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.