Weeding

The weather has been perfect for gardening this week. We’ve been working outside from “can ‘til can’t,” as the saying goes. June is the month for weeding. Half the garden has landscape cloth between the rows. That part went fast. Terry and I started at the other end with the cucumbers. I then went on to do the corn, thinning the seedlings as I went along. Who will live and who will die? At first, I thinned to about 8”. Then I remembered what a pain it is to dig the stalks out at the end of the season and thinned to 12”. I also reasoned that we would still have three dozen stalks per row. With each stalk producing one or two ears and 8 rows of corn, we won’t be short.

Corn, thinned and weeded

When the corn was done, I started the pumpkins. Hilda helped me after she finished weeding the potatoes. I tried a number of different strategies, depending on the weed. Amaranth is my favorite weed. If I grab it close to the ground and pull gently, out it comes. Left on the ground it will shrivel up to nothing, although as long as I have it in my hand, I might as well through it in the bucket. 

Green amaranth pulled from the ground with root intact (left) and still in the ground (right)

I hate the spotted spurge. It grows flat on the ground, for one thing, leaving a person no handle. It breaks easily, and I suspect that any bit that is left behind will sprout. Like purslane, it is the sea star of the garden. We were lucky not to have much purslane in the pumpkin patch. 

Spotted spurge

Dandelions aren’t worth worrying over. The seedlings will die if disturbed. The plants that are growing from taproots deep in the ground can’t be eliminated anyway. As I have said before, if you deprive a plant of its photosynthetic surface, it will eventually die. Grasses. Grrrrr. If the density isn’t too high, and the soil isn’t too compacted, it is possible to hoe them with some success. It is not possible to hoe sod. In the denser areas, I found it was most effective to use my Weed Bandit (a thin metal hoop with a handle). Grass also needs to be picked up to keep it from rooting again.

I like to sit on my little rolling stool while I weed, dragging my weed bucket along as I go. On one occasion this afternoon, I repositioned my stool and my bucket and sat down to start working again. I knew I was in trouble when I didn’t land when I should have. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in my bucket. It was difficult to recover from this position as my feet didn’t quite reach the ground, and I was tipped backward. I was glad Hilda was out working with me so I didn’t have to sit there until Terry wondered why I wasn’t cooking supper. As it was, the hardest part was to stop laughing long enough to do anything helpful.

Stuck in the bucket

It took us two days to get the pumpkins weeded. The whole garden looks great now! We won’t be doing much more weeding. The plants will soon be big enough to shade out the weeds, and very soon we will be too busy with the harvest to worry about weeding.

Pumpkin patch before weeding

Pumpkin patch after weeding

In other news, I helped Terry put up a deer fence around Nursery 5 back by the creek. Deer fence is 7’ high. He puts it on bamboo poles that are seated in PVC pipes in the ground. My job was to hold the roll of fencing upright and hand Terry wires while he secured it to the posts. This is his second deer fences. He did the pilot study around the apple trees by the house and was so pleased with the results that he is expanding his fenced-in areas.

The whole deer fence

Close up of deer fence

My prairie restoration area has spent a good deal of time in standing water lately. Many of the yellow coneflowers have died, but here’s one that didn’t. I didn’t see anything else new blooming this week.

Yellow coneflower

Garden and chick update

We were surprised to find that the farm had gotten another inch of rain at home while we in Ohio. Hilda had not been able to get any weeding done on Sunday at all. Last Thursday, I took the row cover off of everything except the cantaloupe, which are behind because something ate the sprouts from the first seeds I planted, and I had to start over. Boy, the cabbage and Brussels sprouts looked bad, especially on the low end where water had been standing.

By Monday, they were looking perkier. I should have taken the row cover off sooner, however, because the some of the leaves suffered permanent damage from rubbing against the fabric. The Chinese cabbage and kale were ready for harvest! Peas are just starting to bloom. We were very late getting them in this year.

Napa cabbaage

Kale and peas

We are harvesting scallions and radishes now. Too bad the radishes are always ready before the lettuce. One can rarely have a salad with radishes. I love cream cheese and radishes on toast for breakfast. Tomatoes and cream cheese on toast is better, but the radishes tide me over until the tomatoes are ripe.

