Riverbend Journal

  After two days of lows well below freezing, and hopefully behind us now until late fall, I set off for a morning of foraging. My first stop was the asparagus patch which had quite a haul despite perhaps a third of it having frozen and wasn't any good anymore. The tips are starting to be more loosely organized and so it won't be much longer before the asparagus harvest is done for the year and we'll leave the shoots to bolt.  My second stop was to look for gray morels. The first two times I have looked, it has been too dry and a bit on the early side. Since then we got some much needed moisture and the ground looked prime for finding morels but with two days of below freezing temps at night, I suspect it put a damper on them for now. Some years are like this where it yo-yos between too much or too little moisture and heat and we just never find too much until the yellow morels come out a bit later. However the next two or three days are supposed to get up into the 60's...

Some of you may recall back in late summer of last year, we put ourselves in the market for another vehicle. My wife's vehicle is getting long in the tooth by the number of year it is but has pretty low mileage. We have a daughter that has been working after school, perhaps this summer as well, and will soon be headed off for college. Although maybe not known in other parts of this country or world, driving is a mandatory thing here because there is no mass transportation. Then there was the pandemic market after effects. We had been hearing rumors of people ordering and then waiting for upwards of 18 months for their vehicle to arrive.  So we put in an order for a RAV4 Prime which is their hybrid vehicle that also has battery storage enough for electric only driving for up to 40 miles. My thought was that my wife could drive back and forth to work, those low miles, on battery power only and then if she wanted to drive the 100+ miles to the city to shop, she could using the hybrid ...

  A.I. creation of life along the St. Lawrence River in the style of Grand Wood On a rainy day recently, I spent some time cleaning the cobwebs on a distant branch of my family tree. I cleaned up the records on Ancestry, removing duplicates and linking them properly. But in doing so, it has caused me to wonder about certain aspects of them. My 2nd great grandfather Leander Wells is someone I wrote about a few years ago on my blog. He was a carpenter by trade though he died tragically in a railroad depot fire where he was serving as a night watchman. His mother, my third great grandmother is Mary E. Sheldon Wells. I have a number of records for her including her mother's name was Elizabeth Lytle. But I don't have any records connecting her to a father despite it being listed on Ancestry as Winter Sheldon, a name I have always admired.  Winter Sheldon, possibly my 4th great grandfather, has been a mystery to me. I have only one record of him and that is an army enrollment record...

 Above are the ten pints of spicy pickled asparagus that I put up after our first picking. The last time I made some, I made about ten pints and my wife promptly gave away probably eight of those pints and so this year, I hope to make a lot more if possible. Due to a work trip for my wife and forecasted rains, it wasn't looking likely that a garden trip would be possible today, which is normally when we go. So I went down this past Tuesday, four days after the above picking, and picked about half as much as the first picking. It is currently soaking in cold water in the fridge and I hope to get it picked this afternoon (as I write this). Then maybe next Tuesday, make another run down to the farm for another picking and some mushroom hunting after all the forecasted rains, and get that preserved before my wife gets back and says otherwise. Hopefully if I hide some in reserve so she can't give all of it away, that will be enough to last until next year. Our neighbor up the street...

  I don't wish to antagonize Debby but I still do so on occasion with some of my politics and with pictures of my asparagus bed as it looked this past weekend. Hopefully she will successfully get hers going one of these years. Above is the lower end of the asparagus bed which tends to produce first. I'm not sure why but it always seems to be this way. The top half of the asparagus bed only had a handful of spears but I'm sure will be producing plenty by the next time I go down.  What I love about this asparagus, which my parents plants many, many years ago, is that the spears are quite fat, but yet really crisp. Always before I have picked just the tops of them and we have eaten and preserved those. But this year, I am picking them down to where they start not being crisp. They don't snap apart. By doing so, I'm left with some spears a good 16 inches long! These I plan to pickle for a tasty side that I consume all year long. We really didn't have a lot planned f...

If one breaks down my DNA into regions, the largest part by far is Scottish, and yet I have yet to find a single ancestor that lived within the current boundaries of modern Scotland. I have a number that lived in Northern England and are probably contributing to that Scottish component but all of those are on my mother's side of the family, which contributes only 8% of my overall DNA profile. On my paternal side, 36% of my DNA is Scottish which adds up to a total of 44% of my DNA is Scottish. I feel as if I should be eating haggis at least once a week. The reason I start off with this, goes back to the Grim branch of my family tree which I wrote in the last post. Nearly every person I have ever talked to or read, associates the Grim family from the paternal side of my family tree, with the famous Grim brothers of Germany who wrote the fairy tales. Since my paternal side of my DNA has exactly 0% of German DNA, I find it highly unlikely. My guess is that my Grim ancestors probably ca...

