Tractor Story Update

Hey, guess what?  When the neighborhood guys looked into Harold's tractor they discovered the problem wasn't the clutch after all, but the torque amplifier.   They got the tractor running good and put the loader back on and we are in business again!  No spendy repairs needed!  At least for now anyway.   Someday Harold will have to deal with the torque amplifier, but it isn't needed for now.   When three savvy country boys put their heads together, they can fix anything..............

Some Pictures From Around the Farm

I took a few photos of how things look right now around here.  Things seem to be growing nicely, except for the grapes.  If you recall from a previous post, we were thrilled with this year's grape crop.  However, we got that dreaded fungus on our grapes again.  We have had very rainy weather, in fact way too much rain - and that is responsible for the fungus on the grapes.  

A cluster of grapes with the dreaded fungal disease.

We will still have some grapes, but we have lost a great many clusters due to fungus.  It doesn't help either that the deer have eaten a lot of the grapes also!

We may not have grapes this year, but we will certainly have apples!  Our tree is so loaded with apples the branches are just sagging with the weight.

Just look at how every branch is loaded with apples!  The back side of the tree is just as loaded with apples.   There are hundreds of apples to pick later next month!

The apples are about half the size they will eventually be.

My zinnia patch - so tall and pretty!

This year I also decided to grow statice flowers for dry arrangements for winter.  Next year I will grow plenty of these flowers, as they are so pretty in a container, and dry so well into bouquets for lasting arrangements.

A bunch of statice in an old enamel coffee pot on my porch.  I think they make beautiful dried flowers!

Things are growing nicely in the greenhouse, too.  The carrots on the left will be harvested for market tomorrow, as well as the parsley and romaine lettuce.

After lunch today, we gave the cats the corn cobs to chew on.  They just love it!  They like to eat whole corn, too, when the corn harvest is ready.

Several of the farm cats enjoying some corn.  They love to chew on the buttery bits of corn left on the ears.

Here are a couple of pictures of new farm kittens:

A kitten born in May thinks a cement block is just comfy!

A camera shy kitten hides under the porch.

Earlier this month when my son Kelly was visiting us, there was a big thunderstorm and a deluge of rain.  About 1:30 a.m. Kelly was outside enjoying some quiet country and fresh air after the storm, and heard a kitten crying and crying.  He called me outside to help him find where the kitten was.  So I got dressed and together (it just started raining again), we found the kitten - completely soaked, nearly drowned in a puddle, very cold and barely alive.  I wrapped him in a warm towel and tried to find its mama.  All our mama cats were running around frantically trying to find their kittens.  I put the kitten next to one mama, but she just sniffed him and walked away, so I knew that wasn't the mama.   Nobody seemed to claim him, so I just left him in the warm towel and put him in his cat house until morning.   Next day I expected to find him dead, but he was alive and well fed and dry.   Here he is today.  I call him Thunder, because he had quite a loud voice in the rainstorm!

Here is little Thunder, the kitten rescued from a pounding thunderstorm!

Finally, let me show you what I did to my favorite straw hat.  I have had this hat for about 10 years - it's almost a part of me.  But it was falling apart.  So I sewed some patches on it, and made it look like a real "hayseed hat"!  I even added a daisy for good measure!   Now my hat and me can enjoy a few more years together!

I just couldn't give up my straw hat!  When it started falling apart, I decided to fix it.  Now it's a real "country hat" don't you think??

Busy Country Morning

Things were pretty busy around here this morning!  The day started off nicely watching a bunch of trumpeter swans on Two Squaw Lake around 6:30 a.m.

Here are 9 of about a dozen trumpeter swans on the lake this morning.   They can be pretty noisy, but they are such beautiful birds. 

Then around 8 a.m. Harold had our neighbor Frank over to help him with his tractor.  Yesterday Harold was busy moving dirt and doing landscaping with the tractor/loader.  The clutch had been acting up on his tractor for quite a while now, but it finally went out.  Harold asked Frank to help him get the loader part off the tractor so he could take the tractor to the shop for repairs.   So Frank brought over his tractor/loader to help.

