I've been out in the garden every morning and evening for the past week, it is finally starting to show the work that has been put into it.

The Joseph's Coat Roses are in bloom, I had hopes the yellow part of the flower would have been a bit brighter, maybe it's a nutrient thing...

The irises transplanted from my Mom's yard in MA are looking ready to be divided later this summer, time to dig a new flower bed!

In the veggie garden:
Sunflowers are starting to take off, several neighbors have asked me if I am going to plant them again this year, they really got a kick out of the 12 foot monsters. Right now they just look a little leafy.

My new thing for this year, popcorn...we'll see how this goes!

The lettuce is already providing plenty of salads and the collards, kale and Swiss chard are taking their dear sweet time.  The brassicas are hiding under the floating row covers to protect them from caterpillars and harlequin beetles that will chew them to the nubs.

 The fruit production seems to be moving along...

Baby apples

Blueberries, not yet blue

Strawberries, ready to pick for dinner

My husband's babies, Sarracenia Pitcher Plants, in bloom.

Later this afternoon/evening's project--planting asst squash, pumpkins,okra, and a few extra popcorn seeds, they will soak for a few hours first.

The other big project:

The Blue Behemoth

It looks worse than it is.  It is getting new axle bearings, so it is on jack stands, our neighbor is a bored former Dodge mechanic who is helping us out for fun, that is a huge help.  It is a '95, but it has spent all of it's time until a month ago in Hemet, CA--so there is no rust!!  It spent the first 17 years as transport for a retirement home, so there is space between the seats for folks to put their walkers, or just stretch out those extra long legs!   The next three years it was a musician's haul-mobile and then it moved him and his family across the country, and then two weeks later it became ours! It has 50% less miles on it than my car. The engine needs one O ring, it came with new brakes and tires...it will be the vacation and hauling mobile.  The interior was absolutely disgusting, and the windows were covered by stickers of Elsa and Ana from Frozen, but two afternoons and four cans of carpet cleaner later it is pretty clean.  I'll steam everything once it is mobile again.  Ahhhhhhhhhh, to go camping and have free space under my legs and to be able to move and inch or two to the left or right without bumping into gear!  Summer's coming!

The Let Me Think About It Monster

Around 28 days remain in the school year, so we are preparing by looking at the day camps available.  Music? Fine Arts? Sports? Computer? Hunger Games? We looked at them all,the ones offered by the school district, by the county parks and recreation, by the local community college, private, everything. Some were a half day, some were a full day, some were a half day, but were an hour or more away from home...what does Mom, the chauffeur, do when camp is in session for four hours or less?

The half-day/hour away camps were crossed right off the list.

The unbelievably expensive horse camps crossed right out.

The drama camps were immediately vetoed by my daughter, though they would do her some good.

The cheer camps were not an option, we skipped the ballet from three years old and gymnastics every week by choosing to buy groceries during those early years.  Besides, she wouldn't be caught  wearing the giant hair bows in public, even when she was three, she yanked those things out.

The computer camp she wanted the most turned out to be when we will be camping out West, we crossed it off. The others just wouldn't do.

 In the midst of our conversations a friend texted her that there was a Hunger Games camp offered by the community college and that they should sign up together.  Her eyes lit up, and her words tumbled up on top of one another.  She was waiting for her friend to text her an image of the camp description.  Meanwhile, I handed her the paper brochure and asked that she read it carefully. On closer inspection the Hunger Games camp was not what it appeared to be.  A little phrase at the end of it noted that  it was an academic camp and that a great deal of time would be spent in the classroom researching the information needed to survive outdoors. My daughter flopped in the red chair and harumphed that it sounded more like school than a Hunger Games role play.  She wanted to learn the information about the plants, starting fires, strategy and such, but wanted to learn it outdoors and then role play the game with her friends, do it like in the movies, go through training and then into the games.

I continued chopping vegetables for dinner.