  We returned to our garden though there wasn't a lot on our agenda. I burned the debris under the trellis to get it ready for planting when it gets a little warmer out. My wife cleared out her cut flower patch and we burned all the debris in the middle of our two small raised beds that were our failed strawberry beds from two years ago and last year's carrot beds. I hoped that the burning of the debris would sterilize some of the weed seeds and add some nutrients to them. We then planted a few potatoes that we had that were going bad and starting to sprout.  I checked the asparagus bed which we had burned a few weeks earlier. The burning is supposed to warm up the ground a little bit so that we get early asparagus and sure enough, I found a single solitary spear of asparagus. Hopefully in another week or two, we should get enough for a meal and to start preserving.  It is also a reminder that my favorite time of the year is fast approaching. That time of year when I star...

  I have two Adam Grim's in my family tree, a father and son as you might expect. Adam Grim Jr, also had a son named Adam Grim as well making three in a row and all living in the same vicinity of Pennsylvania north of Pittsburgh. That and combined with a first cousin also named Adam Grim, it makes untangling them quite difficult. Click happy people on Ancestry, make the job even harder as nearly all of them have combined Adam Grim Sr. and Adam Grim Jr. to be one and the same. To make matters even more difficult, I only have the death date of Sr. and an approximate birth date for Jr. To give you some idea of the time frame, Sr. was born sometime around the start of the Revolutionary War and Jr. was born most likely around 1806. Two of the four records I have for him list that date and the other two list 1798 and 1812, a very wide range.  So in my hunt to end the confusion of the Adam Grim's, I have been trying to figure out the death date for Adam Grim Jr., my 4th great grandfa...

  I took this picture a little over a week ago, in fact on the last day of March. The last few years of our farm garden we haven't had much in the way of spring crops. Because of the distance involved and the business of our lives, we are left to gardening only on a weekend and that is if the weather cooperates. The last few years it has been cold and rainy on the weekends to the point that when we do get our spring crops planted, it gets hot much too soon and they fail to produce. This time, we had a very narrow window of opening. Keep reading for details.  Above is what we got done. We mulched the strawberry bed and planted one row of watermelon radishes (first time for us), two rows of snow peas, and one row of carrots from leftover seed. On the spur of the moment, deciding we might never get such an opportunity again, we drove 15 miles to pick up some onion sets and planted a row and a half of them. We also bought some potatoes and planted those too. We have potatoes on or...

I am not much of an engine mechanic. I may understand how to do a lot of things but making engines work is not my strong suit. So when the day came a couple weeks ago to do my annual engine maintenance, I wasn't looking forward to it.  I have four small engines I need to tend. One in the snow blower, lawnmower, tiller and chainsaw. For the snow blower, it is the end of its season so I drain the gas, change the oil and do any adjustments to the business end of the unit. The lawnmower needs an oil and filter change as well as the blade sharpened. The tiller needs an oil change both for the engine and the gearbox. Finally the chainsaw doesn't need any oil changes though I try to run it out of gas and oil when I know it will be sitting unused for a long time. Part of the reason I hate doing all this is because I have to locate four different manuals, and usually read through them multiple times to get all the pertinent information. For example, in three of the manuals, the amount o...

Due to a timely seasonal cold, I didn't at first smell anything as I hopped into the van to take the kids to school. But the oldest one declared that it smelled like garbage when she got into it. The youngest one entered and said it smelled like cheese. She looked around and quickly isolated the issue, a carton of milk left in the rear seat cupholders. She retrieved it and handed it to me, bulging at the seams and very much feeling like I was handling a live grenade with life and death possibilities. I gently opened up my door, walked it to the outside garbage can and disposed of it. My youngest said it had dripped onto the floor as she had retrieved it but fortunately we have floor liners and not carpet. Our local school system only goes half of a day on Fridays and so doesn't serve lunch to those in high school. Instead they just give them a sack lunch and a carton of milk. Near as I can figure, with spring break and a European vacation thrown into the mix, that carton of mil...

  A couple weeks ago as one of those early spring warm streaks rolled by, I dusted off the porch swing project that I had started very late last fall. Glue has a finite temperature range to work with and in an unheated garage, that means that I have to flow with the weather. After figuring out where I left off, I glued the back to the seat and started making the arm rests on either side.  Because this is sort of an experiment making it out of cedar which isn't the best wood for such things, over wintering has been hard on it. Some of the arm pieces had developed cracks in them and so I had to remake a few pieces not shown. Due to the nature of the design, I will have to screw into end grain which is the strongest of joints. To help reinforce that, one can insert dowels perpendicular to the end grain and then screw through the dowel. But I didn't have any dowels on hand. So after scavenging the scrap pile, I found a short piece of oak that would do just find if I could turn it ...