Summer is in Full Swing

Susan and her daughter rearranged their schedule to something that worked better for them, so I’ll be able to hitch a ride with them to retrieve the car this week and still be back to teach the serger class on Thursday. I worked on the handout over the weekend and that’s just about ready to go. I have a list of what I want to take with me (serger, threads, fabrics, etc.). The class samples are already on display at the store. When I traveled and taught knitting, I had a bag of dedicated teaching supplies. I might have to make one for these serger classes, too, so that I am not pulling tools from my workspaces.

I put the borders on the Cultivating Kindness jelly roll quilt over the weekend. It’s ready to be basted and quilted, but for now, it’s in the “future projects” pile. I haven’t had time to get back to the Slabtown project and probably won’t for a few more days. All that rain has made the grass and weeds grow.

One of my apple tree seedlings is struggling. It’s the Seek-No-Further that Susan grafted for me last year. (Of course, it’s the one I most want in my orchard.) Susan looked at it last evening and her assessment is that it probably won’t make it. We can’t quite figure out what happened, because the other four apple trees that we planted at the same time—two from Costco and two other grafts from Susan—look fabulous. I am going to leave it and hope that by some miracle, it recovers. Fortunately, she had grafted two of the Seek-No-Furthers, so she brought me the second one. I’ll put that one in the spot where we took out the pear tree that was destroyed by a falling tree in the last windstorm. We also took out the Fantasia Nectarine. I commented to the husband that it’s called “Fantasia” because it’s a fantasy to think that we could grow nectarines in Montana. Susan had one and took hers out, too, so I don’t feel so bad. We removed a couple of cherry trees that just couldn’t hack the winters. That’s not a huge loss as cherries are my least favorite fruit.

It’s survive or die here, plant-wise.

And we had a bear visit. Someone posted on a neighborhood social media group that a bear had gone after one of their piglets a few nights ago. This person lives down the road from us a couple of miles, so I knew the bear was probably roaming the neighborhood. The husband and our renter saw it Friday night around 10:30 pm, out by the garden. The husband said it was “not small.” (It’s a black bear.) So now I’m carrying the can of bear spray with me every time I go out to check on pigs.

I don’t think it can get to our pigs because of the electric fencing—and we close them in the Piggy Palace at night—but the fact that it was out there means it was scoping out potential dinner locations.

I processed 18 pints of chicken stock yesterday afternoon:

Pints work better for me than quarts.

I still need to pick rhubarb and make the Victorian BBQ Sauce. I might do that today as it’s supposed to be close to 90 and I don’t want to be outside. Thankfully, the temps are supposed to go back to seasonal mid-70s for the rest of the week. If the long-term forecast holds, they should stay there for the rest of the month. We do need more rain, though.