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I do see some bluegill/redear hybrids. Not a lot, but a few.

Definitely the type of situation where it is appropriate to apply the SSS rule.

Yep I’ve got nice redear in the pond. Quite a few of them >12” in size. They only spawn once per year so they don’t tend to get out of control the way bluegill do. I stocked the redear specifically for snail control so we don’t take them out unless gut/gill hooked and not going to survive. We swim in the pond and nobody likes a bad case of swimmer’s itch.

The BIG news - I am mowing the bank! I practiced on some short, steep banks

Mowing the pond dam with my Kubota ZTR was an unpleasant adventure until I swapped out the turf tires that it was originally equipped with for a set of Carlyle chevron tread tires.

Us kids were paid a PENNY for every ear we shucked. And it had to be PRISTINE! No silk left behind on those ears!

Oh my, they had you shucking corn the hard way. lol

By far the best way I've found to deal with sweet corn is to boil it in the shuck. Pull it out, dump it in an ice batch until it's cool enough to handle, cut the butt of the ear off with a sharp knife and peel towards the top. There will be very few silks left behind and those will usually come off with a quick rinse under running water.

It's been a wet week here in Central Missouri. I dumped another 1.8" out of the gauge this morning. There's close to a foot of new water in the pond over the last two weeks or so. Need another foot and a half to reach full pool.

If it's not dumping rain after work today I'm going to deploy the fyke net in my bait pond and see if I can catch out most of the bluegills that are in there. After that soak I'm going to move the net to the front pond and see what kind of weight reduction I can accomplish there. I'm hoping to pull 100lbs total weight - all bluegills under 9", all green sunfish, and maybe some yellow perch will be removed. Bluegills <7" will go to my buddy's quarry lake, bluegills 7"-9" will get the knife, bluegills >9" will go back into the pond.

I stopped by the nursery on my home from PT on Tuesday. Picked up a dozen tomato plants, two cayenne peppers, and four rhubarb plants. I re-potted the tomatoes and stuck them and the peppers in the greenhouse for now. It's too early to put them in the ground here, and even if it was time the ground is too muddy to even think about it.

So a T-Rex is basically a pre-historic, reptilian, democRat.

Raw bluegill, ditto.

We have an old tomcat that was born in the pile of construction waste that was left over from when we built our house in 2007. In March of 2008 we were sorting through the scrap heap, burning the small scraps and sorting out the lumber that was still useful for something.

I saw something fuzzy down in the pile and figured that it was a bunny rabbit nest. Nope. It was a litter of ~2 week old kittens. There were three charcoal gray and one yellow tabby. The yellow tabby went home with one of my 4H ham curing project kids. Two of the gray ones met with untimely ends. Steve went through the serpentine belt on my '99 Dodge pickup and Shanaynay got dog-chomped, but old Snoopy is still kicking.

Anyway, Snoopy absolutely loves raw fish. He will eat fish scraps until he can't choke any more down and if I don't keep them coming at a rate that suits him I'm liable to wind up with a bloody leg because he will literally use me for a climbing tree to get onto the butchering table.

It's quite a nuisance, actually, but he's been here almost as long as we have so I let him get away with pretty much whatever he wants to do.

The past week was a blustery one here in Central Missouri. Several squall lines came through bringing with them lots of wind and a bit of rain too - 2.5" spread over three storms.

I was able to get all of the mowing done Saturday while Mrs. Augie, three of our kids, two DiL, and five of the grands went to the zoo in St. Louis. After that was done I ran the tiller over the patch in the back where I used to plant the sunflower field, seeded it with Kentucky bluegrass, timothy, and fescue, then dragged it in with a cattle panel behind Mrs. Augie's golf cart. After THAT was done I spent a couple hours moving dirt from the giant heap into the new garden space. It will be a few days before it's dry enough to get over it with the tractor and tiller, but it needed some rain to help the loose dirt begin to settle.

I have three Dunstan Chestnut trees that still need to be planted. All of the spots in the grove along our driveway have been filled. I planted three others in the front yard where the kitchen garden used to be. I'm thinking I'll put the last three in the field that I sowed to grass on Saturday.

The yukon gold spuds that I buried at the edge of my compost heap have sprouted and are looking healthy. If they make a good crop I'll try it the same way next spring. Anything I can come up with that reduces my maintenance time in the garden is likely to happen at this stage of the game.

Nice. We got screwed last year and the year before and probably going to get screwed again this year.

I suppose I should be grateful I wasn’t floated down the river when the giant evil corporation I work for was assimilated by an even gianter and more evil corporation a couple years back.

Getting off the beaten path is usually a good plan, but don’t neglect to look at the edge of the parking lot and along that beaten path on your way out to the honey hole. Many people, in their haste to get away from everyone else, miss the ones that are right under their noses.

My forebears brought Virginia Bluebell bulbs with them when they migrated westward from the east coast in the 1700s. They worked their way across the Blue Ridge into Kentucky and eventually landed here in Misery.

The original homestead cabin here was built on a rocky knob sometime around 1840. For several years my wife and I would go there in the spring and dig Bluebells that we then transplanted at our homestead site. They struggled for the first few years but have been increasing steadily since they got settled.

