Early summer in Michigan

 Cynthia had several weeks of work in May and June, so rented a car and drove back, leaving the boat safe in a marina in New Bern (beside a wood-spar ketch owned by a fellow named Skip... how's THAT for coincidence?). Delightful neighbors: we shared stories and got lots of ideas for adventures and boat improvements.

Driving with two of us is always fast and easy and we arrived at the house in good shape... to find surprising destruction. Apparently a storm had passed through and done considerable damage to one of the big maples behind the house, sending several large branches into the earth like spears, but none hit the house.

Thank goodness we avoided anything like this we saw nearby:

Our neighbors kindly lent us a couple chainsaws and we rented a chipper and had a few days of fun work together. We delighted in the chipper, especially: it could chew up a branch twenty feet long in under a minute! We also took out some other dead and crowded trees while we had the chainsaws and chipper. Lucy went mad for one of the cedar trees, chewing on it and crying and barking, so we cut it down and  carpenter ants POURED out!

Done with that, she got excited about an old evergreen stump, so we pulled it out and let her dig madly at the hole...

and we then found that there was a big lump of pitch (sticky sap from the treee) in the soil, now well worked into her fur. Cynthia spent an hour or two clipping out the matted, sticky mess. Fortunately, Lucy needed a haircut and looked hardly the worse for the amateur emergency clip.

We mowed the path in the back meadow and added a couple more. The grass looked beautiful in the sunset light;

these brown and orange butterflies love the purple hairy vetch (there are three in the pic); 

Lucy would hunt through the grass flushing rabbits; and monarch butterflies danced around the milkweed, feeding on nectar and laying eggs; and the monarch larvae ballooned in size daily in a race to mature before predators removed them. 

We also found a few of these raspberry relatives near Lake Michigan and identified them as wineberries. Definitely edible.

Good memories.

Update on Sonoma citrus grafts

Back in April I posted about grafting various citrus onto the orange tree at my parents' place: https://hydrophiliapow.blogspot.com/2020/04/pandemic-stuck-in-sonoma-twiddling.html
A week ago I returned and pretty much rushed through greeting my dad in my eagerness to see the results. After cutting back some of the lush growth from the existing tree, I found satisfactory results... for a first time citrus grafting effort.



Four of the five varieties are still alive. Orlando seems the worst and I do not expect it to survive:. Alas!

Next is Satsuma (branch with rubber band), grown a bit over a foot and looking healthy. 

Then comes the blood orange graft, grown nearly four feet over the summer! See how nicely it is connecting to the old branch!

All the rest of the good grafts are Cara Cara navel oranges. Three of these are healthy and all have grown nearly four feet. 

We will want to be careful to prevent too many fruit too soon as this may break off the grafts at the slightly weaker junction. We also want to prevent the base tree from competing too much on those branches as most trees prefer to support themselves rather than transplanted varieties, so we will need to keep shoots pruned back. 

Over all, I'm satisfied and have hopes for blossoms in the spring and fruit a year after that. Just a year and a half to go! 

Christmas tree pruning by mystery herbivore

Clearly, I've been remiss: months have passed with no blog posts! In that time Cynthia and Lucy and I have visited Cape Cod, Maine, Norfolk, and New Bern. We've caught mackerel, king mackerel, pollack, bluefish, and a swordfish. We've enjoyed oysters, mussels, steamers, littlenecks, and quahogs. We've sailed in fog, bright sunshine, still nights, and storm. We've seen dolphins doing tricks for us and large groups of little whales. We've even seen approaching walls of wind just in time to batten down enough that little fell over or leaked when the wind struck and shoved us roughly far over on our side and held us there for ten minutes. And we've dealt with engine troubles, made repairs on leaking bits of decking, made progress on re-coring the deck, and installed a pretty sweet lithium battery bank that allows us to make far better use of our available electrical power. Currently, Cynthia and Lucy are near Philadelphia beginning a new job there, the boat is in New Bern, and I am helping my folks out in Sonoma, CA.

What to mention first? How about Pickering Island, ME?

As we began working our way from Maine back toward Cape Cod, the winds were light and variable and the fog thick, but the tide swept us along.... until it turned. So we chose a nearby island, scanned it for habitation using Google maps to see if it would be a good place to take Lucy for a walk... and found interesting signs of old foundations (bottom left corner).

We motored in until we found a good spot to anchor, launched the dinghy, and rowed to shore, Cynthia casting for fish and pulling in a mackerel as I rowed.

On shore, we scouted around until we found a path to the ruins and followed it in, Lucy bouncing about, eager for any sign of squirrel or mouse. We came to the clearing and found numerous stone foundations,

old apple trees, hunting stands in a few trees, and this little "Christmas tree"... with a very poorly pruned top.

I found the tree fascinating. I'm sure no one pruned it, so the trimming was probably the product of some herbivores browsing on it. Deer are the most common, but the height of the pruned section (about 3.5') argued for a shorter critter... like goats or sheep. I've heard sheep will eat evergreens and that there are sheep on several islands in Maine and I believe that goats and deer would eat at least up to five feet from the ground, so I think we found pretty strong evidence of sheep on this island. I DO love a bit of deductive reasoning!

And here is a random pic from chilly Maine: