Rainbow at Dawn

We set a live-capture trap for whatever it is that's scaling the fence and eating the sweet corn, using cat food for bait on the assumption that we're dealing with raccoons. Temperatures cooled enough overnight that about four o'clock this morning I turned off the air conditioning and opened the windows and listened to the breeze in the sycamore, the bullfrogs in the pond, and a few errant drops of rain upon the roof. By five-thirty I'd had enough bed time and got up to find that the trap hadn't caught anything, but neither were there any freshly-molested corn stalks.

Just at sunrise this was the view to the east.

And to the west, a symbol of hope. A little later a nice shower fell but I don't think it amounted even to a tenth of an inch.

We're finalizing preparations for a to-do that commences in a few days, the Palmer Long Outdoor Weekend, Muscatine Edition. The working-out of the acronym is left as an exercise for the reader.

We're keen to get the trails in good shape, so Alan and I were out with the chainsaw and rotary brush mower, pushing through the spots where fallen trees obstructed the old tractor trails that we're re-establishing, and finishing the surfaces.

Eye Chair exposed! It had been buried beneath a fallen, over-mature black cherry.

That black cherry is now a stack of logs. We're looking into ways we might market the wood, possibly as stock for lathe turners, lumber for furniture or flooring, or gunstock blanks.

Here a trail branches into a loop through Cedar Grove. Counting the field perimeters I think we've got about three miles of trail at this point, with a wonderful variety of vantages, up and down hills, along the creek, past the old growth giants.

And we've essentially completed the shooting platform at the trap range. It is a very sturdy construction!

We've got some other features in store for our guests this weekend, and those that follow. But that is all for today!

Diversion II

This weekend we traveled north out of corn country, across the Mississippi River and into the driftless region with its old rock bluffs and dales, past dairy and hay farms, and beyond to the paper and timber lands of the North Woods. This is where the legends of Paul Bunyon and Babe, his blue ox, were born.

Our destination was Chippewa Falls, WI. Our purpose was the ninth annual Leinenkugel's Family Reunion, where we met family & friends from Chicagoland and conducted some practical research on brand creation and customer loyalty and retention. It was a very pleasant, low key affair on the grounds of this mid-19th century brewery, with plenty of free beer, food, and music.

I made some new friends, played catch with a couple of my little nephews-in-law, and swam in beautiful Lake Wissota whose clear waters have the merest orange tint from naturally occurring iron in the underlying geology.

We returned yesterday and were grateful to find an inch of rainwater in the gauges, enough to have filled the soil profile to a depth of fifteen inches or so. A lot of the second planting has already emerged: corn and pole beans intercropped, bush snap beans, turnips, mustard, Swiss chard. Today brought high winds and extreme heat. Relative humidity was 70% at dawn, plummeted to 18% by noon. Two hours' work beginning to clean up the big brush pile in the northwest field, and all the junk buried within it, completely sapped me. I gathered more spearmint and it's drying in the garage – strong stuff.

As the sun set and we ate our dinner outside, the bunnies came out to engage in several parties and frolics, most amusing.

The pond is eminently swimmable. Y'all come down now, hear?