A Blistering Weekend

Here's a copy of the Partridge, KS weather report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for late afternoon today:

Hutchinson Municipal Airport
Lat: 38.08 Lon: -97.87 Elev: 1522
Last Update on Jun 26, 4:52 pm CDT

'Fair and Breezy' 106 °F (41 °C)

Humidity: 24 % Wind Speed: S 23 G 37 MPH Barometer: 29.58" (998.7 mb) Dewpoint: 62 °F (17 °C) Heat Index: 109 °F (43 °C) Visibility: 10.00 mi.

It's wonderful that it's a day of rest, and vegging out in air-conditioned comfort is totally legitimate. I pity every parched living thing trying to survive outdoors today.

************************

We had a surprise Shalom Quartet number at the end of church today: Is That Wedding Music That I Hear? (I'm not sure of the exact title.) After the song, Willard M., who helped sing, had a further surprise for us when he said that Matthew [Nisly] and Andrea [Mast] requested that the Shalom Quartet sing this song at their wedding this fall. That was Papa making an engagement announcement for his daughter and her fiance. I never saw that one coming. I was really caught up in the beauty of the words and music and John's lead first tenor part, and didn't stop to think much about why this was happening now.

I also heard that Jared Mast and Sara Yoder's engagement was announced several weeks ago. An October wedding is planned.

************************

Amos Nisly, our retired bishop, turned 87 last week. His oldest son, JR, was in church today, apparently here to help celebrate.

************************

I recently watched this story documenting one part of the story on cancer research and treatment and found it compelling . . . and unnerving. I recommend it.

************************

Over the past several years we have bought and lost lots of guineas, but one pair has survived at least two seasons longer than any others. At least Hiromi says they're a pair, based on the noises they make. He learned how each of them sounds from a woman who brought guineas to the poultry auction in Yoder one year. They keep each other company regularly and roost together at night in the rafters of the hog barn.

Of late, though, only one lonely guinea has been keeping watch in the vicinity of the front yard. I suspected they were up to reproductive tasks, but my careful searches in the thick growth of the pampas grass clumps by the driveway failed to reveal a nest. On Friday my sleuthing paid off. While I watched one guinea in the middle of the front lawn, I heard another somewhere near the road. So I marched out there toward the mailbox and peered under many clumps of foliage in the overgrown flower beds along the driveway. Nothing there. I walked around to the backside of the curving corner bed and investigated from that angle. Aha! In the shadowy area under overhanging peony leaves I spied the white-dotted plumage of our pearl guineas. The bird sat tight and I didn't disturb her--or is it him? Someone told Hiromi the males do the incubating, but I haven't seen that verified elsewhere, and I rather doubt it.

Tonight for a time both guineas were walking around together again. No matter, we thought. At 106 degrees ambient outdoor temperature, those eggs were in no danger of cooling off.

Lizzie N. told me that guinea eggs are quite small and very pointed. The shells seem impossibly strong and hard to crack. The nests are deep and hatches can be very large. Leading tiny downy keets through wet grass is the besetting sin of guinea hens. Soaked babies do not fare well, and many of them die.

We're racking our brains to try to think of a way to provide some protection for the babies once they hatch, but the adults are not used to confinement, and we can't really think of a surefire way to catch them and then exclude predators after they're caught. The black mama cat has three babies to train to hunt, and we're afraid stalking keets would make an easy and rewarding hunting exercise.

The whole point of having guineas around is to depopulate the resident insects, and more birds on patrol means fewer marauding insects. We're beginning to see grasshoppers around, and Hiromi can't reach the company in Colorado that used to sell Nolo Bait, the parasitic nematode that can eventually decimate the grasshopper population if grasshoppers ingest the nematode-laced bran bait. Dying grasshoppers are cannibalized by other grasshoppers, and the infection spreads nicely by this means.

Having grasshoppers die by means of nematodes sure beats having to snip them in half with my flower scissors. Every time I do it I shudder violently and almost can't use my scissors right away again for delicate tasks like harvesting picture-perfect zinnias, but the next time I see them chomping on a stem right under a big, beautiful flower otherwise destined for a bouquet, my heart hardens right up again, and I snip and snap my scissors enthusiastically in the direction of any grasshopper I see.

Shane is doing his bit to help by stocking the grazing area around the garden with cattle. Four Angus pairs arrived around dark on Saturday night. They stepped off the stock trailer and promptly disappeared into the dusk. I haven't seen them since, although they've been up at the tank for a drink. Keeping the vegetation short should provide less favorable conditions for grasshoppers. They love to inhabit tall, heavily-foliaged areas.

***********************

At Farmer's Market on Saturday, a customer asked how the beef Shane was selling had been fed. This was meat from an animal in Myron's registered Gelbvieh herd. He feeds them corn for about the last three months before they're "harvested." (How do you like that innocuous-sounding euphemism?) That was not what the lady was hoping to hear. She is very sensitive to corn, and suffers a reaction if she eats meat from animals that have been fed corn.

I suggested she keep checking back, since Shane hopes to eventually sell meat from forage-fed cattle that he has raised. If he has to wait till this year's calf crop is ready, it will be awhile. If he can buy something before then that has been raised on forage alone, perhaps it can happen sooner. No added hormones and no antibiotics should be part of the good-for-you meat animal package too.

**********************

Shane, Dorcas, and I manned the market booth on Saturday. Hiromi spent the day at home, for the first time in many months. We're still playing catchup on this year's weed crop, and he was glad for the opportunity to work on weeding. It was a muggy, 100+ day, and he reported that sweat rolled from his forehead and created rivers on the lenses of his glasses.

I was a little jealous of him when he stayed snugly in bed early in the morning while I hurried around to get ready for market, but it was my turn to luxuriate in a nap in the afternoon while he was out toiling in the heat.

**********************

During the school year my weekend rising time can be later than on weekdays. Not so this summer. My alarm is set to ring at 4:55 AM. on Saturday and Sunday morning. Studying for teaching my Sunday School class gets me up early on Sunday. I don't set an alarm on weekdays, but I usually wake before 7:00.

**********************

I've been enjoying my front porch the past few days. On Thursday I finally got all my decorative pots planted and arranged where I wanted them on the porch. Before that I had purged the plastic leftover containers of earlier planting projects, and then swept and hosed off the floor. Yesterday I topped all the soil in the containers with Spanish moss--a trick that Diana from Benton's had given me for keeping containers from drying out too fast in the sun and wind. I watered on top of the moss and hoped for the best.

The flowers are an eclectic assortment. That's another way of saying there's not much rhyme or reason about the color choices--orange Lantana in one container and lavandar Lantana in another, and deep pink Vista Bubblegum Petunia in another. With the orange Lantana, I planted Talinum--which ends up with tiny orange ball-shaped structures on willowy stems. Before this, however, the orange balls are pink buds, and they really don't do much for the overall effect. It's my small outside-the-box venture into unconventional color combining. It helps that the pots are not clustered together near each other.