Riverbend Journal

  Out of focus, it might not look like much but for me, it is a sign of hope and a new start. That is one of the first sprigs of asparagus growing up out of my new plot. I had to dig it out a bit as it was still buried a bit under the mulch, but it is definitely there. For reference, it is about an inch tall and not much bigger than the lead of a pencil in diameter. Growing up, my parents sent my brother and I out to search the old fence rows for wild asparagus. There we would maybe pick a couple handfuls of few times every spring for consumption. The problem with that method, was it is hard to spot in fence rows growing with every kind of weed, grass, and tree sprout you can imagine so we probably missed more than we picked. It also had to be quite tall before we could see it above everything else and so was a bit tougher to eat.  I remember my parents planting a bed of asparagus in the yard of our old farm house. Although I could probably still find it's location within a fe...

  As often happens in the wee hours of the morning, I lie awake in bed because a problem is rattling around my head. On one particular morning, after I wrote the blog post about taking a calculated risk of pulling a trailer without working lights, I had an idea. I had originally nixed the idea of adding the proper wiring for trailer lights because it required me to route a wire underneath my vehicle, something I can't do without having it up on a hoist or a lot of jacks, neither of which I have. So why can't I route it through the inside of the van? The only hard part I could foresee was the firewall, or metal partition between the engine and the passenger part meant to keep noise and fumes at bay.  So I took another calculated risk that I could figure out some way of getting through that barrier and ordered the wire harness. Above is the wiring harness tucked into a side cubby where I also store a set of jumper cables. At this point, it was installed by removing a couple trim...

  More often than I care to admit, I come across a really good idea from one of the many blogs I read every morning. Last week, Donna over at Just Me , posted a picture of her newly planted tomatoes and they looked very much like the above picture with the metal posts driven down through the center of the cages to prevent them from falling over. Nearly always I have put up those flimsy metal cages only to have them fall over at some point in the season. It never hurts the plant but it does make it a bit more difficult to find all the tomatoes on the bottom side of the plant. It also creates a tripping hazard if unnoticed. I'm not sure why I never put my brain towards figuring out a solution.  Last year, the final year in our old garden, we actually never got around to putting up those cages because of the timing of our visits and when we finally got down there, they were way to big to cage without breaking a lot of their branches. So we just let them grow freely and although I...

  This day has been looming for awhile and though I am excited for it, I'm not sure I'm emotionally ready. My eldest daughter is graduating high school and my youngest is graduating elementary school. The former weighs on my a lot more than the latter. Preparations have been in the works for months, mostly by my wife and daughter. I have done a few things but haven't been pulling nearly my weight on this project. On this day, the morning of the graduation party, my job was to set up a tent that we bought from a friend whose son graduated a couple years ago, and set it up. As one would expect, the directions were lacking but I eventually got it figured out. Below you can see it partially set up with the roof in place and lashed down where I could. Knowing a bowline and trucker's hitch knots are keys in getting a flimsy affair like this tent lashed down to where only a moderate wind might jeopardize it.  We are holding our graduation party a day earlier than most so that ...

  Although we've been getting timely and adequate rains thus far this year, normally our summers here can be a bit dry. So we started mulching in our garden by mulching around the potato crop seen above. Because this is a new garden, it lacks in organics in the soil which help retain moisture for longer periods of time. This is very evident when immediately after an inch of rain, I can walk out in the garden and barely sink. In our old garden, doing that would guarantee my shoes would be buried in mud up to my ankles. So my hope is that I can till all the straw into the soil this fall and help to start building up the organic load along with any remaining crop residue. Some of you may remember that after I tilled the lawn last year to create this garden, I seeded it down with Daikon radishes in order to help build up the organic load and to help penetrate down into the harder layers below the top soil to allow moisture be absorbed even more. I didn't yet have a fence and after ...

A.I Generated My old computer was getting very long in the tooth. The root drive for installing programs had long since filled up and despite installing those I could on another partitioned drive, it still caused issues. The operating system had been upgraded from I think, Windows 7 which was a thing 15 years ago. All in all, it was time to upgrade before the thing just completely shot craps.  So I got a new one with features like Solid State Drives and a new operating system, Windows 11. Whenever I have upgraded in the past, I have always expected problems and this time was no different, but the nature of the problems has shocked me a bit. Nearly every single program has gone to a subscription model. I don't like subscriptions. I'm not a heavy user so why do I want to pay for something I may only use a few times a year. I just want a no frills software that gets what I want done, which I can reliably use without updates or learning for the next decade.  Microsoft Office came ...

  First, a brief update on my wife's vehicle. The problem turned out not to be a fuel pump issue at all and one that was easily fixed. For some reason, the oil fill cap came off and bounced around upside down in a recess where it was located. This allowed a small amount of oil to spray the inside of the engine compartment and the heat of the engine burned that spilled oil and thus gave us the odor that we both though smelled like fuel. They cleaned up the engine compartment, changed the oil and put the cap back on in place and everything is right with the world. Perhaps due to the recent bruhaha with my vehicle, all was done free of charge. Of course they accused me of not putting on the cap but I have never opened the hood on that thing in the 5000 miles we have put on it since it was brand new from the factory. I suspect that it was never tight to begin with and engine vibrations caused it to eventually come loose.  Finally, a month late, my asparagus crowns came in and so I...

