When will it end? The short answer: today. The long answer: I don't have any more photos of the corn. I will, however, let you know when the two plots are harvested, or at least cut down.
Looks like a messy weather weekend is forming up. Freezing morning temperatures will give way to warm (ish), rainy days. Great dog-walking weather. Not.
Or at least it seeks to find out. Some deer (I think) ripped this ear of corn off its stalk and enjoyed a meal or two of fresh corn kernels. The cob is in the dirt road not far from a stand of corn out among the grape vines. Just as I took the photo, a certain canine stuck her nose into the shot (second photo).
This morning's low temperature at the house is about 9ºC (about 48ºF). Compare that to yesterday's low of just below freezing. We should be having some rain this morning as the warmer system moves through. According to the radar, it's just about here as I type this (06h45).
This ear of corn is still attached to its stalk, but it's been opened and the kernels have been nibbled. I'm thinking chevreuil (roe deer). They're tall enough to stand next to the stalk and easily reach the ears.
Another day starting out at freezing, or a little lower depending on where you stand. Yesterday I sawed some more old grape vine trunks for the wood burner, and I burned a good deal of them. I may be out there again today to do some more.
I'm planning a market run to the nearby town of Montrichard on Friday. I want to check out our poultry vendor's calendar for the holidays so we'll know when to place our order for the Christmas bird and when, and where, to pick it up. This year is tricky because Christmas Day falls on Saturday, the day of the regular market here in Saint-Aignan (our poultry vendor does both markets each week). I'm sure it's fallen on a Saturday before, but I don't remember the details of how that affected the market schedule.
These are cynorhodon (rose hips) from the églantier (wild or dog rose), common along the edges of the vineyard road and woods around us. They provide a nice touch of red this time of year. According to Wikipedia, a common name for these is gratte-cul (butt scratcher). Apparently, the fibers inside the hip cause an itchy rash when they come into contact with human skin. Who was the unfortunate one to find that out first, I wonder?
We're down to freezing again this morning. At least the precipitation seems to be over. Until Wednesday, when a warmer system is expected. December will be coming in like a... uh... goat?
One of the vineyard parcels that was torn up recently has now been plowed. Except for a strip leading to the pile of grape trunks in the middle. Interesting. Will the trunks be taken away? Burned between now and spring? Who can say?
Lunch plans for today's hachis parmentier (shepherd's pie) have been modified. Ken's making a lamb and barley soup instead. He also put away enough lamb to make a curry and a tajine (spicy north African stew) in the coming days. The soup is going to get a lot of stuff out of the freezer, so that's good. And with our chilly, windy, and showery weekend, the soup will be a perfect meal.
It rained last evening. This morning, the stars and the waning moon shine brightly as gusty winds whirl around us. Everything is wet outdoors.
The good news is that, so far, our central heating boiler has not blown out. We'll keep and eye on it through the day, but I'm hopeful that the problem has indeed been fixed. Cross my fingers, spit on the ground!
Corn stalked, that is. They still stand, in this parcel and in another larger one. I've seen a few cobs on the ground nearby, stripped of their kernels. I guess it's wildlife. Deer? Boar? Badgers? No idea.
Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. Our leg-of-lamb meal was a success and there are plenty of leftovers. I think the plan for today is sliced cold lamb with Ken's home-made mayonnaise. An hachis parmentier (shepherd's pie) is likely over the weekend. And who knows what else? Ken took some photos of the meal and put them up on his blog today.
A week has gone by since the 2021 Beaujolais nouveau was released and I haven't mentioned it here. We've been drinking different bottles all week and have found about half of them, well, ordinary. They taste just like Beaujolais does when it's not nouveau. A few of them, however, have that characteristic "new wine" taste. Ken got a bunch more of those in his last supermarket run.
We don't expect Beaujolais nouveau to be superb wine. It's just a way to mark time and the season. We usually have a nouveau to go with our American Thanksgiving feast. This year we've chosen a local "new" wine, a Touraine primeur, as they call it. This one comes from Thésée, a town just across the river from us.
