A Lazy Day, Almost

Picked tomatoes and peppers for 'Share the Harvest'  at the post office. Went back this evening and all were gone.

Carol wanted to go for a walk which is good for her.  We walked around the block.  Hopefully we will be able to take longer walks in the future.

Carol's medical tech person gave her  prescription.  Drove to Fillmore to get it.  It was so expensive we decided to wait until Thursday when we go up north.

We drove up the canyon to Maple Hollow.  The fall leaf color is makes an attractive display.

 Carol looking for autumn leaves to fill the empty vase in the kitchen.

We broke a bunch of branches.  They are in a vase in the kitchen.

Three, four foot ponderosa pines growing in the area west of the cattle guard.

There are a lot of plants which have ended their useful life at this time of the year.  I have started a new compost pile.  I removed all of the dribble tubing.  I cut the vines from the stakes.  There were a bunch of watermelons and Topaz melons that have some indication of being ripe.  I cut one that didn't look like it might be ripe.  It was quite pink, but the heart was pretty sweet.  The vines were tangled with each other and I had to really pull hard to break them loose and get them into the wheelbarrow.  It took five loads to get them all moved.

There it is looking to the south, the vines are removed.

Looking east show the vines gone and the bare naked stakes.

I put a sprinkler on the end of the hose and soaked up the peonies.  I hope to get them moved and planted somewhere else in the next couple of weeks.  There are five plants that have been in this garden for years.  After they are moved that garden will be tilled.

The first of each month I have to pay the cell phone service.  It was supposed to be an automatic payment.  I found a phone number on line.  I called it an automated system answered.  It asked me questions.  The last question was to enter my phone number.  I did. It said, "that number is not in our system."  I searched for something from Wal-Mart, and clicked the log in button.  I entered my password and got into the system.  I then clicked on the right buttons.  My cell phone rang.  Phone is working again.


Comments and questions are welcomed.

Carol's Appointment

Carol had an appointment with her medical tech at 10:45 in Provo.  We left early and did a little shopping on the way.  Our first stop was at WalMart in Payson.  I had some one check my phone.  They didn't help much and I forgot some of the questions that I wanted to ask.

We then went to Sam's Club and spent nearly $170 on soaps and other non-food items.  We did get a few things that we can eat.  We are out of sugar, so we got two 25 pound bags.  A lot of the bags had holes in them.  I found two that had not holes.

The next stop was the Revere health clinic.  We met with the tech.  She prescribed an ex-ray of her stomach which has been somewhat painful.

We met Lisa and Eric at the Sizzeler for lunch.  We had a nice time with them.  Eric treated.

On the way home we stopped at Costco where I dropped ink cartridges for a refill.  It took them thirty minutes to fill them.  So we walked around the store, eating samples and buying a few things.

We stopped a WalMart for another look at my phone.  He showed me how to get a new phone by calling the SamSung people.  He also explained to me how to take a picture.  That was very helpful.

Comments and questions welcomed.

We then stopped at the Red Barn for ice cream.  There was a zillion people there.

No pictures.

Service, etc.

We took a tote filled with white sweet to the post office

It looked like some of the beans survived the frost.  I picked some pole beans.  They were wilted a little.

A half hour before lunch I got prepared to help Alishia.  She has some Rose of Sharon plants growing in her yard.  They get mowed down every time the lawn is mowed.  I prepared some stakes and picked up a bunch of Azailua pots to cover the Rose of Sharon.  After lunch I filled the back pack sprayer with weed killer.  I loaded everything into the truck and in about an hour I was finished.  I covered all the plants, sprayed around them with the weed killer, and then drove a stake into the ground by each one of them.

I saw a tomato plant a couple of days ago where the corn was growing before the hard frost.  When I checked it this today, it looked pretty dead, but the were a few green leaves close to the ground.  I dug up a tomato plant that had unusual shaped tomatoes.  I pruned the stems right to the main trunk.

They were not ripe, so I don't know how large they will grow.  The photo give a little idea of shape and size.  I don't think that they will get much larger

Several different times during the day, I hauled compost to fill the large raised bed.  I watered it down and hope to plant it soon.

