September Already?

I began the Swann Family News eleven years ago today. It was a Saturday in 2003 as it is in 2014. Time sure flies!

I find it hard to believe that Labor Day has come and gone. Summer is winding down. This has been a dry summer. Those crops planted late have suffered. We did get over four inches of rain in the last week that offered some relief. As it is, the smell of tobacco barns being fired hangs in the air.

LIMBER GIRL. We took supper of to Mom’s a couple of times last weekend. One of those evenings Jenna called me to the living room saying, “Can you do this, Dad?” She was lying face down on the floor where she had folded her legs, arched her back, and pushing with her hands, raised her head so that she touched the back of her head with her toes.

No, Dad cannot do that. All I managed to do when I tried was a pushup.

A bit later she was sitting on the floor with her legs folded under her when she laid back flat on the floor. (Picture her laying flat on her back with her legs folded so that her feet are still under her rear.) Then she invited the boys to copy her. Being the young, gullible sort they eagerly set out to show their sister they could do anything she could. They quickly found out their quads aren’t as flexible as Jenna’s.

BEES. Back in July I mentioned that we had a hive of bees in one of the front porch columns, and that a friend of mine was trying to get them to move. Well, he has coaxed a large number of bees to move into his hive box. Last weekend he returned with an established colony of bees in another box and took the box that had been here away. His plan is to introduce the bees from here into another colony while leaving the new group of bees to attack what’s left of the bees in my column and clean out the honey in there. This plan can backfire if his bees like my column better than their current home, at which point he will start over and try again. But if this goes as planned there will be little honey left on my column and I will be able to clean and repair it safely.

What was really interesting is that he brought a flexible camera (or snake camera) with him to look around inside the column. The flexible piece is only about a foot long, but we got to look around at what was going on in there. We have no idea how far the honeycomb goes up the column, but there was plenty of it at the bottom where he inserted the camera. It was fascinating to see the bees crawling around.

PICKING PUMPKINS. Jenna and Ben have been offered a short-term job picking pumpkins for Steve Freeland. Today was their first day and they both put in about four hours. I think he’ll be able to keep them busy in the afternoons and on Saturdays for several weeks.

Steve has grown and sold pumpkins at his house for the last 16 years. The kids learned today that he raises over 50 varieties of pumpkins on about 8 acres of his farm. These varieties range in size from small, decorative ones that are golf ball sized to some large enough to require two people to lift them. He told the kids he grows 12,000-14,000 pumpkins a year. He fills large orders for some wholesalers as well as selling to the public himself. Most of these are for fall and Halloween decorations, but he raises pie pumpkins as well. I’m just amazed at the number of pumpkins he grows.

Joe