Our Local Treasure

I may be biased because I teach there, but the Quilt Gallery truly is a wonderful store, and much of that is due to the owner, Marianne Buller. She is my special guest on today’s podcast episode. It took us a few months to coordinate our schedules, but we sat down last week for a conversation and talked for almost an hour. You can download the episode at Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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We received a notice in the mail yesterday that the company that underwrites our commercial liability policy for the construction company is not going to renew it. They claim that insuring concrete work is no longer “within their appetite.” The fact that we have never filed a claim with them seems to be immaterial. I will call our insurance agent today to see if we can get coverage with another company.

That’s just one example in the pile of stuff on my desk at the moment. I’ll be tied to my office chair for most of the day.

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I ran errands yesterday morning and that always takes longer than I think it will. The only sewing that happened was making part of the tote lining:

I worked a bit on the zipper facings for the top of the bag, but I think I am going to do them slightly differently than instructed.

I harvested all the apples from the State Fair tree last night after dinner. Our trees are not huge; they are only about 15 years old and are on semi-dwarf root stock. Unfortunately, that means that the deer can get the low-hanging fruit, and we have had a couple of determined young bucks stripping the lower branches. I was able to get a big box full of beautiful apples. I don’t spray my trees—more out of laziness than anything else because I barely get them pruned in the spring—and I have very few problems with insect damage. I am of the opinion that spraying trees selects for resistant pests and lowers the ability of the tree to fight them off. People have told me the bugs just haven’t found the orchard yet, but if they haven’t found it after 15 years, they must be very stupid bugs.

The Honeycrisps and Red Wealthy apples need another couple of weeks yet. My Lodi tree did not produce this year. Susan offered me a box of Duchess of Oldenburg apples for pie filling, so I’ll can those up this week. The husband will eat the State Fair apples.