Riverbend Journal

  As you can see, our garden is still very dry and required the hauling of many buckets of water to keep all the tomato/cabbage/kohlrabi/pepper plants alive until next week when we can get down next. As you can probably see by  the water darkened spots, we have amassed quite a collection of them. A friend of ours who plants a big garden for charitable causes ended up with way to many tomato and pepper plants and asked if we could use some. Why yes we could, especially since they were twice the size of the ones growing in our garden currently. So we planted them. I don't know how many tomato plants are now growing out there but I'm guessing it is somewhere in the order of 40 or 50 plants. Way more than we will ever need if they all grow to maturity. But why not since we have the space and perhaps we can give them away to someone in need. Our peas aren't doing too well in the dry soil and we will be lucky to harvest much from them. The radishes in the center row are doing qui...

  Time constraints continue to prevent me from doing my normal blogging routines but hopefully by the middle of this week, things will ease up a bit and I can visit my blogging family more than I have been.  This is the scene that greeted me the very next morning after the last picture taken shown in the previous post. The bird house is supposed to be at the top of the post and the bucket, a.k.a. raccoon deterrent, is supposed to be underneath that. But a fat raccoon had evidently hung on the bottom of the bucket and as you might tell, broke the bucket bottom so that it slid down the post. After that, the raccoon essentially had a step stool to the buffet. With the nesting straw hanging out the the opening, I wasn't optimistic that any birds have survived. Indeed, when I got closer and looked at the grass shown below, I knew the ending. Although the birdhouse isn't mine, I had a lot emotionally invested in it this spring and this makes the third or fourth time it has been raid...

  Hopefully next week, my blogging can return to normal. Until then, don't be worried if your comment isn't published in a timely manner.  The bluebirds are growing fast and now have blue tinged wing tips, a sign that fledging is a day soon arriving. They still won't look at me yet, preferring not to see death coming. Both parents are non-stop finding food and flying it back to the nest, at least as long as I can see before dark closes in. I don't know at this point if the parents spend any time actually inside the nesting box. It lacks room for them. Occasionally I see one or the other of the parents sitting on top of the nesting box, probably taking a breather for a few seconds before heading off again. Above is day 14, I think since hatching and they now have a white feathered ring around their eyes which signals the last day humans are supposed to actively monitor them so not to risk premature fledging which could start in another day or two. At least for front open...

  Due to a busy schedule, please forgive me if your comment isn't published or I respond in a timely manner. I will try to do both as soon as I can.  My wife often has to eat and work at the same time and so takes a lot of finger type foods. One of her favorites to take is homemade hummus. Since the ones found in stores are often plagued with salmonella or other additives, we prefer to make our own and so years ago, I would pressure can chickpeas for my wife to later turn into hummus. By pressure canning them, the chickpeas are soft and ready to be blended up with choice of seasoning and are shelf stable. It is a fairly simple process but to do a batch, still takes most of the day. I have to boil the peas briefly, rinse them, boil them again for a bit longer, hot pack and then can them for 75 minutes per canner load. This batch took two canner loads but yielded 13 pints of ready to make hummus which will probably last us most of the year. Despite leaving ample room for head he...

A Farmer Busy In His Garden in the Style of Dali  Although for the most part I will be home today and every night this week, we will be having a guest and in our house, that means giving up my office as an extra bedroom. Thus I won't have much access to my desktop computer where I do the large majority of my blogging. So if I'm scarce this week, that is partly the reason why. The rest of the reason is that said guest and I have a lot of activities planned and so I just may plain be busy. But I will catch up upon my return.

  As a wood worker, one will quickly learn that there are many opinions on how to do or not do something. It is hard to discern the truth out of all of those so often one is left to make an informed choice and then hopefully learn from the experience.  One such subject is whether or not one should finish cedar. Cedar wood in its raw form is naturally rot, moisture and bug resistant which makes it great for an outdoor wood. But left alone, it will over time fade away from the nice reddish tones into a uniform bland gray and eventually almost black in color. It will still be structurally sound but the color will be different.  There is an option to finish the wood to help preserve the color longer. One can apply a film finish which sits on the surface and essentially creates a protective bubble around the entire object. But with time and use, that finish always fails at some point and then moisture and time will play havoc on the finish causing it to bubble, blister and pee...

  The next morning following a rain and two days after a prior rain, we went down to the farm garden with hope in our hearts that it would have the must needed moisture. While there was signs of rain, the ground had been so dry that it just soaked it all up and it was still fairly dry on top. But the crops were looking 100% better than the prior week. Left to right in the top photo are the mulched strawberries which have green berries on them, a row of peas, a row of watermelon radishes that are looking quite well, another row of peas, a missing row that we planted carrots in that never came up, a row part potato and part onion and a full row of onions. The peas are way behind and will likely not produce much but with some scattered showers and cooler temps in the forecast for the next week, we haven't given up hope on them yet.  I'm not sure who asked on a previous post but here is the asparagus bed after a light picking. Most of the spears are in the bolting stage and I will...

