I’ve got too many posts with the same title…
And to many days that start with HOT HOT HOT, and yet it IS hot. And humid. It was hot at the lake too, hitting 99F a few feet from the water, and much higher further away. Sunny too.
I did a bunch of small stuff this weekend, mainly because for one reason or another it is stuff I can safely do, or have all the stuff present to do. Bigger more important things languish… but I can make the place look better and function a little better.
SO ..
I installed the new freezers, and moved stuff out of the kitchen to one of them. I installed a handrail on the steps I built for the dock. One of our neighbors who we would like to see more often will be much more comfortable with a solid handrail. I back filled a bit of a hole at the edge of the same steps. With the lake down, this would be an excellent time to backfill all of my bulkhead to fill the gaps where water gets UNDER the concrete wall. Too bad I’m not ready and don’t have the time. I could start with less but to do the whole thing would take about a dozen cubic yards of material. I suppose there will be a period of low water next year too.
I did normal visit things, cutting the grass, cleaning up debris, making the place look loved and lived in.
And I tried out my new crawdad traps. Overnighted two traps, baited with dog food and freshwater mussel… and one had a whole mussel that died before I could cook it. That trap had 7 or 8 small ‘bait fish’ in it, including one inside the mussel shell. All the bait was gone. The other trap in deeper water (3 ft vs 1 ft) had bait left, and nothing inside. Too small a sample size to draw any conclusions. The bait fish would have been handy for a morning session trying to catch bigger fish.
Collected and cooked some mussels. Not horrible, but not New Zealand Green Lips in garlic butter and white wine either. I should try some smaller ones next time, and cook them in something besides water. The coons harvested and ate at least one other large mussel, I’m finding one big shell a night on the steps of the dock.
Turns out one of the trees in the back is a peach tree. Local wildlife has left ONE peach intact so far, but it’s still small and green. I did find a well gnawed peach pit on the patio, so there was at least one other fruit. It’s too small a tree to have much fruit anyway, but a nice discovery.
I’m trying to figure out what we actually have in terms of plantings and beds. The previous owner’s wife was an avid flower gardener, and there are several neglected beds. One is full of bulbs and flowered earlier. One is wildflower and rose bushes- the butterflies love that one, but I’m going to take at least half for a ‘salad’ and herb garden. There is a rock garden with what looks like blue agave… there were several flowering trees, and now I found the peach. I have done a bunch of weeding and cleaning because “hey, free landscaping! hey, free trees! hey, free flowers!”
Speaking of the garden, I’m abandoning my veg garden at the lake for the rest of the year. I’ll try again in fall. I pulled up 4ft of each row, didn’t find a single veg, so it looks like nothing sprouted. I took the ‘deer guards’ off and cut the watering time to 5 minutes daily. I can still experiment with how fast the grass grows back, and how little water I can put on the plot. The most useful thing to do might be to cover the whole thing with black plastic, and let the summer sun bake the heII out of it. That is supposed to kill a lot of the stuff in the soil, including the nutgrass. Don’t know if there is enough time to try it this year, before the fall garden needs to start.
At home the cukes or zukes are still growing vines. The grape vine is climbing the trellis. The collards are thriving. Peas and beans died. So I stack cans of veg.
Plenty of the same stuff to do this week as last, with the added complication of picking up D1 from a local ‘leadership’ class at 3pm every day. Kinda cuts short my workday. Oh well. If I can’t drive all over town, I can play chess with D2.
Stack some memories as well as canned goods, they will be there to get you through when the going gets tough.
nick