I pointed out that I had been trying to teach her about the plants in the woods ever since she was little, but she really didn't want to hear it from me.  I pointed out that I had been doing the same with some of the outdoor craft that one needs to master, building a fire and so on, she had pretty much ignored me.  Her fires smoked and then went out.

I pointed out that I could teach a bunch of that to her and maybe a couple of her friends.

The scrunched brows, lifted, the eyes lit up, the wheels turned and I thought, "Oh no, what is cooking inside that head of hers?"

"We could run our own Hunger Games camp! My friends could come and we'd learn stuff from you and some of them know stuff too, that we could use and we could do it for a whole week and..."

I put the chef knife down and thought, "Oh no, what monster have I created?!"  Then I realized that this was the first thing that she had been truly excited about in a long time, so I stuck the monster image away in the back of my brain and entertained the idea.

I said,"Let me think about it. Something like that would take a good deal of time and preparation and I would need to consider quite a few things. It would be a huge project and I don't know if I'm going to do it, but let me think"  She pushed to plan it immediately, and I pushed back saying I needed time to consider it and that it might be a "No.".

For the rest of the day she was floating.  The energy the idea had given her made her bob through her chores and even be pleasant and on-time the next morning.

When she returned from school she stated that she needed to use the computer "as a tool" (meaning she was not going to play a game and use it as a toy, which has a time limit) and that it was TOP SECRET, at least for now. She shut the office door and tapped away at the keyboard, while I chuckled as I prepped another dinner.  Twenty minutes later she emerged and asked me to enter the office to view the TOP SECRET document she had created.

It was a PowerPoint that contained the fourteen names of kids she had recruited for the camp at school that day.  It contained research for Nerf guns and pricing. It contained a list of the different expertise topics, including martial arts and knife throwing, of the fourteen kids she recruited and some logistical planning.  If I could only get her to do that level of detail for her 4-H poultry project!

What proceeded next was the--I said I would think about it, not that I would do it, and fourteen kids are too many, etc. conversation.

I will probably do something, with tops six kids including mine.  Find some edible plants, find some that need to be avoided, learn to start a fire, learn to tell direction by the stars, read a compass, sleep in a tent without freaking out, outdoor sorts of things mixed with ice cream eating, hot dog roasting, and sprinkler running.  The next day, let them role play Hunger Games for a bit,  the average session only lasts about an hour until they get bored, and wave goodbye in the morning.

Old and New

The little ones hanging around the run.

I've been busy in the garden and with my chicken girls.  The little chicks have been enjoying pleasant days outside in their run, and evenings back inside in their brooder for warmth.  The big chicks have been busy, they left off laying for the winter and it took a while for them to resume, but they have bounced back with plenty of spring!

Looks like no one collected yesterday!!

There are beginnings in spring and there are endings.  Our crab apple trees is aged, which makes it so spectacular, but last night we had heavy rain and winds and it lost a limb.  One more chore to add to the list.

Flower bed by the driveway, needs some serious attention.

The apple trees we planted shortly after we moved in are just now maturing to the point of producing apples, if the deer will let it happen.  

Dwarf Liberty Apple Tree

Brassicas with floating row covers to keep out harlequin beetles and cabbage loopers.

Mixed very baby greens, salad in two weeks!!

Quince

Love this color!

Athena supervising my photography.

Ursula, curious, but camera shy.

I was recently asked why I don't write about my cats much and I present to you Exhibit A

Most of their action occurs between 10 PM and 1:30 AM, usually involving hockey with a plastic Easter egg that clatters on our wood floors , or else kitty opera.  At that time of day, I am usually not in the mood to take cute videos.  Their days, at 12 years old next month, involve aerobic napping, hard core snoozing, and, once in a while, illicit tuna mooching.

Layers and Layers

I made a few changes in my gardens this year. Last year I had two vegetable gardens, the front one and the back one.  Yes, we have a vegetable garden in the front yard, we are "those" neighbors. The back one was put in by the previous owner of the house, who also planted a few fruit trees, all too close to the woods, so that they do not receive enough sunlight to produce much of anything. 

