Well - it's winter - again!

Riding mower service time

It was nice and warm Thursday.  In the 70's!.  Friday temps dropped into the teens!   Oh and it snowed more!  I drove up through the snow storm; it wasn't so bad on the roads.   It made for some nice pictures though!  I came up early on Friday to be here to have the zero-turn riding mower picked up for service.  The mower started up and I was able to just drive it onto the truck bed (they had a tilting bed truck - nice).

Shelving over the chop-saw station

I got to finally putting up the shelving over the chop-saw station.  I used a cleat attached to the concrete block wall using concrete screws.  The shelves had a lip on them that was designed to hang from - kind of like a french cleat system.  I don't know how much weight these can take.  I will try to take it easy on the weight i put in them!

Its cold as heck, so it must be time to do some rain gutter maintenance!

I was walking out to the shop and happened to look back toward the house when I noticed the rain gutter hanging about 1.5ft from the roof!  In fact, about half the length of the gutter on the front of the house had been pulled away by winds!  So I immediately found some fasteners (fortunately I had 3 packs of screws and ferrules made for this purpose on hand!) and got the big step ladder out.

I never think to get the "before" shots! :(  So this is after repair shot of the front gutter.  This piece was about 1.5ft from the roof when I started.

I went ahead and repaired the entire front.  Cleaned it while I was at it.

That should hold (famous last words...)

Here is the back side of the house - THIS is a BEFORE picture - lol - finally.

It has pulled away some, but most of the gutter is still intact.

NIce after shot. All clean and screwed up tight

After shot of front.

After shot of rear.

Scrub plane refurbishment

I started going through my recent ebay purchases and found my "new" replacement base for my recently acquired scrub plane.  The seller of the scrub plane said that he discovered the plane in a pile of dirt in an old family barn.  It was in fairly decent shape, considering how it was treated, but the base had been rusted pretty bad - big pitted rust marks.

Hard to see how deep these pits go in the picture - they are almost a 16th-8th on an inch deep!

So I found a replacement base for this plane on ebay.  It was also old and rusty but it wasn't as bad as the original.  I replaced the original base and started cleaning it up.

As per my usual habit I did get a before picture!  Here is a shot of the base after considerable cleanup.

Here is kind of a midway through picture.

Below are the after pictures!  I sanded the wood portions some and treated with danish oil.  I lightly oiled the metal surfaces to keep them from rusting.    I had to trim the bolt that runs through the rear handle to get it to tighten sufficiently.  All in all - I like it!

This Stanley 40 Scrub plane is ready for some work! Actually, I need to sharpen the blade yet - but otherwise its good to go!

Shelling beans

It was cold out and I couldn't get to most of my to-do items so it was time to shell some beans!  These are "accelerate" variety of bean.  This coming year I think I will just plant kidney beans and maybe some navy beans,  These beans, "accelerate" and "velour" are just too small and difficult to process.

Beans are DONE - and some rain - finally!

Last of the bean picking for this year!

I finally got to finish picking the shell beans this past weekend.  The "velour" beans are same and were crowded with weeds, so picking them took quite some time.  I got them done Sunday morning, before the rain really started.

Now, to shell them all out!  UGH

More harvest

I got out to pick the strawberries, summer squash and tomatoes before we left.  Good amount of the tomatoes came from the volunteers!  Not sure how we are going to preserve these - some will go to FDer for sure, but other might be frozen for FDing later?  Or maybe I will make some chili base for eating now?  We will see.

Family reunion!

Saturday we went over to my cousin Patsies house for the family reunion.  We took coleslaw, some zucchini muffins and some of my concord wine.    Here are some pics:

Panoramic view

Panoramic view

Paul's grove of black walnut - like 35 years old! 

The puppies stayed in their cages for the most part.  We did take them out on leashes to go walkies.

There were a good number of dogs there so taking the cages was a great idea.

We had a good time and reconnected with some cousins and their kin.  As usual, I ate too much!

More harvest stuff - shell beans, tomatoes and squash

Shell Beans

I planted 19 45-foot rows of shell beans this year.  The patch was originally unprotected (no fences).  Deer eventually found it and ate the leaves off most of the plants!  I eventually did place a baited electric fence around the patch that did stop the deer (either tha or they found better things to eat!), but the damage was done. Many of the beans did not fill out - they didn't mature.   Anyway, we started picking the beans the last weekend of August - we got about 1 bushel of the Accelerate beans from 4 rows.  This weekend I was by myself but able to dedicate most of my time to picking so I got another bushel and a half of the accelerate variety.

