Thursday, September 24, 2020

Ordinarily Extraordinary

 Today was one of those golden days. 

I had my morning coffee, researched some stuff about propagating grapes from some family vines. I wanted to get cuttings and let them go nuts in the office's southern window over the winter. It is my hope that they'll be well established and ready to grow by next spring. 

I went up to water the raspberry suckers we planted two nights ago. We planted 12 and I was glad to see all but three looking perky with no trace of wilt at all. Two others have some wilted leaves but over all look good. One just looks very droopy and depressed. Not so sure about him. Over all, they appear to like their new home. We will let them go until it starts getting cold and then we will lie them down and cover them with a thick layer of leaves for the winter. 

I was surprised to see that three frosty mornings in a row have left our poor apple tree completely leafless. That is one of our big projects this winter. Big, not because of the size of the job, but because of the importance of it. We love that old tree. It is ancient and it has been untended for years uncounted. Part of it shows rot and insect damage. We meant to remove the dead wood during the summer but got scared after getting some advice from someone who knows more about these things than we do. (Thanks again, Ed!) It's too early to do the work, but it is surely not too early to be considering how to best do it. I marked two  'definitely-got-to-go-branches'.



Our grand old lady produced well for us this year and is a deer magnet, and the game camera also caught a coyote coming by to eat the apples on a regular basis. Tim has had suspicions. He's a pretty observant fellow, and has been seeing signs. 

Iris needs a winter coat. The coats at the consignment shop that Brittani uses go for $30. We both agreed that if you were going to spend that kind of money on a coat for a two year old, you might just as well buy new. I told her I'd keep my eyes open when I got home. Yesterday at my regular thrift store, I found a pair of Columbia snow pants. I waffled about buying them because I was afraid that I wouldn't find a coat to match, but finally went ahead because they were in such perfect shape.

Today on the way home, I stopped at a little hardware store in a neighboring town for some rooting hormone. On the way through town, I passed by a little shop called 'The Restore'. This store is kind of unusual. They sell everything, no matter what it is, for 50c. I've never been there before, but on the spur of the moment, I decided just to check them out. I was shocked to find a little brown winter coat with pink embroidery, a perfect match to the pink snowpants with brown trim that I found just yesterday. I checked the size, absolutely certain in my heart that it would be the wrong size, but it wasn't! I mean, what are the odds???

To celebrate, I blew another 50c on a purple corduroy jacket for her.  
Whoot!
Grandmas Gone Wild.

I got home and got supper going and then came in to check my e-mails  I had written to someone about writing for their publication a couple days back. I had not heard from them, and was telling myself how foolish I was to even think to be considered. Yet there it was: I will be writing again. It is small scale, but I'm happy for the opportunity once again to do something that I really love. 

For an ordinary day, it was extraordinary.

5 comments:

  1. The squirrels got our apples at our house but down on the farm, the tree had quite a number of apples. Unfortunately some sort of beetle has nearly girdled the back down at the base so it may not be with us for very long. I picked what apples I could reach and just started a pot on the stove to cook them down into applesauce to can later today. They were really buggy this year so our yield wasn't the best but it will be enough and better than none which is what I thought we would have after the squirrel theft.

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  2. I should add that we have pruning of our fruit trees on our late winter list this year. We haven't done it since we planted the trees six or seven years back so it is definitely time.

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  3. It was easy to tell what was dead when the tree had leaves. Now that they are gone, I wish that we'd have marked those branches earlier. We're probably a lot more worried than we need to be, but we'd feel pretty badly if we tried to help the tree and wound up killing it. On the flip side, if something isn't done soon, it will probably die anyway.

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  4. And now that you mention it, I guess I never paid attention. I've never seen a squirrel at the camp. I know that they are in the surrounding woods, but they seem content to just stay there. Interesting.

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