A quiet day around the property

Today's adventure was pressure-canning dried beans.

A pound of dried beans makes four pints of canned beans. The primary advantage over cooking from scratch is convenience. I can see Southern Belle and Handsome Hombre coming home from work and throwing together chili-beans and cornbread speedy-quick. You cannot do that from dried beans.

Beans

I was caught out not being generous today.

Handsome Hombre stopped over to mow my yard. Then he asked if he could pick the purple pole beans.

I did not acquit myself with honor. I had been nursing them along to increase my seed-stock. Ten, fifteen years ago many nurseries carried them but now they are no longer in fashion. I misplaced my saved seeds and had to purchase new. The new seeds were shriveled, shrunken, discolored beans with poor germination. Such is our post-Covid world.

I told HH that the beans were over-mature and then he shared that in his native country it was common to pick over-mature beans (but not yet dry) and to boil them like green peas. He waxed lyrical over the fond memory.

Mrs ERJ gently kicked me in the backside and I mumbled "(something not suitable for publication) OK."

Surveying the damages, I will still have more seed than came in the purchased package and HH was as happy as a clam. He shelled out about 2 cups of beans.

Grapes

Mrs ERJ and I took a walking-tour of the vineyard and sampled grapes.

All of the varieties with large clusters responded well to cluster thinning to one cluster per shoot.

Carrots

Something ate the tops of all my carrots.

Once again, it looks like winter squash is my best option for beta-carotene.

Peppers

The Stocky Red Roaster pepper has been a good producer. Mrs ERJ admits that she prefers the taste and the crunch of the commercially available bell-peppers but that the SRPs will be awesome if store-bought become unavailable or unaffordable.

The Aji peppers are just starting to ripen. They are HOT peppers. They will be going into salsa if I can get enough of them to ripen. God willing, we are likely to have three more weeks of good growing weather.

Plum seeds

I picked the South Dakota (cultivar) plums that had been pollinated by the Niobrara Select American Plums (land-race) and planted them into the food-hedge.

Having thorny plants in a hedge is not a bad thing, especially if I ever need to contain livestock in a power-down situation.

Prunus americana and Prunus nigra are both thorny species with the P. americana suckering more profusely so they should be a fine addition to the hedge. Good fruit. The right height for being beneath power wires. Thorns.

Moving suckers is a dicey business. Suckers tend to not have very many feeder roots. One strategy is to use a sharp shovel and to sever the horizontal root between the main stem and the sucker (that is, the root from which the sucker originated). That often stimulates small feeder roots on the large, horizontal root and increase the survival rate of transplants.

Domestic pears are also thorny when they are juvenile. The high winds knocked down a bunch of pears from my trees. I put them in buckets and added them to the seed-bank in the food-hedge. Untrimmed, the pear will be MUCH too tall but I can cut partway through their trunks and bend them down so they are 30 degrees from horizontal.

Squirrels

I saw three of the four tree-squirrels that are native to Michigan and I saw them before 8:30 in the morning. I saw a red squirrel, a fox squirrel and a gray squirrel (black color phase). I did not see a flying squirrel which tend to be nocturnal.

Nor did I see any chipmunks (a ground squirrel) which were very common earlier this summer.

The last squirrel species in Michigan is the common ground hog. I did not see one of those, either.

I much prefer fox squirrels to red squirrels. Red squirrels are cache hoarders. They stuff nuts into mandolins, between joists, sheathing and drywall of dwellings, in air-cleaners of trucks. I would love to hear any comments about red squirrels and their cache habits. I think it would be awesome if we (humans) can figure out the critical parameters and get the red squirrels to collect nuts for us.

Fox squirrels PLANT the nuts. They dig a hole and then bury it, one-at-a-time. Fox squirrels are AOK in my book for spreading desirable species like hickory, oak and so on. They are also much bigger than red squirrels and are worth the effort to clean-and-eat.

I cannot say much about the gray squirrels. The black color phase became very common in cities and towns and have since moved out to rural areas.

Dragon-Flies

I was looking out the window and saw a right smart number of them flying in the space between a persimmon tree and the barn.

I plunked myself down in a lawn chair for about five minutes.

I would be lying if I told you I made a precise count of them. They move quickly and dart in-and-out of sight. I suspect there were a few more than twenty...all whizzing around in about 400 square feet of space.

Very puzzling.

Mrs ERJ suggested that they are actually ANGEL-Flies since the statue of Mary resides beneath the persimmon tree in question.

I don't have any better explanation. We are 250 yards from the nearest open water.