The photo below shows a little of the bricks under the 2x6s to hold the soil in place.

The compost is out by the road and not too far away from house six.  I didn't count the number of trips I made, but it didn't take long.

These pepper plants so heavy with fruit were hanging over the edge and touching the ground.  I drove some stakes in the ground.  With some twine, stretched between two stakes I was able to get them off the ground.  I did the same on the other side.

Comments and Questions are welcome:

To the Dump Finally

We took the peppers to the post office

I cut down a small elm tree growing where it should not be and loaded it on the trailer.  The chain was dull and would not cut.  Yesterday, a new chain was put on.  I was able to cut the tree down and cut it into pieces and load it on the trailer.

We took it to the dump.  A neighbor, Dee Frost, come in right behind us and helped unload it.  That sure saved some time.

After lunch I started to dig the sweet potatoes.  The one in the photo is a white potato on the west end of the raised bed.  I used a small garden trowel to remove the soil.  I thrust into the soil a safe distance from the sweet potato and cut into one of the potatoes.  I carefully removed the soil.  Sometimes with the trowel and other times with my hands.  I felt like I was in an archeological field uncovering rare artifacts.

I have removed more soil and some of the potatoes.  There was two nursery cans.  I put the soil in the cans.

The potatoes are on the grass and the nursery can full of soil is on the top left hand corner.

This is the center of the clump.  I haven't dug any on the back side.

The potatoes from the first plant are piled on the grass.  Quite a bunch.

Starting with the orange sweet potato.  Roots growing all over the place.

There were not many potatoes on this plant.  The light orange, yellow potato is the mother potato.  Early this spring I planted a potato where most of the starts were cut off.

The next plant produced whole bunch of potatoes.  The yellowish one on the bottom middle is the mother potato.  I dug around it and pulled out potato after potato.

I dug out a couple more white potatoes.  The white were much different from the orange.  The white ones had roots that went all over and on the end of them were small narrow potatoes.  I cleaned some in this egg bucket.  The mother potato is on top

  Below is the mother of one of the orange potatoes.

The cleaned white potatoes in a tote in the house.

The orange sweet potato is below.

At the end of the day I prepared the sweet potato bed for next year.  I am going to raise the height about four inches.  In the bed below most of the roots went into the hard clay.

The saffron plant is blooming.

 I harvested the red stigmas which is the spice.  There are three stigmas on each flower and one flower per plant.  They are about an inch long.  The photo is pretty fuzzy.

I cleaned Carols laundry hamper.  She hasn't used it for that purpose for many years.  We have stored the plastic grocery bags in it.

Worked on the raised bed in house two. It is made with 2x6 boards.  I put a brick under each corner.  I then laid bricks down the right side and forced them under the 2x6.  On the left side I put a 2x4 under the 2x6.  I have hauled in several wheel barrow loads of compost and put it on top of the recycled potting soil.  The don't show in the photo.

Comments and questions are welcome.

Prepared Yesterday, Mowed Today

Yesterday I juiced out a couple of watermelons.  I put them in the freezer.  I brought it out this morning and put it in a sieve resting on a bowl.  My theory is that watermelon juice would melt out first and leave the water as ice in the sieve.  It didn't work out the way that I thought it would. The liquid in the bowel had no taste and pulp in the sieve tasted awful.

The first of the month always brings the bills.  Some I pay with bill pay, and others I write a check.  There were two that required a business check.

After lunch  I mowed the lawn.  The lawn has not been mowed for several weeks because of the snow and rain.  It dried all morning.  I had to go slow because the grass was to tall.  There was a hose laying in the tall grass and part of it I couldn't see.  It took about an hour and I had to dump the catcher three times.

We then drove to Fillmore to get gas for the car and for the lawnmower.  I made a deposit at the credit union and we got ice cream cones at the "Ice Burg."  They served fast and we received the biggest cones ever.

I took a walk around the garden to check out any frost damage. below are Topaz melons.  I picked four of them that looked like they may be ripe.

 Another picture of the Topaz melons.

