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June 1, 2015

Butters and I walked around the Mill Pond today.  Queen's cup, ninebark, honeysuckle, and wild roses were the predominant wild flowers.  In the deeper woods they bloom solitary and delicate like this rose...  I saw the pair of eagles that seem to be making the Mill Pond their home, as well as the rival ospreys...   A pair of rednecked grebes seemed to be contemplating nest building near the edge of the pond.  This year our nesting mountain chickadees have hatched, and the robin on top of the nesting box still seems expecting, as does our broody hen who had 14 eggs under her today...
The forecast for today was severe thunderstorms, but we only have had sprinkles and a couple dull booms all day...
I finished planting the garden this morning, and here are June 1 photos as a future bench mark for where the garden is on June 1...

pears start out upright and droop as they get heavy

So do apples.  This is a golden delicious, looks just like a red delicious right now...

ditto with red and yellow cherries.

These are peas just emerged...


sweet corn two inches high by the month before July

blueberries get large quickly, shouldn't be ripe for another month...

These are scarlet runner beans planted in an old sink.  An experiment...

Some strawberries are getting ripe. 

This tomato doesn't look like the store ones, but we started it ourselves and it should produce just fine...

That's a whole bunch of grapes before it even flowers...

we mostly grow chives for the flowers...

June 5
My son helped me make this fun ad for Sondahl Pottery: https://youtu.be/hw-rh1t8R7I
We got an inch of rain earlier this week so everything is copacetic as the weather trends towards a hot weekend (90's)

June 6,
With the heat I took Butters along the Mill Pond early this morning, and along the top of a low ridge found this new wildflower:

It resembles a dandelion but with grassy stems...  I'm hoping someone will help ID it...  Probably pale agoseris, thanks to Jill Wilson....  I found more of it on patches on the ridge...


June 9
The heat wave is laying us low with temps to around 90.   My son's parents- in- law just visited, including a canoe trip to Upper Twin Lake, where we saw a young moose feeding, but I forgot my camera so I'm left with just the memory  (which is increasingly faulty)...

June 15
The heat went away and returned without showers between, so we're watering a lot...   We've got strawberries and lettuce from the garden, and everything else is growing and appearing to be weeks ahead of other years...
The new Fireside Park is getting a picnic shelter built, which will mostly (I imagine) be used for shade, since there's precious little otherwise.   We swim from the new park, but mostly have it to ourselves, while seeing a couple dozen people using the Fish and Game access across the street...

June 20
June is busting out all over--I find myself making orders for materials, getting wholesale and other orders, and struggling to keep up with watering and weeds.  
One of our lesser known projects is starting a thrift store in part of our church at Priest Lake to serve the local people, both in the cheap goods they can buy and the proceeds which go to short term help for those in need.  As volunteers have been sorting for the store, we've been hauling the rejects to be dumped, but we end up getting stuff out of the rejects, and are opening our own rummage sale adjacent to our pottery display to see if anyone else would like the stuff...  Tomorrow is the 13th annual Big Backin Lawn Tractor Drag Races, with over 1000 people in attendance in front of our pottery, so that will be our first test...

June 23
We got rid of a lot of the rummage at 10 cents and up prices...  We also had a big weekend of pottery sales, so for once it was clear I should stick to my day job ;-)
    I picked about a cup of raspberries today.  There are a few blueberries looking blue.  There are a lot of cherries looking red, but none tasting sweet...  The strawberries are about done, but with the other fruit coming on, things are looking great if we make it through the predicted 100 + degree heat wave over the next week...
    We already had some excitement from a 10 acre brush fire on state land just outside of town yesterday.  They used helicopters with scoops and two specially adapted float planes that scoop up water from the lake and immediately take off again to dump it on the fire.  They don't climb any higher than they have to with the 800 gallons of water, so they were buzzing over our house about 50 feet above it for several hours.  I went up on the ridge to see if I could get photos of them scooping the water, but I would have done better to take pictures from home...  I'm saving up some video footage to make a Spirit Lake promo like the pottery ad...

June 29
The heat has been a thing to contend with, with several days around 100 and the indefinite forecast in the 90's.  This weather is so rare here that we don't have air conditioning, but manage to cool the buildings overnight as the temperature drops into the 60's.  The Mill Pond is bath water temperature and dropping in level fast...   We're watering all our gardens nearly constantly, and they're responding with great growth and the first raspberries of enough quantity to sell today.   We also have a few ripe blueberries and peas, and cherries that are edible but could be sweeter.  And the corn is knee high before the fourth of July...

Books read and other media of note
Hero at Large by Janet Evanovich.  An early romance written under a nom de plume with a touch of her sense of comedy.  I was disappointed because the paperback had a dog on the cover and I assumed he got at large...

Willful Child by Steven Erikson.   The funniest SF satire I've read since the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, serving up Star Trek with extra schmaltz...

Skink No Surrender by Carl Hiaasen.  A reader might spend most of their time mourning the bad decisions these teens make, when a female cousin goes off with an online paramour, but the tone stays light enough to make it enjoyable and the cantankerous ecoterrorist Skink is always a fun foil for middle class fluff...


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