I had a much bigger frog doing duty under my house but he probably got tired of living there all alone and went seeking companionship. He did a fantastic job. Wonder how long it will be before the basement crickets overrun us again. All that grape juice just sounds wonderful. We gave up on grapes because the birds just made it impossible to gather them and covering them meant always getting birds untangled from the netting. Alas and alack, we now have to buy our juice and jelly.
Praise the Lord, your hubby has a good hearing aid. It will make such a big difference in his life and in yours also. My mother was hearing impaired almost all of her life (childhood illness caused the problem) and hearing aids were not very good back then. The batteries were a real nusience and ran down quickly. She died in 1962 at 52 years of age and I don't think she ever had one that did a very good job for her. They make really good ones these days so that is good.
Rain. And wind. And only 38 degrees. It's not what I wanted, but what I got today. The cows and calves in the field just to the east of us are clustered in a corner near a gate, have been there for a couple of hours. The storm drove them in that direction and they would like somebody to open the gate for them so they could just keep going. It isn't going to happen, although one little guy managed to get to the other side of the fence through a little gap, and now he can't figure out how to get back.
One of my recent, and thus far unfinished projects, has been to dig out and dispose of a patch of very large weeds that grew up in my vegetable garden while I was looking elsewhere. Soon I will be needing to rototill the garden plot, and I sure don't want those thousands of weed seeds in the soil. Just the ones the wind dislodged and those that fell while I carefully dug and removed the plants will be enough to supply me with weeds there for the next few years. Two of the worst offenders are a mallow that is known here as buttonweed, and elsewhere as cheesewheel or something close to that name, and pigweed which is in the amaranth family and has quite large, almost feathery seedheads. Another, less abundant one is lambs quarters.
When I got tired of weeds, there was another project waiting: transplanting asparagus plants from an old row next to the grapes, and far too close to them. Of course, before I could plant them in the gaps in my newer asparagus rows, they needed to be dug out. It wasn't an easy job, but eventually I got about a dozen of them moved and gave them a good drink of water in their new locations because the soil is quite dry. There are still a few more, but for next year at least, they get to stay where they are and I will try to keep the weeds and quackgrass around them to a minimum.
The flower beds have also recieved some attention, and parts of them look better, which makes the untended parts look worse. It's something like washing part of a wall. Hubby helped me cut down a couple of lilac bushes that were making one corner of the yard too crowded and too shady. At first I was only going to trim the old wood out and shorten them by half, but as I got started trying to cut the 1-2 inch in diameter stems with the loppers, I decided the job needed a chain saw. I have 7 more lilac bushes, all the same color, so they won't be missed, and meanwhile, the iris and daylilies planted near them will have a good chance of blooming next season. The lilacs will come back up from the roots, so it will take some diligence to keep them cut down. Like weeds, they aren't likely to give up easily. As I have said often, gardening is the art of causing some plants to live and others to die.
Speaking of weeds, and we have many healthy ones right now, I am often amused at how hard some of us work to grow plants that are pretty much considered weeds in some other parts of the country. Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder.
Today is going to be pickled beet day. I dug and pulled out the last of them this morning. I wish I had done it yesterday because last night we got more rain, and the soil was quite muddy. The water trough that catches the overflow from the spring makes a good place to wash and scrub them, even through I have to bend over in an akward position to do it. Spraying them with the hose on the lawn would get me almost as wet as the beets, and even though it is a sunny day, the wind is blowing and I got cold enough doing it the way I did without being wet.
Now the house smells quite earthy with the beet roots boiling in my soup kettle on the stove. The kettle holds 16 liquid quarts, and is almost full. I think I'll just put them in gallon jars, pour the vinegar/sugar/spice mixture over them and let them sit in the referigerator for a few weeks while we eat our way though them. I've done that before, nothing bad can live in that much vinegar.
My neighbor's three horses are in a field on the opposite side of our driveway from my horses, so they visit with 30 ft between them. When I looked out the window a while ago, all of them were sleeping in the sunshine, almost lined up along the fence with heads all going the same way. I thought about taking a picture, but decided that if I had walked out there, they would have stood up. Mine are happily picking at the green grass that emerged after we had some rain last week followed by a couple of warm days. There isn't much there, but is is fresh and green. It keeps them busy trying to get a mouthfull.