  Funny how things just seem to get in the way. Late last fall, after putting the finishing touches on the greenhouse, my wife requested I make her a porch swing. When we added the addition onto the house, we added a covered front porch, something I have always wanted, and made plans to someday hang a porch swing, something my wife wanted. I couldn't very well say no to her though I did caution that cold weather was soon approaching and I might not get it done until next spring. Cold weather did indeed put a halt to my gluing activities in the garage and so it sat collecting dust until a warm stretch earlier this spring when I was able to put some time on it and get it nearly assembled before running into problems. I intentionally made this project somewhat of a challenge by using cedar. Cedar is a beautiful wood and readily available for a reasonable price in the form of deck boards but it is brittle and not easy to work with. It is very light but can split over time when adding s...

  The bluebirds are growing fuzzier and stronger and they can now hold their heads up alongside of the nest in between parental treats. That is why I suspect we lost one of the bluebirds. Either the egg didn't hatch or one didn't survive the initial couple days. I have never been able to see all five bodies at once and was always assuming the other one was underneath the scrum but now that they are older, I suspect it was just an egg that didn't hatch.  I asked my neighbor who the bird house belongs too what happens if the egg doesn't hatch or if the young chick dies? Does the adult birds carry out the remains of the egg or the chick? He didn't know. But again, it makes me wish I had a video camera instead of just sticking my phone in there once a day. This picture was taken seven days after they hatched, or at least I think they hatched. As I open up the box front, there is maybe a one inch slot between the top of the nest and the roof of the box. This is where I s...

  I knew as we drove down to the garden that it wouldn't look the best. We had been nearly three weeks without any measurable amount of rain with the last one arriving before we even planting a single seed. Thus crops like the peas are stunted and every single tomato plant we set out the previous weekend had died of dehydration. So we set out the bulk of what we have remaining and hand carried buckets of water the 1/8th mile round trip to the nearest hydrant hoping that little amount will get them through the next rain. Suddenly, I was quite happy my MIL went so overboard in her starting tomato plants in our greenhouse. The fallow side of the garden had been seeded down in later winter with clover but it was old seed and didn't germinate at all. So I tilled it up in a cloud of dust, to kill the weed cycle and try again with some pasture seed I found at a local farm and home type store. But again, unless we get some rain sometime soon, it will be futile.  It isn't all for no...

  You may recall the above picture I posted awhile back of the five eggs in our bluebird house. Based upon the temperatures and how well the male feeds the female, incubation can be anywhere from 13 to 20 days. We had three nights below freezing so I figured it would be on the upper end of that range but that male must have been feeding his bride really well because they hatched probably at the 13 day mark. This what I found when I stuck my phone into their nest this past Tuesday. I'm guessing they are a day old at this point. According to my neighbor, bluebirds are very tolerant parents and don't mind being disturbed by photography. They don't abandon their nest just because I stuck the end of my phone into the narrow slow between the roof and the top edge of the nest to take a picture. Well, technically they do because they will fly off to a nearby tree and keep watch and then return when I am done so it is a temporary abandonment. Still, I try to be a kind neighbor and o...

Tiny home in the style of Salvador Dali For those of you who might have noticed my absent during the first half of the week, I have an excuse. I was helping someone build a tiny home. Well actually we just formed up and poured the foundation for one. Although we are calling it a tiny home, it is more like a small cabin and will be around sixteen feet by 24 feet.  It is being built on an old farm site that has long ago been razed and cleaned up but there is still water and electrical hookups nearby. It is on a small hill with rolling hills in about every direction you look. We spent on evening staking out the perimeter and then a couple days forming up for the concrete, digging a footing, reinforcing everything and finally a morning pouring the concrete itself. It would have been fairly pleasant work had not the wind been blowing 40+ miles an hour THE ENTIRE TIME! Have you read about old settlers on the plains who were driven insane by the wind? I can now understand why. At one poin...

Rhubarb on an old farm in the style of Picasso A.I. picture I drove down to the farm specifically to look for morel mushrooms again. The last time there was adequate moisture but we were fresh off of two nights below zero and so I thought it was too cold. This time, two days later, two warm 60+ degrees day later, I thought for sure they would be popping but I was wrong. Or at least I walked by hundreds and didn't see a one. So I'll give them a couple days and try once more but judging from the signs of the forest floor, weed heights, etc., we now need some more rain and if we get any it will be in the form of the less desirable yellow morels. Maybe for the first time in my life, this will finally be the year where I go without finding a single morel mushroom. On my way home, I got to thinking about mom's rhubarb plants. She had them planted on the south side of the garage and they always produced lots of rhubarb in spring. Mom would turn it into tangy cobblers that we alway...

What you are looking at is the rear bumper of the family minivan. It isn't particular interesting other than it is dirty from driving the gravel roads down by the farm looking for mushrooms and asparagus. But if we are ever going to successfully move our garden from the farm to behind our house where it is much closer, something about it has to change. There will be a need to occasionally get some compost or other amendments, especially in the early days, and I will need to physically haul up the tiller from the farm. In order to do all that, I need a trailer and a way to pull it. The minivan seemed to be the likely candidate for this endeavor. Hitches for it were plentiful to find on the internet and reasonably inexpensive. There were even videos online showing how to do it step by step for the exact year and model we have and apart from it requiring two people, I thought it was pretty doable by me. After all, one engineer can equal two people in a lot of things. So I placed my or...