The rest of the "Accelerate" bean harvest

I started in on the "velour" variety but found some issues.  The Velour bean is much smaller and evidently matured earlier.  Also, the weeds in the velour side of the patch were much more prevalent so picking was very difficult!  I essentially was pulling EVERYTHING!  Except for some volunteer locust trees which I think I will try to transplant next spring.  I got only a tiny amount of beans, shown below.  I still have most of the velour section of the patch to pick.  I hope the weather doesn't turn rainy next weekend!

"velour" bean harvest to date.

Elderberries and crab-apples

I found more then a few elderberries left on the bushes - at least enough that I didnt feel good leaving them there!  So I picked these last elderberries:

There is about a half-gallon of them after picking off the stems.  Very ripe!

I mowed what was tall in the orchard - there is a draught so not all the grass needed mowing.  AS I did I noticed some crab-apples were ready to pick - so I grabbed them.  Not sure what I will do with these though.

Crab-apples - this is whole harvest!  Of course, these came off a tree that I thought would have died this year!  

Tomatoes and squash

I harvest the volunteer tomatoes in the front patch as well as the planted tomatoes in the sweet-potato patch.  I got about 35lbs!  We are going to be drying some of these, but I don't think we can dry them all before they go bad.

From the planted tomatoes

From the volunteer tomato plants in the front patch.  The squash are from the  squash plants - go figure!  The last of the corn harvest is in there too - not sure if it was worth it though.

I also harvested the zucchini and even one of the butternut squash from the far patch!  There are lots of butternut squash getting close.  IDK what I will do with all of these!  I hope they keep well!

Strawberries keep coming!

Decent strawberry harvest considering the time of the year and the drought conditions!  I am definitely going to have to buy more everbearing strawberries!

Onion, bean, zucchini, corn, and tomatoes - o my!

Veggie harvest continues

I put in a lot of time mowing - grass was getting a bit tall in some areas since I didn't mow everything last time (because of drought).  Nonetheless, I had to pick some veggies!

Onions

I put in a lot of work on the onions.  They were a nightmare of weeds because we just never got around to keeping them weed free. I debated with myself about using the potato plow to dig them, but decided against it.  I dug them all by hand (I used a potato digging fork to break up the ground afterwords, but wasn't really needed to pick).

Here they are - all of them!  Laid out on newspaper to cure for a week.

All told, I am guessing about 1/3rd of a bushel of onions.  These are all "stuttgart" variety.

Tomatoes

Harvested more of the volunteers from the front patch and quite a few more from the paw-paw patch. Some of the ones from the front patch were starting to go bad so I made tomato gravy with them as soon as I could.  I served the gravy over some of the new potatoes that I boiled.

Paw-paw patch tomatoes

Front patch volunteers!

Tomato gravy.

Shell Beans

We finally got to pick some of the front patch shell beans.  We discovered that a lot of the beans were not fully formed.  I suspect that they would have filled out better if the deer had not had eaten all the leaves off of them!  We only picked the "accelerate" variety this weekend.

This is off of only 4 of the 19 rows of beans in that patch!  Ugh

Squash

I discovered quite a load of squash in the far patch!  We will eat what we can and then try to freeze-dry the rest.  

Corn

We harvested the last (essentially) of the corn this weekend.  I cut down the stalks.  Some of it was pretty worm ridden.  Most of this will be freeze-dried.

De-weeding continues. Japanese beetles and varmint onslaught!

EEk! Bugs!  and weeds, and varmints..

As I suspected would happen when I was leaving last weekend, bugs have gone crazy this week! Japanese beetles all over the place!  Eating elderberries, grapes, and cherry trees quite voraciously.  I went to the hardware store to get some stuff to get the outdoor spigot to work (Sugar got car sick again on the way up) and I picked up some more Sevin and some new corn seeds (the old seeds just are not germinating or just plane were attacked by crows an other varmints).   Some of the corn that was up was partially eaten and some even pulled out!  I suspect crows as this is their MO.  Many of the elderberry plants looked like they were eaten off by deer but maybe that was partially due to Japanese Beetles as well.  Lots of damage to the sweet potato plants as well, although I am fairly certain that potato damage was from varmint, not the beatles.