Hubby has been cleaning up a row of miscellaneous things that have accumulated along the fence line in the orchard pasture. When we don't know what else to do with large, outdoor items that might be useful some day, that's where they've gone. So, over the years there was been quite an accumulation of 55 gallon drums, pipe of various types, cement forms that we thought we might use again someday, partial rolls of field fencing and barbed wire, old barbed wire that was salvaged off an old fence years ago, etc. It was a good sized pile when we moved here in '93, and we just added to it. Weeds have grown up through it, and the large cottonwood trees along the fenceline have dropped limbs and leaves on it. What a mess! But hubby loves to organize things, loves to clean up messes, so he is having a great time. The local dump will take all the metals, no charge. The cost of hauling it to a scrap metal place would cancel out the price we could get for doing it.
Just think, our rusty wire and pipe could come to you in the form of a shiny new car! I always wonder what things like that used to be.
We got rain today, not like most of you folks get, but it is the wet kind. It started while I was working at the coop, sometime between noon and 3pm. Today was a little bit interesting there because I worked with a different product. Gelatin capsules. Empty. People buy them and put ? in them. We have them in the department with the bulk spices. I know some use cinnamon and also red pepper. Not sure why, but that's ok. 100 of them weigh .03 pound, counting the plastic bag I put them into. I just got curious about that and the scale was right in front of me.
Anyhow, they come in a bag that says it has 1,000. So I made 10 labels on the computer, and started pouring them out onto a tray and pushing them into a bag with a knife. 5-10-15-20-oops, now they are building up some static electricity and extra ones want to follow the ones I have counted. Basically they act almost like styrofoam beans and in addition are much smaller and transparent. What a labor intensive job! The bag of 1,000 actually had 1,192 in it, so I made another bag and another label. I had thought ok, count out 9 bags of 100 and just pour the rest into another bag. Wrong. I could see that there were a lot more. So I had to count them, and put the extras in another bag in the office to save in case the next 1000 is short. The other bag had 1,021. I'll probably be pushing those things around in my sleep! They come in 2 different sizes, 0 and 00, both small. The thought crossed my mind that these things behaved something like cows!
The big news at the coop today was that we have the possibility of moving the store into a different building, closer to the center of town! There will be a membership meeting next Monday evening to vote on it. I plan to be there. It sure would be nice to have more room and better storage, maybe a walk in fridge, who knows. Just having more space would be nice. I'm not sure if they see this move as a permanent thing or temporary until we build a new building on property the coop is buying near the present location. Either way, better facilities will probably increase our ability to supply the public with some unique products, like gelatin capsules! Actually, most of our inventory is unique.
Chiro admitted he might have overadjusted me last time. I need to back up here to say that I went in Tuesday for a minor tune up and in a couple of hours was very stiff and sore. Time didn't help it, so I went back today and he twisted me into a pretzel again and hopefully has everything lined up right now. Fold this leg over that one, pull this arm out and fold over the other, push here, pop! Nothing hurts when the bones move, but I can hear and feel them, sort of like a large version of knuckles popping. Shudder! I always hated that sound. I still have sore muscles tonight. Hopefully they will settle down in a couple of days. At least I am far more comfortable than yesterday!
Yesterday afternoon I rode Patch for the first time since my painful endurance ride last month. The neighbor needed to move a bull who had jumped a fence when they tried to move him a couple of days before. Patch and I got there a few minutes early and moved him for about a quarter of a mile, but then we came to a gate and waited about 20 minutes for the neighbor to join us and move him the rest of the way, including across the county road. During that time the bull decided he wasn't going any farther. He turned around and went at a hard and determined trot back to the corner where he jumped out, and rather than run him through the fence, or give him an excuse to jump it again, or to run over Patch and me, we let him go.
Plan B to get him moved is just to leave the gates open into adjoining fields and let him get curious and move himself. 2,000 pounds of lightning fast beef on the hoof is definitely something to respect! You might remember the joke about the 500 pound gorilla being able to sleep anyplace he wants, well, this fellow is times 4 and is capable of moving very fast! As the saying goes, the ball is in his court.