The back garden was placed right next to the woods, all the veggies in it leaned and stretched southward toward the sun.  I'd tie up my tomatoes and all of the new growth would lean toward the sun and I would have to pull them back again, and again.  I decided to dig out the fence posts and put them around the front garden. I started digging, what appeared to be 4 ft fence posts were really five foot fence posts sunk really deeply into the clay soil to support a 3 ft chicken wire fence.  It took several sessions of digging while mumbling somewhat unrepeatable words about overkill in sinking posts 2 feet deep for a little chicken wire fence, to get all of the posts removed. The first session with my mom who was visiting. She removed the old chicken wire fence which was attached to the posts in somewhat creative ways, while I fought with the clay.

I finally finished digging the posts out a few weeks ago and moved them to the front yard.  enclosing an area that was twice the size of the garden, anticipating expanding it over the next couple of years.  I bought new fencing, knowing that it won't keep out the deer, but it will keep out the neighborhood dogs, some the the less creative rabbits and maybe even discourage the chickens a little.

As I'm writing this, I am looking out of the window wondering why when it comes time to take pictures for this blog, it's always raining.  I just chuckled to myself, realizing that I would be busy working in the garden and not blogging if it was a dry day.

So, having fenced in twice the developed area, and having decommissioned a decent size garden, I realized that I was going to need more beds than I currently had to plant half of what I wanted to plant.  The issue is with squash, my daughter has finally come around to the idea that winter squash is yummy.  She will eat seconds and then later scrape the bowl for the last bits as we clear the table.  I can grow it and know that it will get eaten now, but it takes up a lot of space.  I will be doing some three sisters plots with popcorn, pole beans and squash, but I want three different squash varieties, which hedges the situation if one type fails...which means that I need more garden space this year, not eventually.

I'm not digging into the soil because it is a slight slope and will erode and because the weeds we call a lawn won't even grow well there, though the weeds do well fifty feet away.  Mowing that section in the front gives me flashes of the beginning parts of The Grapes of Wrath, as the dust swirls and settles around me. This whole region was once tobacco farms and my yard is one of the flatter places around. I know it hasn't been farmland for at least forty-five years, but I think the soil is still destroyed.  No sense it starting with inferior material, I'm building up. I've spent the last few days laying cardboard and covering it with horse manure and the straw that I mucked out of the chicken coop. The cardboard will decompose and be worm food, adding to the soil.

The flower bed

Planting beds on the left are mostly from the last two years, the new ones are forming on the right.

Cardboard with horse manure, I need to make 5 more trips to the horse farm for the veggies and one to two for the flower beds. I need more cardboard!

Sugar snap peas, with bitty weeds.

I get my cardboard at the waste transfer station, here it is called the convenience center.  There are signs that you are not allowed to scavenge there,   Yesterday, my biggest supporter was working, she  started using the cardboard as a weed suppressor in her own yard last year after I explained what I was doing. She fished out a nice thick pile of furniture boxes for me, and even yanked off some of the big pieces of tape.  It feels less like dumpster diving if I have the enthusiastic approval of the people supervising the site. Some of the folks will just sigh and say I can take some, clearly wondering about the sanity of the lady in the square car with the weird gardening methods.

I have made five or six trips to the horse rescue farm to collect the manure in Rubbermaid tubs to tote home in my car.  I'm about half-way there filling in the new plots.  All this so that I can plant butternut, Guatemalan blue and delicata winter squash and still have space for crookneck and zucchini and tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, beans, popcorn, herbs, potatoes...lost control, yeah...

Chicks at 1 Month Old!

