May 18-20, 2012

No rain and very dry, with temperatures in the 50s at night and 80s during the day.

Mow

In spite of no rain, the grass was high and had to be cut. Given the dust I kicked up you would have thought it was August. If it is this dry in May I hate to think about the rest of the summer. I did around the house and down to the pond.

Fruit

The nectarine tree is loaded, but something is already nibbling on them. The peach tree has lots of peaches, but not that many leaves. I will be surprised if it survives the year. Three big limbs were broken out of the 3-in-1 pear. I suspect raccoons are climbing it for the pears and breaking the limbs out. The apple trees are surviving, though I forgot to spray for apple-cedar rust. I watered all these.

Pond

While mowing at the pond I could see that the algae and grass was bad, so I made two trips down with my backpacker sprayer and Cutrine Plus. I did see two giant grass carp, but plan to get more next weekend anyway. I'll be anxious to see the effect of this spraying. Soon it will be time to start adding the bacteria to eat the muck.

Garden

In spite of no rain, the garden is doing fairly well. Sally has picked green beans the last two weekends and the onions are looking really good. The summer spinach has also completely filled in (seen in the back of this picture).

Wash Out Barn

We stopped at Betsy's on the way out to borrow her power washer, but it was much too large to fit into the 4Runner. So Saturday morning we tackled the barn with a hose, brush, and floor broom. Once I changed out one of the hoses and the nozzle, the job went much better. Sally thinks this will be good enough, which I was glad to hear. We couldn't see any baby barn swallows, so Sally sprayed a couple of nests with water to knock them down. Wouldn't you know it, one had two babies. One immediately died and the other kept hanging on, so I took it up the ladder and put it into one of the empty nests. The swallows came around it and made a ruckus, but wouldn't immediately go to it. I never saw it on the floor, so we are hopeful that it survived.

Trim Trees

Sally had me cut some dead and some living limbs out of the three oaks near the barn -- to open up the view. She would have had me cut many more, but I refused to be that draconian. This one had lots of dead limbs and even some danglers from the 2009 ice storm. They did look much better afterward. I also took the ladder and my chain saw over to the white oak where we plan to park cars (past the spring box), and took out the lower limbs so a car could be parked underneath.

Pull Knapweed

This stuff is horrible and was just beginning to bloom. The plants in and beside the road coming in are huge. Rather than weed eat them down (which is difficult because they are so thick) I took my pick up the road and would loosen the hard packed dirt and pull them up. I got most of the ones in the road and some of the ones beside it, but there are many more. My hands were soar for days after gripping, twisting, and pulling on these. Afterward I took the brush whacker up the road to clean it all up.

Kathi

Kathi has moved a travel trailer on to her place to live (since her house burned last month). They were setting it up Saturday. I'm not sure if she has moved in yet or not.