, snipped the old spark plug wire to slide off the spark plug boot, cleaned it, shortened the spark plug wire, stripped the wire and crimped on a new spark plug snap tab, slid the boot over the tab, snugged down nuts holding the coil to the flywheel after getting it .010 inches away from the flywheel, then cleaned and installed the blower housing cover. The engine started on the first pull and ran nicely. A new coil made a huge difference.
  • I found another apple under the Goldrush tree. This one was bad.
  • We marveled over several of the features found in the latest Apple cell phone operating system in our iPhone 16s. Our old iPhone SE (1st generation) phones couldn't update beyond system 15. These new phones are on system 18. We're still waiting for a confirmation from Apple to change Mary's password, so we can finish linking the phones to iCloud.
  • We heard a screech owl at night while walking Plato. It was in the east yard.

• Sunday, 9/7: Processing Peppers & Removing Wood Splitter Hoses
  • Mary picked bell peppers from the far garden and put 29 bags of cut up green peppers in the freezer. She would like to put away 60-70 bags of peppers. We have predicted highs in the 90s next week and she didn't want the peppers to go bad. As it was, a couple had sun scald, so it was time to act.
  • Mary watered all garden plants.
  • I added mothballs to all of the plastic bottles we use to keep mice from chewing up wiring in vehicles and drilled holes in five more bottles to store around the log splitter engine. We have 32 bottles in and around the pickup, 10 for the riding mower, and now six at the splitter engine. I draped an old plastic laundry basket over the splitter engine to keep the mothball bottles from blowing away in the wind or getting knocked off by critters.
  • I drained the hydraulic fluid from the log splitter and removed all five of the hydraulic hoses. These rubber hoses had cracks in them when we first inherited the splitter in 2009 and every year since then, I've commented on how we need to change the hoses. They're rather expensive, so we kept putting it off. Since we rely on that splitter, it's time to change them. Several fittings are tight enough that I had to use a pipe as a cheater bar on the end of the wrench to break them. This splitter is homemade and obviously cobbled together by a local farmer, but it's much more powerful than anything I ever see in a store. The hose running from the tank to the pump was a piece of old hydraulic hose with the fittings cut off and clamped onto hose barbs at both ends. I was extremely hard to remove from the hose barbs and I tore up one end of the hose while digging at it with a screwdriver to get it off the barbs. I covered all 10 of the exposed and open hose fittings on the splitter by stretching plastic wrap on them and securing the wrap with rubber bands.
  • I cleaned up my tools after dark while using a head lamp. Several wild birds that roost inside the machine shed were upset with some guy wondering around with a bright light on his head.

Aug. 25-31, 2025

Weather | 8/25, sunny, 51°, 70° | 8/26, sunny, 47°, 74° | 8/27, p. cloudy, 54°, 79° | 8/28, sunny, 53°, 83° | 8/29, sunny, 57°, 84° | 8/30, sunny, 61°, 84° | 8/31, cloudy, 63°, 79° |

• Monday, 8/25: South Orchard Weeding
  • When I stepped outside with Plato for his morning walk, I saw the legs of three small deer that were under the Sargent crabapple tree as they zoomed off through the cedar trees to the east. At first I thought I saw dogs, but by the way those legs moved, they were deer.
  • We tasted a couple apples that were under apple trees. They were Goldrush and Porter's Perfection apples. Mary said the Goldrush tastes like an old fashioned Golden Delicious, but not like what you get in today's grocery stores. The Porter's Perfection was bitter, the way we like apples. It's astringent taste is supposed to vastly enhance apple cider flavor.
  • I moved four large dead weed piles surrounding the Empire apple tree, then cleaned weeds under and around seven small apple trees in the south orchard. I discovered all kinds of issues that were hidden under thick weeds. The Goldrush tree had two apple-filled branches on the ground. I found the tubular mechanism of a folding camp chair in the machine shed and propped it between holes in the surrounding cow panel to hold the branches off the ground. The Calville tree was leaning, so I found an old pipe in the machine shed and used it as a stake, then ran a wire through a chunk of old garden hose and pulled the tree upright. I cut two branches growing from the rootstock area of the Roxbury Russet tree and painted tree tar on the cuts. The Antonovka tree grew so tall that two branches were rubbing on the top of a hardware cloth tube encircling the tree. I removed the hardware cloth cage and painted the rub marks with tree tar. I installed the hardware cloth cage around the small transplanted Sargent tree. The ground is very hard where I pounded a rebar stake into the soil to stabilize the hardware cloth tube.
  • I saw a white wooly worm, which Mary identified as an Isabella tiger moth larva. Folklore says that spotting this worm signifies a winter with heavier than average snow, or even blizzards...aha!...more firewood.
  • There is now a huge pile of weeds where I dumped what I removed from trees. It's about 8' by 8' by 5' high.
  • I looked up and wrote down apple ripening dates. There is a wide variance from various websites and I notice that we're earlier than what most people list as ripening dates.
  • Mary picked a few more beans and watered the near garden.
  • During Mary's hornworm hunt, she found 16 worms and 14 eggs.
  • With a cooler nighttime temperature predicted, I closed the chicken coop windows to help keep the chickens warm. It's the first time in months that we closed coop windows.

