Summer beauty

Even though it has turned cold outside, take a moment and enjoy the early blooms of summer.

Renewal

It has been many months since I have written anything on my blog. My life took many turns- some planned, some unexpected.  And a long story made short, my efforts and energies were used up after I made dinner, so the task in taking time to do some writing was placed on the back burner. The stories were not gone, just at rest and waiting for their time.  For those of you who have checked for posts since last summer, I thank you for your interest, and apologize to you for making you wait so long for something new to read.

I have much to learn about so many things but find it exhilarating to try new things or see something I've never seen before. To experiment. To create. To see improvement after practice. To rethink things. To live!

One skill I have wanted to expand on is gardening. Growing up on a farm and having fresh produce right outside the front door is a way of life that you never forget. My raised bed is thawed out from winter's grasp, waiting to be of use again.

It was nice

We had a tree in our backyard that was so pretty. It was tall and the limbs were nice and symmetrical. A perfect looking tree - really nice.

A couple of years ago, it started budding up in the spring, but never grew any leaves. The thin branches snapped easily to the touch and the entire tree was dead. What happened? We can only guess. It could have gotten hit by lightening. There was a big ant colony nearby that could have infested into it's roots. Maybe it picked up some sort of disease. Whatever the case, it was done. We weren't too excited about having to get it cut down. Fortunately, the clearance was a good distance from the house so it would not present too much danger. One day, we'll get someone over here to remove it. That was over two years ago.

This past spring, we heard a chopping noise in the back yard. What is that??? Come to find out, a pileated woodpecker decided to have breakfast, lunch and dinner in the dead tree trunk. There must have been a whole lot of eatings in that wood. He pecked a hole in it that was two feet wide by four feet tall and about a foot in. Now there was trouble in the makings. We covered the trunk with plastic and found someone to cut the tree down. It had officially become a hazard instead of an inconvenience.

The last of the pieces of our beautiful tree were hauled away today. The back yard looks bare. It will take a while to get used to the way it looks back there. But the possibility of it falling on our house or shed is gone now.

It doesn't matter how wonderful something was in it's glory days, if it is dead, it needs to be dealt with. Bye-bye tree. It was nice knowing ya.

A time to plant

Last Friday, my dad came over and helped me build a raised bed garden. This was their anniversary gift to us this year. I have to say, it is one of the best ideas for a gift that I have ever heard of!

We shopped for the wood and dirt, toiled in the sunshine to put it all together, placed it in it's spot and got the job done in about 2 hours. Amazing! I don't know where my father gets his stamina - I can hardly keep up with him.

So it was time to plant. I put in seed for stringless green beans, beets, carrots, and onions. I also planted 4" potted tomatoes (big boy and grape), lettuce, and green peppers. Everything you need for sauce and salad!

Sowing seed in May. It's a beautiful thing!

A wonderful thing to see

This is the best time of year, in my humble opinion. The harsh bite of winter is becoming less noticeable and the sights of spring are upon us again. I am thankful for the early spring this year. It seemed like jack frost knocked on our door early - right after Thanksgiving - and we were in need of relief. The row of daffodils along the side of my house are displaying their full glory, raising their faces to the warmth of the sun. It's a wonderful thing to see.

"...Consider the flowers of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these." Matthew 6:28b - 29

Get out the seeds....

According to my Dad, the first planting in the garden can be done on (or around) St. Patrick's Day. Yes, sugar snap peas can be planted right now, ladies and gentlemen! They don't mind the cold. Maybe that is why they are called snow peas. Can you say "stir-fry"? Mmmmm.

As you may remember, my gardening efforts failed miserably last year. I have alot of work to do in order to get it right. Since I am not a green thumb, this is a big challenge, but I am always interested in trying again. There is nothing quite like home grown garden food! My carrots were so sweet and tasty, we want more!

I do not have any sugar snap pea seeds, and my ground is not even close to being cleaned of the debris from the fall and winter. I am not even sure that I know where all my gardening tools are at the moment. But this is exciting! Time to prepare, time to till, time to plant!

