An eventful couple of days. Lots of thunderstorms, close lightning strikes with down pouring rains and cool weather.
We picked our first batch of pickling cucumbers on August 3rd, and made four quarts. In another week or so we’ll get to do this again.
The pickling cucumbers are so much smaller than the slicing cucumbers for salads. Both kinds are starting to kick into high gear as far as production goes.
Today we’ll pick lettuce for a salad and use up the cucumber, along with a pepper from the garden. Tomatoes are starting to turn red again but it will be another couple of weeks before we can pick any of those. The dill is setting heads and those should be ready for the next batch of pickles. This was all from just one plant for the pickling cucumbers and we have three plants, all of which are starting to set pickles.
The melon plant continues to amaze us. It’s huge and trying to escape from the greenhouse as well as climbing the wire walls which support the plastic.
Black and red raspberries. That's the end of the black raspberries but we'll have more red raspberries in a couple of weeks.
I made three more jars of black raspberry jam and four more jars of red raspberry jam. The black raspberry plant only produces fruit on 2nd year canes, and we only had three canes this year. There are a dozen new canes that grew up this year, and next year we’ll have fruit from them. Can’t wait. We need to do some serious work in corralling those plants. They have impressive thorns besides totally delicious fruits.
I really do need to wash this window one of these days! A juvenile Red-Railed Hawk perching on one of the posts Dan put up for the bird feeders to attach to in the winter. We're going to put a bird house on this post for next year, see if we can attract a blue bird pair to set up housekeeping.
The posts are nice and tall, and should keep the feeders out of the reach of the deer who dearly love the sunflower seeds and learned the trick of standing under the feeders and hitting them with their heads to dump seeds. This one doe in particular is teaching her babies bad habits!
Yesterday morning this young hawk caught a ground squirrel or pocket gopher in our front yard. We all watched him making sure his kill was successful and then picking up the rodent in his talons and flying off with it.
Mish in particular was entranced and then he was halloween-catting all around the living room for a while afterwards. We weren’t sure if he was celebrating living through the experience (he could definitely tell this large bird was a predator), or celebrating chasing it away with his bravery. Could have been both, but he was sure full of himself for hours afterwards.
The hawk hung around all day, looking for rodents. And the word got out, evidently. We haven’t seen any chipmunks or ground squirrels running around all over the front yard yet today.
In the late morning, a couple of people came walking up to the house in full firefighter regalia, carrying shovels and axes, etc. They were asking about a gate up the hill from our house, how to get through it as there was a report of smoke seen up there.
When I went out on the porch to talk to them, I told them they had scared our pet hawk away – they were impressed by the bird which flew off as they got close to it. Most people don’t get to see hawks from 15 feet away. I was wearing a red shirt and standing next to a hummingbird feeder and I had those little guys buzzing all around me while I was talking to the fire fighters. They were kind of impressed by that as well.
It was totally foggy and there wasn’t a chance of seeing anything, but we also went out to look and see if we could smell anything. Too foggy. The firefighters walked up the private road past the gate, and climbed one of the small hills to sit down and wait for the fog to lift. When it did, sure enough, a tree was on fire, smoldering, on another hill top near our neighbor’s place. They walked to his house and he happened to be here visiting, and told him he had a fire. He was busy doing something else, looking down, and hadn’t noticed the fire. Imagine his surprise! He came to tell us about it in the afternoon.
The fire fighters were up there for several hours making sure the fire was out. That makes two fires from the storms over the weekends, even with the torrential rains it does show just how dry the woods really are, and explains why we had helicopter and trucks running around all over the mountain for the last couple of days.