Riverbend Journal

  Many years ago, perhaps nearing 15 or so, we used to raise garlic every year in a small raised bed garden we had behind the house we lived before this one. A coworker at the time had given me a couple bulbs of his softneck garlic and I stuck them in the ground to great success. Over a period of maybe five years, we kept replanting and eating that garlic and ended up with a decent sized bed of it. But then we moved and left that behind. After that, we mainly just consumed and preserved excess from my mom's garden until she passed away but she never raised garlic. After her death, we took over the gardens and made them our own but being 40 miles away, we often lacked the energy to drive down there in late fall to loosen up some soil and stick garlic back in the ground for another year's crop. So, we just got back into the rut of using store bought garlic again. Last fall with our first garden season under our belts from the new garden behind our house, I decided it was about ti...

  On our first full day in New York City, we had a plan to get most of the tourist things out of the way. So we hopped on the subway 33 plus a few more stories down from our room and found ourselves on the south side of Manhattan in the Wall Street area where we tracked down a deli by the name of West Bank Gourmet Deli and secured some food for the day. The pastrami sandwich on rye which I got was so delicious and the owner/manager of this deli was so nice and pleasant to us. He certainly wasn't the stereotypical New York experience that everyone talks about or lampoons. "No soup for you!" From there, since we were nearby and had some time to kill, we walked up to see the statue of the giant bull in front of the New York Stock Exchange but as you can see above it wasn't there. It had been the last time I had been to New York City so we had to google what had happened to it. Fortunately, we found it had been moved to a park on the way back to our ultimate destination s...

My current nemesis For perhaps the same reason our fruit harvest have been abundant this year, we have been suffering an invasion of moles beyond what I have ever experienced. Our front lawn has been completely torn up by their digging and rooting underneath the surface.  Moles have been around pretty much every year that we have lived on this piece of property. Half of it has trees and is unmowed so they have plenty of places to thrive. They have occasionally snuck up to our front lawn and dug around but eventually the ground gets too dry and they move on to better locations and the wounds in our lawn will heal over. I tried periodically over the years to spread chemicals on my lawn to degrub it which is what they were after but it never seemed to work reliably. They would still come up and dig several holes and tunnels before moving on to better, more grub productive places. But this year, they never moved on. When we first moved here, there was some that were living underneath o...

  I guess because I enjoy sour cherries so much, I have kept track of my harvest progress since I planted my first tree 25 years ago. I planted it in our back yard which had too much shade but was the only place on my quarter acre that it could go. It grew slowly and produced a handful of cherries for a couple years and then we sold that house and moved. I still wonder if that sour cherry tree is there, a lot taller and producing buckets of sour cherries for the current occupants. The place we moved to has 3 acres and so I wasted no time in planting another sour cherry tree. I'm not sure if it is the location or something else, but it was and still is extremely slow growing. In fact, its slowness towards life frustrated me that I eventually bought and planted a second sour cherry tree and then a third. The conditions for the second sour cherry tree evidently were the best for it has grown at a tremendous pace and is already 4 times the size of the first one. Nearly every year the h...

  When I last wrote about our trip to New York City, I left off as we came back to our motel at the end of the first half day to relax our ears from all the noise outside and 33 floors below us. Alas, for a time it wasn't to be. We started hearing a lot of honking going on below us and when we looked out our window, we saw the above scene.  A crowd of people were upon a bridge looking westward for no apparent reason other than to block traffic. At this point, one lane of traffic was squeezing well into the oncoming lane and both lanes were getting through albeit it at a snail's pace. But soon even that changed. The crowd size doubled or perhaps tripled in a matter of minutes and soon the people were completely blocking one lane and half of another leaving only a single narrow path barely wide enough to allow a vehicle to pass. In fact, vehicles were having to go one at a time into the crowd, laying on their horn continuously and inching ahead only inches at a time. Eventually ...

I ran a few errands first thing in the morning. Knowing it was supposed to be the hottest day of the year, I wanted to get a jumpstart on the moving process. So I wrapped a packing blanket around the top and cinched it in place with a ratchet strap. I removed the seats in the old minivan and put a scrap piece of particle board (that the plywood for the top came protected with months ago) down to protect the altar top from the fastening mechanisms that hold the seats in place. I pushed my mobile work bench, with the altar top on top, up to the rear of the van and was able to slide it down into the back with the ratchet strap still holding the packing blanket in place. It was easy enough to get that accomplished with just myself but it will require two of us to reverse the process. With the van loaded, I prepped the tools and other things we will need for the moving and assembly process and put them into the van so they were ready to go. I laid out a selection of ratchet straps and more ...

