I was glad to see how tall Ben’s corn is last week. The summer has been good for me – after last summer’s blisteringly dry heat, I’m enjoying the slightly milder temps and the rain. I haven’t even had to get the sprinklers out of the garage yet.
And Iowa must be doing OK as well. My next-door neighbors were gone for about 10 days – visiting the grandparents south of the border. When they travel in the summer, I always water their outdoor plants; it’s easy as they just pull all the pots over to the fence and I can just apply the hose to them whenever I am watering my bales.
I’m happy to do it and I don’t think of it as an onerous chore (especially when it rains so much) so I was surprised when they came home with a bag full of corn for me as a thank you. Straight off the farmstand corn and the pretty kind I like best – yellow and white.
The only problem with 12 ears of fresh corn is when you are the only one home for over a week. YA was away on a work program. There was no way I was going to waste all that gorgeous corn so I rolled up my sleeves and dived in.
I saved two for just eating and de-kernelled (is that a word?) the rest. Froze one bag then made a double batch of corn salsa (froze some), a lovely fresh kernel cornbread and then a fun garden veggie pizza with ricotta as sauce. All done in three hours!
So now I’ve processed cherries and corn this summer. Wonder what else will come my way?
What kind of foodstuff would you like to have too much of?
I’ve got the brush mower on and I’ve started mowing weeds. We have a good crop of thistles. They’re taller than the tractor!
I went around the mullen’s.
As always though, majority rules.
Mowing waterways is a good opportunity to go down the middle of the field and see the crops. The corn is taller than me and the tractor in places.
Soybeans are not quite up to my knees yet, but they’ve got blossoms on them. The oats are up to my waist, but the quackgrass is quickly taking over. My neighbor who combines the oats, will be out of town this weekend and next. The oats aren’t quite ready to swath, yet it’s starting to go down (from the rust fungus weakening the stalk) plus the grass taking over, so I hate to wait too much longer. I’m thinking by the end of next week I’ll want to be cutting it. It will need to lay and dry for a few days before it will be ready for combining.
I had an email this week from the oat growers who market it for food grade vs animal food. The price at the food grade plant is $4.30 / bushel. At the local elevator, it’s $3 / bushel. That’s pretty hard to pass up the higher price. Yet I need to get it hauled down to the plant in Iowa, and the grain needs to be heavy enough for them to accept it. All things that are harder for a small operator like me to coordinate. Not impossible, but harder. And, of course, it costs money to haul it to Iowa, too. So there’s always a trade off. I’m still working out details.
The ducks are doing well. We bought them a kiddie pool last week and they’re big enough to get in, but not big enough to get out, so there’s a big rock in the pool. They’ve figured out how to go into their pen on their own at night. They’re fun, when I go out there and call to them, they all call back to me. It isn’t quite a ‘quack’ yet, still more of a ‘peep’. I call out “Hello ducks! Hey Kids!” and they’re all “peep, peep, peep”. They know I’m bringing food. They don’t want to be picked up or anything, but they come over closer too me. This sure is an interesting looking bunch. I can’t wait to see what they look like when grown up. Notice the black spots on the feet of some of them.
I spent most of the week working on the Rep Theater stage again. I’ve had good help from my buddy Paul, and Chris, Michael, Doug, Max, and Noah. Max and Noah are the teenage boys helping me this summer. Max hasn’t done anything like this construction before. He’s learned and used a lot of new tools (and found the chalk line really fascinating- although he doesn’t come out and say that). He’s a good kid, a hard worker, smart, and good to have around.
The majority of the work is done, the main stage is done and has one layer on it. Next up will be the second layer of 3/4″ plywood and a top layer of 1/8″ plywood. We call it ‘lauan’, but the lumber yards don’t know it by that name. And it used to be $10 / sheet. Double that now. Jeepers. And 3/4″ plywood is $40. And that’s not even the fancy sanded stuff.
I did get a little bit done in the shed at home and replaced the windshield washer pump and one nozzle on my truck. Cut some grass one night.
A couple years ago, four of the bolts holding a gear box on the brush mower got loose. My brother and I tightened them up. They came loose again. This summer we replaced the bolts and put ‘lock-tite’ on them. After mowing for a day, they’re loose AGAIN. I need another helper to tighten them up again, but I’m afraid this might turn into a bigger repair job requiring a piece of steel welded underneath or something. I dread adding it to my list again.
It’s finally drying up around the barn and yard a bit, so that’s good.
