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...