I'm Mr White Christmas

The other day, A Year Without A Santa Claus was on TV. Who hasn't seen Tanta Kringle sing about being the king's #1 toy maker or felt kinda bad for the kids in Sombertown because it was illegal to play with toys? The kid in me rose up and I kept the show on. There are two big battles in the show. The battle between the evil Burgermeister against the good-hearted Kringles, and the battle between the sons of Mother Nature, Heat Meiser and Cold Meiser. These two duke it out over who gets a white Christmas and who gets rain. These guys are funny and imaginative characters with catchy little life-jingles.

If Snowy was really out there, we got a blast of his cold breath last Thursday and Friday.

The weather forecasters were saying a big, bad ice/snow storm was on it's way. After lots of less than accurate predictions from them, I pretty much take what they say with a grain of salt. Did I grocery shop? Nope. Did I expect the power to go out? Maybe, but not for very long. Did I cover my car with a shower curtain so I wouldn't have to scrape ice off the windshield? Yes, I did do that. Were the weathermen right this time? For the most part, they were. We lost power for a whopping 25 hours, and that was pretty good, compared to so many other people. That is the advantage to living so close to Route 9 where all the businesses are. They have a higher importance-level priority and get their power back on right away and as a result, so do we. Here's some shots of our National Grid-free day.

My cats have the ability to find the warmest places to hang out. Mouse has so much hair, she can sprawl, but Tiki wanted more help from the hanging coats.....



There is a huge Maple tree in front of our house. The ice caused lots of trees to snap branches, including that one. The limbs that broke fell right onto my driveway and missed my car by mere inches. The picture shows only half of what fell and they were alot bigger (and heavier) than how they look in the pic. If either of us had parked in front of the garage, it would have been time to call the insurance company......




When we bought our house, I was thrilled that we had a gas stove/oven so I could still cook when the power was out. Come to find out, our model has a safety feature in it to shut off the gas supply to the burners when a power failure occurs. That made us have to pull out the good ol' Coleman camping stove in order to make a hot meal....




A few days after buying our house, we had an ice storm that knocked the power out. This was a bitter sweet event for us. The bad thing was it made the sump pump stop so our basement begin to back up with water, and it got cold quick without the furnace doing it's job. Welcome to homeownership! My father brought over a small generator so we could keep those things running. The good thing about it was it made us realize right away that we needed a generator of our own, so we did buy one way back then. It was there for us when we needed it this time! We were able to keep the furnace on, the sump pump kept going, our fridge got plugged in, and one light.

So, we survived what has been dubbed on the radio as the "Ice Storm of 2008". When a quarter of a million people loose power, I guess it is an event worthy of a title. When I look out my window, there is no dreaming of a white Christmas.....



...unless Mr White Christmas retreats again for a while...which would be ok with me.

The shortened days of winter - pt 1

The days are definately getting shorter. The tilt of the earth has almost reached its peak but the ever increasing absensce of light presents its own set of consequences.

Yesterday, I flew home after work in order to finish up the front yard raking job before it got dark and before it starts getting snowy. This always winds up having to be done twice at my house because our annoying catalpa tree looses all it's leaves as soon as the temperature dips below 45 degrees and it's leaves are about a big as dinner plates, so they need to be removed reasonably quickly from my already suffering grass in the front yard. When those humungous leaves get wet, they are like sponges and become super heavy which equivalates to maximum raking un-fun-ness. Have I ever mentioned that I really hate that tree? I think I have, so I won't go on about that.

Anyways, I raked my front yard about a month ago and drug all those leaves on the biggest tarp I own, which is about 10'x15' (we used to cover a pop up camper with it) into the corner of our back yard. I made 5 trips with all the leaves (from just one side of the front yard) and piled them up pretty high. This makes sense since I am contributing to nature by feeding my compost pile (that sounds pretty good, doesn't it?) and providing a shelter for a stray mouse or chipmunk or something like that (so compassionate to wild animal welfare). I would have filled at least 40 leaf bags (I kid you not) if I chose to bag them, and after bagging the first year we lived there, I have vowed to not do that ever again.