Ever had a pedicure? What color would you paint your toenails tonight?
One nice thing about living out here is that no matter how hot it gets during the day, it almost always cools down at night because of the low humidity. That means we can turn off the air conditioning and open up the windows after midnight. Our town is also really quiet at night, with the only the occasional train whistle breaking the silence.
On Tuesday night I woke up at 3:30, turned off the air conditioning, and opened the windows. I had just settled back in bed when it started. Somewhere in our neighborhood, very close to our house, a bunch of crows began making a hullabaloo. First one crow would give voice, then four others would chime in. They were loud and raucous, and it went on and on for an hour and a half. They sounded really upset. I didn’t have the energy to get up and close the windows and turn the air conditioning back on, so I just put a pillow over my head, I finally fell back to sleep after they quit.
I believe Husband and the dog identified a possible motive for the crows’ behavior. Yesterday morning on their walk they came upon the corpse of a rabbit on the sidewalk near our house. The rabbit’s head was missing, and it looked as though it had been there for a couple of days. There is a small stream and slough several blocks from our house where a mink or weasel would feel quite at home. Minks and weasels decapitate their prey. I think the crows were sounding the alarm that a murder was being committed in our neighborhood. The crows have been quiet since Tuesday night. The next time they start a ruckus in the middle of the night I will have more sympathy for them and wonder who is being murdered this time.
What are night noises in your neighborhood? Any mysteries in your neighborhood? Any other creative theories for the headless rabbit or the crows’ alarm?
The weather is changing. The rain has stopped and the temps and humidity are up. I’ve turned on the chickens fan, and got the ducks in their outside pen. The ducks are at that awkward stage where a gallon of water last them half a day, everything‘s wet, and they chewed off the string on the bottom of a brand new sack of feed so then I had an open tube that used to have 50 pounds of feed in it. It was time to get them outside.
This was a mixed assortment of ducklings so I don’t really know what I’ve got yet, although six of them are all black, a couple are twice the size of a couple others, and like most teenagers, we just gotta get through this phase.
It takes a while for the ducks to learn how to get back in again at night, which means for now, Kelly and I have to wrangle them back inside. Everything is still wet down there, and it is stinky mud, and they’re not the smartest animal on the farm, so it’s kind of a whole big thing, but this too shall pass. Eventually.
I went out with the tractor and loader and moved the downed trees off the edge of the fields. The soybeans were sprayed with fungicide and broadleaf preventer on Thursday. I wanted the tree in the bean field out of the way for that. I’ll be mowing weeds in a week or two, and oats will be ready in 3 weeks or so. I moved two trees out of the oats field. I saw the neighbors cornfield just starting to tassel Friday afternoon
I’ve been spending a lot of time rebuilding the stage at the Rochester Repertory Theater. The old stage had been there since we moved there in 2007, and it was built of used lumber then, so it was squeaky and kinda wonky and wore out. Last year’s ‘Give to the Max’ campaign raised money for this new stage. I had a good group of volunteers come in to cut up and haul out the old one. We loaded it on a trailer and I hauled it to the recycling center. I didn’t expect it to cost $450 for disposal. Ouch. There went my budget.
Of course, what’s a project without a few extra items thrown into the mix? We are creating a tool room out of the former elevator room, we are insulating some windows, and we are making the control booth window larger too. All good stuff!
Except that I’m not getting much done on my machine shed shop project. I get a little done, it’s just slow going. I got steel wrap and the window trim done on one window, so I can get back to the steel siding. I did change the windshield washer pump on my truck and I need to replace one nozzle. And I cut off a tree root and reset some rocks interferring with the wellhouse door. And I got to use a pickax and a grub hoe.
I’m just not getting the shop work done.
Thursday, Kelly and I took a road trip to Golden Valley to ‘Monkey Wrench Productions’ and picked up some lighting stuff.
A new lighting console for the Rep theater (thanks to a very nice grant from the Carl and Verna Schmidt Foundation) and with all the construction on Hwy 52 that we ran into, we decided to take a different way home. Came back through Hastings, and had lunch at the ‘Lock and Dam Eatery’. Walked down to the river, and had a nice talk with a photographer.
A few days ago we took the four wheeler down through the woods. There’s a trail that a neighbor keeps mowed and I had been on part of it, but not all of it before. Although there were places I remembered checking fence 35 years ago when I still had beef cows down there. Like this gate; people would open it in the winter and if not closed again, cows ended up in their yards and they didn’t like that. Guess they never learned the rule to leave the gate like you found it. But that only works for the first person.