Harold attaches a chain to Frank's loader to steady the loader on our tractor, so Harold could take off the loader part.

While Frank holds the chain taut and steadies the loader on Harold's tractor, Harold un-bolts things.

Frank keeps the loader supported while Harold backs out of the loader on his tractor.

Harold's tractor is now free and clear of the loader attachment.

I asked Harold how come this loader thing had to be placed right in front of the beehives?  This will certainly be a challenge to mow around!

This is the area Harold will be working on!  He needs to replace the clutch plate, pressure plate, torque amplifier, and throw out bearing (all Greek to me, but the neighbor guys know all about this stuff!).  Harold needs to take off all the housing in the middle and some of the hydraulic lines.  Looks like a real challenge!  This is a project he does NOT need!  But he will have help from neighbors Frank and Don.  Harold estimates the repairs will be around $300 for parts.

Before Harold can continue any kind of work around here, he has to fix the tractor, as it is an important item here on the farm.   We use the tractor for so many things - tilling, wood hauling, dirt work, and moving heavy objects.
     Before the tractor broke, this is what Harold was doing.  We still have one side of our house to finish.  It has been a real challenge because that side of the house is steep, the ground is uneven, and there are several huge piles of dirt still left from the original excavation when we built the house.  Shortly after building the house, Harold was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer, and so any future projects were put on hold until he went into remission.  Harold doesn't work as quickly as he used to since his cancer, but we are making progress anyway on home improvement projects!

Harold got about half of the biggest dirt pile moved against the house before his tractor clutch went out.   When he gets the tractor fixed, we will continue moving and leveling the dirt so we can put scaffolding up to finish the siding, paint the house, and also build a retaining wall at the corner.   The tree in the middle of the photo grew up out of the dirt pile in the past 10 years.  It has to go.   This side of the house is one BIG project!!

Later in the morning, about 10:30 a.m., we went to the potato field to dig potatoes for market and for our own use. 

Some nice red potatoes hanging off one of the plants!

A variety of sizes - some big and some small.

Harold did all the digging, but I get to pose with the bucket of potatoes!  We dug up about 25 lbs of potatoes.  We still have maybe 50 lbs left for ourselves.

After all this work, we went home to a nice lunch of meatloaf, corn on the cob, baked beans, sliced tomatoes, and fresh cantalope.

Garlic and Cherries

Over the weekend Harold and I picked 5 ice cream pails full of cherries from a friend's farm.   They have many large cherry trees.  These are sour cherries for pies and cooking.  Cherries are one of my favorite fruits.  So I made 12 jars of my favorite  cherry ice cream topping, and 6 jars of jam.  Today I am using up some in a filling for a coffeecake, and the rest I will try freezing in bags this year.  The cherry season is very short, so you have to work with them immediately as they are quite fragile.   This is why a person rarely sees fresh sour cherries at the supermarket.   Check out these beauties!

Lovely cherries ready to cook with.  It's a lot of work to pit all the fruit, but a cherry pitter makes the work easier.   And even after all the work, it is SO worth it for all the wonderful things you can do with cherries!

Here are 2 of the 5 buckets we picked.

Besides working with cherries, it is time to harvest garlic.  I planted garlic in my greenhouse last October.  It was covered with a heavy layer of straw during the winter.  In April we un-covered the garlic area and soon the plants emerged.  Now that it is July, the garlic is ready to harvest!  I will dry it for a couple weeks, then clean up the bulbs and sell some at market, keep plenty for myself, and also keep some for replanting for next year's crop.   Garlic is so easy to grow that I wonder why more people don't try it.

I am holding a dozen heads of freshly harvested garlic grown in the greenhouse.  I have about 6 times this much to harvest yet.  The smell of the fresh garlic makes my kitchen smell like a real Polish kitchen!  When the heads dry a little, I will trim the roots and cut off the dry stems and store the heads in a cool dark place (like the pantry).