Michael Wolf @[email protected]

First rain

Recommended early-Autumn activity: harvest basil seeds.
Step 1: Cut off the flower/seed pod once it has turned entirely brown
Step 2: Leave to dry a few days
Step 3: Crush the pods in a paper bag
Step 4: Dump out onto a piece of paper, preferably folded a bit
Step 5: Blow the chaff away gently

Made an attempt to mount a butterfly for the first time. I found this fellow had been deceased for a bit of time so I didn't try to spread its wings too much.

I should have rearranged my home office sooner.

Been really enjoying my physical copy of Mini Motorways

Visited a lavender garden today. There are better places to have a baby photo shoot but always fun to see another farm.

Unseasonably early plums calls for jamming. This batch was just plums, sugar and pectin. Anyone have a better #recipe?

Went on a tour/lecture of First Rain Farm. No till and the only soil amendment is an on-site compost made of wood-chips and goat piss applied on the beds once a year. Prescribed burns and grazing for land management. Inspiring simplicity #permaculture

It seems I have forgotten how trees look #penandink

Interesting patterns in the yard today

"The elites don't want you to know this but the turkeys at your parents house are free. You can take them home. I have 458 turkeys." (I didn't actually take any baby turkeys)

Hate

New blog post! I finished reading The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and wrote down all of the fun middle english words I didn't know. Here are a few examples:

mickle: a great many
"Men go to the city of Rames, the which is but a little thence; and it is a fair city and a good and mickle folk therein."

septentrion: north, or northerly regions
"And therefore in the Septentrion, that is very north, is the land so cold, that no man may dwell there."

https://wolfmd.me/blog/words-of-sir-john-mandeville.html

Visit recommendation: North Fork American River

Bonus! This little seedling hitched a ride with one of the strawberry plants. My mother bought them from a nursery so perhaps it'll be interesting.

Hopefully these June-bearing strawberries don't mind being June-planted. This bed just took longer than expected to complete. Rabbits, please leave some for me.

In the age of the Commodore, 3-2-1 Contact, ostensibly a magazine aimed at children, published a series of pretty rad BASIC programs to be typed into #commodore #atari or other #retrocomputing machines. I've put together a somewhat searchable PDF of the old scans my dad had in his archives here: https://nullbrook.org/archive/books/321ContactBasicTraining/321ContactBasicTraining/321ContactBasicTraining.pdf but you can seek out the sections yourself in full color here: https://archive.org/details/321contact

The white flowers of this mock orange actually look pretty decent on this trellis. The smell is incredible and the pollen even more so. #florespondence

Delighted by Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, an early collection of nursery rhymes. The British Museum has made part of it available online. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/tommy-thumbs-pretty-song-book In addition to the humorous prose there's this little advertisement on the last page. "Tired of beating your children? Try teaching them some naughty rhymes!" #books #history