The people across the street from me fill about 6 bags and they are happy as clams together raking their leaves up. Making a fun dad-son-daughter event out of it. I, on the other hand, am miserable and blistered and aching from my unforgiving yard, wondering why I decided to not have sons who would eventually take this task over for me. Sparkie is not allowed to be around for this sort of thing, since it would be a Wood-tick-stock event, and he would be the campground and concession stand. It seems like most of the trees growing on my street are on my lot and only one of those trees is a pine tree which presents it's own unique pine-needley mess in the back yard. That is another story in itself.

"Why do you have to do the yard twice?", you ask? Because the tree in the other side of the front yard hung onto it's leaves until about a week ago and, I kid you not, my front yard looked like it had never been raked at all. There were so many leaves on the driveway that you couldn't even see the asphalt. Have you tried to shovel snow that is over a leaf covered driveway? Take my word for it, you don't want to let that happen. And after the leaves were getting mashed into bits from being driven over and parked on so much, I had to face the fact that enough was enough. *Sigh* Back to square one. So out I went with the rake and the gardening gloves and the gigantic tarp to clean it up again.

Although the job was much faster and I didn't get any blisters this time, my mind couldn't help but think about how we never raked when I was growing up and yet our yard always grew just fine. Then I reminisced about how my brother and I used to do chores together and he would manage to have to go to the house to get something and then not show up for an hour and a half while I did all the work by myself. For a minute I remembered I had a leaf blower in the garage, but since I was almost done at that point, I just made my thoughts go elsewhere. I also tried to figure out how I might get my hands on one of those leaf sweeper/catcher contraptions that I could hook up to the back of the lawn mower so I'd have an excuse to ride around on that thing one last time before winter hits. But mostly, I thought about how I was only cleaning up the front yard of my lot and how the back yard was just going to have to fend for itself this year. After all, the days have become too short to do that much raking after a day at work.

Glorious carrots

I finally harvested my carrots. That sounds impressive, doesn't it? It's just the opposite, really. I mean, it's not like I had a successful garden this year. Everything I planted in the ground petered out on me. No onions, no peppers, no tomatoes. My lettuce grew in a planter, but is was not that tasty. The beets did nothing but grow big greens - eeuw - not a beet green fan. So my last hope for home grown produce were my carrots.

You probably remember seeing ones that were picked a few weeks ago. They tasted fabulous! I cut them up and put them in our big dinner-sized salads. No store bought carrot ever tasted so good.

My dad said that carrots take a long time to grow. I wanted to wait as long as possible before I picked them. Now that we're getting frosty at night, I thought it was time. Here's the rest of what I wound up with...


Container gardening is an interesting concept. It definately has it's drawbacks. Seed gets planted in a small area so it gets packed in tightly. I have rabbits in my yard, so I wanted to keep the leafy greens up on the porch. The containers seemed like the perfect solution. I think I have to continue to experiment with this before I get it right!

Regardless, I was so excited to pull my carrots out of the dirt and see what was there. I had 28 carrots remaining. They are of varying sizes but they all smelled so carroty-good! After washing them up and lining them up in a camera-ready row, here's what I harvested...


Aren't they awesome!?!?!? The smallest one doesn't even really qualify as a bite of food! But it is a carrot! And that one looks like a headless, legless body... a carrot! There's one that is kinda spiraled and most of them are pretty normal looking. All carrots! My carrots!! Have I said it enough times before? I'll say it again - It doesn't take much to make me happy!

I'm not sure there are even enough here to make a carrot cake! That was alot of work and growing time for a couple dozen carrots. They will taste awesome in a couple of dinners, though. If it was the year 1820 and I were trying to stock my root cellar for the winter, my family would definately not make it til Spring. I will try gardening again next year. Maybe I can grow enough for a main course and a dessert!