Beetles are even eating the wild roses bushes! (yay!)

Still lots of de-weeding to do - but the strawberries at least are intact

No new weeds in the berry patch this week.  The wood mulch seems to do the trick

We need to get those onions clear of weeds too!

The shell beans grew nicely this week,  

I am hoping that they outpace the weed germination so far that I wont have to cultivate them!

Dog-fence gate

I needed to put a gate into the dog area so that I could mow.  I just used the auger to drill a post hole and stuck a new post in.  Then I just cut a piece of fencing to fit the gap and "twist tied" it in place.  I don't have an actual gate, just a fencing panel really.  If it looks like it is having issues I will make a "real" gate for it later.  For this weekend it worked great - the dogs didn't stress it at all.

"gate" between the two posts so i can get the  mower in

I cleaned up the wooded area next to the dog pen.

Spigot repair and hose hook up

As I mentioned, Sugar got car sick again on the trip up.  I decided to save Katherine some hassle and repair the outdoor hose spigot (some crazy person on a riding mower destroyed the handle on the spigot last).  At first I was sure I was going to have to replace the outdoor spigot entirely - ugh!  But when I looked closer I saw that I just needed to replace the faucet handle!    So I popped into the hardware store and got a universal handle replacement kit (yes - there is such a thing!) as well as a spray nozzle for the hose.

New handle in place!  Much nicer than the old one!

Further progress on removing the plastic tree-tubes

I used the wire fence left over from the dog-fence to make tree cages for the black walnut, butternut and paw-paws.  I got all of the black walnut and butternut trees "caged" but still need more fencing for the paw-paws.  

Black walnuts all caged now!  I hope they "crinkle"

Butternuts all caged now too!  They look fairly healthy

Looks like I have about 11 more cages to go for paw-paws.  I figure I need about 44 more feet of fencing to complete the caging.

Grape vine care

I spent a considerable portion of a day (3-4 hours) trimming the weeds away from the grape vines and tieing up the new runners.  Good news is that the older vines seem to be growing nicely an I see little to no rust on the leaves!  Not only that, but the concors have quite a few little grapes on them!  After I trimmed the grass an tied up the runners (and trimmed a few wayward runners) I sprayed the with sevin and general purpose fruit tree disease spray.  I wanted to hit them with some sulfur but the weather reports called for rain on Monday which would wash off the sulfur too soon.  I will try to get them next time.  Some of the wine grapes are getting rust pretty bad.  

Seeing some rust on the new vines!  Need to treat with sulfur soon

As you can see, the new vines aren't seeing much growth as the old vines.  Should I side dress with blood meal again?

All trimmed and tied!

You can really see how much better the concords are doing compared to the other varieties!

Sevin

I also sprayed the hazelnut trees and the cherry trees with sevin to try to save them from the Japanese beetles.  I put up a couple beetle traps too.

Hazelnuts sprayed

Two new beetle traps

Trimming

I continue to try to stay ahead of the weeds!  This weekend I trimmed around the pines and the elderberries next to the big patch.

I need to put wood mulch on these elderberries yet.

Replanted corn - yet again!

AS mentioned earlier, I found that much of my corn was either not germinating or pulled/bitten off. So I bought some short season corn and planted them in between the few stalks that came up from the previous plantings.   I also covered the unplanted areas with black plastic to knock the weeds down in prep for planting winter squash in the upcoming weeks.  When I planted this time, I put in blood meal and planted about 3-5 seeds per hole!

Cleaned up sweet potatoes and put own more plastic

The sweet potatoes were showing signs of damage from varmints - maybe rabbits?  Nonetheless, most were still doing well but getting a bit crowded by the weeds.  I de-weeded the sweet potatoes and put down black plastic over the unplanted area of the garden to keep the weed tops from going to seed.

I de-weeded the sweet potatoes.  Some of these are starting to vine!

The tomatoes are mostly doing ok.  They are near the bottom for the picture.

Elderberries are looking good!

While many of the berries are still blooming, quite a few have little berries on them! 

Box turtle

We found this little guy trying to crawl through the dog-fence compound.  He seemed determined. Katherine finally moved him to the other side of the compound, assuming that's where he was headed.