The little chicks in the garage are nearing the fluff-free stage, which means that they can soon be scratching up the straw in the big girl run outside.  Circe seems that she will need the most time to mature, still a bit of fluff to go.  Freya has been fluff free for several days and is looking quite mature, I did a little reading on the Delaware chicken, she should be laying eggs a whole month before the others.  The Brahmas are coming right along, BB and Bob are nearly fluff free and are the laziest chickens I have ever seen.  Bubbles moves around much more and has a bundle of personality, which means when she gets older she is going to be a real pill to deal with.   Effie and Diana are the acrobats of the bunch, they are constantly hopping on and off the tops of their waterer and feeder and jumping out of the kiddie pool that they call home, luckily they have learned how to jump back in.

The big chicks, Ursula and Athena have been defying gravity lately.  Their breed descriptions say that they bear confinement well and that they are not flighty, I guess the exceptions prove the rules.  They are locked into their fence every morning and by lunchtime they are scratching anywhere in the yard that they please.  They both have their wings clipped and are heavier weight birds, so flying really isn't really a possibility, but they have been observed throwing themselves over the four foot fence by sheer force of will.  Keeping them in is such a challenge,  the fence is to protect them from roaming dogs and to keep them out of the road, but if they throw themselves over it, it can't do a thing for them.  At least I know when the little ones are fenced in the Brahmas will be so darned heavy that the laws of physics will keep them in, I think.

Freya

 

 Time for a chickie fix...

Diana on the feeder, Circe back left, Freya and Bubbles front right

These are the same little balls of fluff that arrived not quite a month ago!!

Circe and Diana on March 12th

Stella

As I mentioned last week, our dog, Stella, was ill.    She was suffering from some sort of neurological disorder and was progressively getting worse.  She was requiring 24/7 care, needing to be given water and let out so frequently that attempting to sleep was futile.  I arrived at the point where I was fearing that my husband or I would fall asleep while driving, because we were so groggy from going out with her into the  backyard in our pj's at 2 AM and then again at 2:30 AM and then again at 3:15 AM, and it continued that way all through the night.  She stopped eating.  She looked right through us, not really at us.  We became sources of water, not her people.  If we fell asleep and she didn't get the water her mind demanded, she would enter a frenzied state that she seemed unable to get herself out of.  She would race from one end of the house to the other barking and whining, back and forth, for up to 17 hours.  After three weeks of this, and many, many medical tests that told us only that she didn't have any of the diseases known to cause some of her symptoms, we decided that it was time.  The intervals between her needed drinks were getting shorter and shorter, we could no longer cope. Further tests seemed only to have the purpose of telling us what was going to kill her rather than provide a treatment, so we decided that it was time. At the end of the week we made the difficult decision to put her down.  We really miss her and routinely look for her at certain moments of the day, and tear up,

because she isn't and won't ever be there again.

Falling Behind and Falling Asleep

I haven't kept pace with everything I need to do this spring, things have been conspiring to make it difficult for me.  First my kid gets sick and then she gets well and has a birthday slumber party.  Somewhere along in this our dog develops symptoms that are not making any sense to the vets, it's not looking good.  We are trying a medication route that may or may not help the symptoms, but won't cure whatever it is (or the several whatevers it may be).  Part of her illness is drinking too much and urinating too much, and, yes, we have investigated the usual illnesses (and some rather rare illnesses also) that cause these symptoms and have come back with all negative test results.  She needs to go out many times during the night, my husband and I are sleeping in shifts, so that we get any sleep at all.

My garden is starting to go in.  Most of the greens are planted, from arugula to Swiss chard.  I thought I had one more type of collards than I do, so I will need to go get seed, in between my dog's bathroom breaks.  The peas are planted and due to poke out of the soil at any moment.  My tomato seedlings this year were a total failure, some would come up and immediately die, I'm going  to change my seed starting medium and try again.  I'll set up the cold frame any day now to start heating up and getting ready for baby plants.

The chicks are oblivious to all that is going on in the household.  They grow bigger by the minute and are at that awkward stage when they do not look like chicks and they do not look like chickens.  They have a bit of the teenage dinosaur look to them.  Judge for yourself!

Time to raise the light, they are all ducking.

Circe and Bubbles

Bubbles and Diana

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