• Tuesday, 8/26: Stairs Fix & Watering
  • While Mary went up the stairs, the top board of the step came loose and tilted up and out. Fortunately, she had hold of the rail in one hand and the top of the landing in her other hand and didn't fall. I removed that loose board, knocked out broken nails, drilled four holes and countersunk the holes, then installed long screws on both sides of the board. When Herman built the steps, he used finish nails. They're pulling out or breaking in half and aren't appropriate for stair steps. I'll eventually need to replace all of these finish nails with screws.
  • I watered all of the small fruit trees, which involves two pear trees, seven cherry trees, four blueberry bushes, and seven apple trees. All trees were pretty dry. 
  • During that same time, Mary watered the far garden. Tomato plants are finally setting fruit. The extreme hot weather in past weeks set them back in fruit production. We aren't seeing any tomatillos and green beans are very skimpy. On the plus side, we're seeing a lot of acorn squash and the sweet potato plants look healthy. We have all of the zucchinis that we need.
  • Yesterday, I killed a bunch of aphids on the top young leaves of the Antonovka apple tree. Today there were even more aphids. With Mary's help, we doused the leaves with Dawn soap spray and rubbed out aphids until our fingers were yellowish green. Then I poured water on the leaves to wash off the soap. Mechanic's soap that removes grease and oil wouldn't take the yellow aphid stain off our fingers.
  • Mary picked 27 worms off the tomato and tomatillo plants while using the UV flashlight after dark. I visited her after cleaning chicken waterers. She was on the last row of tomatoes. I watched satellites fly by in the night sky as stars slowly appeared after the sun set, which was really cool.

• Wednesday, 8/27: Mowing & Wienie Roast
  • Mary picked beans, zucchinis, cucumbers, and a handful of cherry tomatoes. She decided it is time to remove the bean and zucchini plants, since the green beans lost production to flea beetles and we have enough zucchinis.
  • Mary watered what's left of the near garden and two rows in the far garden.
  • I cleaned out the poke berry forest under the Granny Smith apple tree. This time, I was careful to lop off branches of the poke berry stalks and carefully move them to the wheelbarrow, putting permanent poke berry stains on the wheelbarrow, instead of on my pants. They grow to heights above my head and into the apple tree. I then mowed under Granny Smith.
  • Both Mary and I mowed the west yard, so we'd have cut grass around the area where we enjoy a wienie roast fire. We put mulch around a couple of small trees.
  • As the sun set, we enjoyed an outdoor wienie roast with a fire that I lit on the cement pad next to the mulberry tree in the west yard. It's always fun to notice changes in sounds and sights as it goes from daylight to darkness. Birds eventually quit singing, then you hear crickets and tree frogs. After stars appear, you start to watch satellites moving across the sky overhead. While watching one satellite, we also saw a falling meteorite. Bats occasionally flitted in and out of site. It's amazing how relaxed you get while simply gazing into an outdoor fire. We saw a firefly...they're still around.
  • I burned up a large stick that we've used for over a decade to poke logs about in an outdoor fire. After moving a chunk of wood into the fire, that poking stick stayed lit, like a fireworks punk. So, I decided it would be safer to toss it into the fire. It burned hot with blue flames.
  • We enjoyed some 2023 apple wine and a bottle of 2024 spiced apple wine. Apple wine is a perfect companion taste to crispy hotdogs. This time, I didn't filter the spiced apple wine. The cinnamon taste was much stronger and it tasted better. I won't filter it in the future.

