Right after I posted the Journal last Sunday, a big storm blew through here. It was part of that massive storm that swept across half the country wreaking havoc. We had just finished lunch when all of our devices went off, sounding a tornado warning alarm. The wind began to roar. Thunder rumbled almost continually. Rain came slashing down. Branches broke off trees. Our power flickered off and on. The neighbor's trampoline took flight and landed in our lilac hedge. We didn't get a tornado, but the storm was pretty intense. Luckily, it didn't last long. Then it rained through the rest of the day and into the night. All of this was the result of a cold front moving in.
It seems I spend most of my mornings now waiting for the world to warm up. March is notorious for flipping back and forth between cold and warm. On the mornings when we have frost, I always wait for it to leave before I leave the house. If the day doesn't warm enough to melt the frost, I stay indoors and only venture out to do the necessary chores. Monday was a thoroughly Monday sort of day. It was cold, gray, and wet. It snowed a little, but didn't amount to anything. I didn't feel motivated to do much. Miriam spent part of the day working on a quilt upstairs. While she works, she always has a movie or a show playing on the TV. I went up and watched whatever she was watching. It was a pretty drab day. It was St. Patrick's Day, but there wasn't much that was green about it. We did have a traditional St. Patrick's Day dinner with the Shilligs. We had corned beef with cabbage, carrots, and potatoes, and soda bread. I read an interesting article from Smithsonian Magazine about the history of corned beef and the Irish. Here is a link to it https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/is-corned-beef-really-irish-2839144/. It turns out that the Irish in Ireland don't associate corned beef and cabbage with St. Patrick's Day, it's an American thing. Nevertheless, it is delicious and I don't have any Irish ancestry anyway, so I'll take any excuse to enjoy a corned beef and cabbage dinner.
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| Crocuses in the long border. |
On Tuesday the weather was better. After a cold night (16° at dawn), the morning was chilly, but by 10:00 I was out working in the garden. The first thing I did was prune my roses. I have three rose bushes. One is a pink rugosa rose I planted twenty years ago in the lower part of the long border. Roses are not easy to grow here. Only the hardiest can survive our cold winters and rugosa roses are one of the hardy types. My rugosa is an extremely thorny bush, but it has pretty, single, fragrant pink flowers. Another of my roses is a climbing rose called 'Gertrude Jeykll' that I planted two years ago on the driveway fence. It is supposed to be hardy to zone 4, which we are, but it isn't flourishing, so I did very little pruning on it. The third rose is a very old bush. When we moved here, there was a big, half dead lilac bush in the side yard. We pulled it out, and in the process discovered that it had overrun and practically smothered a rose bush. With the lilac bush gone, the rose recovered and has grown into a big bush. I don't know what variety it is, but every June for a few weeks it is covered with old fashioned, very fragrant pink flowers. I gave it a good pruning, all the while reflecting on how beautiful it will be in about three months. When I placed my seed and plant orders this year, I ordered another rose. This one is a gallica rose called 'Tuscany Superb.' It is an old rose dating from the 14th century with fragrant, dark crimson flowers. It hasn't arrived yet and I haven't decided yet where I will plant it. The thought of roses in June makes me happy.
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| Top: Pink rugosa, Gertrude Jeykll. Bottom: my old rose, Tuscany Superb. |
The day got warmer and by noon, the weather had warmed into the 50s. I kept on working, enjoying the sunshine, getting my hands dirty. That afternoon we went to our friends, Bob and Nancy Jones's, and helped them prepare their asparagus bed. We pulled up the old dead stalks from last year, pulled some weeds, and spread compost on the asparagus rows. They have a large patch and Nancy often shares their asparagus with us. It won't be too long now before asparagus season begins. It is my favorite early spring garden treat.
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| Working in the Jones's asparagus patch. |
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| Bob hauling a load of compost. |
I suppose it was pruning roses that did it. When I woke up on Wednesday morning, I had a song playing in my head, Paper Roses, by Marie Osmond. That song is part of the soundtrack to one of my fondest teenage memories. Paper Roses was Marie Osmond's first solo release in 1973. It became a hit and I was one of its admirers. In the summer of 1974, when I was sixteen, I went with some of my friends and two adult leaders from church on a week long high adventure at the Boy Scout's Northern Wisconsin National Canoe Base. On our first day there, they dropped us off at our starting point on the north end of a lake with our canoes and supplies and we had to be at our pickup point at the south end of another lake a week later. I remember the general area we were in, but I don't remember the names of the lakes we traversed. We had maps to use to chart our course across the lakes. We paddled all day. We had to portage our canoes several times. Each night we stopped and set up camp. The lakes were beautiful. The weather was perfect. The entire time we were there, we hardly saw another human. We saw a lot of wildlife – deer, fish, and birds. We saw osprey and bald eagles and all kinds of waterfowl. I especially loved the loons. Every evening after we made camp, I would go to the edge of the lake and listen to the loons calling in the twilight. As we paddled every day, we sang the songs popular on the radio that summer, among them Rock the Boat (Hues Corporation), I Shot the Sheriff (Eric Clapton), Star Baby (Guess Who), Hooked On a Feeling ("ooga-chaka-ooga-ooga" Blue Swede), and one of our favorites, Paper Roses. One day we lashed two canoes together and rigged a sail made from paddles and a rain poncho and let the wind carry us across the water. That week on those lakes with my friends is one of my fondest memories of my teenage years. Tuesday morning, after waking with that song in my head, I listened to it several times and I found those memories flooding through my mind and I was filled with nostalgia for that time of youthful innocence and for friends I haven't seen in half a century.