Radishes and scallions

One morning last week two bucks with velvet-covered antlers wandered through the yard. Terry was not yet awake to swear at them.

Two bucks, but only one would pose. The other is off to the left

The creek has gone down quite a lot despite the new rain over the weekend.

The creek is now well within its banks

The chicks are growing fast, especially the meat chickens. The meat chickens are already pretty disgusting because, since they walk and stand very little, they spend most of their time lying around in their own poop, which mats the down on their bellies and makes them sticky. Already it almost takes two hands to pick them up. Here’s a picture showing the difference in size.

Two Rhode Island Reds next to a meat chick for size comparison

All the chicks are getting their wing feathers.

Meat chicken's wing feathers

The only chicks we have named so far are the Americauna because they are the only ones we can tell apart. Our naming theme this year will be from our new favorite book, The School of Essential Ingredients. One of the characters in the book, Chloe, wears excessive black eyeliner, and we named the chick with black around her eyes after her.

Chloe

Antonia is the most beautiful character, so this chick got her name. This morning we found her standing on top of the waterer, which means she is starting to fly. I put screens over the brooder when I was done with the chores.

Antonia (she's the one with a stripe on the top of her head)

Lilian is the instructor of the School of Essential Ingredients and is Chloe’s mentor. Here is her chicken version.

Lilian

The Rhode Island Reds seem mild mannered. They are the smallest of our chicks.

Rhode Island Red

When I cleaned the brooder box yesterday, I had the feeder out for a little while to shake the food dust out of it. When I put it back, there was a feeding frenzy.

Shortly after that was nap time. Now that we are experienced chicken owners, we no longer become alarmed when the chicks put their heads down in front of them and look dead.

Nap time

And sometimes we get so tired eating that we put our head right down in the trough. 

Chick sleeping in the food trough

Weekend in Wooster

We left Friday to drive 8 hours to Wooster, OH to visit Peg and John. We made our estimated 6:00 arrival time by leaving at 8:15, which gave us 45 minutes for construction traffic, rest stops, and lunch. The trip over has the illusion of taking longer because of the time change.

John made pizzas on the grill for supper. He’d made two batches of dough in case we were really hungry. I learned the trick of stretching the dough out on parchment paper so it would not stick to the peel. We only ate two of the pizzas. I shared my trick of freezing the half-baked dough, which works very well and makes pizza a quick and easy supper on another night.

After supper we played Mexican Train down to the 5’s. It was very, very late by my standards (11:00 local time). Whew, what a wild and crazy night!

Saturday began with heavy rain. After a lovely breakfast of sticky buns, we headed to Lehman’s in nearby Kidron. Lehman’s began as a genuine Amish store. It still has a vast selection of oil lamps, hand-cranked washing machines, wood stoves, and propane-powered refrigerators (for homes without electricity). It has, however, largely given itself over to the tourist trade. A few years ago, they added on, more that doubling (it seems to me) its space and adding a little cafeteria where John said he had the worst hotdog he had ever eaten.

East entrance to Lehman's

I got a new French-style rolling pin, which is essentially a cylinder of cherry wood, to replace my spindle rolling pin (widest in the middle and tapering toward each end). The spindle never worked as well as I hoped it would. I also got a wooden spatula to replace the one I set on fire (what is that smell?) while I was still getting used to a gas stove. (Note to self: don’t leave the spatula in the pot.)

New rolling pin (front) to replace old spindle rolling pin (back)

Finally, I got a bottle of Cheerwine. Terry and I liked to watch Unwrapped on the Food Network. It has recently been reincarnated with a new host as a show called Rewrapped on the Cooking Channel. We like the factory footage. Anyway, a show that we recently watched featured a segment on a soft drink called Cheerwine. We never learned what flavor it was. A Google search revealed that I could get it locally at Farm and Fleet, but they were out of stock when I checked. Cheerwine is not cheap ($2.29/bottle), but the good news is that you only have to buy one bottle, and it is sweetened with sugar rather than high fructose corn syrup.

Cheerwine "Legendary Flavor"

The Amish don’t shop much at Lehman’s, although I did see a group of 4 older Amish persons conversing in a language I didn’t recognize. Peg said it was a form of low German. There were horses and buggies parked across the street, presumably by other stores where the Amish do shop.