You gotta take your adventures where you can get them.
What’s the most money you’ve paid to get rid of something?
I received a text from Daughter on Tuesday in a panic because it was 93° in Tacoma, her apartment was hot except for her bedroom, where she has a portable air conditioner, and her refrigerator had stopped working and everything in her freezer/fridge was melted. She had to throw out eight grocery bags of food. Only the cheese was salvageable.
I immediately went into problem solving mode, inquiring about rental insurance, repairs, etc. This was not what she needed or wanted. She just wanted me to commiserate and console. It turned out to be a problem with the fridge shorting out the fuse panel in her apartment. She just needs to keep an eye on it.
Very few people in the Pacific North West have air conditioning because it rarely gets that hot there. There have been unusual but increasingly frequent heat waves there. I am a person who is always cold, so no matter how hot it is, it rarely bothers me. I could probably do ok there. I remember how excited my parents were when we got an air conditioner installed in the dining area of our house when I was in about Grade 1. It only kept the livingroom cool, but it sure made them feel good.
I have never had to deal with a freezer or fridge that went on the fritz. I often wonder what we would do if we had an extended period of electricity loss given all the freezers we have in the basement. I think I would gets lots of ice to keep everything cold and get a gas powered generator to fill in for the loss of power.
When did you first have air-conditioning? Ever had to deal with a freezer or fridge that malfunctioned? What kind of help do you want when you are upset?
It’s been five years since we lost our Little Jail Bird, Edith. I think of her often and whenever I tell someone about her, I say what a hero she is to me, that she made a courageous decision to go ahead with the risky surgery rather than live the rest of her life with her illness (her words). In her memory, I’m running her most iconic posting on the Trail.
Until last fall, I had never been to Banning State Park. I had driven by it dozens of time, because when I head up to my sister’s house, I always turn off 35W and take Highway 23 into town. I didn’t know much about Banning, but when I was looking for a day trip, it seemed to fit my needs perfectly.
First, I wanted a park where I could drive there and back in one day without getting too tired. Second, I wanted a park that didn’t involve driving several back roads, because I knew that I would be driving in the dark due to the shorter fall days and my night vision and sense of direction is bad enough that I would get lost unless I kind of knew where I was going. And third, I wanted a state park because I had a state park sticker and wanted to use it as much as possible to get my money’s worth out of it. Banning fit all of those qualifications. Plus it has a waterfall, which is a big plus in my book.
So, off I went, one sunny morning in October. When I arrived, I stopped at the visitor center to get maps and ask where the best spots were. I was so excited. It seems that often when I go north, I am early for the fall colors and often find myself driving home just a few days before “peak” and this time I was not too early! I said something about that to the woman at the desk (while trying to not jump and down in excitement) and she shook her head woefully and told me in a discouraging tone, “You’re going to see LOTS of brown out there.” Gee thanks, way to burst my bubble.
Of course, since I drove all the way up there, I figured I better go on the hike anyway even if I would see mostly brown. I drove to the parking area and when I stepped out of the car and looked up, I knew it was going to be a good day (see header photo).
I hiked all the way to the falls and back and shot lots of photos. It was an incredibly beautiful day: that clear, deep blue sky that you only seem to see on autumn days and – surprise! – lots of colorful leaves on the trees. It can be a challenge shooting in bright sunlight, but I was so overcome by the beauty of it all that I just took that in my stride. There was that wonderful northwoods smell in the air – pine trees and dead leaves. Nothing like it! and nothing else invigorates me like that does.
It was getting pretty cool and the sun was going down quickly by the time I was heading back on the trail but the golden evening light only made things more beautiful and the colors more intense. I went home pleasantly tired and very happy and glad that the woman’s prediction of “lots of brown” wasn’t true.
Any comments / reflections on any or your heros welcome
A couple of years ago, sometime in October, I decided it was time to bring my rosemary plant in. I was just kind of quickly grabbing plants – some would go down to the garage and a couple would stay in the house. I grabbed the rosemary plant and was stunned at what I saw. A fat, little tree frog snuggled up next to the stem of the rosemary plant!
It was cold! I was surprised to see him there, hunkered down next to the plant in the soil. He was about the color of the soil, very well camouflaged. He was already in a state of torpor. I knew a bit about the overwintering habits of tree frogs. I knew he needed to be in a wooded area, down beneath the thick leaf litter, maybe under a partially rotten log. I knew he needed to find that shelter himself and that he wouldn’t have time anymore, especially since he was already sleeping.