 The cucumbers in the north garden froze.  Yesterday Carol picked a few large ones.  She took them to the post office.  They were all gone tonight.

 The outside leaves of the tomato plants froze.  The inside leave are still good and there was no frost damage to any of the fruits.

 Bean plants have some frost damage.  There are some of the beans that are still good.

 The cucumber vines on the cow panels are badly frozen.

 The cow panel bow which has Italian squash, luffa sponge and pole beans sustained a lot of frost damage.

The rains and snow that we had last week caused the germantion of winter annuals.  Below are mallow weeds seedlings.  An indication of how many weed seeds are in the ground.  There are other weeds in other places.

This still a little more time before supper.  I cut the strings holding the summer squash and cut the vines at ground level and hauled them over to the new compost pile. The stakes are laying at the left.  I had to run water down the row to soften the soil before I could pull them out of the ground.  I still could not pull them out. With a shovel I wedged a shovel into the stake below the surface of the ground and levered it out.  I then cut down all of the corn.  Tomorrow they will go to the compost pile.  There were a couple of good ears that I had for supper.

I also picked a bucket Anaheim peppers and sweet peppers, and a small bucked of jalapeno peppers.  These are for the post office tomorrow.

Comments and questions are welcome:

Two Day Report in One

Saturday before conference started we steamed the boxelder berries.  Carol picked off the stems and I helped a little.  This is just half of the berries.
We had to batches and steamed the for one hour each.  We ended up with one quart of juice.  On the right is the steamer and on the left is the hot pack canner.

We ended up with five half pints of elderberry jelly.

Miles and Nyleen came down to give me an hair cut.  He cut a lot more off this time.  We showed them around the nursery and gave him some tomatoes

Monday Morning

It was quite cold outside and it had rained during the night.  I figured that I would mow the lawn sometime this afternoon.  It didn't work out that way.  I walked out to Robert's garden.  There were a lot of mallow weeds there.  Where's the Shovel?  I found it and cut out a lot of the mallow weeds.  The ground was quite muddy so I quit.

Carol went over to the Masner's to care for the dogs.  While she was gone I canciled the web page that I purchased Saturday evening.  I found the phone number and made the call.  It went much better than I thought.  There were no questions why.  He didn't pressure me to stay on.  He didn't even ask me to stay on.  There was a two question evaluation for him.  I answered both questions with a "5"

Carol came back and we immediately went out to the garden and picked over a half bushel of tomatoes.  Some were really ripe and others had just started to turn.  It was cold and there were a few sprinkles.

Flue shots today.  We were at the town hall right at eleven, and we were the first ones there.  We had been there a couple of minutes and another car drove up.  In the car were the technicians.  we went in and other people began to arrive.  We got our immunization  and went home.

The cat trap has been set up for several days.  White fluffy was in the trap.  I relocated her.

After lunch I went out to dig weeds in the strawberry patch.  The photo show some of the weeds.  It doesn't show much, but just a mental reminder of working in the strawberry patch.

I was reminded about the Safron Crocus Bulbs.  I found them and got this picture.  They are budding will bloom in a couple of days.

I dug a lot of them and noticed the iris that I dug up last spring planted next to the strawberries.  They were full of mallow weeds.  There are a few irises that are poking a leaf above the mallows.

I started digging them out with the shove.  There a lot that I could not dig because they were so close to the irises.  I got a few more digging tools.  A little hoe, a garden trowel, and then another one, and then I got a pair of pruners.  I got a board to kneel on because of the wet ground.  After a couple of hours I finished.

Alisha came over to get some hibiscus seeds that she would start at her house.  I decided to cut the hibiscuses down.  The snow had bent them over.  So I removed them to make the mowing easier.  I knelt on the board to keep my knees dry.

There is a hibiscus on both sides of the side walk.  I cut these down first.  It will save a little time in mowing.

This is where the Dracaena was. It is now in house two.  I filled the hole where it was with some extra soil.

Below is the hole filled with some dirt that came from the patio.

The lawn is now ready to mow.

I caught and relocated another cat.

Robert and Frank stopped by for an hour.  They got tomatoes, peppers,  a watermelon.

Comments and questions welcomed