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| I think these are the lakes we canoed on. |
After our week at Canoe Base, some of us went on to spend another week with our Boy Scout troop, Naperville Troop 50, at Camp Chin-Be-Gota in Shawano County, Wisconsin. It rained for most of that week. We spent a lot time in our tent-cabins playing whist and swatting mosquitoes. We had a problem one evening when maggot-infested ground beef got turned into sloppy joes and no one noticed until they were half eaten. And then there was the day my friend Larry closed a pocket knife on his finger and had to go to the infirmary to get it bandaged. And walking in the woods one night, for the first time in my life, I saw foxfire, bioluminescent fungi, glowing in the forest. I rode home from camp with Larry, whose parents came to pick him up. On our way home, we found out that, while we were away, President Nixon had resigned. By then August was half over and I was about to begin my junior year of high school. It all seems like an age ago, and so it is.
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| Baker Lake, Shawano County, Wisconsin, where Camp Chin-Be-Gota used to be. |
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| Me at sixteen. It was 1974. We wore our hair like that. |
On Wednesday tragedy struck the barn again. When I went down to do the chores, I found seven more dead hens. This time three of them were mangled, heads and necks eaten. Kurt and I went down in the late afternoon and set three live traps and a motion detector to see if we could catch anything. That night, just before midnight, the motion detector alarm went off. I threw on some clothes, put on a headlamp, grabbed my .22, and ran down to the barn. I saw nothing. I went back to bed. The alarm went off again at 4:45 in the morning. I grabbed my robe, headlamp, and gun, and ran down again. This time I saw it. There was another dead hen and, crouched by the back wall of the coop, a mink. Its little eyes were glowing in the light of my headlamp. It ran around inside the coop and sent the chickens into a panic. I took a shot at it with bird shot, but I only had one round and I missed. It disappeared down a hole. So the culprit all this time has been a mink. I came back to the house and tried to go back to sleep, but it was too close to my usual rising time by then and I was too riled up. I showered and got ready for the day.
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| This is a mink. |
The spring equinox, the exact moment when the length of day and night are equal in the northern hemisphere, occurred at 5:01 on that morning. I was wide awake to greet it. I went out later to watch the sun come up. It was a warm morning, and the sunrise was pretty, but I could tell the weather was changing. There was a smell of approaching rain in the air. Later in the morning I went back down and spent some time with the chickens to brood on my failures. I came back to the house and sat around trying to assuage the anger and frustration I was feeling. In just under two weeks, I lost more than half of my flock. I needed something to soothe my mind. I chose the Six Cello Suites BWV 1007-1012 by Bach played perfectly by Yo Yo Ma. It is wonderful music and it usually uplifts me, but this time it didn't do the trick. I was in such a bad mood. Instead of comforting me, I found myself thinking, why didn't I study the cello so I could play Bach like that? And why didn't I stick with studying the piano so I could play Chopin? Why am I just a listener, not a performer. So many regrets. And after forty years of keeping chickens, why was I not smart enough to save my flock? Stupid mink. Stupid me.
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| Sunrise over the beaver pond on the spring equinox. |
All through the morning I fumed over that mink and my slaughtered flock. I should have figured it out sooner. I should have a more secure coop. I should be a better shot. Midmorning, I went back to the coop with a rake and a shovel. I raked up all the feathers. I shoveled out the holes the mink was using and refilled them. The whole time I was working I was thinking, devising ways to improve my coop. The few chickens that remain stayed out in their yard while I worked. Their chatter sounded like a chorus of reproof.
Because it was the first day of spring and because I was in a grumpy mood, I felt the need to plant something. When I came back from working in the barn, I went out to my raised bed garden and planted half a bed of spinach and another of lettuce. They are both tolerant of cold and I know we still have plenty of cold weather ahead. It felt good to put seeds in the soil. The rain held off until I finished. By then it was noon. After my disrupted sleep and a morning's hard work, I felt I deserved a treat, so I took a nap. I read recently that several studies have shown that there was a 68% decrease in deaths from heart disease in men who habitually take a midday nap. So yes, I did it for my heart.
