Where did the month of July go? Not much happened this month, but that hardly justifies the month taking a hike so quickly with August now on the doorstep. The beginning of July was pretty steamy though wildfire smoke coming down from Canada kept the air temperature from soaring into the mid-nineties and roasting us to a turn.
So here’s a few pics taken during the month. A nice little collection of forest fungi and lichens decorating fallen branches.
A geranium I bought last year has decided to put on another display for this year.
I’m still doing crochet, a craft I began teaching myself last fall. One of my practice pieces was a funky looking throw blanket made from tail ends of yarn balls from other projects. With over a dozen different yarns in it, I’m not about to pull it all apart to reuse the yarn. I’ll leave it as is. I kinda like it.
In crochet, there is what is known at the ‘magic circle’, a way of starting a project which is being done in the round, such as amigurumi yarn toys. I have finally, FINALLY, managed to gain some mastery of it. One of the benefits of this technique is it makes it possible to close the hole at the starting center so your amigurumi won’t have a gap in the top of its head. I’m not adept enough to make cute yarn critters yet, but I did manage to create these disks, which also allowed me to master increasing the size of a project. These are also keepers. I’ll stack on each other to make a small table-top display.
The month of June here in northern New Hampshire has seen its fair share of rain, a little more than three inches for the month compared with four and half inches last month. Fortunately it’s been spread out rather than coming in mass quantities all at once. There’s only been occasional minor localized flooding, nothing disasterous.
This month’s project has been tree removal. For years the white pines around my home have been growing taller and taller. Given that winds seem to being blowing more strongly than they used to, I figured it was time to take down some of them. I started with three pines all well over fifty feet tall as well as a large oak tree located beside my house. Two of the pines were just over the edge of the bank and the remaining pine and oak were at the end of an old defunct garden.
The space between my home and the steep narrow bank next to my property was kind of a tight squeeze but with a bit of jockeying the tree service guys worked in their bucket truck and commenced the felling. They started with trimming branches off each tree, feeding them into a woodchipper which noisily gnawed through them, spitting out the chips into a truck also driven up on the lawn.
To make room for felling the trunks, undergrowth had to be cleared out to one side, so the cutters had a place to drop the trees.
Then came the main event, the felling of the trees.
First the tops.
Pine top being cut down
Then the bottom halves.
Base of the garden pine being felled.
Then the bottom half of the last pine.
Last pine tree on bank being felled.
This last one fell so hard, it snapped in half.
Last pine trunk snapped in half when falling
Then all that remained was to haul off the trunks, probably to be cut into boards or firewood.
Pine tree trunks being loaded on flatbed
All in all, a job well done by the tree service. Admittedly it was a bit expensive to remove four trees, but it was worth it for the peace of mind. Now, of course, there are two huge pines on the other side of the house that need removing but that’s for a later date. In the meantime, I will be mulling over what kind of landscaping needs to be done in order to spruce things up.
The weather has finally moderated enough to put plants into the ground and so far the rain has been fairly generous. Yard sales are beginning to pop up with the promise of a lucky score. Last year I got a small magnifying stand with a light for only a quarter of the price I see online. The lamp with its magnifier will come in handy for my aging eyeballs when I come to do mending. This year I’m hoping to find a bundt pan that doesn’t have that nasty non-stick coating. Another item is a blocking board for the crochet projects I’m doing. I’ve seen some crocheters use those foam pads for infants when they’re playing on the floor, so I’ll see how I make out there.
The local recycling station has a shelf where people put old unwanted books. I’ve recently found the book below.
It’s a little beat up and the pages are yellowed, which isn’t surprising since the publication date is 1927, just shy of a century old. But the book is still quite readable. At a hundred years old, you won’t see any low fat, gluten-free or low cholesterol recipes. The recipes have a minimum of ingredients, meaning you don’t see the huge laundry list of items which go into making a supposedly easy recipe, something which has always irked me. The following looks interesting enough so I think I may try it at some point.
Savory Potato Balls
6 medium sized potatoes, 1 ½ tsp paprika, 1 tsp finely minced green pepper, 4 tsps butter, 1 egg, ¼ tsp celery salt and ¼ cupful cheese
Cook the potatoes until tender. Drain, dice and add salt, butter, celery salt, paprika, green pepper and beaten egg. Beat well, make into balls the size of croquettes. Arrange in greased pans, brush with beaten egg, sprinkle with cheese and bake in hot oven of 450 degrees until brown. Serves six.
I’m guessing that some of the beaten egg is saved to be brushed on the potato balls, though the recipe obviously isn’t clear about this. Also, it doesn’t say whether to peel the potatoes first or not. I suppose it’s your preference which to choose.
This one looks good too.
Celery Chowder
4 cupfuls finely cut celery, 1 quart milk, 1 large potato grated, 1 medium-sized onion, 2 Tbs fat, 1 Tbs of flour, 2 hard-cooked eggs, salt and pepper to taste.
Cook celery in water to cover until tender and force through a sieve, keeping the water as well as the pulp. Add milk and grated potato and cook five minutes. Chop onion fine and saute in one tablespoon of the fat. When delicately browned, add to the first mixture. Chop the hard-cooked eggs and add. Thicken slightly with one tablespoonful of fat and the flour blended together. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Leaves and the tough outer stalks of the celery may be used. Serves six to eight.
One thing that caught my eye was the ingredient ‘fat’. The recipe is not specific on what fat should be used but since this book long predates modern obsessions with dietary fat and cholesterol, it is quite likely lard, though it could be Crisco shortening as well as that had been introduced in 1911 and was being heavily touted by its makers. Some of the recipes in the book did list shortening as an ingredient.