Horses and buggies on a rainy morning in Kidron

There were also buggies at the Mennonite Relief Store, which is a resale shop similar to Goodwill. They are very organized at the Mennonite Relief Store and put all the clothing on racks by color. There is also a side room with two giant frames for hand-sewing quilts for auction and a loom with hundreds of warp strings on spools (I wanted to ask if I could take a picture, but the man who was weaving was deep in conversation with a friend whose wife was coping with cancer. Not that I was eavesdropping.) for making rugs out of denim strips. I bought one of these rugs years ago and just brought it out again now that Della is gone. In addition to the weaver, another man was cutting strips of used denim and sewing them into long, long pieces for the weft. I was just darned glad I wasn’t the one who had to string that loom. Holy smoke, what a job. My guess is that they only do it once and keep a close eye on the spools so they can tie the end of one spool to the beginning of the next.

After a stop at the Hospice thrift store, we went to the local food store (store for local food, not food store nearby), Spoon. Spoon was selling mulberries by the pint. I can’t imagine why, except that it is June and the real food won’t be ready for another couple of weeks. Mulberries are totally a lesser fruit.

We went back home for lunch. I split the Cheerwine into four juice glasses. “Legendary Flavor” it said on the bottle. “Dr. Pepper,” I said as soon as I tasted it. It was a cherry coke.

“Dr. Pepper is better,” Terry added. Well. We can say we’ve had it now.

We speculated on the histories of the two beverages. Now that I am at my computer, Dr. Pepper was first served in 1885, while Cheerwine production started up in 1917. The Carolina Beverage Corporation, which makes Cheerwine, has the distinction of still being owned by the same family after all these years.

We finished the last 6 rounds of Mexican Train and then taught Peg and John how to play Farkel. All the while we were watching the sky and the radar trying to decide whether or not we wanted to go to Akron to see the RubberDucks play baseball against the Erie SeaWolves. The rain stopped; we decided to go. Terry made a motion that we agree to leave without discussion as so as any one of us got cold. The motion carried. I asked to borrow a sweatshirt, since I had expected it to be warm when I packed. John brought me two sweatshirts. I chose the one that said “Born Again Skeptic.” I took along the stadium blanket that I always have in my car, and Peg took a towel to dry the seats.

By the time we got to Akron, it was a beautiful, warm, sunny evening. I didn’t need the sweatshirt but wore it anyway, expecting the temperature to drop and sunset. I left my stadium blanket in the car. We didn’t need the towel either.

We were completely wrong in thinking that there wouldn’t be that many people at the game because of the rainy weather. We had to park a good distance from the stadium entrance. On our walk, we passed a remnant of the Erie Canal at one of the locks.

Erie Canal in Ackron--note waterfall in back where the lock used to be

John poses by the ticket booth while Peg and Terry wait to get tickets

We got great seats behind first base in the last row, right in front of the Chick-Fil-A vendor. I love Chick-Fil-A sandwiches in spite of their conservative politics. Even served out of an insulated bag and without the pickle, it was really good.

Peg, me, and John by the Chik-fil-A vendor

The view from our seats

It was Star Wars night at the RubberDucks game. During one of the inning breaks, there was a contest among four boys to see who could make the best Wookie growl. Two of the boys were not in costume. One  was dressed as a storm trooper (in white and gold). The youngest boy was the cutest little Yoda we had ever seen. The other three didn’t stand a chance. Even though little Yoda’s Wookie growl was pretty lame, the audience whooped and hollered the loudest for him, and he won the contest. He was just so adorable!

Isn't this kid in the front the cutest little Yoda you have ever seen?

I noticed a timer behind home plate. Peg told me that some teams are adopting new rules to try to move the game along (thank God!), and these included limiting the amount of time for each pitch and the amount of time to change teams after three outs. The batter and pitcher now have 20 seconds after the pitcher gets the ball to make the next pitch happen. The batter can’t step in and out of the batting box a million times until he gets his cup just right. The pitcher can’t dither with the catcher about which pitch to throw. The teams have 2:25 to get into position and get the pitcher warmed up. These are very good rules. They would be even better, in my opinion, it the pitcher could not interrupt the process to throw the ball to first base in an attempt to catch the runner off the plate. I have never seen the pitcher get an out this way. John disagrees, feeling that this stupid waste of time is somehow integral to the way the game is played.

