Watered the Garden - June 30, 2023

My sister called earlier in the week and said that she'd found hornworms on her tomato plants.  Later that evening, The Husband and I went to the garden to inspect our plants for worms and, sure enough, found several.  

The Great Northern Beans (2nd crop) that we planted last week had still not sprouted Wednesday evening, so Thursday evening, I set the sprinkler out and watered most of the garden.  About the time I was finishing, The Nephew said that it's supposed to rain this weekend.  It'll be ok if it does rain.  We need it.

My first day home alone with Axel was not so bad.  About mid-morning, I went down to Nanny's to mow her yard.  When I got home, there was an empty and torn hamburger bun sack in the entry hall.  The buns had been on top of our chest-type freezer, and he just helped himself while I was gone.  Probably didn't even have to tip-toe.  Other than that, he spent most of the time splayed out and snoozing on the cool floor.

Besides being a great hulking beast, Axel has two very bad traits: (1) He stares a hole in you while you try to eat.

He has a very sensitive stomach, and we have to limit both the quantity and type of food he eats.  Nothing but canned dog food and water, or else he pukes.  He was very interested in the slice of frozen pepperoni pizza I was eating for supper.  (2) is he likes to press his anus against your knee (or whatever he can reach.  When I refused him my pizza, he got all offended and tried to stick his butt against my foot.  This is most annoying.

Pet-Sitting Again - June 30, 2023

While Son #1 and family have gone on short trip, The Husband and I are babysitting their great beast of a dog, Axel.  

He is a Rottweiler.  He weighs roughly 160 pounds.  He is a gentle giant, not a vicious bone in his body, but dang he is stubborn.  He does what you ask him if it suits him.  

The Husband and I do not have a pet and do not want one.  Both of our sons have pets.  We have babysat dogs and cats for Son #2, but this is the first time Son #1 has asked us to babysit Axel.  We had to day yes because we've babysat two dogs and a cat for Son #2.  Gotta be fair.

Axel arrived last night with a dogfood bowl the size of a big mixing bowl and a wireless fence.  When we let him out this morning to "do his business," he trotted out to the limit of his fence and would not come back when called.  He went over to the neighbor's yard and dropped a massive poop.  The Husband and I called and called, and he'd stop and look at us for a second or two, then continue his investigation of his unfamiliar surroundings.  There is no such thing as clipping a leash on his collar and dragging him back to the house.  At 160 pounds, he is impossible to lead.  

I wanted to choke him.  After about 15 minutes, The Husband and I gave up and started back to the house, at which time he came barreling toward us like a freight train and ran straight onto the back porch and into the house when we opened the door.

This is going to be a l-o-n-g weekend.

Pickling - June 29, 2023

This year's first batch of pickled cucumbers just went in to soak overnight in pickling lime water.

Experts recommend against using pickling lime in home-canned pickles.  The reason for this is that canned pickles need to maintain a certain acidity in order to prevent botulism.  Lime lowers acidity, and if any lime remains on the cucumbers as they go into the jars, botulism could develop.  

I wash the cucumbers very thoroughly when they come out of the pickling lime solution.  Wash, and wash, and wash, and I'm not talking about lifting them out of one bath and dropping them into clean water, repeatedly; I'm talking about washing them under running water (repeatedly), and then dropping them into clean water, and if a film develops on the clean water, wash them some more.

We have a good many jars of pickles - sweet and dill - left from last year, so today I am trying the "red hots" (cinnamon pickles) recipe that people used to make when I was a kid.  After these pickles finish soaking in lime water (24 hours), I'll rinse them well and soak them in ice water for a few hours.  I'll rinse them again (probably several times) before cooking them in the syrup.  There were a few hot peppers - cayenne and jalapeno - in the picking bucket, so I threw them in the lime water, too.  Might tuck them in the jars with the pickles.  

The recipe calls for red food coloring, which I think I will skip, since the red hots candy ought to tint them.

This makes close to 20 pounds of cucumbers that we have picked in a week's time. 

We planted W-A-Y too many cucumbers.

P.S. - That stuff behind the cucumbers that looks like meat is actually the little chunk of Nanny's birthday cake that she made us keep.  We want to eat it, but are trying to stay away from sugary things.