Another recipe, called English Monkey, took breadcrumbs, milk, egg, cut-up cheese and some seasonings to create a topping for crackers. I had never heard of this recipe before so did an internet search, discovering the existence of monkey bread (here’s a link to a recipe). The AI overview (which seems ubiquitous now on Google) states it is Hungarian in origin and was brought over by immigrants to America where it was quickly adapted into the sticky pull-apart treat described in the YouTube video.
Since preparation calls for a bundt pan for cooking, I’ve made the search for one at yard sales a goal for this summer. Wish me luck!
When out walking, I sometimes spot something I didn’t see before and wonder why I didn’t notice it previously.
The above picture show two trees, one a birch, the other either a maple or an oak, growing around each other. Since they are right beside the road, I marvel that they hadn’t caught my attention earlier. It probably falls in the same category when something that’s always been there gets removed, and you notice the absence but not what had actually been there. It’s not that I didn’t really notice the trees, it was that I hadn’t noticed what they were up to. Well! Guess I better mind my own business.
April has been on the dry side, with a few brush fires here and there, though thankfully not near where I live. With the weather finally growing warmer, I’ve begun prepping the spent flower pots and raised beds for the next round of growing. I’ve bought only one bag of organic soil for use. With plenty of soil amendments left over from last year, it’s more a matter of supplementing what is already there, rather than starting from scratch. Some of last year’s smaller pots have been dumped into the raise beds with some green sand and a bit of fertilizer. The last of the bagged manure from last year will be added to it and I will buy a new bag this year, hopefully from the nearby greenhouse.
The goal is to plant some garden peas and wax beans, which I will have to cover with chicken wire as a woodchuck made its appearance in the backyard a few days ago. Carrots and potatoes will also go in. I have a left over seed packet of Bloomsdale spinach that I never got around to opening for some reason. The packet is not dated,so I have no idea how old it is and if the seeds are still viable. So I will test them out by putting them in one of the pots I have, to see what happens. If nothing grows, I’ll just put in something else.
As I like to experiment a bit with new plants, I bought a seed packet of Miner’s Lettuce.
It looks intriguing enough so I want to try it out. Internet info says that it is hardy from zone 6 through 9 which makes it an annual in my zone 4 so some I will have to grow in a pot. It is shade tolerant, a plus since shade is something I have a lot of.
Another vegetable I am looking at is New Zealand spinach.
Also known as Warrigal greens or Botany Bay greens, it’s actually related to figs and marigolds. It does well in hot weather and tend to sprawl as it grows. As with miners lettuce, this is not hardy in zone 4, so I’ll have to grow as an annual. Because it contains oxalates which can interfere with mineral absorbtion, cooking is recommended, boiling or steaming much as you do regular spinach.
There’s no guarantee I’ll like either one of them, but that’s why you experiment. If they are good, I have a new addition to the menu, if not, I move onto the next experiment.
The weather has finally moderated (slightly) enough so that the foot and half of snow in my front yard has almost entirely melted away, except for a tiny patch here and there. We’ve had a few spells of rain, but of the raw and chilly kind. This is actually normal for this time of year here in northern New Hampshire but it does make one impatient for the weather to warm up enough to make outdoor activities enjoyable instead of an exercise in endurance.
A persistant breeze blows which carries with it a wind chill factor that discourages me from doing any walking, though I’m hoping the weather forecast for the next week or so for milder weather pans out. While walking is good exercise, it can be a bit tedious at times, since I tend to walk the same route. Still once in a while, I get a little gift which keeps my interests up.
Pussy willows are something to keep an eye out for. Found on various small willows, they are actually the flowers of the plant, the ‘cat fuzz’ is protection for them until the weather moderates enough to justify them turning into catkin flowers. They’re not much to look at, as they are wind pollinated and do not need to be showy to attract pollinating insects. A good breeze pretty much does it for them.
One day during the summer, I came across a sugar cookie dropped on the ground by some careless child.
It quickly drew a horde of ants that I’m guessing were in the process of disassembling it. By the next day when I passed that spot, it was totally gone, whether by the ants themselves or an opportunistic raccoon is hard to say. At any rate, Bon Appetit!
One time, when making a final lap on my walk, just a short ways from home, a dog (name and ownership unknown) living on a side street spotted me and barked. It was not an aggressive worrisome bark that would have alarmed me, but rather an authoritative ‘halt-who-goes-there’ sort of a bark. I stopped and he immediately trotted down and sniffed me over.
Evidently I passed muster as the encounter didn’t escalate. But, nevertheless, he must have thought I was of sufficient concern that he escorted me home (which wasn’t far). After closely inspecting my garage and driveway, he ‘marked’ the corner of the driveway and headed back to his home turf.
By far, though, the best thing I saw, which regrettably I have no photo of, occurred a number of springs ago. While out walking near a small estate called the Boulders, complete with tennis court (which never seems to be used), I could hear the loud honking of some geese. I thought it was odd that the well-to-do people who owned the mansion, would keep geese on their property, but who the heck knows with rich people? The voices of the geese were audible at quite a distance, though it sounded like only a few of them. At any rate, I continued walking, made the round of a church parking lot and headed back. As I came to the crossroads by our local high school, I looked down the road, which is at a downward incline and gives me a long view down two streets. At that point I noticed that not only was the honking still audible but was getting louder.
It was a pair of Canada geese, who had apparently made a brief stop at the Boulders. They had just taken off, and were following the road towards me as they flew along, quite low. I could see them gradually draw closer and closer until they flew overhead and out of sight. While I had my camera with me, I didn’t bother pulling it out as I wanted to absorb the experience without fumbling to take a picture of it.
Now what does one do with a gift like this? One that you can only get if you’re in the right place at the right time? You cherish it of course. And you keep an eye out for more, as there are always gifts being offered like this by the universe we’re embedded in. So pay attention no matter how tedious things may seem.