Pitch/team change timer on the left showing 17 seconds

The RubberDucks did not pull their starting pitcher in time, and the SeaWolves (which we all agreed was an odd name, since Erie is not by the sea, and there are no SeaWolves in any case—but how much better is RubberDucks?) got 5 runs in the sixth. The RubberDucks came back with 4 runs, but Erie won 7 to 5.

We left after the last out, wondering why there wasn’t a rush for the door. Just as we got to the car, fireworks started. We watched what we could see from the sidewalk.

We had a leisurely breakfast of French toast and sausage Sunday morning. We got on the road about 9:30 and got home a bit after 5:00. Gaining an hour on the way back is so much better. It was a very fun weekend. 

Too much rain!

Wishing that it would stop raining is just as effective as wishing it would rain. Watching the water rise as the rain comes down, however, has an immediate and panicky helplessness that a dry spell lacks. We can water the garden if the rain isn’t as frequent as we’d like; we can’t stop floodwater from filling the low spots and encroaching on our vegetables. Monday was a day of helpless watching and waiting as shower after shower swept over our land. There was a time in midmorning when it rained as heavily as it did when we were in Houston in April. And the puddles grew and grew.

I put on my Wellies and went out in the late afternoon. The garden was still mostly above water. The pumpkin leaves had gotten huge in the two days since I’d last been out.

The flood around the wetland and into Terry's trees

I couldn’t make it around the wetland without getting water in my boots. I took a picture of my boots and ended up with a reflected self-portrait in the shadow of the umbrella.

Self portrait (see shadowy image in the shadow of the umbrella) with umbrella handle

I slowly walked out of the deep water so as not to create ripples that would go above my boots and headed down another path. The path along the west side of the property next to the creek was flooded, but not very deep until I was about 15 steps from where it got shallow again. At that point, my desire to see the creek overcame my inclination toward dry feet. I charged ahead.

This is not the creek; this is the west path, complete with its own current

The creek was up to the very top of its east bank. The railroad side is artificially higher for the tracks. The current was swift. If only the rain would stop, the creek would carry the extra water away pretty quickly. If only the rain would stop.

This is the creek

It did stop late in the day. We’ve had two mostly dry days now. With any luck, I can start weeding the garden tomorrow. It surely does need it. The amaranth and crabgrass has been growing as fast as the pumpkins. Fingers crossed.

New chicks and prairie flowers

What can be cuter than a box of baby chicks?

Box o'chicks

We got the call from the post office at 6:48. I’d been up since 5:15 waiting. Hilda and I drove to the post office in the rain to pick up the cheeping box. We mixed up a half gallon of water with a half tablespoon of sugar and a half teaspoon of Chick Starter (which was shipped with the chicks) and gave each chick its first drink by dipping its little beak in the water trough.

Rhode Island Red--a new variety for us

We have 21 chicks: 15 meat chickens (the big white ones), three Americauna (various colors, some striped), and three Rhode Island Reds (small uniformly light browh). We put them one by one in the brooder box. Some ran straight for the food. Many ran for the water as soon as we put it in the box. After drinking their fill, they stood in the heat of the lamp, shut their eyes, and began to sway. We left them alone, knowing that nap time was just around the corner.
The video shows the first few hours of arrival from the box to nap time. Toward the end, you can see on of the meat chickens stretching on leg. This is very common behavior. A Rhode Island Red tries to fly and knocks herself over. Not so common behavior.

In other news, Gracie has gone broody again. After Nelly Elly had her second go-round in the cage, I left the cage up for several days just to be sure we wouldn’t need it again. Approximately 10 minutes after I took the cage down and put the cement block back on the storage stack, Gracie started hanging around in the nest boxes too often. In a few days, she was in there all the time, puffed up and squawking when disturbed. Yesterday I hauled the cement blocks back and set up the cage again. Once I had Gracie in the cage, she seemed unperturbed. All the other girls gathered around her. It would be nice to think that they were there to give moral support and sympathy, but really they are just after her food. It is, of course, identical to the food that they all have available in abundance in the coop, but we all know that food tastes better al fresco, especially if that food belongs to someone else. In the video, you can see one of the Buff Orpingtons stick her head through the wires to get at the bowl. Gracie cooperated with the effort by flinging pellets from here to kingdom come when she ate.

