The lake is way down and has been for nine months or so. Down so far that the pump system I have down on the dock was inoperative because the water intake point was high and dry. In fact, the bottom was dry beneath the intake point so even extending it down wouldn’t fix the problem. That would have been too easy anyway. I’m very patient and lived with this for quite a while knowing that I didn’t really need to water anything in the winter and that when spring came the lake would rise up and solve the problem. It hasn’t happened that way and many of the plants I have down by the lake are drying up and dying. That plus the fact that we’re having a party next week and I wanted to power wash the dock but without water, no go.

So I bit the bullet this weekend and decided to correct the problem by moving the water intake point out to deeper water. I could have just moved the pump itself farther out the dock but really like it where it is. If my new plumbing job doesn’t work, that will be my fallback. The job is simple enough on paper. Just add some PVC pipe and couplings. But it had to be run underneath the dock which is a bit trickier and means I would be working in waist deep water and working over my head with a drill to install the pipe hangers. For me that means the certain dropping of hardware and couplers while trying to screw in hangers and hold a 20′ piece of PVC pipe in place; and the real possibility of dropping my drill. Which would really piss me off because it’s my favorite 19V DeWalt. Then assuming I got the pipe hangers installed, I had to cut and glue the various pieces together with all the measurements exactly right. For many guys all this would be a piece of cake. And guess what, the project went flawlessly. Not a dropped part, not a piece missing, not a bad cut or glue job. No trips to the hardware store or even the shed to get that one thing I’d forgotten about. I started the job at 9:30 and was finished by 11 AM. I need to let all the pieces set for 24 hours before firing up the pump so the story is not complete but the nasty part is done and looks very professional (to me). And because it’s located under the dock, I don’t have to worry about critics.

My next project is to assemble and install the yellow fly traps. Now that is a nasty job but the flies have come this year with a vengeance.

—————

I’ve often heard that after a bee stings you, it dies. I hope so. In fact I hope it’s a very painful death. I got my first bee sting this season clearing palmettos and had forgotten just how hard they hit and how nasty the after affects are. I do daily battle with fire ants and give as good as I get but the bees play at a totally different level.

And once again it’s yellow fly season. Yellow flies are like deer flies but yellow in color. They bite hard enough to draw blood and are super persistent. If you are patient enough to let one land and start to chew, you can easily kill them because they won’t let go. Nancy has trouble with that remedy. There is a way to semi control them. Sounds bizarre but they are attracted to black things. So we build traps that use the same principal as fly paper. You blow up a 20” beach ball and paint it black. Then you coat it with this nasty, sticky stuff called “Tacky Foot”. Easier to say than to do since the goop is about consistency of axle or bearing grease but is incredibly sticky. Any place it touches gets this difficult to remove gluey mess. I use latex gloves to apply it and am getting proficient enough that this year I wasn’t totally coated myself.

—————

And for the guys – watching the Dem’s fight over the nomination shows that we have a real problem. If you don’t like Obama, you’re a racist; if you don’t like Hillary, you’re a sexist. Our problem is that we don’t have any kind of “ist” for people who pick on us poor white males. I guess that’s ok for us Republicans since we are used to being called either Racist or Sexist but not sure how you white Democrat males – as few of you as there are – are dealing with having to take on one of the labels and not having some kind of defensive shield to hide behind.

The real shockers in the garden so far are two varieties that I’d never planted. I tried planting spinach all winter long – several different varieties, different locations, different times. Nothing really worked to my satisfaction and the crops ranged from total disaster to marginally acceptable. Tucked away in one of my catalogs was a variety that said it did well in the summer, especially hot, moist summers. It was a climbing, red stemmed variety called Malabar Spinach. I tried it out of desperation. It started slowly, as in 2 weeks before the first sign of any germination and it was more than a month before it got beyond the first two or three leaves. I pretty much forgot about it and chalked it up to another spinach failure. It’s been particularly vexing since spinach is really a no brainer crop. Overnight it seems that climbing spinach took off and within a couple of weeks it has climbed up maybe 5′ on the lines I had optimistically installed. If you didn’t know it was a spinach variety, you’d never guess. The leaves are very thick and have a rubbery feel to them. The garden calculator I designed says that I should have edible leaves in a couple of weeks and I’m starting to believe it’s correct. In fact, if it continues the way it’s going, everybody I know will have edible leaves.

