Strawberry season is upon us. We’ve had about a week of beautiful berries. Yesterday we used them all up, so today we went on a quest for some more. We’re buying local, especially after watching “Food, Inc.” the other night. I’m a lifelong vegetarian, so the images of how we treat our “meat animals” was hard to watch in the first place, but even given that, it seems we’re on an insane path with our food. One fellow suggested the department of agriculture set forth a goal with our food production that we’ll have fewer people in the hospital next year compared to this year. What would change if that became the goal? It is a strange world we live in when a goal like that seems so radical and unlikely.
Anyway, we drove to L’anse first to get some paperwork signed for a project I’m working on for FOLK. Our drive around L’anse and Baraga on the way home bore no fruit 🙂 So we decided to drive to Nisula and get our berries at the Hulkunen farm. Since Prickett Lake was right on the way, we decided to make the short detour to look at our old friend. I had heard the hydro part of Prickett was down, so wondered if the lake was down also, but it was up to its usual level. Back in the car and on to Nisula to be greeted by the sign that said the berries were sold out for the day. We stopped anyway and chatted a bit, then headed home. Somewhat wiser, we called the only other place we knew about, and luckily they had berries and agreed to hold 6 quarts for us.
Supper tonight had several local components. We had greens from our garden, asparagus from our friends the Krumm’s garden, and strawberries from down the road.
During the day I was working on the pipe supports for the new dock that will go in the front pond. I’ll need to drive the pipes into the mud in the bottom of the pond, so needed to fashion a point for the pipes. I decided to slice a triangle out of a small section of pipe, and then pound the result together to make the point. I used the acetylene torches for the first one, and it worked pretty well. Unfortunately I ran out of oxygen just as I was finishing it, so the torches were down. For the second one, I used my metal cutting band saw to cut out the triangle. It was a bit slower, but the results were as good if not better:
We’ll see hopefully tomorrow if the metal work I did will work or not. Hopefully some pictures of the new dock installed will be forthcoming.