A gathering of days

This is my favorite summer or hot weather snack. This would also be good as a desert, too. All you need is some yogurt, and thawed raspberries. If you do use fresh ones, crush them a little, so that you will get some juice without having to put sugar on them. Then mix it together, find a good book and curl up in your favorite spot!

As you know, we spent Saturday cleaning out the shed on the Horse Barn, that the milk cow's yearling calf will live in during the winter and early spring.


It was deep - up past my knee! I'd say that it was two and a half to almost three feet deep in some places. Despite that we finished just after quarter to six in the evening. It's amazing how tightly packed it gets in the corners. For the last three or hours of the cleaning, I took a pitchfork and dug out the corners and then forked it into the bucket.


Afterwards, my hands were so sore from the seven or eight water blisters that I got from not wearing gloves (I caught heck about that), that I could hardly type.

Then after that was done, Dad hauled a few bucket loads of sawdust and spread it in the shed for the first layer of bedding.


Yesterday afternoon, Dad started baling the "wet" hay. Despite being lighter than the previous bales, we got less by about twenty. I forgot until I heard it, how much I like the sound of the baler and how much I had missed it, though I am glad to be almost done with the hay. The picture above was not loaded last night, it's the last load we hauled from that field until now, we just never unloaded it.



When I was reviewing last night, the pictures I took yesterday, I was looking at that field and thinking how long ago that we cut it and how nicely the grass was coming back. We were done with it by the twenty-fourth of July. That seems so long ago, but it's really only a month a half or so.

Colors of Fall

Photo credit: M.O.H

"These are the days we will remember, These are the times that won't come again, The highest of flames become an ember, And you gotta live 'em while you can, These are the days we will remember." - These Are The Days, Keith Urban

It seems like fall is already already upon us, even thought it doesn't officially start until the twenty something of October. It's barely the fourth of September, and already the temperatures are dropping and the night air is turning sharp. The last four nights, we have had to light a fire in the furnace, using up some of the precious fire wood, just to stave off the chill.

You know it's getting cold when you can build a fire at six or so o'clock in the evening and the house doesn't get too hot. When I was writing this post down in a note pad because the computer was busy, I was sitting out on the steps in the sun, wearing my sweat shirt over a medium thin tee shirt and I didn't get too hot.

Every year, it's agonizing waiting for the raspberries, the blueberries, blackberries and the apples to be ready. In March or April, it always seems like the above mentioned gets ripe in late July, early August, when really, it's late August on.

This year because of the spring rains, everything is later. Our Transparent apples, they are the earliest in the orchard, are two or three weeks late. We just got them picked a couple days ago, so the others are going to be a few weeks behind them.

This morning I was looking at the chestnut trees and noticing how small their prickly burrs - that we cuss when we try to sit down under the tree - are, and how far they have to go before being ready. The blue jays are in a flurry of activity, with the filberts (hazel nuts) and the walnuts being ready.

Oh, I don't know if Mom mentioned this already, but on the twenty-eight or ninth of August, she saw a flock of geese flying south. They were really high, but still, the idea of them leaving so soon. At least the leaves aren't turning yet!

I'm not ready for summer to be over! Or for it to be pitch black when I get up, or when you constantly have to wear at least two shirts. Soon we will be in frenzy to get all the apples and pears picked up, the squash in to cure, the beans put in the green house to dry.

** Hay Update **

Finally got that troublesome hay raked today! If this spell of good weather that we have right now holds like the weathermen are predicting, we should be able to get it baled and in the barn before the next rain. *crosses fingers*

Well I was going to call this "raining on sunday", but it's not rainy or Sunday, sooo, I need to think something better...

This is what it was doing yesterday morning, but now it's bright and sunny with a few clouds lurking. Yay! The hay will finally get a chance to dry! It's so nice to walk outside and wear a tee shirt without getting wet, or too cold!

Look at all of those swallows!! When it's a dry day, that is their morning perch from about 8:30 to 10:00, or so. You can't really tell from the picture, but the peak of the shop roof is about eighty feet long. I bet that there is at least one hundred twenty swallows sitting up there.

Trace: "ahhhhhhhhhhhh!"

Melvin: "Is he done yet!?"

Trace: "Oooh, is that a Siamese cat over there??"

Me: "Uh, no, there's nothing over there. Come on, Trace, lets go this way, before you yank my arm off!" Contrary to what I was telling Trace, there actually was a Siamese cat hiding out in the hay field, but I managed to convince him nothing was there and just barely avoided getting my arm ripped out of its socket...

October?