I suppose pickles also count as "sugary things," don't they?  ;)

A Surprise Birthday Party - June 27, 2023

Today is Nanny's birthday.  Until noon today, the plan was for the whole family - kids and grandkids - to meet at a local restaurant for dinner.  I was going to make the birthday cake.

Everybody but Nanny knew about this plan.  We weren't trying to keep it a secret from her to surprise her, we just all neglected to tell her.  

A little before noon, I went to the grocery store to get stuff to make a cake.  While I was in the grocery store, The Husband called and said the restaurant wasn't taking reservations, as it had been packed every night since Sunday night's storm (which had knocked out power in a large area, but not at that restaurant).  They couldn't guarantee us a table for 10.  

I didn't much care where we ate and named off a few other nearby restaurants.  The Husband said he'd call his sister and they'd come up with Plan B.  Meanwhile, I found a frozen strawberry cake in the deli section and decided it would do just fine for the birthday cake.  Shortly after I returned home from the grocery store, The Husband called and said that Plan B was "the party is at our house."   Surprise!  There was a moment of panic before he told me his sister was bringing barbeque and fixings.  Whew, no cooking.  Cool.

An hour before the party was to start, our next-door neighbor called and asked me to go check on her grandfather, who lives here on the hill.  "Uncle B" (as my children called him), age 93, had taken a nap on the couch and could not get up.  I put on some shoes and hurried across the road to check on him.  He was lying flat on his back on the couch and could not figure out how to sit up.  The couch had sort of swallowed him.  I helped him sit up, and once he had his bearings, I helped him to his feet.  Other than being 93 and frail, he was okay.  Once his daughter called and said she was on her way, I came home to set up for the party.  

The Husband came home just as I reached our driveway.  I had seen Nanny's car go by while I was with Uncle B, and it seemed odd that she would have gone somewhere so soon before the party.  When I asked The Husband if he had told Nanny about the party, he said he hadn't talked to her but assumed that his sister had told her.  His sister had assumed HE had told her.  In any case, she showed up on time.

The strawberry birthday cake from the deli freezer was absolutely delicious. Seriously.

After supper, Nanny opened her presents.  The "hit" gift was a bag of candy from each member of Son #1's family - 82 "Kisses," 82 Tootsie Rolls, 82 jelly beans, etc. - one piece of each kind of candy for each of her 82 years.  

Camera Trouble - June 26, 2023

I could not wait for The Husband to get out of bed Sunday morning to check his phone for trail cam footage of the critter we're trying to trap.  This camera is so weird.  It has WIFI, but in order to see the pictures on a phone, you have to use a wrist-watch-looking thing that somehow patches the phone to the camera.  I have not bothered to learn how to do it, so I went out to see if there was anything in the trap.

The trap had been moved, and fresh holes had been dug around it, but the digger had not gone in.  Nevertheless, I was excited at the prospect of finally identifying the culprit.  Surely the trail cam had caught the goings-on, because the digger had been there for a while, digging all those holes. 

As soon as The Husband got out of bed, we checked his phone for pics/videos.  

I don't get it.  There were videos of us setting up the trap, and one of us taking the SD card out of the camera the next morning, but nothing in between.  

The Husband said, "We have a ghost varmint."

For some reason that escapes me at this moment, I wanted to take the SD card out of the camera and examine its contents on my laptop.  I ended up accidentally deleting ALL of the files on the card.  All of them.  Probably a couple of years' worth of pictures.  

Once upon a time, I knew enough about computers and MS-DOS to have undeleted the pictures, if pictures can be undeleted from an SD card (the internet says it's possible).  So I spent about an hour trying to undelete the pictures from the DOS prompt.  No luck.  

I wasn't wildly upset about having deleted the pictures, even though they documented some pretty important events, like birthdays and weddings.  The thing is that if I go to the trouble of getting out my camera to photograph an event (versus using my phone camera), I usually transfer them to my laptop right away because I want to see how they turned out.  The good ones I copy to my hard drive right away.  Still, the fact that I had not been able to undelete the pictures perturbed me.  I like to do what I set out to do.  

Eventually, I paid for an app that promised results.  $75+, tax and all.  And it basically was doing the same thing I was trying to do from the DOS prompt.

It didn't work.

It might have worked if I had been willing to spring for the "premium" version, but I wasn't willing.  

