The One I Let Get Away

Having canned as many quarts of dill pickles as I needed, ten, plus a quart and a half gallon of fresh sliced dills in the fridge, I decided to let the chickens have the rest of the cucumbers.

Pretending to not see this cuke, I waited to see how big it would get.

This guy no doubt thought he would escape the pickle jar by becoming the Arnold Schwarzenegger of cucumbers. I believe I heard it chuckle when I gasped over what a big boy he'd become.

The chickens love to peck out the seeds, but leave the rest of the cukes. Periodically, I have to rake out the cucumber and zucchini donuts from the hen run.

Rupert the Rooster is quite gallant, calling the hens to eat before he does. I've watched him break off a small bit of clover and put it down for a hen. The stupid hens never do notice his offerings, but do come for chow whenever I appear anywhere nearby. They prefer vegetables to cracked corn, which always gets left for the cardinals and other birds to clean up.

As for Mr. Big Cucumber, as sometimes happens with these late-maturing brawny types, he wound up being terribly henpecked.

The Skeeters are Back

In early spring, I was hanging out laundry when I smelled smoke. It was terribly windy, too windy to be burning brush. There had been lots of brush fires but surely no one in their right mind would be burning anything outside.

Coming around the front of the house, I saw the smoke was black and coming from down by  the Skeeters. It's a cabin calling itself a lodge, back in the trees on the other side of the road, down by the bridge. The folks who own the place only come on occasional weekends, to shoot skeet, set off loud fireworks and generally disrupt my peaceful life. They are not bad people, just noisy. I'm sure it never crossed their minds that I live here because it's so peaceful. What a concept.

There were young persons there earlier in the day, zipping up and down the road on motorbikes.

But now, there was this smoke. I called 911. The dispatcher said a fire truck was already on the way.
After a while, I heard it coming. The smoke got darker and more voluminous. More trucks arrived, plus a water tanker. There was that popping sound I heard when the Yeller's house across the road from the lodge burned down that dark rainy night.

Finally, some of the trucks moved off and I walked down the gravel road to check it out. I'm not much of a gawker, but I do get curious. Some firefighters were working at keeping the fire from getting carried away in the dry leaves in the woods all around the lodge.

What was left of the cabin was still burning. I noticed the two motorbikes parked some distance away but the kids were nowhere to be seen.

Later, I saw the bikes in the back of a pickup truck that went by. I could imagine the kids saying, "Gee, Dad, we didn't mean to burn the place down."

The guys who do plumbing for me are volunteer firemen. They said the kids had been trying to burn some leaves in the high wind and the fire got away from them.

That was in the early spring. It didn't appear that they would be rebuilding the lodge. I did hear shots from over there on some weekends. A 30-06 rifle sounds a lot like a cannon.

This week, however, some big dump trucks and bulldozer worked to shore up the drive to the place. From the looks of that effort, something grand is going to rise out of the ashes. Already it's noisy.

This fine driveway gives a clue as to what the new structure will look like. Now, I'm curious, but the STAY OUT sign peeking out from the leaves makes me wonder if they mean me. After all, I'm their nearest neighbor. Surely they don't mean me. It doesn't say This Means You.

It doesn't help for my grown kids to keep kidding me about how I solved the noisy neighbors problems with the Skeeters and the Yeller.

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Basswood Honey

The first super has been extracted, and the honey is exquisite! The basswood blossoms gave the honey a fruity flavor and light color that makes it a premium honey. The new extractor proudly stands by  its work.

For six years I've been looking at the huge basswood tree, smelling the fragrant blossoms in springtime and thinking bees could surely makes some good honey from them. I wanted some guy to come bring a hive. At last, I did something about it, all by myself. Now, I wonder what took me so long.

Putting the honey in jars was easy. I just filled them from the honey gate in the bucket that strained the honey from the extractor.

Uncapping the super  frames was rather a sticky process, but not bad for my first solo harvesting effort.

The bees had made some burr comb between their hive body and the super. That broke apart when I took the super off, making things sticky from that point. In front of the hive, a nice chunk of comb honey dropped from one of the frames. I picked it up, getting honey on my gloves and my trusty lawn tractor's steering wheel. I whisked the super away, covered by a towel,  in Rosie's cart.

It is a beautiful sight and somewhat irresistible. The second super may consist of some basswood and some wildflower honey, perhaps catnip. Some is already capped, but I await the completion of it by the bees.

The day after I took the one super, I returned it, empty of honey, to the hive all sticky and ready to be cleaned up and reworked by the bees. Bless their tiny hearts, they had cleaned up the honey from the burr comb, which is sort of a bonus storage area for them between stories of the hive. They were calm, not seeming to hold it against me that I had marauded their food stores the day before like a big clumsy bear or maybe a Sasquatch..