  We've had a slow start to our garden due to the colder spring than normal but it has really made progress these past couple weeks with some heat and rain applied. Above in the foreground is our garlic which for lack of a better plan, I stuck in the unused half of my wife's raised strawberry beds. Her strawberries were decimated by rabbits last year and even this spring before I finally figured things out. Though behind the garlic, they are looking a lot better now. The garlic itself doesn't look the best. I'm assuming it is due to a lack of nutrients which is to be expected since we started this garden pretty much devoid of anything nutritional to plant health. The soil is a lot better than last and will continue to improve so there is hope for the future. The sweetcorn is really growing fast and it won't be long before it obscured the rest of the garden from the above angle. Below is from the other corner where the heavily rabbit eaten peas are staging a comeback...

  Living in rural America has one really big disadvantage in that it is time consuming to go to major metropolitan areas on either coast. They inevitably involve a transfer at some major hub along the way and based on recent years experiences, those transfers times shift around at the airlines whim between purchasing the ticket and the day of the flight, sometimes leaving uncomfortably short windows of time to complete the transfer where when you bought it, it had been a comfortable amount of time. However, our local "urban jungle" airport has been expanding in recent years and not long ago obtained a regular direct flight to New York City, a place I've been too a couple times on business but never explored much. With the kids home from school for the summer, we purchased four of those tickets and set off. Above, after managing the mass transit system of a bus and subway, is where we ended up for our stay, sandwiched on the 33rd floor of a building right next to Grand Cen...

  Part way through Memorial Day weekend, before we went to decorate the graves of our family veterans and spent time remember those who died in service, we decided to use our grill for some nourishment for the first time this year. We've been slacking on that front especially given the mild spring we've been having thus far.  I moved the grill over towards the railing so I could admire the garden while I was cooking the steaks which fed the four of us for two meals. As you can see, mulching had been started earlier and I was making plans to finish it up in the coming week before we left for a small family vacation with our two girls, both now out of school.  The enhanced electrification of the fence has been working well (when we remember to have everything connected) and the garden is looking great as a result. It is very satisfying to see all your hard work start providing results, in this case, lettuce, radishes and onions on a daily basis. Two days later, this is how ...

  After deciding on the color of the altar and aiming for a shade darker, I nervously started applying the stain. It looks fairly dark in the picture but that it before I wiped off any excess that didn't get absorbed. The next day, I applied a second coat and I think I did pretty well. Below you can see the color sample I made and if you recall, we decided on sample C only a touch darker. I think I was able to accomplish that. The bottom half of the picture is my color sample board and the top half is the altar top itself. I am pleased with the results. Next up, I started the application of the top protective coat which will protect the wood surface from damage from water or scratching, etc. I am using a hard wax oil that you wipe on, let soak in for 15 minutes or so and then wipe off.  Above is the altar top after two coats have been applied and I've just wiped off the excess of the second coat. As it dries, it will dull a little bit and not look so shiny. Above is two coats ...

  This picture of our garden from two weeks ago shows that it is looking pretty good though our peas are a bit sparse and short thanks to the prior rabbit incidents. This last two weeks, we've been eating huge salads for our evening meals that come completely from the garden except for perhaps some cheese, croutons and a bit of salad dressing, my favorite being Dorothy Lynch's Salad Dressing. I started off making them in regular soup bowls but quickly upsized them to our bigger bowls and then went right to the dinner plate to hold all of the salad. Still, with four of us eating large salads every night, we aren't coming close to keeping up with the growing lettuce crop. First world problems I know. While eating one of those salads, my wife happened to notice that there was a rabbit in the garden. I jumped up right away to shoo the rabbit off but I was troubled about how it had gotten in. I had been out there that morning mulching the far end of the garden where our sweetcor...

Above is the ambo which we were initially shooting for as the color to match as it will be staying next to the altar I build. Some of you may remember that I am partially color blind so I stink at matching colors and to me, there is a lot of orange coloring in the ambo though my wife and others assure me there isn't. So that will perhaps explain the next pictures. Using up some leftover stains/oils and picking up some samples from the local store, I came back and created the above color "swatches" to match against the ambo. Sample 'B' looked much too orange and 'D' didn't look enough orange to my defective eyes. So I decided to try a blend of 'B' and 'C' to bring the orange tones down and came up with the below sample which is the backside of the board above. I varied the ratios and by the time I got to one part B and 4 parts C, I thought I was looking pretty spot on. So I drove down to the church where I met the Good Samaritan and he q...

  While walking with my youngest to the bus stop a couple weeks ago, I noticed two things that caught my eye. Above is one of our fruit trees we planted in our new orchard. Maybe five or so weeks ago it was covered in blossoms and looked nice. The blossoms them wilted as they tend to do but it never leafed out while all the other trees in the orchard have leafed out weeks ago. I thought it had perished for unknown reasons. However, a new burst of white caught my eye and when I walked over to look, I saw that it had more blossoms and some leaves. So I'm not sure what is going on. Perhaps being new to this world, it thought our cold streak a few weeks back meant winter wasn't over quite yet and now it has reconsidered yet again. I can't recall what kind of tree it is. I think it is either an apple or a sour cherry but I am unsure right now. The blossom looks like a sour cherry but both of my other sour cherry trees have long blossomed and are full of fruit already. Perhaps on...