Terry mentioned that he’d seen a lot of purple flowers back by the railroad bridge over the creek. He didn’t think it was purple loosestrife, but he wanted me to check. Hilda and I took a walk yesterday to check the creek. We’ve had quite a bit of rain this week, and we wanted to see how close we were to flooding. The creek still had a long way to rise before overflowing its banks. Hilda went back to the house. Not remembering exactly where the railroad bridge was, I bushwhacked through reed canary grass over my head and shoulder-height stinging nettle along the creek. The vegetation was so thick that I often could not see the ground. I walked very slowly, feeling for sink holes and slippery logs. When I finally got to the bridge, I saw that the purple flower in question was spiderwort, which is a native plant. Also, the bridge was about 30 paces from the path that Terry keeps mowed around the perimeter of our property. Note to self.

Spiderwort by the train tracks

My long-time blog followers may recall that I spent an inordinate amount of money buying native seed for part of our hay field in the fall of 2013. Last summer, Terry kept the area mowed to discourage invasive alien weeds. On June 7, I wrote about cutting out the curly dock and observing a number of forbs. Well, the blooming has commenced! The field is now full of Penstemon.

Penstemon in the restoration area

What kind of Penstemon? I looked it up in my Peterson Field Guide to Wildflowers, which had the genus listed in both the white section (which is the kind in the restoration) and the purple section (which I have growing by the tractor shed). In the white section, it said, “There are at least 8 white or whitish species in our area, mostly westward. A difficult genus, separated by technical characters.” And the purple Penstemon? “The 17 species in our area are often difficult to identify without recourse to technical manuals.”

White Penstemon

Purple Penstemon

In my case, that means Swink and Wilhelm’s Plants of the Chicago Region, which is a true botanical key filled with words like pubescent, glaucous, and glabrous (which mean, respectively, hairy, waxy, and hairless). I brought both the white and purple flowers to the house to work through the key. It came down to a choice between with or without thick white hairs on the back of the anthers. I pulled the petals back for a better look. The stamen (male structures) were beautifully curved to follow the inside of the floral tube. I didn’t see any hairs on either the purple or the white flower. I read the book again. Oh! Anthers. I had been looking at the filaments. Silly me. I got my hand lens. Sure enough, the white one did seem to have coarse hairs (although I would not have called them white) on the anthers and the purple one did not. The long description of the species below the key verified my identification by stating that Penstemon calycosus (smooth beard tongue) was purple and Penstemon digitalis (foxglove beard tongue) was commonly white. I can’t be sure, though, because they also say that P. digitalis can be purple and P. calycosus is more common in southern Indiana and the Ohio River valley. It would be good if I could remember where I got the plant.

Curved stamen (filaments are white, anthers are black ovals at the end) of P. digitalis. The straight white structure is the style, part of the pistil (the female part)

Foxglove beard tongue seeds were in the mix that we sowed. There is some daisy fleabane blooming also. This was not in the seed mix, but it is a native. I wonder what will bloom next!

Cleaning the freezers

Last Thursday, on the actual day of my birthday, I went outside to weed underneath the row cover and install the pea trellis. I got as far as uncovering the kale and peas (two rows) before it started to sprinkle. I figured I could at least get the trellis in, if I only knew where it was stored. That seemed to be more urgent than the weeding as the peas had tendrils all over the place. On my way to the outdoor storage area, which Terry calls “the bone yard,” I spotted a large patch of star thistle in the field. It was developing flower buds, therefore trumping the pea trellis. I had hand pruners with me, so I tromped through the tall grass and started cutting. As long as you deprive it of its photosynthetic surface, it will eventually die.

It sprinkled off and on while I was whacking at the thistle. I checked three other storage areas before finding the trellis in the greenhouse. I got the wires poked in the soil without breaking too many peas, covered the rows again, and headed in for lunch.

With the weather uncertain, I proceeded to indoor activities for the afternoon. I try to get my freezers cleaned before the harvest starts. It’s good to know what needs to be eaten and what needs to be thrown out.

When I told Hilda what I was going to do, she lamented that her freezers also needed defrosting. The upright was particularly bad, but she didn’t know where she would drain it. I explained my method of loosening the ice with a blow dryer and chipping it into a bowl. Usually the meltwater does not exceed the capacity of a single towel.