• Thursday, 8/28: Watering During Dry Conditions
  • Mary and I both watered for two hours in the afternoon. She watered the rows of tomatoes in the far garden while I watered all of the small fruit trees and blueberry bushes. I discovered two more blueberries that I didn't know existed, because they're all covered with tall grass and weeds. Mary showed them to me.
  • This summer is tough on green living plants, due to the two periods of high heat without any rain. There are several trees, especially mulberry trees, that show dried up leaves. Garden plants, like tomatoes, tomatillos, and strawberries, didn't set fruit during the bouts of 90+ heat. We'll see if anything comes on now that temperatures are lower.
  • Mary found 14 eggs and six hornworms in her worm hunt.

• Friday, 8/29: Black Snake & Preparing Winter Greens Soil
  • In a morning check of the near garden, Mary spotted a long black snake crossing her path. Later, she identified it as a western ratsnake.
  • I removed weeds in the winter greens tubs. The soil in the tubs was very dry. Some big weeds had immense roots. After shaking off all soil, I had a large wheelbarrow full of dead weeds. I broke up the soil with a triple claw hand cultivator and threw out a lot of small roots. One of the tubs was split on one side in the middle. I found a hardwood board in the machine shed and screwed it into place at the top of that side of the plastic tub to give it a straight shape.
  • Mary knocked down grass just north of the house with her scythe and piled the tall grass near the compost bin.
  • Mary watered the near garden and two rows in the far garden. All soil is very dry. The chicken yard is full of deep cracks, due to clay soil drying out and developing crevasses.
  • I found a perfect Goldrush apple under that tree.
  • I looked up possible online locations that sell parts for our woodstove and found two entities. One is in Columbia Falls, MT.
  • I finished reading Alexander Kent's book 7, Passage to Mutiny. These British Navy novels are hard to put down.

• Saturday, 8/30: Calville Apple Tastes Wonderful
  • Mary watered all gardens. She said the plants looked as if they never received water at all. We need rain.
  • Mary saw a velvet ant (a female wasp without wings) that is very pretty. It was walking down the path to the gardens. 
  • I added to the soil in the six winter greens tubs. First I collected soil from mole mounds in the front lawn and added a wheelbarrow load to the tubs. Then I added a half wheelbarrow load of compost. Finally, I added over two 4-gallon buckets of potting soil that Mary didn't want anymore. When we bought it last year, it was extremely wet and it seemed to harm plants, rather than help them. It worked in nicely with the extremely dry soil in the tubs after I thoroughly mixed all of the levels of soil.
  • Mary picked seven eggs and three small worms from the gardens.
  • We saw three common nighthawks flying overhead in the evening when we put the chickens to bed. They're migrating and were flying southeast. 
  • One of the Calville Blanc d'Hiver apples was under that tree. The name translates from French to white winter Calville. I cleaned it up, cut out bad sections, and Mary and I tasted it for the first time, ever. Oh my! Even green, this is an excellent tasting apple. It's touted as the best culinary apple in the world and I believe it. Unfortunately, that small tree leaned over in a wind this summer and the top was trimmed by nibbling deer. I'm going to have to work at helping this tree along so we can get more fruit from it.

• Sunday, 8/31: Small Number of Green Beans
  • Mary processed and froze 20 sandwich-sized bags of green beans. This is about a fourth to a third of the amount that she normally processes from the garden. The weather and flea beetles changed that this year.
  • I sowed seeds for our winter greens, covered the tubs with tulle fabric, and watered them. There is one tub of Winter Bloomsdale Spinach, one big tub of Winterbor Kale, a tub of Astro Arugula, one of Red Tinged Winter Lettuce (2024 seeds), another of the same lettuce (2025 seeds), and one with Red Fire Leaf Lettuce.
  • Hops climbed over the Virginia Creeper vines on the east side of our house and are putting on cones. We see them out our bedroom window and from the outside near the peak of the roof (see photos, below).
  • Mary picked a few more worms and worm eggs on her garden worm hunt.
  • I suspect a squirrel or a raccoon is climbing the Porter's Perfection apple tree and knocking off leaves and apples. I collected three apples that were on the ground when we put the chickens to bed this evening.
  • The tick switch clicked off for the summer. We're now not picking any ticks off Plato after his walks down the lane.
  • We had popcorn and parsnip wine while we read books after dark. The earthy and tart taste of parsnip wine is impossible to describe, other than it's amazingly good.

Viewing hops cones out our bedroom window.

Hops cones (light green) on the east side of our house.