I considered my rosemary plant. I knew life would be just fine for me if I didn’t keep it. I knew his life depended on it. But how could I use it to make him a safe place for the winter?
I took the pot outside near my driveway. In the corner of the front wall of the house and the front steps there’s a terracotta sunny face and some prairie agates. This corner is sheltered and when the sun is out, it’s warm enough to melt ice even if the air temp is in the 20s. The corner also has an abundance of oak leaves.
I pulled all the leaves and debris out of the corner, set the rosemary plant in the corner, and gently buried it with leaves. Then I placed another empty terracotta pot upside down over the top of all the leaves. The frog was still in the rosemary plant when I buried him, sleeping soundly. I placed the terracotta sun face in front of it to hold it all in place. He had air to breathe through the loose leaves, even though he would be breathing very infrequently. He was covered and had plenty of shelter. He would freeze almost completely in the winter and thaw out again in the spring.
I asked my friend TeeJay if he thought the frog would make it. I also wanted to name it. TeeJay suggested “Herb” since it clearly loved the rosemary plant. He said he had no idea if it would make it or not, but the shelter I’d made might work.
I thought about Herb all winter. I wondered if the shelter would protect him. It got awfully cold and we had a lot of snow. Sometime in April I took the shelter apart and looked in my dead rosemary plant. Herb was gone. He’d gotten out on his own.
Disclaimer: I don’t know how to sex frogs. I have no idea if Herb is female or male. And the frog I saw sunning himself for several hours on my deck rail today may or may not be Herb. It might be one of Herb’s kids! There are lots of tree frogs here. I hear them calling a lot. I haven’t seen one since Herb left though. It was very nice to see Herb today! I know how silly it is but I thought maybe he was going to get too hot so I set him in my herb and flower garden. He can choose which plant he wants. For now, he’ll be catching lots of mosquitoes and flies. He’ll be getting fat for winter. I’m happy to have him here.
As I started writing this on Thursday I wrote, “Well, it hasn’t rained yet this week, oh wait, it’s sprinkling now.” And now late Friday afternoon, we’ve gotten another inch. I think it sprinkled Monday, it sprinkled Tuesday, sprinkled Thursday. Never amounted to much but it’s just kinda damp everywhere. I’ve got springs down by the barn, got springs around back, got a wet spot in front of the duck pen, got a big lake in the neighbor’s field with several ducks in there. Nothing we haven’t had before, it’s just been a few years.
I did notice the rust on the Oats really came out earlier this week. It’s a fungus that overwinters on Buckhorn, (yet another reason to hate Buckhorn), and then it’s moved by wind, and loves high humidity and moisture. Although I’ve never seen it turn a field brown like it has in a couple of spots. The end of one field seems worse than others, and that could be because it’s sheltered by trees, so maybe it doesn’t get much sunshine, plus some different soils. It was a little stressed in the first place. Of my 25 acres of oats, this is just a few acres in that field.
The rest of it is waist high, and there could be a lot of grain out there. Not gonna count the bushels before they’re in the truck or weighed at the elevator, but it’s looking good right now.
Corn is waist tall as well.
The ducklings are growing fast, and as expected, everything’s wet in their pen too. This weekend, I will probably get them out of their starter tank and into a larger pen. More room to spill water and find dry spots.
We made good progress on the fence this week. Last summer‘s Padawan came back to help this summer’s Padawan. I forgot what two teenage boys are like together. (snicker, eye roll, fart noises). As of this writing, the fence is about 80% done. I have to set four or five wood posts yet, and grass, and the whole thing is just a pain. Not to mention I’m a lot older than I was the last time I made a fence. It’s been strangely fun using the old rope wire stretcher (to pull the wire tight before attaching it to the posts). My brother was skeptical that it is still the original rope. And I used the new , longer handles on the post hole digger!
Back to some theater projects for a while. Tuesday, myself and ten volunteers tore out the old stage at THE REP. New stage will be roughly the same size, just a few inches taller, and built so it doesn’t squeak. The biggest change is backstage: tearing down a bunch of shelves, and platforming the whole thing from end to end and wall to wall. Also insulating some walls, and blocking off some tall windows that are kind of a problem.
After the fence, after the stage, then, THEN I’m gonna start working on my machine shed shop again. Honestly, one of these days. And in a month, I’ll be down in Chatfield working on a show there, “SpongeBob SquarePants, the musical”. Friday afternoon, myself and another guy were out cutting up another township tree blocking a road. In the rain.
