Wildflowers

I don't know what the top three flowers are called. The last picture is of huckleberries while they're still green.

Carrots, cut-up, cooked, and ready for the dehydrator.

Susan and I (with the cat's help) shelled peas this morning.  We set aside the best  and will save them for planting next year.

These are wild raspberries.  We stopped and picked a paper cup full of them (not counting those we ate while picking)  We also found some saskatoon berries and gooseberries growing nearby.

These are left and right views of the road where we parked to pick huckleberries. 

These are ripe huckleberries waiting to be picked!

Susan properly attired  for picking huckleberries.  Jeans, stout shoes, hydration pack, 357 magnum on belt and pepper spray on pack strap, sweatshirt tied around the waist to use if mosquitoes get bothersome, and bucket tied to her belt to leave both hands free for picking.

Prime huckleberry habitat. 

Proper evidence of huckleberry picking.  A purple tongue is evidence of huckleberry eating.

We met a black bear on the road about 3/4 mile from our house.  He's a fair size bear but not as big as the one I have hanging on the wall.  Bear season opens in about a month.

The goat thought he was starving when we got home.  Here he's climbed up on a stump to get at the leaves.

Susan and I shelled peas first thing this morning.  We saved some of the best for planting in next year's garden.  The others will be dehydrated for future use.  We planned on leaving right after that but had a neighbor stop in for a  short visit.  He was on his way to Eureka to get some things and wanted to know if we wanted to ride along or if we needed anything.  We gave him enough money to buy a couple of gallons of milk.  He got back before us and just left the milk in the refrigerator.  When he left I emptied water jugs into the barrel for the tank over the sink and we filled it up.  We loaded the water jugs in the car to fill at the church on our way home.  Susan put together some stuff to eat while we were there and we left to pick huckleberries.

We stopped at some wild raspberries alongside the road and picked some to use at home.  (Okay, to be honest we ate as many as we saved!)  Susan will use them in muffins tomorrow.  We parked at our favorite huckleberry location and had a very pleasant afternoon picking H-berries.  We ended up with a couple of gallons.  We'd like to have more so we'll probably go back on Friday.  We didn't see any bears there but the wild flowers are in full bloom.  Most of the berries near the road have been picked so we walked up the mountain a couple hundred yards before getting into many huckleberries.  There are still plenty of green ones so the picking should be good for a couple of weeks at least.  Not many people will venture that far from the road because it's too much work to climb the mountain through all the brush and blown-down trees.

We headed home around 5:00 pm, stopping at the church to fill the water jugs.  We saw the bear as we started up the fork going to our cabin. 

August 3, 2010 Continued...

We (Susan, me, the goat, the cat, and the dog) walked over to feed the buffalo this morning.  We're letting the goat run loose (we've got a long lead rope on it just in case) to get used to staying with us.

It seems to have developed a taste for hay now that I have a bale of it to feed the buffalo.

It followed me through the electric fence to help scatter the hay (and get some for itself).  You have to be kind of careful going through the fence.  When you're barefoot you get a real good ground!

Another gopher bites the dust.

I took some time to shoot a couple of rifles today so now it's cleaning time.  I picked this spot to keep an eye on the goat.  We let it range the yard the other day and it got into Susan's flowers.  Now we keep it under observation and out of the yard.  The cat likes to play with the goat's lead rope.

I'm almost finished with the SKS and will start on the MAK 90 next.

Susan did laundry this afternoon.  We kept kidding about how she was going to bring more rain.

The line is full and she's almost finished.

Afterwards she made supper.  Our son is running his generator so I have the brass tumbler going and Susan will have the dehydrator going soon as well.

Tomorrow we go to pick huckleberries.

This is the sunset from Sunday evening.

Yesterday we decided to ride bicycles into Eureka to get some bananas.  That's me in the distance on the first stretch of paved road coming down from our "mountain."

This is Susan on the old highway a few miles from Eureka.

There were a bunch of people with old cars in Eureka yesterday (Monday) so this was a common sight.  Note the block in front of the left rear wheel to keep it from rolling down the hill.