Did we skip a month and it's really October, and nobody told me? Okay, maybe we didn't, but it sure feels that way.
It's dark and cloudy all day, and raining, too.

As you can see from this picture, that we have about four hundred 18" x 36" x 14" sponges out there soaking up all of that rain. We did get two loads hauled before the rain hit us, but there is still four or five more out there.

On a brighter note, we did get three boxes of miscellaneous flooring scraps, and a bundle of stickers from the flooring mill down in Portland yesterday.

These boxes are about 4' x 4' and three or three a half feet tall. One down, two more to go!


Our helper. . . I didn't even notice that Trace was sitting in the cab of the truck until I reached for the camera, which was on the dashboard. What's funny is that he can jump right in the pickup when he really wants to get in, but otherwise you have to lift his back end up, and help him get in.

Wheeeee! I just love the look on Trace's face - priceless! He always gets this funny look on his face right before he starts running his circles and figure eights, like most aussies do.

I'm sorry, but I can't take credit for this one - my mom took it. It's a blue Lacecap Hydrangea.

Misc of the last couple days...

Yesterday, we finished hauling the last of the "fourteen acre field", which is the second to the last field, and then we are done.

This is a nice short load of sixty bales, so I didn't have to go five high, I could do four stacks of fifteen instead of two and a half stacks of twenty-five, which would then need to be tied on.

Because it would be too much trouble, and it would just waste gas to make another trip, we towed the "Donald" back to the house with the hay truck.

This is the of the last field, partially cut. It's going to be a devil because there are so many obstacles to go around, putting big wows in the rounds.

While I was putting the horse out this morning, I heard some cutters start felling trees to the north, and twenty minutes earlier, I had seen a logger's pickup go up the mountain.

It'll be nice to have log trucks going by again. After they finished their job and moved out in late spring, we missed hearing the tower(it was a canyon that was being logged), and the loader, and the trucks going by.

My Mom and I were are so good at recognizing engines, that we made a game of guessing which truck was coming by, just by the engine and the driver's driving habits.

With it being so hot and the humility in the mid twenties, when you step outside, you don't even have to take a deep breath and you can smell the woods/trees. Everything is a dry as a tinder box. When the woods are like that, the loggers are on one o'clock shut down, and then someone has to stay for a couple hours on fire watch. I have already smelled a couple fires so far.

When I got up this morning, it was already 60* Fahrenheit. In preparation of the heatwave, Melvin got his pants trimmed, so that he will be a little cooler and won't overheat, hopefully.

In other news, I ate the first blackberry of the year this morning. It was a little sour, but delicious!

This was a luck shot, of the swallows sitting in the big, dead cherry tree. They usually sit on the top of the shop roof. I counted fifteen in this picture and about ten more on another branch.

The high for today was 102* Fahrenheit, and as of now - 8:20pm - the temptature has went down to 83*. The weather man is forcasting even hotter for tomorrow.

Found this spider on the way up to the greenhouse this morning. I can't tell what it has caught...maybe a crane fly or something like that.

Record heat?

Well the heat has finally come. Yesterday it was 92* Fahrenheit, the weatherman is forecasting 99* for today, and then cooling down tomorrow to a nicer 93*. Hopefully we won't get over a hundred...but this is good haying/hay drying weather. A couple years ago...2006?... The temperatures hovered right at 104* and 105* for three or four days. Everybody and everything was wilted!

Fixing some barbed wire fencing around the corral orchard is on the agenda before it gets too hot to be working. Luckily, there's some shade from the apple trees.

Took this on Saturday, when Dad and I were rebuilding a couple bared wire gates(another post).

Busy, Busy

Right now is the busiest part of the the summer. The garden is going great guns, the organic cherries have arrived and are in need of processing right this minute before they go bad, the hay has to be put up, pesto has to be made, the garden weeded, garlic pulled, etc. Out of the twelve boxs of cherries that we started with, there are only four left!

The bale(idiot cube) tally as of now, is 926 or 18 tons. That's off of three fields, and there are two medium sized fields left. The next on the list is a fourteen acre field right next to the one that we just did, and the one after that, the last one is about eight acres.

We got 423 bales off of this four acre field. The pasture behind the little grove of hawthorn trees is the next in line.

Yesterday, while it's still cloudy, and before the horse shoer came, me and mom hauled seven or eight wheelbarrow loads of sawdust and dumped it into the turkey brooder before they come this morning.

While we were hauling wheelbarrow loads of sawdust for the turkey poults, I caught Jetta doing this:






















And mom found these when she was weeding the tomato jungle in the greenhouse... .