Aug. 18-24, 2025

Weather | 8/18, sunny, 72°, 91° | 8/19, p. cloudy, 72°, 87° | 8/20, p. cloudy, 67°, 87° | 8/21, p. cloudy, 63°, 78° | 8/22, fog to p. cloudy, 64°, 82° | 8/23, cloudy to sunny, 64°, 81° | 8/24, sunny, 54°, 75° |

• Monday, 8/18: Heat, Watering Garden, & Apples
  • Mary watered the near garden. The plants were very dry. The sweet potato leaves were severely wilted, but sprang back to life after a thorough soaking. Mary, on the other hand, returned inside several times and was very wet, due to the heat.
  • On Mary's worm patrol, she found 10 worms. They were mainly tiny army worms. She also found four hornworm eggs.
  • I was on the apple detail and processed another milk crate of Empire apples. I have 2.5 crates left to handle after today's work. I'm mostly through filling the tenth gallon of applesauce in the freezer. Wow, I'm really going to be in the apple winemaking business. I added 20 unblemished apples to the refrigerator, giving us a grand total of 104 to eat.

• Tuesday, 8/19: Apples & Hornworms
  • I started the day by throwing out poor fruit in the remaining 2.5 milk crates of Empire apples and tossed two four-gallon buckets. After days of slicing apples, it's easier to tell bad ones from good apples. It reduced the remaining apples to 1.5 crates. I processed one crate of apples today. There are now almost 14 gallons of applesauce in the freezer. I added only nine unblemished apples to the fridge, giving us a grand total of 113 to eat. Today's apples came from the top of the Empire tree, where more bug and bird damage occurred. They also caught more sunlight, resulting in a dark red color. I should be done processing Empire apples tomorrow.
  • Mary watered the far garden and picked three zucchinis.
  • Mary found a bunch hornworms in the tomato, pepper, and tomatillo plants. She found 22 during her evening search. After darkness fell, she returned with a blacklight flashlight in hand and got another 38 worms, for a grand total of of 60 hornworms. She also found two hornworm eggs.
  • During her daylight stint of worm patrol, Mary heard a rattly sound, looked up and watched a great blue heron fly overhead. It was on its way to Bass Pond. 
  • We noticed an immature hummingbird looking into house windows twice during the day.

• Wednesday, 8/20: Last of Empire Apples & Wasp Battle
  • I finished processing Empire apples by sorting through half of a milk crate. There are now 15 gallons of applesauce in the freezer. I saved out another 14 unblemished apples for a grand total of 127 for us to eat.
  • There were 65 apples in this last half crate load. With that number I estimated that I picked 875 to 900 apples off that single tree. Whew!
  • Mary picked the first green beans from the near garden. Bean leaves are almost white due to flea beetles eating on them, so this year's bean crop is looking small. She also picked two zucchinis.
  • Mary watered the near garden and checked for hornworms in the far garden. Her hornworm numbers were greatly reduced after yesterday's big worm collection.
  • While putting a bucket away in the woodshed, I was stung by a wasp on my right shoulder blade. I ran inside, put baking soda on a wet paper towel, then zipped out to the far garden to get Mary's help in applying the baking soda-filled wet paper towel to my back, since I couldn't reach it. I stood bent over for awhile in the garden as the magic of the baking soda eased the sting. I returned to the woodshed armed with a squirt bottle of Dawn soap and water and killed wasps. I received another wasp sting on my neck. It was a glancing blow, but I nailed a ton of wasps. They die quickly once hit with Dawn soap spray. After Mary finished her hornworm hunt, she joined me in the woodshed and took a shovel to knock down five wasp nests. She tossed them into the tall grass south of the house. I bet I'll be feeling those two wasp stings for awhile.

• Thursday, 8/21: Shopping Day
  • My two wasp stings were itchy, today.
  • We shopped in Quincy, which was rather uneventful.
  • Mary picked more green beans and one zucchini. She also checked for hornworm eggs and got just a few.
  • We watched two movies: the 2007 movie, Enchanted; and the 2022 film, The Lost City.
  • After nine days of sitting in the pantry, the cherry wine has changed to a deep red color.
  • While walking Plato after dark, we heard coyotes howling to the southeast and we looked at a beautiful night sky, due to extremely clear air.