Finding morels... the best advice I can give is to learn your trees. In my part of the world morels have an affinity for apple, ash, cedar, cottonwood, elm, mulberry, multiflora rose, and sycamore. There may be others but those are the species that I key on when I’m searching.

Then there’s the “I’m a fungus and I do what I want” thing... at my grandparents homestead (built in 1860) I would find morels growing all over the house yard. The trees there were catalpa, hickory, and oak. I suspect the affinity there was for the catalpa, but I can’t be certain. I would occasionally find some in a catalpa grove that my GrandPap and Great Uncle planted for fence posts in the early 1900s so there may be something to the catalpa affinity. I know people that claim to have spots where the predominant species of tree are oaks, but I’ve never been able to put a pattern together on those.

I know a lot of people who have good spots in the hills. Most of my spots are creek and river bottoms, but I do have a couple hill ground spots that are very reliable. I’m getting to the stage of life where it’s a lot easier to get to the patches on flat ground so I find myself checking the hill spots less often each year.

If you’re on fakebook you’ll find numerous morel hunting groups that can be a gold mine of good information if you’re willing to wade through the BS and troll posts, and there’s a lot of it to wade through even on the groups that are well-moderated.

My best spots are all on public land. Conservation areas along the Missouri River, city parks, state parks, national forest land, and wildlife reserves.

It’s been super warm and dry here in the middle of Misery for the past week. Most of the spots here are done if we don’t get some rain real soon now. It’s sprinkling out now with a good chance of heavier rain all day, and again on Thursday so I’m holding out hope that the late season will be a good one.

All this talk about morel mushrooms is making decide to share about a Wild Morel & Leek Jack cheese by Meister that’s just incredible when shredded and melted over steak.

That sounds amazing. I'm gonna have to try it.

I managed to catch a few more last week. Some of these had a bit of frostbite on them but that's no big deal - just snip the bad stuff off and they're good to go. We've eaten most of the freshest ones already. I gave a gallon or so away to a couple of my neighbors who can't get around good enough to find their own. I've got a couple gallons dehydrating to save for later, and the really junky ones I chucked on the ground in my woods to maybe get lucky and start a new patch.

My spots are pretty much finished for the year unless we get some rain real soon now.

I made some more progress on the new hoop house over the weekend. The stringers are all up and the ground has been covered with a nice layer of topsoil. Still need to install the cattle panels, frame the ends, and cover it with greenhouse film. I'm out of time to start tomatoes and peppers from seed so I'll just buy bedding plants this time.

The bundle of Dunstan Chestnut trees that I ordered earlier in the spring arrived on Friday. I was able to get two of them planted yesterday morning. I hope to get the rest of them in by the end of the week.

Why wait for it be empty?

I'd think it would be too early for morels to be popping up there on the tundra. They're just getting going good down here. I checked my creek on Saturday and found two scouts where I always find them. That means it's time for me to leave the early spots alone and start checking the spots where they come later.

Pops came over yesterday morning and ran the post hole digger for me. I don't ask him to any heavy lifting these days but it makes him happy to get out and help how he can, especially if it gives him a chance to use one of the tractors. Once the holes were punched he went to the couch and I got busy. Cleaned out the holes, bedded the posts in ag lime, set the temporary braces, and called it a day. This hoop house is going to be a bit bigger than the old one - 10'x25' with 9' to the peak of roof. I'd like to have it finished by the weekend but I have a feeling that mushroom hunting may slow the progress just a bit.

Last week was mostly cool and breezy here in Central Missouri. We had a couple rounds of showers move through during the week. 1.1" from one and .3" from the other. It's setting up to be a good year for finding morels.

I'm going to stay out of the woods today and try to get something done out in the new garden patch. Maybe set the posts for the new hoop house...

Gorgeous weather over the past week here in Central Missouri. The weekend was busy as most are here.

The grass has been mowed and several more dead trees have been chopped down, cut up into smaller pieces, and shoved off into the sippy hole. This one was a whopper and I'm happy to be rid of it.

Main tasks for this week are to put down on paper how I'm going to lay out the beds in the new garden and to set the posts that will support the new hoop house. I hooked the post hole digger up to Mr. Clarence yesterday but with all of the chainsaw time I decided to give my bones a couple days to recover before I start setting fence posts.

That and it's time to get serious about looking for morels.

That sounds like a lot of work. There's not enough of me to go around so I'm always looking for ways to simplify what I need to do.

I started off 16 years ago with three bulbs of California White from one of the local hippie food stores. They were about half the size of the bulb pictured below. I saved back the best bulbs for planting and now almost every bulb comes out near the size of a baseball.

Garlic is super easy Pete, and it does very well in raised beds.

In our growing area stick cloves in the soil by Thanksgiving, cover with 6” of compost, keep the weeds out, water a bit if the weather is bone dry, harvest when the tops are mostly dried up and starting to fall over - usually around July 4th.

Pull it, braid it, hang it in a well-ventilated place that’s out of the sun to cure.