And speaking of Thanksgiving, we will be preparing our traditional roast leg of lamb for lunch today. We'll serve it with flageolets (little green beans) and maybe some topinambours (Jerusalem artichokes). For a starter, we'll have some of Ken's home-made pork terrine with cornichons (little gherkins). I made a pumpkin pie for dessert using a muscade pumpkin from last year's garden (roasted and frozen). Happy Thanksgiving!
With four quickly ripening bananas in the kitchen, what was I to do but make a loaf of banana bread? The recipe is a basic, standard recipe. The only modifications I made was to cut the sugar (I used cassonade instead of white sugar) down by half and to add walnuts. The recipe is quick to put together and the batter baked for one hour, exactly as the recipe said it would.
We're down to just about freezing this morning, according to the thermometer on the outside of our house. I'm sure it will be below freezing out in the vineyards. It's my morning to walk, so I will certainly bundle up!
While taken in roughly the same location as the last Tasha Tuesday post, this photo is three weeks newer. Tasha looks smaller because I used the 24mm wide angle lens for this one instead of the 50mm lens I normally use. All that means is that, with this photo, you get to see more of the landscape.
The sky is clear and the moon is shining brightly this morning, and the temperature is a degree or so above freezing. Novembrrrr is living up to its name.
There were hardly any walnuts on this tree this year. In those years when there's a good crop, the nuts are too small to be worth taking. The wildlife gets most of them.
The weather continues to be typically fall-like. Windless foggy days. Dew-drenched grass. Water dripping from the trees. One day soon, the high pressure systems will start to falter and the cold fronts will resume their march across France, bringing winter winds and rain (and maybe snow).
This is part of the vineyard parcel out behind our house that's being dug out to make room for new vines. The canes were cut off and mulched. The guide wires and posts have been removed. All that's left is for the trunks to come out. I wonder when that will happen?
Speaking of vine trunks, we have a rather large pile of them out behind the garden shed. Most of them were here when we moved in (almost nineteen years ago!) and I added a bunch more during the years that Callie would bring one home from each of her walks. They're kept dry under a couple sheets of corrugated sheet metal. Old vine trunks are famously used for barbecues in these parts and, I suspect, wherever grapes are grown. People say they give good flavor to whatever is being grilled. I did some of that back before we had the gas grill. Not sure about the flavor thing, but they burn well.
I always planned to burn the trunks in the wood stove, but the stove turned out to be too small to fit them in. Now, with the new easy-to-start chainsaw, I've begun the process of cutting them down to size (one cut does it) and burning them. If I'm lucky and keep at it, I might get that whole pile burned this season. Free firewood!
Here's one from the archives. People enjoying a warm spring day on the banks of the Seine in central Paris, April 2009. If I remember correctly, I met up with some American friends for a day or two while they were vacationing in Paris. We had lovely spring weather, and I had some time to wander around on my own.
My camera at the time was a Panasonic Lumix FZ7, my first digital camera. I haven't used it now for many years. I should probably get it out and see if it still works. It's a small camera and could come in handy when (or should I say "if") we start to travel again.
This variety of érable (maple), whatever it is, has dark red leaves that turn bright orange in the fall. The leaves are all on the ground now; this photo is a couple of weeks old. Now it's time to get out there and rake.
When I got up this morning I saw the full moon out the window. A few minutes later I looked again and it was gone. The eclipse is just about to start, but I have a feeling that the fog thickened and will obscure it. Oh well, we'll see it all on tv and the internet.
My friend and former colleague, Andy Nash, sent me this photo last week. It was taken (I'm not sure by whom) in 1992 when Andy ran for a seat on the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) District. He didn't win, but it was a good try. I was fresh out of graduate school that year and lucky to have found a job with these amazing people.
I worked with Andy, Lucy, and our boss Mike, at Silicon Valley's transportation policy agency and met and worked with transportation professionals across the Bay Area. I went on to become an executive at the San Francisco Municipal Railway thanks in no small part to the confidence they, and others, had in me. Good times.
We're still waiting and wondering when (and if) our deck contractor will start work. We may be waiting until spring at this point. Abandoning this contractor to find another sounds good, but I'm not sure it's worth getting at the back of someone else's line, if we could find someone who would even bother calling us back. I note that the husband of our mayor recently told Ken that he waited a year and a half to have a concrete slab poured next to his garage for a planned carport. Another neighbor has been having her house re-stuccoed and the work has been going on and off for over a year now. Chimney sweeps are overwhelmed and most don't even respond. One did answer our call, but said he has too much work and can't take on any more. So it's not just us that this is happening to.