The other shocker is the spaghetti squash. We love it and I’d never grown it before so really didn’t know what to expect. This is as close to a jack in the beanstalk story as I’ve come. I planted 3 seeds and have 3 plants; each with multiple stems. At this point the stems are approaching 8′ in length and the leaves are at least a foot in diameter. It started blossoming a couple of weeks ago and there must be 2 dozen baby squashes so far. And I can only see a bit of the plant since I planted it amongst the corn field just like the Indians did. In fact I planted several different types of squash in the corn and in some cases now the squash is actually taller than the corn – that would be over 5′ tall. Maybe I need to rethink my bug killing strategy and let some survive to help harvest the crop.

Also tried a couple new cucumber varieties. Holy cow!!! We’ve been harvesting a couple a day for the past month from 3 plants and they are ginormous. One day they will be micro – a couple of inches – and within a week they are over a foot long and weighing a couple of pounds. Each one would be equivalent to 3 cuc’s you buy in the store. And they are the most delicious ever. No matter how big they retain the firm, juicy character you’d expect from a baby variety. And they are burpless – no bitter after taste that bothers some people. Considering the price of cucumbers, I honestly think that one crop alone has paid for all the seeds for the rest of the garden. Ditto the zucchini.

By the end of the month we’ll be picking corn, tomatoes, green peppers and jalapeno’s. And actually pulling out the first planting of beans from which we’ve been eating for a month.

New guests – we have a pair of screech owls living in the oaks up by the carport. They are incredible birds and are harassing the squirrels (tree rats) with constant screeching and flying beautifully among the trees. The noise is really mind boggling and you can understand the terror it must strike in the hearts of any small mammals. It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever seen more than one owl at a time and in the middle of the day. The pair was perched on a low branch facing away from me the other day. I was probably within 50′ which is really close. Then both turned their heads to face me directly. No body movement at all, just the head swivel. Is that creepy – but neat. One second you’re looking at the back of the head, the next the face full on. It’s like the head is totally disconnected from the body.

We recently refinanced our house to take advantage of low interest rates available then. About midway thru the process we were told by Chase, the mortgage bank, that a new appraisal showed that we needed to increase our flood insurance because the replacement costs would be higher now than when the initial mortgage was written. Made sense to me.

A little history – when we originally built the house the surveys showed that we didn’t need Federal Flood Insurance because we were not in a flood plain and the house was elevated far enough above the lake. When it came time to finalize the mortgage, the bank (Chase) disagreed and said we needed flood insurance. I argued a little but we were far along in the process and the insurance was only $264/year and I wasn’t really sure about the lake.

So anyway it wasn’t a big surprise when the bank insisted that we uptick the insurance a bit. Fast foward to this week and we get a letter from Chase saying that we really didn’t need flood insurance at all and if we wanted to cancel it, just use the letter in a communication with the Insurance company. I didn’t jump on it instantly because I wanted to contact our home owner policy and get it exactly right in my mind about what constitutes a flood and to make sure that water damage resulting from blown in windows or roofs was covered by our home owner policy and not considered flooding. Last night Nancy is reading the local paper and hands it over and tells me to read this article on Flood Insurance since it answered all the questions I had. It did that but it also included a chart which showed how many flood insurance policies were in existance in all the communities of Volusia County and also what the average cost of those policies is. I looked down the list and noted that there were 14000+ policies in Daytona and maybe that many in New Symrna and that they cost about $400 on average. Further down the list was Pierson, our location. There was 1, one, uno flood policies in existance in Pierson at an average cost of $264. I cracked up laughing. That had to be us. I can just imagine all the people reading that article wondering who the jerk was in Pierson who had a Flood Insurance policy. Hope they publish the list next year!

Did my first work till exhaustion, jump in the lake today. I was harvesting grape vines and brush from my neighbor’s yard and chipping it into mulch for the garden. Is that over the top or what? I’m so convinced that the success of the garden is directly wired to the addition of mulch that I’m actually spending hours working on the neighbor’s jungle. Man did that lake feel good. Very cool and it brought my body temp down from 200 to 75 in about 5 seconds. Bring on the heat, I’m ready.

Of course the pic is the garden. People have asked for a picture so here it is. I guess everybody knows that you click on the picture to enlarge it but just in case……………