June 14

Posted by sydney on Jun 14th, 2009
  • 1793: June 14, 1793 – Cut four cucumbers.  Mr. John Muslo came.
  • 1791: June 14, 1791 – White frost, dark & cold; covered the kidney beans with straw last night.  My annuals, which were left open, much injured by the frost: the balsams, which touched the glass of the light, scorched.  Kidney-beans injured, & in some gardens killed.  Cucumbers secured by the hand-glasses but they do not grow.  The cold weather interrupts the house-martins in their building, & makes them leave their nests unfinished.  I have no martins at the end of my brew-house, as usual.
  • 1790: June 14, 1790 – Sweet hay-making weather.
  • 1789: June 14, 1789 – A patent machine, called a Fire Escape (rather perhaps a ‘Scape fire) was brought along Fleet street.  It consisted of a Ladder, perhaps 38 feet in length, which turned on a pivot, so as to be elevated or depressed at will, & was supported on timber frame-work, drawn on wheels.  A groove in each rail of this ladder-like construction admitted a box or hutch to be drawn up or let down by a pulley at the top round & by a windlass at bottom.  When the ladder is set up against a wall, the person in danger is to escape into the hutch, then drawn to the top.  That the ladder may not take fire from any flames breaking out below, it is defended all the way by a sheathing of tin.  Several people, it seems, had illiberally refused the Patentee the privilege of trying his machine against their houses:  but Mr White, on application, immediately consented; when the ladder was applyed to a sash on the second story, & a man was hoisted up, & let down with great expedition, & safety, & then a couple of boys went together.  Some spectators were of opinion that the hutch or box was too scanty or shallow, & for that security it ought to be raised on the sides and lower end by a treillis of strong wire, or iron-work, lest people in terror & confusion should miss of their aim & fall over to the ground.  This machine was easily drawn by four men only.  The ladder, the owner told us, would reach to a third story, when properly elevated.  The name of the Inventor is Mounsieur Dufour.
  • 1788: June 14, 1788 – The scarbaei solstitiales begin to swarm in my Brother’s outlet. My Bror this spring turned one of his grass-fields into a kitchen-garden, & sowed it with crops: but the ground so abounded with the maggots of these chafers, that few things escaped their ravages. The lettuces, beans & cabbages were mostly devoured: & yet in trenching this enclosure his people had destroyed multitudes of these noxious grubs. The stalks & ribs of the leaves of the Lombardy polare are embossed with large tumours of an oblong shape, which by incurious observers have been taken for the fruit of the tree. These Galls are full of small insects, some of which are winged, and some not. The parent insect is of the Genus of Cynips. Some poplars of the garden are quite loaded with these excrescencies.
  • 1786: June 14, 1786 – About Newton men were cutting their St foin: & all the way towards London their upland meadows, many of which, notwithstanding the drought, produce decent crops.  We had a dusty, fatiguing journey.  Bro Thos. has made his hay; & his fields are much burnt-up.
  • 1785: June 14, 1785 – Fly-catchers have young.  Standard honey-suckles beautiful, & very sweet.
  • 1782: June 14, 1782 – Ephemerae, may-flies, appear, playing over the streams: their motions are very peculiar, up & down for many yards, almost in a perpendicular line.
  • 1781: June 14, 1781 – We have planted-out a vast show of annuals, which will want no watering.
  • 1778: June 14, 1778 – White butter-flies unnumerable: woe to the cabbages!
  • 1776: June 14, 1776 – I saw two swifts, entangled with each other, fall out of their nest to the ground, from whence they soon rose & flew away.  This accident was probably owing to amorous dalliance.  Hence it appears that swifts when down can rise again.  Swifts seen only morning & evening: the hens probably are engaged all the day in the business of incubation;  while the cocks are roving after food down to the forest, & lakes.  These birds begin to sit about the middle of this month, & have squab young before the month is out.
  • 1775: June 14, 1775 – We just had the skirts of a vast thunder-storm.
  • 1774: June 14, 1774 – Swifts stay out ’til within 10 minutes of 9.  Ivy-berries fallen-off.  Young grasshoppers.
  • 1772: June 14, 1772 – Bright, sweet afternoon.