Last fall, I saw the handwriting on the wall and proactively installed a hitch onto the family minivan. At the same time, I neglected to install wiring that would run the lights of any cable I may pull behind said minivan. The reason for that was because it requires a wire to be run from the rear taillights, all the way underneath the minivan and up through the engine compartment. It would be a fairly easy task with a vehicle lifts and not one that I can accomplish without one. I told myself at the time that I might try to find someone who does such things to finish but never did. I also told myself that one of the advantages of living in very rural America, is that I rarely have a car overtake me or I overtake another car in my drive from my house to the farm. In other words, it is unlikely to be a safety hazard. Two years ago, I bought enough clean rye straw to last several years and stored it in an outbuilding down on the farm. We use it to mulch our gardens to preserve moisture and...

  Early last winter, we placed an order for seeds for our garden along with a selection of berry plants and asparagus crowns. We planted a few berries at our last garden and they mostly fed the birds. I have no doubt that the birds up here will appreciate eating them as well but they seem like the best way to utilize the steep ravine sides that I no longer mow. Unfortunately, it was the first of May before they finally arrive and only after I complained. No wanting the deer to mow them off immediately until they had a chance to get established, I snuck out and got them planted before an approaching rainy few days and promptly fenced them in. The asparagus crowns however, that were supposed to be planted at least six weeks earlier, are still in my refrigerator waiting for the rain to stop, a bittersweet problem. As you can see, we've been having timely and adequate rainfall this spring, a big departure from the previous two years. I'm sure the farmers are a bit riled up as most ...

  Sparrows started their nest for the umpteenth time after it has repeatedly removed and discarded. Along came some bluebirds who wanted the sparrow's latest nest. A great battle ensued. Despite the two day long battle where the sparrows were outgunned and brought down out of the air and into the grass, they seem to have won the battle due to persistence. I'm keeping my eyes on the nest in hopes the bluebirds come back and try again or I might have to remove the nest again for the umpteenth plus one time. 

  Before I start with the garden, you can see some of the starts we have growing in the greenhouse yet to be planted in the garden. Above are some tomatoes, basil, leeks and something else that has flown my mind. Unseen on the other side are some summer squash plants that I just put seeds into pots so they aren't much to look at yet. We've been getting some nice rains of late which have been nice after two severely dry years. Fortunately, now that the garden is steps behind our house, we can easily go out and plant for an hour in the evening and not have to wait an entire week when our garden was a 2 hour round trip drive away. In the foreground are a number of rows of peas, nearly decimated by rabbits but staging a comeback. In the far left there are some radishes, a row of lettuce that I harvest just after snapping this picture for a nice supper of salad. Next to the lettuce are some failed basil and a very thin stand of carrots and a different type of radishes. I'm not s...

  On one of the draws where I hunt for morel mushrooms on a typical year, during my previous visit I only looked at the head of it where I typically find the most morels and indeed found two. Pressed on time though, I hadn't hiked the full length of the draw and so on this visit, I decided to make that my first stop. It had only been four days since my previous trip and had been mostly overcast though a bit warmer and so I had hope of finding masses of mushrooms but alas, didn't see a single one. At the far end of the draw though, I came across somebody's deer stand. There are deer trails everywhere through this draw so I'm sure it is prime hunting grounds. The entire time I was walking this draw with my head towards the ground, a hawk was above me doing the exact same thing and crying out every five seconds or so. I suspect that the hawk had a nest somewhere there and was telling me to watch myself and not get to close or he would come down and feast on my eyes and per...

  A.I. Generated Part of moving our gardening efforts from the farm to our house on the edge of town was having to start a new bed of asparagus. The one on the farm was some 25 years old and getting quite long in the tooth as far as growing asparagus goes but it was still producing enough for our needs. I tried digging some of the crowns up last fall but with the severe drought, the ground was so hard that all I did was bend the tines on my heavy duty potato fork. So we ordered some new crowns to be delivered from a national seed company. Asparagus is supposed to be planted in the spring time 2 to 4 weeks before your average last frost date. Our average last frost date passed us by last week and we still haven't been shipped our asparagus crowns. I called the seed company this morning inquiring on their status and was told their ship date was still a month away. I followed up by asking if they would guarantee their product since by the time we would be getting them, they would be t...

  Spring has officially arrived in my neck of the woods when the fruit trees start blooming. Above is one of my sour cherry trees in full bloom. As luck would have it, just when it was fully flowered along with the apple and peach trees, we received two nights in a row with temperatures below freezing. This happened last year and we have very little fruit as a result. We'll have to wait and see if the same result happens again this year. After my wife returned from her medical conference and while my car was still in the shop after 5 days for a 5.1 hour repair, I begged my wife to loan me her car so I could get out of the house and go hunting for morel mushrooms. Regular readers will know I regard this time of year at the Morel Madness as for several weeks, you will see people parked randomly along the road near brushy draws, stumbling through the woods looking at their feet for fungi which they then secret back home, fry up and eat until they are sick of it because they know it wi...