It wasn’t too bad. We cut it up and I called a neighbor who used his skidloader to push it off the road. A tree company will be out Monday to pick it up. I was going to have them take this tree down anyway as it was leaning over the road. Guess I can cross that one off the list. I’ve got at least 4 trees down in the fields. At this point, I’d knock down more crop trying to clear up the tree than if we just harvest around it. So probably leave them until this fall.
Here’s some chickens:
Here’s a butterfly on a flower:
WHICH NEIGHBOR, LIVING OR DEAD, ARE YOU CALLING FOR HELP?
Sometimes, the day doesn’t go as planned, does it.
Our power went off Monday morning at about 6:30AM. I was leaving to take the rented post hole digger back when I met a truck from the power company on the other side of a down tree over the road. That guy cut up the tree while I went back home for the tractor, and I pushed the tree off the road. He and I talked about how to check the electric line. (Our house is the only house on the mile long electric line from the North road to the South road, and it’s through the pasture and across a creek, and up a steep hill). They found a tree down on the steep hill that took out the line, but they were able to get to a flat spot and cut the line and isolate it so they could feed us from the North end. One of the guys commented that this must be an old line from the first few years of the electric co-ops. (The Rural Electrification Administration, REA, was started by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935) My dad would talk about using horses to pull the electric lines and poles through the pasture in about 1940, and how they laid there until WWII was over.
Getting to the North end was a little more difficult for the guys. It was muddy, and still raining, and the first truck got stuck, and they had to get a ‘track style’ bucket truck in to make the connection and pull the first truck back out. Meanwhile, I got the generator out—hadn’t used that in 10 years, so it was a good time to make sure it still worked. As I was pumping up the tires with a cordless air pump, the power came back on. Of course. But I ran it for an hour anyway. Still works! It was 1:30PM. I teased the electric guys –they didn’t know what they were getting into when they stopped at that downed tree at 7AM.
I got my post holes all dug. Surprisingly, only hit rock in 3 of the 12 holes. Then down to the pole barn and dug some holes there to add support posts to three posts that are nearly rotted off at the ground. It has rained most of the week. I haven’t got much done on the fence because I need to pack the dirt back around the posts, and it doesn’t pack when it’s mud or clay. My summer padawan has helped pull the first wire and tear out the old fence. Maybe next week, when it’s not raining so much, we’ll get back to installation.
We’ve gotten enough rain, for now, almost 6” for June, not counting whatever we get Friday evening here. Growing Degree Units are just over 1000, about 180 above normal. The crops mostly look pretty good. The oats have some color change on the different soils, the corn is almost canopied, and the soybeans are coming along. There are some wet spots in some fields, but thankfully, that lake isn’t in my field.
Got the 4-wheeler running with the new carburetor.
Ducklings arrived Friday morning.
WOULD YOU RATHER GO WITHOUT RUNNING WATER OR ELECTRICITY?
Friday was my strawberry day. I got to the fields just a bit after 6 a.m. and was a little surprised to see a mother/father/daughter combo in the strip next to me. 6 a.m. is normally not a kid-friendly time; I know I would never have dragged Child at that time of day. (Of course, after she turned seven or eight, I never dragged her berry-picking again.)
The young kid in the next row was adamant that her dad (not her mom, just her dad) get every single good strawberry on their side. She let him know, in a fairly loud voice, when he had missed one. She would then pick it and show it to him before putting it into their flat. The rate at which she was finding good berries led me to think that Dad was doing it on purpose. Basically keeping her busy and allowing her to think she was “winning”.
When YA was young, I did occasionally let her win at some games. Yahtzee, Cribbage, Aggravation – all those were fairly easy to lose. Monopoly was a little harder because she could spot if I was doing something stupid. Same with Checkers and Risk. It wasn’t constant – just every now and then so she wouldn’t lose interest. My dad NEVER let us win; in fact he sometimes went to extraordinary lengths to keep us from winning. He thought it was a good lesson for us to learn how to lose – that classic “character-building” thing.
Eventually I didn’t need to let her win anymore and it was about that time that she came home from daycare wanting the game “Mancala”. It looked interesting so I got her a set and then lost every single game we ever played. It took me forever to even figure out the rules and I never did really master it. I think we will have it downstairs but it hasn’t been out of the box in years!
Trail Baboon 