A Day for Bottling

Yesterday morning, I picked eight or 10 pounds of wild plums from a tree on the northwest corner of The Homestead. Together, VSO and EDO bottled eight or 10 jars (bottles?) of plum jam. Can you tell who made the labels? While the water was hot, they also made six jars of pickles. It was a lot of work, but we'll use every bit of it this fall and winter.

The Rain Arrives

In the Parowan Valley, the month of June is typically our driest. By the middle of July, however, we can expect to start seeing monsoonal moisture. In 2012, I noted that we waited 56 days for the monsoons to start, with our first notable rainfall occurring on 13 July. This year, it started a week early. On Tuesday, the 8th, we got so much rain in Parowan that our basement flooded. It wasn't a bad flood, but there was enough water outside the house to pool-up and run in our doors and windows. Two days later, on the 10th, I drove from Marysvale to Parowan in near constant rain. These weren't isolated showers, instead the sky was low and grey from horizon to horizon. It is hot and sunny again now, but I guess the June drought is officially over for 2014. (As a minor aside, when Willa Cather writes about drought—as she does in Death Comes for the Archbishop—she spells it "drouth.")

WSB

I don't know what it is like where you live (or, as foresters from the lake states like to say, "in your neck of the woods"), but in southern Utah we are experiencing a Western Spruce Budworm (WSB, Choristoneura occidentalis) epidemic. The adult is a moth, but the growing budworm is, well, a caterpillar. The caterpillar feeds on the new leaves of spruce, fir, and Douglas fir. In our area, Douglas fir have been particularly hard hit, and many of them are partially defoliated. But, the reason I mention this now is that I was working in an infested stand last week. I was alone and it was quiet. As I worked, I could hear a steady pit-pat like rain on the forest floor. This being southern Utah the sky was, of course, clear, and there was no rain in the forecast. Instead, it was raining frass—the poop of the caterpillar.