So we put the card - the now empty card - back in the camera.  

Before I deleted the pictures, I had noticed that the date/time stamp was wrong and mentioned it to The Husband.  While I was trying to undelete the pictures, he fiddled with the buttons on the camera and fixed the settings.  Some time around noon yesterday, he strapped the camera back in place and re-set the trap.

The camera took pictures and 30-second videos from then until this morning.  HUNDREDS of them.  And although the camera was still going at it when I went outside to check the trap (it caught me in my nightgown), it failed to produce a video of the crazy out-of-nowhere storm that hit yesterday about 7 p.m. and downed a tree in the "way back" section of our yard.  And during the night, the only images it captured were bugs flying past.  No sight of the critter.

I'm beginning to think he's smart enough to delete the pictures of himself.  :-\

Be Vewy, Vewy Kwyet - June 24, 2023

Elmer Fudd and I just set the critter trap, the one that the critter busted out of the last time we caught it.  

The trail cam filmed a set of whiskers last night.  There was fresh digging in the yard.  

It so happened that yesterday, as I was puttering around in the yard, I noticed the trap and picked it up and examined the damage.  The critter had evidently rammed the trap door until he bent the wires that hold it shut.  I set the trap on the patio table and straightened the wires as best I could, but I could not get the trap to latch.  I put it aside and resumed my puttering.  This morning The Husband decided to have a go at it and managed to get the trap to set.  Figuring that the critter can bend the wires even easier next time (since they've already been bent once), he decided to try to reinforce them.  We had these two bizarre strips of flat, hard metal (can't bend it with your hands) that were just the right length to use, but how to attach them to the trap wires?  We wound up zip-tying them.  

This afternoon I said, "Let's set the trap, and put it where the trail cam can see it."  

A few minutes ago, we set it.  I dug up some fresh dirt in sight of the camera and set the trap over it.  We then poured a little potting soil through the mesh.  

It's ready for him.

Compost = June 24, 2023

Yesterday was something of a "red letter day" in my gardening history.

Yesterday, I spread my first batch of home-made compost around some tomato plants in our vegetable garden. 

This particular batch of compost began "cooking" nearly a year ago, when The Husband gave me a small compost bin for my birthday.  I already had a composter, but it was (1) big and unruly and (2) situated in a spot that made me worry about snakes, spiders, and such. 

See the black cannon-looking thing behind my newly-built compost bin?  (My granddaughters decorated the new bin.)  My sister gave me that black composter over years ago.  Now that I think about it, this composter did produce one small batch of compost.  The problem was that it was a b*tch to get the compost out.  AND when I dumped it, out ran the biggest spider I have ever seen in my life.  

Here's the composter The Husband gave me for my birthday last year. We parked it closer to the back door, in a non-creepy spot, in the hope that I would use it.  

It has two compartments.  I suppose one is for finished compost, and the other is for in-progress compost.  I have been sporadically adding things - mostly un-shredded dry leaves with occasional wet kitchen scraps - to both compartments.  After a year, the stuff in the right-hand compartment still looks pretty much like it looked when I put it in.  But in the left-hand compartment, this spring I added shredded leaves and wood chips.

Neither compost tumbler gets tumbled very often.

I figured an actual compost bin might be the solution, so I built one out of pallets, thinking I could tend the compost more conveniently.  That proved to be true, but the bin presents other problems.  

I know what you're thinking, and it's all true.  I don't know what I'm doing.  With all the tools at my disposal, I should have made enough compost to fill the world, but I haven't even made enough to fill the low spot in the vegetable garden.

I will keep trying.

There is one bright spot, though.  There were THREE big, fat earthworms in the compost that came out of the left-hand compartment of the birthday composter.  How they got in there is a mystery.  Although we can dig just about anywhere in our yard and find earthworms, we NEVER see one in the vegetable garden.  Are we chopping them up with the tiller?  Whatever is the case, I have been contemplating buying worms from a bait shop and relocating them to the garden (and still plan to do it).  Finding those worms in the compost made me so happy.  I took the compost to the garden, spread it around the tomato plants, and told the worms, "Be fruitful, and multiply!  Run free!"  

I hope the mid-day sun didn't dry them up before they had a chance to drill down into the ground.