People we know have speculated that because of covid folks stopped traveling and started spending their money on home improvements. There's a lot of work and not enough contractors. So we wait.
With morning temperatures in the single digits (celsius), our sunrise walks with Tasha are brisk. It's nowhere near bone-chilling cold; we haven't had a freeze yet. It's just crisp and frosty enough to keep us moving. It's quite invigorating. Tasha takes it in stride, as it were. Her thick coat (do I need to say that she needs a good brushing?) keeps her warm enough, I suspect.
We can feel the holiday season approaching. Thanksgiving is next week (for us Americans) and we'll be going out to shop for the annual leg of lamb a day or two before. The store circulars are already filled with ads for holiday foods, toys, and decorations. I need a new string of lights. Ho, ho, ho!
Here we are in the middle of November already. We've had a couple of cold spells, but they were short lived. Mild weather and very little wind have been the rules for a while. Fall often brings high pressure that parks itself in the middle of France causing temperature inversions. In other words, still and foggy days.
We don't get harsh winters, and recent winters have been unusually mild. It's normal for it to snow a little, usually in late January and in February, but it doesn't last very long. I hope we get some snow this year. It's pretty and the cold weather is good for the environment.
It's been a while since we've seen Bert here on the blog. Here he is, sitting in the garden plot as the burn pile cooled. I swear that, at one point, I thought he was about to lie down in the ashes, but he stopped short. Now that it's heating season, he's back to climbing up on a warm radiator in the mornings.
We're in a relatively warm spell at the moment, so the boiler isn't cycling on and off as much. That's good for saving fuel oil. Not so good for testing the repair. But I will not complain. The wind and cold will come back. Patience.
So far, it's working fine. But we haven't had a windy day since the new chimney was installed earlier this week. The real test will be if the flame stays lit when the wind blows. The old chimney was abandoned in favor of a horizontal vent through the wall next to the boiler at the time it was installed. The reason was cost. Ken remembers asking about it during the installation and the technician responded that it would cost about five hundred euros more to pull the old tube out of the chimney and install a new one. So, we figured he knew what he was talking about.
But no. Not long after the new installation was operational we started having problems with the flame blowing out. At first I think we thought it was an exceptional occurrence and figured it wouldn't happen all that much. But it kept getting worse, forcing us to go downstairs several times a day to reset the boiler. One technician adjusted the flow of the fuel thinking that would stop the problem. It didn't.
At some point, we came to the conclusion that the wind was either blowing back through the exhaust vent or that it was pushing exhaust into the intake vents, or both. The flame only went out on windy days. We finally got another technician to agree that the vertical chimney was the better solution and the company scheduled the work. So now we wait for wind. I'm in no hurry.
This view is already a week old, and the leaves are dropping fast. Fall is doing its thing and, before we know it, it will be done. So let's enjoy the colors again! The hedges and the grass will stay green through the winter.
I took a huge car load of recycling to the recycle station yesterday. I had been planning to go to the dump on Thursday until I realized it was a holiday. That will have to wait until next week now. I spent the rest of the morning clearing yard waste from the garden plot. With fire. We're not supposed to burn, but no one seems to pay attention to the rules, not even the mayor. I've seen smoke rising from her yard a couple of times already this season. So I picked a calm, cloudy morning and did the same. It was all over very quickly.
I've mentioned the vineyard parcel close to our house that's being taken out. Like many parcels out there, the vines are old and many have died. The grower will replant this parcel with the same grape: sauvignon blanc. There are a lot of parcels farther out that have been dug up in the past year or two. Nothing's been replanted yet. Maybe next spring we'll see some new vines out there. As for this parcel, it probably won't be replanted before two years, allowing the soil to rest and regain nutrients.
Since I took this photo, the remaining posts have been removed and the pruned vine canes have been mulched. The next step should be removing the vine trunks and probably burning them before the parcel is left fallow. There are at least three parcels that I can think of that have been replanted since we moved here. The process is interesting and I'm hopeful that I can get some good photos when it happens.
