Powers of Observation

I try to make it a point to walk around the property once every day to see what’s going on. Sometimes stuff falls off my radar screen, though. We have two sections of fruit trees on our property and another on the rental property. The apple and pear trees are in front of our house. I look at them multiple times a day because of where they are. The peach and cherry trees are beyond the old garage, in the front yard on the other side of the driveway. I haven’t paid much attention to them this year because they haven’t borne much fruit and indeed, the trees are looking sorry enough that I was thinking about taking them out altogether.

I happened to be over there yesterday, though, and what should I see but this?

No, it’s not terribly impressive, but this is only the second time this tree has had peaches on it. They aren’t quite ripe yet. Hopefully I can get to them before a bear does.

We really have no business growing peaches or cherries here. Cherries do well along the shores of Flathead Lake because it’s much more temperate there. Our cherry trees have never produced anything, which is why I am thinking of taking them out. I have hope for this peach tree, but I think it will probably only produce the summer after a mild winter.

[And yes, that is a satellite dish in the upper left corner of the photo. It was here when we moved in. Some day, I would love for it to disappear. Where does one recycle an old satellite dish?]

I haven’t yet tried the rusty nail trick, but maybe I’ll give that a shot over the winter and see what the trees look like next spring.

The only apple trees that produced this year were the Red Wealthy, the Golden Delicious, and one of the Honeycrisps. I tried a Golden Delicious yesterday and it’s not quite ripe. The Wealthy only has about half a dozen apples on it. The Honeycrisp needs a few weeks yet.

My Dirty Girl tomato seeds are in a glass jar, fermenting:

I will probably do one or two more of these, because there just aren’t a lot of seeds in each tomato.

*********************************************

The husband banged out quite a few things on the Honey-Do list over the weekend, one of which was hanging a replacement roller shade in our bedroom. That roller shade has been propped up in a corner for over a year. We went to Lowes after date night one time to buy it—armed with careful measurements based on the shade we were replacing, which had ripped—but the person helping us obviously wasn’t the person usually in that department. When we got it home, the shade didn’t fit. To make it fit, the brackets needed to be moved. That was one of those 10-minute jobs that never got done.

There is nothing like an impending wedding, though, to make sure that all of these little jobs get handled. He also put the towel bars and toilet paper holder back up in the girls’ bathroom. They got taken down when DD#2 painted bathrooms in March. And we hung some of the family photos that I brought back with me from Maryland.

I’ve run across a few more things that need to be done, so I’ll update the Honey-Do list and we’ll keep chipping away at it.

*********************************************

We took down the fencing in the chicken yard separating the little chickens from the big chickens, and now everyone is together. As usual, there was a period of jockeying and arguing, but we haven’t had the bloodshed I was expecting. One of our neighbors said she would take the big baby rooster. He is definitely ready for his own flock. She is supposed to come get him today.

Rooster hierarchy is fascinating to me. We had three roosters last year: the big rooster who was sired by our old Buff Orpington rooster on a Barred Rock hen; a Black Australorp rooster from the year that the farm store had problems and we got a batch of supposed pullets, half of which were roosters; and our new Buff rooster, who is about 18 months old. The big rooster was clearly in charge, with the Buff as his second-in-command. The Black Australorp rooster had a small harem but mostly stayed out of the way.

The big rooster died in February, which left the BA and the Buff roosters. The Buff rooster moved into the dominant spot, but then the BA rooster went to Elysian’s for a few weeks. When he came back, there was a big fight—resulting in a limping Buff rooster—and the BA rooster became the dominant rooster. He still is. It was almost as if having his own coop full of hens with no competition gave him the confidence he had been lacking.

The BA rooster is about five years old, though, which is getting up there for a rooster. He may be ready for the soup pot. I love my Buff rooster, and I’d like to keep one of the baby roos, too. The other baby roos aren’t quite as mature as the big baby roo and it will be interesting to see which one of them develops into a more dominant rooster once the big baby roo is gone.