• Friday, 8/22: Second Racking of the Cherry Wine
  • While walking our puppy, we noticed that dew made spider webs stand out in the morning sunshine. The field east of the lane is full of them.
  • I helped Mary water the near garden, then Mary watered the far garden by herself. All plants were very dry, so those in the far garden each received a two-gallon load of water. It meant watering took almost all day for Mary.
  • I gave the cherry wine a second racking. After pulling the liquid off the fines, I had 11.69 gallons of wine in two large buckets. I added 2.1 grams of Kmeta to the wine. The pH was 3.1 and the specific gravity was 0.995. There was about a third to a half an inch of fines at the bottom of the three 5-gallon carboys. I miscalculated carboy sizes to hold the resulting wine. At first, I filled a 6.5-gallon carboy. Then I filled a 3-gallon carboy, but realized I had more than enough to fill a 5-gallon carboy. So, I emptied the 3-gallon into a 5-gallon carboy and filled the latter, along with a 1.5-liter wine bottle. Mary and I tasted the tiny bit of remaining wine. It's strong on the alcohol taste, but tart and with a full body feel in the mouth. After aging, this will be a good wine.  
  • Mary hunted for hornworms in the gardens after dark with a UV flashlight. She found 19 of them. Some were quite large.
  • While doing her nighttime worm search, Mary heard an unknown call from a cedar tree just southwest of the far garden. She then recognized it as the call of a yellow-billed cuckoo. Mary thinks she startled the bird.

• Saturday, 8/23: Zucchini Processing & Really Good Baked Apples
  • We watched a goldfinch feeding on cone flower seeds out of our west living room window. The bright yellow bird showed up nicely in front of deep green comfrey leaves.
  • I investigated the weight of the fruit that I last used when making apple wine versus what's called for in recipes. It was 28 pounds for a two-gallon batch. A recipe in Jack Keller's Home Winemaking book calls for 18-20 pounds of fruit per gallon of wine produced. Since I'm overrun with applesauce for making wine, I'll increase the amount in the next batch of apple wine.
  • The cherry wine has a super red color (see photo, below).
  • Mary processed 27 packages of sliced zucchinis. She is getting close to enough for a year of upcoming meals. Our fruit bat dog, Plato, likes raw zucchini slices.
  • Mary picked green beans. She says, "Thank goodness for wax beans," because they are producing through the stress of high heat and a flea beetle invasion. She also picked a tiny amount of strawberries. We've decided to buy new strawberry plants for next year. 
  • I put away winemaking items, which included seven empty milk crates, and straightened out the west room and the its closet where I store winemaking things.
  • I vacuumed spiders throughout the house.
  • I helped Mary water the near garden.
  • On Mary's hornworm hunt in the tomato patch, she found nine worms and nine hornworm eggs.
  • When we put the chickens to bed for the night, we found a dead buff orpington cockerel on the chick side of the chicken yards. There was no sign of something attacking it, so we can only guess that it died of natural causes, such as a heart attack.
  • Mary fixed up baked apples that we ate after our evening meal. Wow!!! They were very yummy! 
  • While walking Plato, we heard several coyotes calling from north of our property.
  • I finished reading the sixth book of Alexander Kent's British Navy series, Command a King's Ship.
   

  

  The cherry wine has a very deep red color (snow pea wine is on the left).
  

• Sunday, 8/24: Watering, Weeding, & Mowing
  • We're enjoying cooler weather, which beats the 90+ temperatures that were prevalent earlier this week. We even wore jackets at night while walking Plato. Fifty-degree temperatures feel downright nippy after you experience highs in the 90s.
  • The pickup's rear bumper is rusty with holes in it. I reviewed the price of new beefier rear bumpers for pickups and they're too costly. The best prices seem to be from people parting out their pickups with ads on Facebook Marketplace.
  • Around noon, Mary went to the far garden to pick a few tomatoes to add to our midday meal. She scared up two turkey poults that flew from the edge of the far garden east into the field.
  • Mary watered the far garden in the afternoon.
  • I cleaned weeds from under and around four small cherry trees. I had to remove cow panels surrounding the trees, chop down big weeds, then run a push mower under each tree. After mowing, I replaced the cow panels around each cherry tree. I also mowed all of the paths between fruit trees in the south orchard, between the small cherry trees, and to a brush pile just beyond the south orchard.
  • After dark, Mary used a UV flashlight and found 31 hornworms in the tomato and tomatillo plants. I joined her on the last half of the worm search. Hornworms gleam as bright green masses under the beam of a blacklight and are very easy to spot.
  • Mary and I read books and enjoyed a bottle of 2021 pear wine. It has a deep gold color and tastes marvelous. The wine is very smooth with a strong pear flavor.
  • I started Alexander Kent's seventh British Navy novel. It's entitled Passage to Mutiny.