Jammin'

 It is reasonable to assume that the shadows are long at the beginning and ending of every day, but somehow it feels like they grow longer in the fall. Perhaps it’s because the long shadows of summer happen before I get up or when I’m getting ready for bed.

The long shadows of fall

Last year, the raspberry harvest was a near-total fail. Terry was afraid it was because the river birches were shading the patch, and he was going to have to cut some out. I proprosed that it was because of a cold, wet June. Fortunately, I was right, and the birches are spared. We are back to abundant raspberries this year, and that means two things. First, I could make a raspberry pie, which I shared with a few friends. Love raspberry pie!

Raspberry pie, courtesy of Kate K.

Second, I can make jam again, also know as turning my kitchen into one big, sticky mess. Terry used to pick raspberries every other day. This year he experimented with picking three days in a row and taking one day off. While there are a few more berries that are not quite ripe, there are WAY fewer picnic bugs. I can hardly believe how clean the berries are.

I know I’ve blogged about making jam before, but frankly that’s about all I’ve got to write about this week. The first step is crushing the berries in a food mill. This removes perhaps half of the seeds.

Sieving the washed berries

Once I have five cups of crushed-and-sieved raspberry juice, I put in the SureGel, bring it to a full roiling boil, add a breathtaking amount of sugar, and boil it one minute.

Bringing to a boil

The jam gets put in jars; the jars go into the canner. And there you have it—raspberry jam.

Jam ready for the pantry

I put all the dirty dishes in one place for a dramatic photo.

And the clean up

I have not yet cut either of the giant watermelons that have been growing most of the summer. The vine going to one of the more recent fruits dried up, and knowing it wouldn’t get any riper, I picked it and cut it open. My expectations were low, as it hadn’t had a lot of time to develop, but it turned out to be perfectly ripe and delicious except near the rind. I hope this does not mean that the giant melons are rotten inside. I’ll have to cut one soon.

Test watermelon

Terry alerted me to chicken mushrooms growing on the enormous oak log that graces our front lawn. The mushroom guide says chicken mushrooms are choice and taste like chicken. We learned a long time ago that in this context, “choice” is a code word for “won’t kill you.” “Choice” giant puffballs and hen-of-the-woods are not good to eat. The chicken mushrooms are likely all the same fungus that has spread throughout the log, but they are sprouting in four different places. The largest is on the cut end.

Chicken mushroom on the cut end of a huge oak log

Two smaller ones are on the top.

Two on the top

The fourth one is around knot where a branch once grew.

The fourth one on top of a side branch

I saw a pretty little flower growing at the edge of the garden. Peterson’s flower guide let me down, and I had to resort to Google. After a few false starts, I finally hit on the right search words to turn up Hybiscus trionum. It is not native and goes by numerous common names, such as flower-of-an-hour and bladder hibiscus.

Hybiscus trionum

The bladder part comes from the inflated, lantern-like buds, which persist right through fruit development, like ground cherries or tomatillos.

Bladder buds

That’s all the news for this week.

Cabbage emergency

 The cabbages were rotting. I wasn’t sure why, but our three recent torrential rains were leading suspects. Even though we irrigate, a sudden burst of water will often cause cabbages (and tomatoes) to split. Once the head is split, fungus can move in, especially if another rain washes the spores in between the leaves. This year was different though. A few heads split, but did not rot, while some unsplit heads suddenly went all black. It was a mystery. What was certain was that the sauerkraut had to be made immediately.

As I was pulling off the outer leaves of a Stonehead cabbage, I realized that hail was probably at least some of the problem. The cabbage had several small splits in it. Underneath the splits were moldy spots.

Two small breaks, upper left, underlying rot on the right

Luckily, the inside of the cabbage was perfect. The last Savoy cabbage I harvested had bad leaf in the middle of all the others. That is so annoying.

No rot inside. Victory!

Making sauerkraut isn’t like it used to be. At first, Pat and Nancy came to help Hilda and me. Last year, Jane replaced Pat. This year, Hilda was gone too, and Nancy was out of town. So it was just Jane and me.

Here I am shredding the cabbage, wearing my wire mesh glove so I don’t cut my fingers off in the mandolin.

Shredding cabbage on a sauerkraut cutter

Jane weight the shreds and put them in a bowl. When we got to 2.5 pounds, we added 1/8 cup salt and packed the cabbage into a crock. A few hours later, I was pleased to see that the cabbage gave up enough moisture to cover itself. Fermentation is an anaerobic process. Let the air in, and you have a big, stinky mess that has to be thrown out. 

