I been so busy with work and math and physics that I have not had the
time to post
much on biology.

Last night we had a thunderstorm and it shook off the pears from the
pear tree and the
ground was like a carpet of pears. So I let the horses loose on those
pears and they started
munching away. This year was a wet year and bad on apples for only one
tree produced apples, the oldest tree.

This year was bad on cherries also, so it seems that wet years are not
very good on
fruit trees as compared to normal rainfall years. So I am guessing
that wet conditions
somehow tells the tree to preempt the fruit.

It was a good year for my grapes though, and able to can some
leftovers.

However the item I most needed this year was cucumbers and pickles
since I am
down to my last jar of pickles. I cannot find any pickles in stores
better than my
homemade pickles. And for some reasons too long to tell, my cucumbers
got off to a
late start of end of July. But last night I canned 6 quarts of
pickles. And too bad that the heat of summer is past us, for I would
have loved eating cucumber salads in the worst of the summertime heat.
So cucumbers are the highest priority vegetable. And another problem
with pickles that I have not yet coordinated is the dill to harvest in
conjunction with
pickle canning. Every year I sow the dill too early and by the time
the cucumbers come, the dill has already gone. So I need to improve on
cucumbers and dill.

I have found the ducks and goose to be low maintenance, but come
winter I may voice a different opinion.

This was the year in which the horse fencing was reinforced and sadly
a lot of the other work I wanted accomplished was put aside. Hopefully
next year will not be so far behind in work schedule. But when you
have animals to care for, fencing fencing and more fencing is a
priority.

The cats are doing well, although I lost three males this summer. The
males have a tendency to roam, looking for their own female and home,
and they have a tendency to fight, so they roam even if they do not
want to roam. The new news with the cats is that I
now have three white cats, two pure white and one that is 95% white.
What I intend to do is
breed the white ones with one another.

I should report on cat intelligence. They are smarter than what we
think, in that they have the landscape almost memorized and know how
to get from point A to point B with ease. I am not sure how it works,
perhaps part visual memory of landscape and part scent trails which
they follow. So that if they go into new territory, they scent their
way and if they decide to go back home, they follow their scent traces
of where they came. I would be interested in knowing how cats can go
through a corn field and yet come out where they
started from, if not by retracing their scent trail.

Also, since it was a wet year, we have had a profusion of frogs and
toads. I feel the environment is still good enough if there are frogs
and toads present. But I sure feel sorry for frogs and toads because
they are so soft bodied to be prey for so many other animals,
and I hate to see my cats attacking a frog. But you have to let Nature
run its course.

Archimedes Plutonium
http://www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies