Riverbend Journal

  We were pretty excited for our sweet potato crop. Maybe a month ago we had dug a few hills and ended up with nearly two five gallon buckets full of large sweet potatoes. We had to mud those out due to the garden being so wet and didn't want to have to mud all of them out so we waited for a dry spell. That never really has happened but this morning as I write this, we had I think four days free of rain and so with a frost statistically possible at any time, we went into the garden determined to dig the rest.  We did accomplish that goal though it would have been better if we had dug them a month ago. The voles had gotten into them in a big way and eaten probably a large majority of the sweet potatoes. In fact, they were still there because I dug up some that went scrambling away, although slowly due to them being the fattest voles I have ever seen. What they hadn't eaten, many had been gnawed on and had to be discarded.  Fortunately, the crop was large enough that despit...

  As part of the stewardship of my edge of the city property, I have cut down probably close to 50 dead or dying trees in the 15 years I have lived here. Also as part of that stewardship, I have replanted probably half that number back in native trees to our area. However, where I live deer are as thick as flies and probably on any given night, 20 or so deer pass within feet of the tree above and many a buck would love to rub their velvet off on the trunk, abrading the bark and killing the tree. To prevent that from happening when I first planted them and they were nothing but twigs about 12 inches long, I pounded in several posts around each one and wrapped that in woven wire. That method worked well and accomplished my goal of allowing the trees to grow up unmolested. However, it had its drawbacks. Maybe every few years, I would have to unwind the woven wire panels to gain access to cut all the various sprouts that tend to grow up in land that isn't mowed regularly. It wasn't...

  Who the heck starts running a chainsaw at seven in the morning on a Saturday was the question I was asking myself until my wife called me shortly after leaving for an errand and said she thinks one of our trees fell down and was blocking the entire road. So I got my shoes on to walk down the street and onto the other (and much busier) street that runs behind our property and saw the scene above. Yes it was our tree. Yes it was blocking the entire road. The person running the chainsaw at seven in the morning on a Saturday was a contractor for the city working to clear the road block that my property was causing.  Thank you! They had it cleared a few hours later though they left some of the tree overhanging the strip that I mow to keep the sightlines clear and also a lot of debris. So a couple days later on a particularly nice sunny fall day where the temperature was still in the low sixties by mid morning, i.e. perfect chainsaw weather, I put a fresh battery in my electric ch...

Unknown perhaps no longer? Not long ago, I discovered this photo in a folder I had designated as unknown. That folder was a subfolder of pictures that I had inherited from my grandmother so I knew any answer as to the identify of the house or the people was likely to be found somewhere along her line. So I started clicking through folders of pictures along her line and maybe 15 minutes after starting, I got my first major clue. This is a picture of my great great grandparents, my grandfather in the light suit jacket and my great uncle in the dark coat and hat. They are standing in front of the same house though the trim and railing cap have been repainted with white paint versus the dark paint in the photo above. So immediately my mind turns to the possibility that the first photo is of my great great grandparents along with my great grandmother and her older brother. Above is a picture of my great grandmother and her older brother Clay. Clay looks very similar to the boy sitting in th...

  Perhaps you might remember a close up of this picture in a blog post that I recently wrote about trying to track down the original from a descendant who wrote the book that it is in? It is a picture of Albert Frederick Buchholz and wife Amanda Jane Thomas Buckholz, which I wrote about in a blog post close to five years ago . Well I am happy to say that persistence paid off and in a big way. Not only did I get a copy of the original picture, I got 17 more photos of this family. I feel like I won the lottery! Albert and Amanda Thomas Buchholz - 5 Sep 1902 For reference, Frederick Albert Ludwig Buchholz, who went by Albert or by A.F. most of his life, is my 3rd great grandfather and is one of my original immigrants from Germany along this line. He immigrated as an 18 year old young man with his parents so I don't know if it is proper to call them the original immigrant or Albert, but I guess I have always tended to side with the youngest of the family to make the journey. They immi...