Weights keeping cabbage submerged for fermentation

We did four cabbages and ended up with 16 ¼ pounds of sauerkraut. I’m sure that will be plenty, particularly in light of the fact that we still haven’t finished what we put up in 2019. I’m counting on Nancy taking her usual share.

With the first day of fall coming up this week, we had to move the chickens up to Coop 1, where we can artificially extend their day to 14 hours so they will keep laying. The flock is not yet integrated. The pullets and the hens perch on opposite ends of the perch for the night.

Segregated perching--pullets left, hens right

The pullets miss the shade of the apple trees. Before the sun comes up over the tractor shed, they will walk around in the run.

Pullets wander the upper run

Or stand on the wind break.

Americauna pullets on the windbreak.

Miss USA likes to perch on top of the shade shelters.

Miss USA surveying the run from to the top of a shade shelter

But turning around is a bit of a problem. (Check out her feet!)

Hard to turn on such a narrow perch

Most of the day, though, they hang out in the dog kennel, looking glum.

You may recall that two of the Australorps were, ahem, peckers who tormented the Wyandotts, pecking all the cover feathers off their backs, leaving only the down. I knew because only the Australorps had full plumage. With the Australorps gone, I expected the Wyandotts to grow their beautiful black-edged white feathers back. Not so much. One is getting more feathers.

Wyandott growing feathers on her back

The other two are not. Who’s the mean girl now?

Still not many back feathers on this one

When I went out at sunrise yesterday morning to do my chicken chores, I saw a bumblebee asleep on a goldenrod. I have read that bumblebees can heat themselves up better than other bees and therefore be active at lower temperatures, but the morning must have been too cool for this one.

Bumblebee sleeping on goldenrod

Terry found this cicada in a Japanese beetle trap. I've been hearing them for weeks, but had not seen one.

Cicada

New England aster is summer’s last gasp. As such, it was swarmed with bees, moths, butterflies, and other pollen eating insects, rushing to put up the last stores before winter hits. Sigh.

Honeybee on New England aster

As least we’ve got the sauerkraut done.

Stinkhorns, potatoes, and hail

There were several effects from the two gully-washers I described in my last blog. First, the mosquitoes finally emerged and are making up for lost time. Second, mushrooms started sprouting. Terry called to tell me there was a “dog penis” mushroom by one of the oak trees. They are also known as stinkhorns, but the family name, Phallaceae, suggests that the first common name is more apt. The stinkhorn part come from the usually foul odors that attract flies to disperse the spores.

Stinkhorn

The third effect of the heavy rains was that it gave exigency (a word the English instructors often bantered around in faculty meetings) to digging the potatoes. The potatoes are in the upper garden, which does not flood. The problem is that the rain washed the soil off the spuds, and leaving them exposed to light turns them green and makes them produce toxins. They are nightshades, after all. Don’t get any ideas—mostly the toxins produce indigestion rather than kill a person outright. I’ve never seen a murder mystery in which green potatoes was the MO. And we watch rather a lot of them.

The potatoes were the best ever! Terry estimates 125 pounds. He’s very quantitative.

Potato harvest

The best part was that the Russets were actually big enough to make decent baked potatoes.

Largest Russets we've ever grown

And look at the size of this Kennebec! Terry wanted to be sure to get his watch in the picture for scale. That baby will feed both of us with leftovers!

A giant Kennebec

We have the results of two experiments, one of Jane’s and one of mine. Last year, Jane saved some seed pods from a lavender lisianthus. She planted them way back in December, because they have the smallest seeds EVER, and it takes an eternity for them to get big enough to bloom. Anyway, the first question was whether or not the seeds were viable. Yes, they were. We waited anxiously for the first blooms. Turns out the color was true, but the double (or triple) bloom was not. This is how lisianthus grow with seeds from the catalog. Note all the petals.

Lisianthus from the seed company

The saved seeds just have one layer of petals.

Single blooms of the saved seeds

My experiment was with saving the seeds of the plum tomato that my mother has saved for years. The seeds originally came from Italy through a friend of my brothers. She took me through it briefly last year, but I still didn’t feel quite prepared to do it on my own. Fortunately, it was straightforward. Put the seeds in a bowl, let them rot for a couple of days, and wash away the goo. The seeds sink to the bottom, clean as a whistle. I haven’t tested the viability yet, but I can’t think of any reason they won’t sprout. A seeds gonna do what a seed is meant to do.

Fermenting seeds, left; clean seeds on a coffee filter to dry, right

The sporadic heavy rains continue. Last Tuesday, there was a new addition—hail. Big hail. Quarter sized. While I worried about my melons, I had to laugh. I couldn’t see the hail fall, since it happened so fast, and it looked hailstones were spontaneously erupting from the soil.

