Looking back at summer

This summer I traveled to Ohio as my nephew was getting married. I just happened to stop a few places on my way back. One of my ancestors was involved in the Ohio Erie Canal, he likely was the driving force to get it built. So we have been contracting a long time in my family so to speak. His crews might have built Lock 48 shown below. Not much of the canal remains these days. It is hard to believe this tiny lock had so much commerce going though it.

Lock 48 on the Ohio Erie Canal in southern Ohio.

Mabry Mill on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

My timing was pretty good, but the bright sun kept coming and going, waited for a cloud to cover everything for maybe 20 minutes. The sun was still hitting the roofs of the mill.

Moving up on the Internet!

This week DSL became available here finally. We are no longer out in the "country". For the past 4 years we have used Wild Blue Satellite for our internet provider. Rain would kill it and to get barely enough bandwidth we paid $70 a month  for this crappy service. Tonight after calling them yesterday (Wild Blue took weeks to get hooked up) we are online with a 3MB connection at least 4-5 times faster than before. And all the bandwidth we want, Netflix look out! Saving money too, the landline and DSL cost $60 a month, so we are saving $35 a month. Looking forward to canceling Wild Blue in the morning!

Gardening News:

Sunday we put out the bird feeders and are now using local, yes I said local black oiled sunflower seeds. The platform feeder which was already in the garden had birds in about 2 minutes. The new locations for two of the feeder took maybe 15 mins.

Today I found a Carolina Chickadee on the porch railing, it must have been stunned as I touched its beak with a piece of orange and it did not fly away or want the orange.

The hard freeze(28 this morning) finally dropped the rest of the plants including the rosebud saliva which was still blooming. The blooms on the two camellias blooming were not effected. Kanjiro and Pink Butterfly each have 10-15 blooms on them.

The cold frames I picked mustard greens tonight to add to our salad. Kale and Rape should be picking pretty soon. Green outside the cold frames are doing fine, but not growing as fast as in the cold frames.