The heating company arrived on Tuesday afternoon on time. They spent just under two and half hours to pull the old tubing out of the old chimney, disconnect the boiler's exhaust from the through-the-wall vent, plug the hole, and install a new tubing in the old chimney and attach the boiler to it. The boiler is working just fine and we have a nice, new, and in my opinion good-looking chimney cap. And it's working fine. Of course, the real test will be our first cold and windy day.
The exhaust system is a double vent kind of thing using two concentric tubes (one inside the other). Smoke from burning the fuel goes up through the center tube and fresh air comes down from the outside tube. There's also a condensation process that squeezes extra heat from the exhaust before it goes up the chimney. The company took responsibility for the problem by stating on the paperwork that the job was necessary due to a badly placed exhaust vent; it faced the wind and exhaust was forced into the fresh air intake, snuffing out the boiler flame. Since we have a maintenance contract with them, we only had to pay for parts, not the labor.
This is the view from the den window looking toward the west forty. It's mostly leaves and this time of year the leaves are golden. On the left is a tilleul (linden), in the middle are two pommiers (apples), and on the right is the Himalayan cedar. Soon all the leaves on the deciduous trees will drop and I'll have a better view of the yard and the vineyard beyond.
I have a routine doctor appointment this morning. This afternoon we're expecting the company that maintains our central heating boiler to reconnect the exhaust system to the old chimney. I'm hopeful that (a) they show up, (b) the work goes smoothly, and (c) that it solves the problem of the flame going out. Still no news from the deck contractor.
While there are still leaves on the grape vines, here's a shot of our hamlet above the Cher Valley, looking toward the northeast. Most of the leaves are dropping now, abandoning their bright colors for a more subdued tone. Some vine parcels are nearly bare.
One parcel close to the house is being ripped out for replanting. So far, the guide wires are gone as are half the stakes, and the vines have been pruned back to the trunks. Once all the stakes are out, I expect the trunks will be removed and the ground plowed and left en jachère (fallow) over winter (and maybe longer).
Every year, after the grape harvest, there are bunches of grapes here and there that were missed by the mechanical harvesters or passed over by the hand harvesters. Eventually they'll be eaten by wildlife or rot away. In the meantime we get to enjoy their presence, if not their juice.
Here's a pet peeve: progress bars that pop up on the screen, sit empty for a few seconds, then are suddenly full for a split second before disappearing. What is the point? Discuss...
And nuttin's plenty for me. I'm expecting a calm weekend. Cold weather, but no rain or snow (!) predicted. Today is semi-finals day at the Paris Open, the last Masters level event of the tennis season, with the final on Sunday. Most of the Asian tournaments were canceled this year. The next big event for the men is the ATP Championship, this year being held in Turin, Italy. After that, the 2022 season starts up in January.
I'll probably try to get some wood cut up to burn today and tomorrow. It's nice to have a fire and it helps to save on heating fuel oil. We'll be feasting on leftovers from last week's meals for the next couple of days. No plans to go to the market today. The sun comes up around 07h45 this morning and Tasha and I will head out for a crisp fall morning walk.
These are the flower heads atop those magenta-colored stems I posted yesterday. To me, they look like little fir trees. I wonder if they'll get festooned with teeny-tiny decorations as the holidays approach? I'll keep my eye on them.
A funny thing happened a couple of days ago. A very young man stopped at the house and said he was sent by the water company to test our tap water. We had no communications from the water people that this was going to happen. I said uh, umm, ok, come on in, and showed him to the laundry sink in the utility room. He had a backpack, a kind of briefcase with some electronic equipment inside, and a six-pack sized blue plastic cooler. I stood and watched as he took a blow torch from the backpack and used it on the faucet's spout. I asked if he was sterilizing the spout. Yes, to kill any random bacteria. Duh. Then he let the water run a little before filling up about half a dozen plastic bottles of various sizes. The little ones, the size of test tubes, he inserted into some machine in the briefcase that did something or other. I have no idea what. He emptied a couple and kept a couple, labeling them and scanning them with a hand-held device, also from inside the briefcase. He labelled the larger bottles and packed them into the cooler. He was very methodical.