And the melons got hammered. Look at the holes in the leaves! The fruits were not damaged, however. Ripening proceeds apace, so all is not lost.

The pullets are getting so big! Just about full sized. Terry calls the white-headed pullet “Miss USA,” because she looks like a bald eagle. Compare her size to the Wyandott hen in front of her.

Miss USA is almost as big as a Wyandott hen

The acorns are still making the deer bold. This one actually came out in the full sun and posed nicely while I took her picture.

A doe headed for the acorns in the middle of the morning

And then there’s the turkeys. These two toms are like pets! They keep looking for sunflower seeds beneath the feeders. Terry, like when Mom won’t serve dessert until the broccoli is gone, has declared that he will not fill the sunflower feeders until the turkeys have eaten all the acorns. The turkeys don’t know this, though, so they keep coming around to the feeder, digging deeper and deeper into the sod. Hope springs eternal.

Two toms looking for sunflowers

The hummingbirds have been drinking the feeders dry as they prepare for their migration. They’ve only got a few weeks left!

Hummingbird bulking up

The rest of August

 Tomatoes are so impatient. As soon as I got back from vacation, I was up to my eyeballs. I baked, juiced, and canned tomatoes, filling up both the freezer and the root cellar. It was a frantic race against rot and fruit flies.

Now that I can catch my breath, I’ll catch you up on the rest of August. Goldenrod is a bright yellow reminder that summer is having its last gasp. Soon New England aster will welcome the coming of autumn. 

Goldenrod

It’s a sad time of year for me. The fireflies are long gone. The last chicks have fledged. I saw Daddy Cardinal feeding his chick underneath the feeder. The chick was about the same size as the parent, but even more than the juvenile plumage, its behavior gave it away. It shook its wings and opened its mouth, trying to get Dad’s attention. I’ve seen this “FEED ME!” behavior in a lot of species.

A cardinal feeds his baby

On August 24, the sky opened up about 3:00 p.m. with the heaviest rain I’ve ever seen. It came down like a gigantic fire hose. I had just stepped out of the shower after mowing the lawn. The open-topped feeder was outside in the chicken run, but even if I had streaked out there naked, I would have been too late. Even worse, Terry was in the field on the big tractor and caught completely by surprise. The Gator was outside. I’d parked the riding mower outside the tractor shed for Terry to clean and put inside. Everything, including Terry, was drenched.

Heaviest rain I've ever seen

Over the next four hours, we got 5” of rain. It was unbelievable. We watched the field for signs of flooding, but we were lucky. The creek did not, as far as we could tell, overflow its banks. It didn’t even puddle up much in the low spots, probably because there were huge cracks in the ground from the summer-long drought.

Early the next morning, a doe and her twin fawns came to the oak to eat the acorns that had washed down in the storm.

One of the twins eating acorns

Much to my surprise, two bucks showed up. The doe took her fawns away.

Brief standoff between a buck and a fawn

We have two tom turkeys that do their rounds at about the same time every morning. They ate acorns with the bucks for a short time.

Turkeys and bucks breakfasting together

The bucks soon chased them off.

 A buck goes after one of the turkeys

One of the buck was not content to get his acorns from the ground.

Probably the acorns are better from the tree

The only place we had standing water was in the south field where Terry planted swamp white oak. For a few days, we had migrating shore birds in the middle of the prairie. What they were finding to eat is a mystery. My best guess was solitary sandpipers, which I’ve seen before during the fall migration. The markings were the same, but there were two distinct sizes. The same species or different? I showed my pictures to Nancy, who is a more serious birder than I. She thought they were all the same species, but the white eye ring did not seem consisted with the solitary sandpiper. We don’t know what they were. Birds are so annoying.

Similar shore birds in two sizes

Solitary sandpiper?

On August 28, we had another deluge, getting 3.6” over several hours. And where do you supposed the chicken feed was? That's right. I had to throw out drenched feed and clean the feeder for the second time in a week. Now we had some serious puddling in the west field, but still no apparent flooding of the creek. The turkeys and the doe with twins came back for more acorns.

Turkey, doe, and twin fawns. Note big ol' puddle of water in the back

Mom stands watch while her babies feed

Later that day, I saw a fawn resting under a tree. Does often leave their fawns in a safe place while they forage elsewhere.

Fawn under a tree

A great blue heron came by frequently over the next days, even after most of the water had dried up. As with the sandpipers, we had no idea what it found to eat.

Great blue heron strolling on the lawn

In any case, we had many opportunities to watch wildlife in the last weeks of August.