“But all the ice needs to come off the shelves,” Hilda said.

“Don’t they come out?” I asked. “You could put them in the laundry sink until they melted.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

I took it upon myself to investigate. I took the food out of the upright freezer and put it into four coolers. And I discovered the problem. At the risk of sounding sexist, my suspicion is that this freezer was designed by a man whose wife did all of the freezer defrosting. Not only did the shelves not come out, the freezer coils ran through the shelves sandwiched between wires about a half a centimeter apart. This was not going to be easy.

I considered leaving the freezer to warm up while I did my chest freezers but discarded the plan when I realized I didn’t have any other coolers to put my food in. I got my blow dryer, a plastic putty knife, a flathead screwdriver, and a hammer. I worked on it over an hour. I scraped and chipped the ice from the top and bottom of each shelf and melted and poked the ice from between the wires, all the while thinking dark thoughts about the person who built this freezer.

In the end it was beautiful, and I earned my mother’s undying gratitude. I let her put the food back in so she would know what was in there.

Worst design for a freezer shelf ever--coils between wires, and the whole thing ices up

I have one freezer for fruits and vegetables and one for meat. I started with the veg freezer, which now contained some overflow meat from the sausage-making extravaganza. Usually, I discard vegetables that are two seasons old. I didn’t find too much from 2013, just a few packages of corn and several containers of pumpkin puree. I’m not short pumpkin puree from 2014. I’ll have to make some pumpkin bars soon. Good heavens, did we put up too much corn last year! We could eat corn every day from now until the next harvest in August. But I kept it all, because you never know when a crop will fail. I had no idea I put up as much kale as I found in the bottom of the freezer.

By 4:45, I had all the ice out of both freezers, last year’s veg in one basket at the top for easy access, all the meat organized in the meat freezer, and a sizeable stash of Tundra Surprise—packets of ready-to-eat leftovers that were buried in the corners and forgotten. I won’t have to cook for a week! Tonight, we had pork roast with gravy from last November. Bean soup from January, 2014 is defrosting for tomorrow. And it will be fine. Have you ever seen remarks at the end of recipes that say, “keeps in the freezer for 3 months”? HA HA HA HA! Tundra Surprise lasts forever!

Filled with a terrific sense of accomplishment, I took a quick shower and dressed for dinner. Terry took me out to the Stage Stop in Wilmot. I had a Porterhouse, a lobster tail, and a baked potato. We took most of our dinners home (not the lobster tail…). All in all, a pretty good day.

Starved Rock Tour

In my ongoing quest to do something fun on my birthday, we got tickets some time ago for the trolley and river tour at Starved Rock. We hoped it would be better than the lame Lake Geneva boat tour we went on last year. We had to go on Wednesday, the day before my birthday, because the tour did not run on Thursdays.

The first plus is that the weather was not cold and rainy. It had been raining down south, however, and the river tour was deemed unsafe because of floodwaters. Starved Rock substituted a canal tour instead. We met Jane in Sycamore at 9:30 and drove together in Jane’s car to Starved Rock, arriving at 10:45, as planned.

We began our tour with lunch in the lodge. We were pleased that there were 5 lunch choices: Caesar salad, hamburgers, pot roast, grilled chicken sandwich, and chicken salad on a croissant. Everyone had a burger except me. I had the grilled chicken. All of our lunches came with house-made potato chips. I should not have eaten all of them, but they were so good!

When we checked in, we were told that we were on the green and red trolley. Just before noon, we boarded our trolley along with a number of elderly ladies with two—what should we call them?—activity directors, one young man and one young woman wearing black polos with a “Friendship Village” logo embroidered on the left. There was also a man, a woman, and a teenage boy. Because the tour was sold out, I was afraid there would be no empty seats, but Jane was able to get a seat by herself. A party of five can be awkward when the seat are for two. And mighty uncomfortable seats they were. 

The trolleys--we were on the red and green one

Hilda, Dad, and Terry on the trolley

We all got a souvenir fan because it promised to be a hot day. The trolley was air conditioned, which made the purpose of the fan unclear. But the day was not over.