Those gelatin caps have saved my sanity more times than I care to tell. If you have an animal that is good at managing to upchuck bitter tasting pills, they can be worth more than gold to you. My cat can salivate to the point of almost drowning anyone nearby and having all that foamy mess to look forward to every time you have to give a pill they hate makes those caps lifesavers under such conditions. Just pop the pill in the empty cap and woola! Success! Sometimes you have to cut the pill up a bit but it is worth the effort.
We made it to Boise and back safely, yesterday. Hubby's test was an echo cardiogram, very interesting to watch his heart beating on the screen while the tech took pictures of it for the cardiologist to evaluate. The Doc wasn't even in the office complex, he was miles away at the hospital, so we will hear from him later and might have to make another trip, or maybe not. The tech, although he couldn't tell us anything officially, said Hubby's heart would put most 50 year olds to shame! We take that as very good news! The results will be sent to the local Doc, and maybe we won't need to make another trip to Boise. Round trip takes about $40 in gas. We did take advantage of visiting a HD store, and a Walmart, and also having a nice seafood lunch at our favorite restaurant. It was a good day!
After we got back to Baker, we had dinner at the Chinese restaurant, then went to my 7pm meeting for the food coop. We will be moving the store to a larger building, less rent, more space, better location. I think the timing is good, our sales are up 11.3% even with the bad economy. The move will take place in the week between Christmas and New Years, with our annual inventory happening at the same time!
It snowed! Maybe not in Alaska, but here it did today. The ground is white, the trees still have green leaves, and it is just plain strange! Tomorrow's forecast says mixed rain and snow. Will the garden ever dry out enough for me to rototill it this fall? It's looking doubtful. Maybe we won't ever get the Indian summer we've been expecting. It's strange weather for October. Usually we don't have snow covering the ground for about another month.
On a more positive note, I am thankful we aren't in Colorado where they have 3 ft of the white fluffy stuff! Nothing like putting things in perspective!
This morning the clouds just had a little hole in them for the sun to peek through for about 2 minutes. It cast pinkish splotches on the hills and disappeared for the rest of the day. While I watched the sun, a coyote trotted across the pasture, stopping a couple of times to sniff the air, and he was gone over the hill about the same time the clouds hid the sun.
I haven't finished digging my potatoes, so this morning after it started snowing I went out and dug about 5 more hills of them. They are planted in the ground and have several inches of straw over them, so are insulated well enough to prevent freezing for a while. Some of them have critter nibblings on them, and today while I was digging I found a gopher tunnel leading right into one of the hills. If I dig a few every day, eventually I'll get them all.
As of yesterday, the bull was still happy where we left him, but maybe with this snow on the ground, he might be easily moved by giving him some alfalfa every day, and making him move closer to the gates we want him to go through. The neighbor said he did take him a little hay one day, and saw him eating it, but the next day he didn't go give him any more because he was busy with a project. It would take a few days. There is still plenty of feed out there, so it would be like baiting him with a treat every day. "Here Bully, Bully, come get your treat"! Horses will paw through the snow to get at the grass under it, but cattle do not, so if there is more snow, success will happen faster.
The fire in the wood stove kept the house nice and toasty today. I cooked a pot of pinto beans and will add onion and tomatoes. I'll make cornbread too, we haven't had any cornbread for months, it's a winter thing and my eyes tell me it is winter. Hopefully, tomorrow they will tell me it is not.
BRRR! I can't believe you have snow already. I can just visualize you out digging the potatoes in the snow. Brrr again!
We have corn bread almost every day and never tire of it but of course we southerners are like that. The pinto beans, onion and tomatoes sounds like a winner. Think I will fix that tomorrow too. I will have cornbread too. Sometimes I pan fry it in small pancakes and put chopped onion in the batter. Sometimes I put left over corn in the batter. Tomorrow it will be with left over corn. Love the idea of a wood stove and we are preparing to have one installed very soon. I always liked cooking on a wood stove.
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The pinto beans, onion and tomatoes sounds like a winner. Think I will fix that tomorrow too. I will have cornbread too. Sometimes I pan fry it in small pancakes and put chopped onion in the batter. Sometimes I put left over corn in the batter. Tomorrow it will be with left over corn. Love the idea of a wood stove and we are preparing to have one installed very soon. I always liked cooking on a wood stove.