Thursday evening, Stacey and I ran errands up in Wellsville. While we were at Runnings buying chicken feed, we also bought a mink trap. The man who worked there recommended the Bridger #110 Bodygripper. If that sounds intimidating, it was for us. When we got home, it was just getting dark, so we went down and set the trap right away. It was hard to set. The spring on it is so strong we couldn't squeeze it with our hands. We had to use Irwin clamps. After much maneuvering, we managed to get it set. We baited it with some mink lure that we also bought. We placed it over the hole outside the front of the coop that I think the mink uses to get in and out. We also had all the live traps and two rat traps inside the coop.
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| The mink trap set and ready. |
Friday morning first thing, I went down to check the trap. Nothing. The Bridger #110 Bodygripper was unsprung. The other traps were also empty. But there were no dead chickens, so that was good. My flock is so small now, just twelve hens and two roosters. I'm only getting seven or eight eggs a day now. I'm going to need a lot of new chicks. They are not so easy to get these days. Tractor Supply and Runnings run out within a few hours of getting them. The hatchery that I usually buy from is sold out for the season. I will try to buy chicks from the new local hatchery over in Oswayo, but I don't know when they'll have any to sell. And my friend Pat at church is going to incubate thirty eggs for me. My poor traumatized flock. Now that I am prepared, albeit a little too late, the mink has not come back. The traps are ready. I check them every morning. There is no sign of the mink anymore.
I planted my first seed trays on Saturday – snapdragons, Shasta daisies, Italian parsley, bunching onions, and celery. The trays are on their heating pads under grow lights on the workbench in the woodshed. Now I will wait and watch for the signs of their sprouting. It is exciting, but sometimes disappointing. Starting seeds can be tricky, frustrating, thrilling. I get impatient to see some sign of life in them. Parsley is especially trying. It takes forever to germinate, weeks even. About the time I'm ready to give up and replant, it usually emerges.
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| The first seed trays started. |
Yesterday was an overcast and chilly day. I wasn't tempted to attempt any outdoor work, but we did venture out on a birdwatching adventure. Someone reported seeing a Red-throated Loon on a pond down on Route Six a mile past the Deer Park, so Miriam, Hannah, and I drove down to see if we could spot it. It wasn't there, but we saw a Canvasback, Common and Hooded Mergansers, Canada Geese, and a Great Blue Heron. Then we decided that, as long as we were out, we would drive down to Galeton and see if there was anything on the lake there. We saw more mergansers and geese and also a Pied-billed Grebe and a Lesser Scaup. Since we were all the way down at Galeton, we decided to keep going and drove over to Lyman Lake. There were just mergansers and Mallards there. Then we decided instead of backtracking to Galeton to go home, we would take Rock Run Road over the mountain. It's a single lane dirt road and it was a little muddy in places and there were some icy patches near the top, but Hannah was driving and she did fine. We stopped at the overlook at the top so I could take a picture. It was raining by then, but the view was still pretty spectacular. That was our big Saturday adventure.
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| Lyman Lake. |
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| The view from the overlook. |
Last year, I started some mushroom logs. I had plugs for Lion's Mane and Shitake, which I started in some maple and cherry logs I had on hand. I also had Chicken-of-the-Woods plugs, but they needed fresh oak logs and I didn't have any. The big storm we had last Sunday broke off a big branch from one of oak trees on the Rigas's property and Stacey was able to procure two logs for me. So yesterday afternoon I drilled holes in the logs and pounded in spawn plugs and sealed them with beeswax. The logs I started last year still show no signs of sprouting mushrooms, but it's still too soon. I'll add these new oak logs to the pile and keep on waiting for mushrooms to appear, someday. I hope.
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| Drilling oak logs to start mushroom spawn. |
Stacey and I went on a date to see Snow White last night. As one who loves the original cartoon masterpiece, I went expecting to be disappointed, and my expectations were realized. It just seemed clumsy to me. They added plot elements to stretch out the runtime. They left out some of the original songs, altered the ones they did use, and added others that all seemed forced and out of place. The choreography was the sort you get in so called musicals these days, lots of stomping and gyrating. I think my love of the old musicals when people knew how to sing and dance and make it work has made me critical. Even the animation in this Snow White seemed subpar. This one won't ever be considered a masterpiece like its predecessor, but I don't think Disney is capable of making masterpieces like that anymore.
It's sunny, but cold today. Church was good. Kurt and Julie were our speakers and they gave good talks. In a few minutes I'm heading down to the barn to do the chores and collect my pitiful eight eggs. By then lunch should be ready and after that I will rest. This is the Sabbath, the day of rest, and I equate resting with napping. The week ahead looks like more of the same – chilly weather, lots of clouds. This Friday we are going down to the Thayn's house. Hazel and June are in a production of Bye Bye Birdie and we are really looking forward to seeing them perform. I'll tell you all about it next week.
