Leah Bolt left in March to return home to PA. We certainly miss her and hope she comes back next winter! So we’re down to 6 residents. The first picture below is of David (Leah’s son), Leah and Dominique. The other pictures below are of the Swensons with Alice and the Hinckleys who brought the Paulsons for a visit.
The Larsons came to visit John. While they were here they celebrated John’s 90th… we weren’t allowed to but they could! The staff made a cake with a fish on it.
Speaking of John and fish, he’d been saving up the fish he caught until he had enough for a fish fry. One day for lunch he fried them up… we really enjoyed them. The Vissers came to see John, shown here with Mireille and Dominique. Calvin and Nedda Pinland also visited John.
Lyle and Barbara Davies came to see Alice (Barbara is Alice’s niece). They were with us for a special evening at Samuel and Conchita’s, with the Makis and the Milles.
Monte and Gail Townsend visited, and the Jagielskis visited with Rachel, Jennifer and Joyce.
Samuel turned 53. Elton, Lety and Hannah visited Roger and Teresa in the nursing home. Naomi is in another nursing home, and is not doing well at all.
Blanca and the Rodriguez family visited Raymond. Also the Davila family.
We had 7″ of rain which caused some flooding problems. Samuel and I learned how to graft pecan trees, and the wisteria bloomed.
For those interested, I’ll tell more about the grafting… All of our pecan trees are grafted.. a paper shell pecan grafted onto a native (wild) pecan root. The native pecans have much better roots than the paper shell… the paper shell have much better fruit. Every year some trees are damaged for some reason, and are cut off, so only the native root is left. It quickly sends up branches which would form a native pecan tree. We cut those branches off (there are 2 from the same root in the picture above), and graft in a short piece of pecan wood which was cut in December and refrigerated till the trees bud in March. In this case the graft wood came from a Kiowa paper shell pecan tree, so if the grafts take, this tree will be a Kiowa. The little piece of Kiowa was sharpened with a knife and inserted between the wood and the bark of the native pecan. It’s critical that the green cambium layers between the bark and the wood, be in contact with each other…. that’s where the life is. Tape is used to hold the graft together, and a plastic bag is taped over the graft to prevent it from drying out. In a few weeks, if the graft is successful, the buds on the graft wood will turn green and produce a new branch. We grafted 2 on most trees just because we expect about a 60% success rate, so hopefully 1 of the 2 will take. If they both take, one will be cut off at the ground, so there is only 1 tree trunk.
We have the choice of grafting (this is the first time we’ve tried it) or purchasing a new tree (already grafted) from a nursery. Grafting ourselves has two advantages… it’s cheap… and it takes advantage of roots that are already established. A grafted tree will grow much more quickly than a new tree, because it doesn’t need to grow new roots.
Ken