Souvenir fan

We made a little tour through Utica before stopping at 12:20 at the Cattails Gift Shop. I walked in and walked out with my nose itching from the potpourri. There was a little pond outside with water lilies in bloom, koi, and a lovely statue of great blue herons.

Cattails Gift Shop

Heron sculpture

Water lilies and koi

After killing 25 minutes at the Cattails, we drove to the canal boat. Here is Terry looking at the mule and talking to the mule driver.

Terry with the mule and mule driver

This is the boat. There was no air conditioning. I made the right decision taking my souvenir fan with me. All the people working on the boat were in period costume. The first mate also wore an orange life vest, which looked funny over his hand-sewn shirt.

The boat--far left, first mate in period costume with life vest; right, the tour guide in period dress with straw hat

Ever since I learned about canal boats pulled by mules, I have wanted to go on one. I can now check this off the bucket list. The boat was 73 feet long but had a draft of only 18 inches. Our tour guide compared it to a Styrofoam cup floating on water. Any one of us could pull that boat, she said.

Once we got under the railroad bridge, we were free to go to the upper deck. The air temperature was in the 90’s, and it was hot in the sun. Still, the view was better from up there, so up there we stayed. Jane sat on the bench, but I found I was cooler standing. I made good use of the souvenir fan.

The Illinois and Michigan (I & M) canal opened in 1848. It connected the Illinois River to Lake Michigan. The mules were changed every 10 to 12 miles, but the mule drivers, mostly teenage boys, went 30 miles on a shift.

There were two kinds of boats on the canal. The packet boat carried passengers. The entire 96 miles from LaSalle to Chicago took 18 to 22 hours and cost $4 per person. It seems slow by modern standards, but when the canal opened, that was the quick way to go, compared to stage coach. The boat had a piano for entertainment. Card games were popular. The lower deck was divided by a curtain so people could sleep, males on one side, females on the other. There was a bucket for a latrine. It was emptied over one side of the boat, and “clean” water for washing up was hauled up from the other side. The wash bucket also had a communal comb attached by a string. The passenger trade on the canal was largely replaced by rail travel in 1852, which shortened the trip to 8 hours.

The second kind of boat was the cargo boat. Cargo boats carried local crops, such as grain and glass (made from the very pure sandstone found in the area) as well as more exotic products that had come up the Mississippi, such as tobacco and cotton.

Our tour went down the canal 0.8 mile. We returned to our starting point by going backwards. When the canal was operating, however, there were wide spots that both allowed the boats to turn around and stored water for the operation of the locks.

A fascinating aspect to the canal was an aqueduct over the Vermillion River. I hoped that we would go through it, but we only went up to it before we headed back. It was obvious that the water was a good deal higher than usual.

Aqueduct--the canal on the left goes over the Vermillion River on the right.

There was also a point where we could see the Illinois River.

Illinois River through the trees on the left

The trip back was not as smooth as the trip forward. They didn’t hook the mule up to the back of the boat. As you might imagine, the boat pulled to the side that way. The guy with the rudder did his best, but we bumped against the back frequently. The first mate had a pole, but from the top of the boat, I was not able to see if he used it.

Our boat trip lasted about an hour. The trolley took us to the Visitor Center next, where we had a half an hour to look around. The Friendship Village bus came to collect all the elderly ladies. Because we were at the visitor center when we came down to see the eagles last winter, I took the opportunity to go take some pictures of the pelicans. They floated on the water down to Plum Island, and then flew upstream to float down again. It wasn’t clear that they were doing anything other than entertaining themselves.

Pelicans floating to the left and flying back to the right

More pelicans

The trolley stop was by a mobile made of glass. It was beautiful. I took a video, but forgot to put the camera back to horizontal after taking the vertical still picture. I often forget that videos cannot be rotated.

Glass mobile (chain saw carving of eagle in background)

I was very much looking forward to getting ice cream after the tour. I had a Rocky Road cone. So nice to sit in the air conditioned ice cream shop and eat ice cream after such a hot afternoon.

Hilda coming out of the Country Cupboard Ice Cream Shop

Detail of ice cream cone sculpture on the deck

Overall, the day was MUCH better than the Lake Geneva boat tour on my birthday last year and MUCH, MUCH better than moving the chicken coop and setting up drip lines two years ago!