We went to the bank, the grocery store, and the health food store then headed home.  We thought we might make if out before the thunderstorm hit but we barely made it to the outer edge of town when the storm arrived.  It was a doozey!  Lots of thunder and lightening and hard rain. 

We took shelter under the canopy of a vacant building for about an hour while the storm passed through. 

After the rain stopped we headed on toward home.  This is leftover hail from the storm.  We were through here about 30 minutes after the storm passed through.  We rode on into Fortine and got our mail.  We stopped at the church to refill water bottles then rode the last seven miles home.  The total mileage round trip was about 39 miles.  We were gone most of the day.    When we got home we met some people who were looking at land for sale across the road from us.  They seemed like a decent family and might make good neighbors.  We filled them in on the local lore and showed them around our place.  

Sunrise this morning.  The sun was a deep red (the picture didn't really capture that) which means there's a forest fire going somewhere.  It's not too close or we'd have heard about it by now.  One of our son's is a local firefighter (both structure and wildland certified).  He keeps us updated on nearby fires and we listen in to local firefighting efforts on the scanner.

Susan is milking the neighbor's goat Saturday morning.  (At their place!)

A little buck we saw on the way home from milking the goat.

Checked my gopher traps this morning.  Had two gophers and one weasel.  I felt kind of bad about the weasel.  He was probably helping clear out the gophers.  Of course if he got in the chicken pen he'd have cleared it out of chickens too.

I took some time to do some shooting and reloading today.  I was shooting to see how the point of impact changed between different bullet wieghts.  After shooting I spent a few hours at the reloading bench sorting brass and loading 223 ammo.

Susan got out some carrots from the root cellar and began cutting them up into little pieces.  She'll cook them first then dehydrate them.

I put a strand of electric wire around the goat's pen.  The guy we got the goat from called to say that someone he gave some other goats to lost them to a mountain lion kill a couple of days ago.  I;m hoping the dog will keep the Mountain Lions out (we have a lot of them around here) but we added the electric wire just in case...

Sunday, August 1, 2010

We went to milk the goat Saturday morning. It worked out better because we were on the goat’s home turf. On the way home from there we saw a little buck alongside the road.

This morning I checked traps then did some shooting and reloading until about 2:00 pm. We got more rain and some hail this morning as well. It cleared off in mid-afternoon. The generator was running so I melted down some scrap lead. I dropped in a wheel weight that must have had some moisture in a crack somewhere. The lead erupted like a volcano and blew about two pounds of hot lead all over everything. I’ll be picking melted lead out of my clothes for a week. I always wear safety glasses and a hat for occasion like that although this was the worst one I’ve ever had happen to me. I melted down about 10 pounds of lead into ingots and called it a day.

Susan made a pie out of the service berries and goose berries we picked the other day. It was great. She picked a bunch of peas this evening and has been working on cutting up carrots to cook them then dehydrate them. These are last year’s crop and have been stored in the root cellar since last fall. They are still firm and in good shape. We need to get them out so we’ll have room for this year’s crop.

We took the goat and the dog over to feed the buffalo. The goat has learned to like our walks. It will stop to munch on something then run to catch up. It’s trying to play with the dog but the dog’s not too excited about that idea. On the way back from the buffalo the goat was running along and saw stump that had an outline similar to a bear. The goat came to a sliding stop then dashed around to the other side of Susan for protection. It was hilarious!

This evening the man we got he goat from called and said that another person he had given two goats to called to say that a mountain lion had killed both of them. We assured him ours was okay then I went out and put a strand of electric wire around the top of the goat’s pen.

Milk Goats and Mosquitoes - July 30, 2010

We picked gooseberries for the first time today.  This is a wild plant at the edge of the yard.  There are several others around the property as well.

 

The arrival of the neighbor's milk goat.

 Establishing the pecking order.  I never could tell who won.  They both just finally stopped.
A hard as they were hitting they should both have a splitting headache.

