Riverbend Journal

  Two years ago, we planted some sweetcorn and had an excellent stand growing. Then something started foraging among the ears and I was pretty sure it was raccoons so I used the opportunity to buy something I had always wanted, a trail camera. I installed it and soon found out indeed it was raccoons... ... with the help of their lookout, Mr. Opossum.  I'm not sure what he was doing out there. Perhaps they eat sweetcorn too. Anyway, we decided back then after we got just a few ears out of a couple hundred ears, that we would just buy our sweetcorn from then on. Many grow it around here and it is easy to find in street corners being sold off the back of pickup trucks when in season for very reasonable prices. I removed the batteries from my trail camera and stuck it in a cabinet in my office and pretty much forgot about it. Flash forward to right after I made the decision to electrify our garden fence but before I had received the charger, I thought about the trail camera and set it

A. I. Generated My apologies to reader T.B. about the above picture and part of the below post. I haven't taken pictures of the garden but do have an update of sorts. Our peas, both crops, are now up and looking well along with our lettuce. The radishes and two varieties of carrots however never came up. The strawberries were looking great until they weren't. Presumably a rabbit is getting in there and eating them down to the ground. I thought with all the hawks around, it wouldn't be a problem and I haven't seen a single rabbit, though I saw a nest with a few babies in it earlier this spring not far away. I hadn't wanted to do so but bought a fence that could be electrified. So I bought a solar fence charger to give those rabbits an incentive to eat elsewhere. That is my job this afternoon. This morning, I was at the local repair shop getting my van diagnosed for what will be an expensive repair, all thanks to my dang gas powered chainsaw that I recently replaced w

  A. I. Generated As she read the first reading, she started listing over to her left side as if she was having trouble standing straight and even seemed to struggle with the words, having to force them out in short clipped two or three word long strands. I leaned over to my wife, a doctor, and whispered that something was wrong with her. When she finished the reading, it took her nearly a minute to lower herself backward off the single step to raise her up to the height of the microphone. But once down, she was able to walk back to the pew behind the ambo reserved for the lectors.  During the second reading, she seemed to have recovered and I started thinking that perhaps I had rushed to judgment over the first reading. Although not speaking in a fluid manner, it had been some time, perhaps years, since she had done a reading and so I wasn't familiar with her cadence and just chalked it up as just being hers.  The last duty as lector is to read the petitions or short prayers offer

  Last week, I finally bit the bullet and mowed the high spots in my lawn. I don't fertilize, pesticize, or weedize any of my lawn and so it doesn't always grow at the same speed especially in the spring time. That is fine by me because it is just a functional lawn and mostly keeps the weeds at bay. I don't have it for awards. While doing that, I couldn't help but check out all my fruit trees scattered here and there. Above is one of two sour cherry trees we have. Last year was our worst year since I planted those trees, producing a cup of sour cherries between them both. Well in fairness, birds got all the ones out front before I did. Still, I have higher hopes for them this year, assuming we can avoid a freeze after they bloom which is not too far out. Last summer, one of the last two trees from our original wedding orchard, blew over. For the first time in a decade, conditions were right and it had a bountiful load of peaches and when combined with the wind, proved t

A couple weeks back, I went to our local nursery to secure some strawberries to plant in the new garden. They usually disappear quickly and so I wanted to make sure we could get enough to start a small bed that we can gradually increase in size. While there, I saw some rhubarb plants next to them. They certainly weren't on sale and my wife would have a fit if she knew the price, but the way I look at it, I can depreciate the cost of them over the next 15 or 20 years and so depreciated out, they were just a few pennies a month for the things. A steal! I brought them home but the next two nights were forecasted to be below freezing at night so I kept them in the greenhouse and then planted them the first nice day that arrived. I hope to have a mini-hedge of rhubarb growing on the south side of the greenhouse which should keep us more than amply supplied in pies, tarts and cobblers for much of the summer months. I have frozen rhubarb to use over the winter quite successfully but may h