June in Review

In a word:  RAIN.

Nine-and-a-half inches to be exact.  Versus an average of three-and-a-half inches.

And now mosquitoes.  They reproduce any place there is standing water.

Old tires, regardless of their current state.

Every bucket that was left open end up.

Hoof prints.

Water in the worn paths.

Pugging in the shade.

Pugging near the water tank.

Few things make a grafter look like a genius more than a rainy June.  Scion knit eagerly to vigorously growing understock.

Every graft I made of Lena and H-120 persimmon took.  Not a single graft of Szukis did.  It is just one of those things.  Novice grafters should not take failures too seriously.  Sometimes we fail due to factors we have no control over.  In the case of Szukis, it is one of my less cold-hardy cultivars and last winter was a test winter with a temperature of -20F.

Illinois Everbearing Mulberry.

Raccoons are eating the mulberries.  They break the branches when they climb out to the ends.  This tree was over the dog kennel.  Needless to say, the dogs were not very charitable to the raccoon that dropped in on them.

Allergies

Allergies were rough this month between the pollen and molds.

 

Ear wax remover on the left.  Allergy relief eye drops on the right.

While not admitting anything, I can now lip-read much more clearly and the landscape no longer has that sepia tint to it.

And a few day trips

I got to visit Schupbach's Sporting Goods store in Jackson, Michigan.  It came highly recommended by one of my coffee drinking buddies.  He spent many a dollar there in the 1940s and 1950.  This is an old style sporting goods store right in the heard of downtown Jackson, Michigan.

Long guns

Bows

Ammo

Hand guns

And reloading supplies including a healthy selection of Alliant, Western Powders, IMR and Hodgdon's smokeless powders.

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Including some eight pound jugs.

Some goodies for the volume shooters.

This guy keeps an eye on all of the action. 

After exercising super-human will power (I did not buy anything), we went to a brew pub.  Most of the selections were pretty strange.  They offered a "Breakfast IPA" with hints of coffee beans, oatmeal, grapefruit rinds and blueberry muffins.  It was a little easier to exercise restraint than it was in the gun store.