When he finished, about ten minutes later, he asked to verify our address and the name on our account. He explained that his company was a contractor to the water company and that they go all over the service area randomly testing the water. This was the first time they had come to our hamlet. Indeed, no one has asked to test our water in the eighteen years we've lived here. Ken and I were very suspicious about the whole thing, thinking that any day we would get some kind of offer to "fix" our pipes to filter out nasty contaminants for some ghastly sum. So, yesterday, I called the water company to see exactly what was going on. They said not to worry, this was normal and on the up and up. The guy was indeed working for their contractor to randomly test tap water throughout our area and was authorized to do so. I thanked the woman on the phone and told her I felt reassured. So that's that.
I don't know what these are. They're growing on the edge of one of the cornfields out among the vineyard parcels. What caught my eye were the vibrant magenta-colored stems. Their flower heads are clustered at the tops of the stalks, are bright green, and are shaped like little fir trees.
Nothing much is going on here at the moment. We're in waiting mode for the deck contractor (what else is new?) and we have an appointment with the central heating people on Tuesday to have the boiler's exhaust system shifted back to the chimney. The new boiler was installed in 2015 with the exhaust vent going through the wall next to the boiler. The problem is that the vent faces the predominant winds and they blow out the boiler's flame. I don't know why this wasn't a problem during the first couple of years, but it has been going on for several years now. The first year it happened, we called a technician who looked at the boiler and proclaimed, "It shouldn't do that," as if we were imagining the problem. And he didn't do anything to fix it. So, after several years and several unsuccessful interventions, we think we've finally convinced the heating company that the wind is indeed blowing out the flame (it doesn't happen on calm days) and that going back to the traditional chimney on the roof will solve the problem. At least we hope so, and so does the heating company.
Tired of these, yet? We're still enjoying the color around the neighborhood, but it's not going to last much longer, especially with wind and rain systems moving through. It's getting chilly, too, but I wouldn't call it cold. Not yet.
The deck guy confirmed that he got our choice for new tile, but he hasn't come by to take the final measurements. So we wait. Patience is a virtue. Or so I've heard.
The parade of autumn leaves continues. This red one is a little darker than the others. As usual, I don't know what variety of grape this belongs to.
The holiday weekend is over and kids go back to school today. As usual, our neighborhood was practically full, with people at the Air B&B two doors down and our neighbors' house across the road hosting part of their extended family (adult children, grandkids, and two huge dogs) for a weekend getaway.
While the Air B&B people usually spend their days away (most likely at the zoo), the neighbors' people spend theirs in their yard and out walking in the vineyard. Yesterday they were out back flying a kite. We also see other people walking, biking, mopedding, and quadding through the vineyard and past our house that we don't normally see. Not to mention the hunters on Sunday and Monday (holidays are hunt days). Tasha gets a lot of barking in as people pass by. Today most of the visitors are gone and the hamlet should be relatively quiet for a while.
Or, in this case, red and gold. More autumn color from the vineyards out back. Temperatures are falling slowly and we're getting scattered showers.
Today is a holiday in France. La Toussaint (All Saints Day) is a day traditionally spent visiting cemeteries and leaving behind pots of chrysanthemums.
It seems like our autumn leaves are peaking right now, at least on the trees and grape vines around us. Prepare for a few days of local color.
Most of the grape vines out back turn yellow, orange, and gold in the fall. But here and there are vines that go red. Like this one. Brilliant!
We went to the building supply store yesterday to pick out the tile for the deck renovation. Ken had already found a candidate on line. We wanted to see it in person to be sure. It's pretty much the same as the tile we've had for the last eighteen years. Plus ça change...
The two mysterious cornfields up among the vineyards are still standing. The stalks are turning brown and some of the ears are beginning to show their niblets. I've noticed that, down in the valley, most of the cornfields have been harvested. I wonder when (and if) these two little parcels will get harvested. Is it a local farmer who's growing his own feed corn for a few animals, or is someone just planting for fun? Or appearances? I may never know.
Tonight's the night we go back to Central European Winter Time and change our clocks back one hour. Joy. The EU has not yet got it together to decide to stop the changing of the clocks. I guess dealing with the pandemic put other issues on the back burner. And I read that not all EU countries agree on whether to stay on Summer Time or on Winter Time. France voted to stay on Summer Time, which is fine with me. Maybe next year.