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Friday, July 30, 2010
I was up early this morning to finish up the article I’ve been working on. I let it set for a day and did my final editing this morning. I added a little more stuff and deleted other parts of the article then put together the photo package and photo captions. Since this is being submitted to an online magazine I had to resize the photos to take up less space. I use Adobe Photoshop most of the time although I have other programs that will do the same thing. I take lots of pictures and use the best. I really love digital cameras. I use my Canon Power Shot A480 for most photos but some magazines are a lot more demanding than others. I use my Canon EOS Rebel T1i for them (although the A480 set at 10 mp and with the ASA manually set at 100 does a good enough job for some of them). If you keep the ASA set at 100 or below you get “noiseless” photos good enough for most magazines. I use a tripod for those pictures where detail counts.

After finishing the article and sending it in I took the goat with me as I set more gopher traps. When I had the traps all set the goat and I walked over to feed the buffalo. When we got back I put the goat in the pen and we had lunch then the cat and I conked out for a siesta.

Susan finished up editing a fiction story for another board. There were over 150 pages of run-on sentences and punctuation/spelling errors. She’s spent many hours on it over the past week and finished it up this afternoon.

We took a break for awhile and sat on the porch watching the gooseberries and serviceberries ripen and listening to the garden grow. We let the goat and the chickens out to forage in the yard and watched the cat stalk the chickens and chase the goat’s lead rope.

A neighbor drove up on her 4-wheeler because she couldn’t raise us on the phone. (We were outside.) They’re going camping and needed someone to milk their goat tonight and tomorrow morning. She’ll drop it off later. Susan and I then picked some gooseberries to add to the serviceberries she’d picked earlier.

The neighbor showed up with her goat so we put it in the pen with our little one. Ha! They immediately had to establish the order of dominance and size didn’t seem to matter. The little goat gave as good as he got. Once they calmed down we put our goat outside and left the milk goat in the pen. When it was time to milk her we switched them. The problem we had is that we don’t have a stanchion for milking goats. “No problem” the milk goat said as she jumped up on the picnic table. Susan gave it some grain and I held the collar and stood on one side and Susan began milking from the other side. Then the mosquitoes moved in! They nearly ate the goat alive. (We were rearing heavy jeans and coats with the hood pulled up tight.) I kept busy brushing them off the goat while Susan milked it. We finally got the job done but we lost about half the milk when the goat stepped in the bucket trying to get rid of mosquitoes on her legs. We put her back into the pen with our goat who now has amorous intentions. That shouldn’t be since our goat is supposed to be an “it.” It’s also just three months old. Neither fact seemed to slow down his efforts in the least. So … we loaded up the borrowed goat and took it back to it’s own home. It stays in a fully enclosed dog kennel at night so it should be safe from predators by itself for the night. We’ll go over there in the morning to milk it again.

By the way, have I ever said why we call this “Mosquito Mountain?”

Anyone know what kind of flower/plant this is?  We can't find it in any of our books.

This time of year Susan covers the celery with a "sheer curtain" type of material (I was told that any woman would know just what I was talking about) to keep it from bolting to seed in the hot weather.

The goatling got his horns caught in the fence.  I think it embarrassed him more than it hurt.

When I set my gopher traps in new locations I took the goat with me.  I put him on a long lead (50 foot rope) and let him wander with me with the rope dragging loose behind him.  He'd stop to eat then run to catch up.  (The rope was in case he wanted to play hard to catch.)  The cat thought is was fun to chase the end of the rope and followed us all over our 20 acres.

Barbecued chicken and our first harvest of peas tonight.  Very, very good!

Susan shelling peas for supper.  Some of the better ones were culled out and saved for seed for next year.

All of our peas are from seed saved from last year. (See picture below from May 14, 2010 of Susan shelling the dried peas to plant in the garden.)

This is mint from our garden.  It's been dried and now Susan is storing it in a jar.

Susan put netting over some of our serviceberry bushes to keep the birds away.  Some people call these saskatoons but they aren't.  They're related but a saskatoon is kind of between a serviceberry and blueberry in texture and taste.