respublica

An Autumnal day

It's 47 degrees this morning which certainly lets us know Fall is really here. I like this Nathaniel Hawthorne sentiment.

"I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house."

I get a laugh out of the word, autumnal, it's a funny sounding word not used much anymore.

 

 

Brats, Candy Corn and Wisconsin

This new thing just had to be found in Wisconsin. Butchers in Madison decided have picked up their seasonal brats more than a little notch. They've added candy corn to the sausages. "Each batch of brats churns out about 120 of the links, which includes 25 pounds of brat meat, three cans of Wisconsin's Lake Louie Brewing Oktoberfest beer and two bags of candy corn."

They've turned out to be "surprisingly delicious and very popular."

 

Birds!

We must be at the point in time when many birds are gathering together to fly south. Our street, especially our end with all the trees, was covered in birds this morning. They were also on the ground, all were making bird sounds and it was loud. I went out to watch a bit and noticed coming across the sky from the west were huge numbers of these big black birds flying together. This area may be a meeting place for their travels, it was quite a sight.

It's Fall and the vegetables know it

As much a I hate to do this, it seems to be time to start pulling out most of our spent vegetable plants. We've had a banner year and I hate to see all this go. It has been so great to go out to the backyard and pluck off some beautiful tomatoes and herbs for dinner. Not to mention the fantastic yield we had earlier of onions and potatoes and radishes and lettuce and garlic. Everything did so well, but my favorite was probably the potatoes. They produced well and the taste was just out of this world. Thankfully I still have some stored in a dark, cool place in the basement. I peeled and frozen quite a few Roma Tomatoes for winter as well as some Keller's sweet corn.

A couple of weeks ago I planted some more radish seeds and they are now growing really well. We also have 3 more cantaloupes and they are close to ripe. Oh, and, for some reason we found more potato plants popping up, probably from some pieces of the original group. I read up on this and learned that fall potatoes should actually bear, even though their leaves won't go brown when ready as they do in spring. Probably be smaller as well, but I'm pretty excited to find out.

But, as the annual flowers and vegetable stems get pulled out, the city yard waste pick-up guy is going to hate us.

Seasons change

Yesterday was the first day of Fall. Good-bye summer and with it the longer days. Oddly, we won't be changing our clocks back an hour until November 7th at 2 a.m. But, no matter how we try to keep longer daylight, we can't fool Mother Nature. It will be dark earlier whatever we do.

The season is changing

All of a sudden we can feel the summer gradually changing to fall. It's been cool in the mornings and the light leaves earlier in the evening. I noticed a big drop off in the number of hummingbirds we have around our feeders and the tomatoes are looking weary.

If only the raccoons packed up their bags and headed south for the winter.

A great time of year for food

This is ground zero month for mountains of fresh fruit and vegetables. Tomatoes are abundant, as are peppers, sweet corn and most everything else including the new peach crop. The local produce can't be beat at this time of year.

Safety First on the Fourth?

The 4th of July always brings news story warnings on the danger of home fireworks. These warnings never seem to stop people from heading over to Missouri or another state and buying carloads of explosives which they shoot off in their backyards. At least they do in any neighborhood we've lived in. Some even shoot in the front yard.

We've learned there is nothing we can do about this except wait them out, but one item bothers me this year. Growing up we always got to do sparklers, it was tradition and we were never hurt of injured by them. Which brings me to 2021. I got into a sentimental mood the other day and while in Schnucks, picked up a box of sparklers for tonight. For old times sake.

What appalled me when I opened the box was how incredibly small these sparklers are. With all the warnings about getting burned or worst, every local store is selling these tiny sparklers made for kids. I will not light them, the sparks will be right at my fingers. Why are these things ok especially when they are going to be put into kids hands?

I decided to go over to the front parking lot of Rural King this afternoon where there is always a fireworks stand this time of year. I wanted to see what they were selling in the sparkler line. They had a couple boxes of what I'd bought, but most of the sparklers were much bigger and I'd have to assume safer. One type was 3 feet long, another 14 inches. Aside from that the end sticks to hold onto were much longer than the 6 inch sparkler i originally bought.

This is the original sold at Schnucks and Walmart. It's hardly longer that a package of bean seeds. the burn part not even that long and the stem is so flimsy. Below is the thing on Dale's hand.

Who wants to light this little thing?

Here they are with the other two types.

Each of those is longer than my cutting board.

What weather does

I have to say, this year's spring weather has worked marvelous things in our garden. The vegetables have grown enormously and are bearing wonderfully. The flowers in other beds have been lush. We haven't had prolonged hot and dry periods which is unusual for this area. We've gotten rain when needed, although like yesterday maybe a bit too much. All in all this has been a good year for gardeners...so far.

And today! Kellers Farm stand opens for the sweet corn season! The absolute best and I am very anxious to get over there.

Green dust

I don't know about anyone else, but, boy does our outside area have green dust. I'm guessing it's all the pollen from trees. We had a mess of Oak tree seed strings a week or two ago. I raked up bags of those darn things. But their dust still lays on our porch chairs and everything else.

Google came right up with a pollen issue for Collinsville. VERY HIGH. And it is tree pollen. I'm not one who gets an extreme allergic reaction to all this pollen, but I feel it nonetheless. And it's just dirty. I took my truck to the car wash get most of it off and now I'm looking at a neighbor's truck and it is just green with this dust.

Spring has been gorgeous this year, but all those flowers and seed pods are releasing a lot of stuff.

Wouldn't you just figure it would be males causing this?

Pollen is a powdery substance consisting of pollen grains which are male microgametophytes of seed plants, which produce male gametes.