I'm digging back into old photos again for lack of anything new. This is the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Half Moon Bay, just down the coast from San Francisco. It was brand spankin' new when I took this photo in 2002. Of course, I've never stayed there. I don't golf. And it's way too Ritzy for me (see what I did there?). I slept on the ground in a tent just down the road.
So, we haven't seen the deck guy yet. He still could come today, otherwise it will be after the holiday weekend. Tuesday at the earliest. Sigh. The new chainsaw works perfectly well and I got started cutting birch branches on Thursday. It's going to take me a while.
For lack of anything else to post today, here's a gratuitous shot of our living/dining room from last week.
The new chainsaw arrived as expected yesterday. This morning I'll put it together and see if I can start it up. I would like to get some branches cut before the forecast rain over the weekend. This is a big holiday weekend in France (Toussaint, All Saints Day) but it looks like it might be a wet one.
The "news" is that we got a call from the deck contractor yesterday. Well, his wife. She does all the phone work for the company. She said her husband would be over in the next couple of days to take the final measurements before starting work. She asked us to go to a local building supply store and pick out the specific tile we want for the deck so he can order it. I'm allowing myself to be a little excited by this development!
I made some progress in getting the deck cleared off. The table and chairs are put away for the winter and I got the grill (mostly) cleaned up for the season as well. There are a few other things that we'll get put away over the weekend and then we'll be ready.
Here's a closer look at our neighbors' crape myrtle and its fall colors. The shrub was part of the panorama in Sunday's "Over the road" post. I see on Wikipedia that an alternate spelling for the plant's name is crêpe myrtle. That sounds tasty!
I had good intentions yesterday morning. I got all ready to saw some birch branches and I couldn't get the chainsaw to work. It started, but sputtered out before I could cut anything. After about ten minutes of trying I gave up. So frustrating! I was complaining to Ken about it and he said why don't you just get a new one. We looked on line and found one. It's scheduled to arrive today (Amazon Prime!).
The "old" one is only eight years old. I've had trouble starting it from the beginning. I even took it back to the store (40 kilometers away) a week or so after I bought it because it wouldn't start. The guy in the store started it up on the first try, of course. I felt like an idiot. I guess I don't have the magic touch.
At any rate, I'm hopeful that the new saw will work better. By the way, these are not full-size chainsaws, but are something called élagueuses, pruning saws for smaller jobs.
This is another view from our guest room window, zoomed in on the hedge and the cylindrical bay laurel in the southwest corner of the yard. Not much to say about it, except that I'm enjoying the color. As winter approaches the golds will fade to browns and the leaves will tumble. The hedge and the grass stay green through the winter, as do the fir trees, of course.
Speaking of winter, I've had a couple of fires in the wood stove already. Just to take the chill off. But the weather gurus are predicting a warming trend this week. I want to take advantage to cut up some of the birch branches the landscaper left us (as opposed to splitting the trunks; that's another chore). I can burn the branches in the stove when it gets cold again.
Regular readers will recognize this view from our guest room window. The vineyards stretch out toward the west from our little hamlet, bordered on the north and south by stream beds that carve deep ravines as they descend toward the river. Those ravines are where the woods grow and where a lot of our wildlife lives.
The vineyards' fall colors are mostly yellow and gold, but there are traces of bright red here and there. The show is subtly different each year, but never boring. The parcel just in front of the cabin in this photo is being dug up right now. If you look closely, you can see that the canes and their leaves are gone. The vines in that parcel are old and there are a lot of empty spaces where dead vines have been removed in recent years. The parcel will be replanted with sauvignon blanc (that's what's there now) according to one of the guys who works out there, probably in a year or two.
This is the view of our neighbors' property from our kitchen window. They do a nice job keeping the grass cut and the shrubs trimmed. It helps that they have an army of kids, grand-kids, and friends to lend a hand. And, at this time of year, we get treated to a show of fall colors.
I had a small breakthrough yesterday. My little chainsaw has been temperamental since I got it back in 2013. Specifically, I have trouble starting it. The choke lever is very sensitive. This year, when I wanted to start it up, it wouldn't even sputter. Nothing. Nada. Rien.
Before I go further, I'll tell you that I made a decision this year to spend €€ on pre-mixed fuel for the saw. The engine is a two-stroke engine which requires a mix of gasoline and oil to run. I never remember the mix ratio and it's always a pain to look it up and mix the fuel, and I have to buy a special kind of oil for that at the hardware store. I noticed a couple of years ago, however, that the hardware stores sell pre-mixed fuel for two-stroke engines. It's expensive, but I don't really use much. So I broke down and bought some on Saturday morning. This prompted me to try to get the saw started again. No luck.
Ken suggested that maybe the fuel filter was clogged. Some research revealed that there is no fuel filter in this chainsaw, but there is an air filter. I've had a clogged air filter on one of my lawn mowers in the past that prevented it from starting until I replaced it. So, I opened up the panel on the back of the saw where the carburetor is, checked to see if the levers were working (they were), then pulled the filter off. It looked ok, but I took a toothbrush and water to it and cleaned it up a little.
You can guess what happened next. I put the cleaned filter back in and the saw started right up. Now it's time to get out there and slice up some birch branches!
Our poor little fig tree had an amazing year this year. I suppose it was all the rain. There are more figs on the tree this year than all previous years combined. Or close to it. That tells me that the tree needs to be watered more in drier years.
I was so happy to see all the fruit and notice that the birds didn't seem to want them. I eagerly awaited harvest time (late summer) and dreamed of fresh fig tarts and eating figs with foie gras. But Lucy pulled the football away once again.* All of those beautiful figs are as hard as rocks. Not one of them is edible.
Maybe I'll pick them, cook them, and see if their salvageable that way.
* A reference to the cartoon "Peanuts" in which Lucy holds a football for Charlie Brown to kick and each and every time, despite her assurances to the contrary, she pulls the football away at the very last moment causing Charlie Brown to whiff and fall flat on his back. And he never learns.
Friends of ours welcomed a new puppy into their home earlier this year. When we were invited over for lunch last weekend, I thought a gift of home-made dog biscuits would be nice. I looked on the internet and found a recipe (there are a lot) that used ingredients that I had, more or less, on hand.
Tasha liked the biscuits so I hoped the new pup would as well. And it turns out that she did. They're made with whole wheat flour, duck fat (in place of vegetable oil), chicken broth, and a little leftover roasted pumpkin purée (in place of corn meal). What's not to like? BOL (barking out loud)!
I mentioned that, last July, I started digging out the rock/concrete border of the little path that makes a useless loop out in the south forty. I was using a pickax. Not fun, and not good for my back. And I didn't get very far before letting the project drop.
Then, last week, the landscape contractor used his mini backhoe and made short work of the entire path, removing the rocks, the concrete, and the little stones that made up the walkway. What a relief!
Now, I'm using up a big pile of mulch we've had for a couple of years to fill in the path. The goal is for the mulch to break down and that grass and the other wild plants that make up our "lawn" will fill in over the next years.
The path was a barrier to mowing because of that rock border. Weeds and wildflowers grew up around the rocks and in the middle of the path and it was ugly, not to mention a pain to trim by hand. So now it's gone. We may need to get some bags of soil before spring to finish filling in the gap. I'll keep you posted.
When we moved into this place a little over eighteen years ago, about a dozen noisettiers (hazelnut trees) lined the northern property line out in what I call the west forty. In the spring of 2013, we had them cut down to hedge height.
Now, at least half of them have died, likely from the persistent drought conditions that have built in over time. At least, that's the opinion of the landscaper for the reason we and others are losing so many trees and shrubs right now.
So, as part of this year's work, the landscaper took out the line of dead hazelnut trees/shrubs and their roots. We never got any nuts from the trees. The weevils bored into most of them, ruining them for eating. I'm sorry to see them go, but not sorry at the same time. Cutting the grass between them and the fence was a real pain. And, each year, thorny blackberry brambles used them as a support and needed to be cut back. That was a necessary but so-not-fun chore each year.
The other half-dozen or so hazelnut trees are hanging on (although one of those has died as well). They'll probably have to come out in the near future.