Garden goods

In May, I got all ambitious and planted, if that is what you want to call it, a garden. I put in peppers, tomatoes, onions, and some herbs in the ground. I figured I would probably be able to make a pot or two of sauce with the pickings. The plants had other plans, though. Nothing grew for me...except the weeds, of course.

Since there wasn't a huge plot of earth to plant stuff in, I gathered together my biggest, deepest containers and planted stuff in them too. In a long one I put lettuce seeds and I did have lettuce grow in it. The seedlings came up like there was no tomorrow but there were way too many of them competing for space so a bunch of them died out and I got enough lettuce for two bowls of dinner salads. *sigh*

A few years ago, I purchased a fica tree for our living room. When I got it home and hundreds of teeny ants started coming out of the huge pot it was planted in, the whole thing went outside. Then the tree died and the pot has been sitting plantfree in the shed. As I was planting, I had a great idea for that pot.

Since the pot was big, round and deep, I put carrot and beet seeds in it. The beets didn't do anything except make big greens, so I pulled them all out. The carrots have been growing! Every time I look at them and see their little orange tops in the dirt, I get so excited. My dad told me that carrots take a long time to grow. Well, the anticipation got the best of me today and I pulled one. Isn't it the cutest thing you ever saw? It smells so good too. I can't quite get myself to cut it yet. It is in the fridge staying cool. After all, I grew it from a little seed and look at it now! I will be patient, and leave the others in place to continue to grow and will pick them when they are more mature.

Although most of my gardening efforts failed, I still have hope for my pot full of carrots. This story kind of reminds me of a parable of Jesus. Know which one?

Lawn neglected

Oh, my lawn. How can I mow you if it does not stop raining? The rabbits are enjoying the tall grass. And so are the mushrooms. Why do I have mushrooms in my grass? Something is plentiful in my dirt's chemistry and feeding them well.
At least when the grass is long, the dried out, dead patches are not as noticeable. I think I will get some gasoline tomorrow. Country Farms is selling it at $4.07 a gallon - best price I've seen around here.
Is my lawn neglected? Yes and no. I always have hope for tomorrow.

To mow or not to mow . . .

. . .the never ending question when I get home from work. One rule that we have at the Baim estate is to not mow the lawn over the weekend if at all possible. My reasoning behind this philosophy is that mowing is a job. It is a chore. It is noisy, and it is not something that should be done on days of peace and relaxation, i.e. the weekend. Unfortunately most of my neighbors do not embrace that same philosophy. ***sigh***

The other day, I came home and looked over the lawn. Has it rained? Is it wet? Too wet to cut? My data weighed more towards mowing than not so I got Sparkie and we started the dreaded preliminary chore of picking up sticks. Because of the many wind and rain storms we had, there were more sticks to gather up than usual. Figures. Sparkie ate grass, jumped around in the leaf pile, tried to find the rabbit that lives in the yard, chased the sticks that I threw aside, selected the choicest ones and chewed them up into bits. Yup, that helped me out alot.

Whent he sticks were gone and the mower was gassed up, I got Sparkie back to the safety of the house, fired up the big, bad, loud rider and went at it. The front lawn only takes about 10 minutes to cut since it is pretty small. After I was about half done up there, I saw some ominous looking clouds above and started to feel raindrops. "Ha! I am tougher than this light sprinkle of rain!" I said to myself and kept mowing.

On to the back yard. A much bigger space. I threw the mower up a gear so I could speed it up a bit. Then, the drops got a little bit bigger. "This isn't going to stop me!" I muttered, reminiscent of Charlie Brown getting rained out of the baseball game and being stranded by his teammates. The mower started to pool little drops on the engine cover and my clothes started to get damp. One thing I don't like is getting wet. I just don't like it. I want to be dry or I want to be soaked. That damp feeling is just so annoying. But the final goal of a neatly manicured lawn was the higher purpose so I continued until it was done.

I like to mow the lawn. Getting to drive the mower, seeing that green velvety finish, smelling that cut grass scent - it's a satisfying task. I am not sure who will do this task when we have fallen off the face of the earth over the next 9 days. Hmmmm

Rain storms and my lawn

I am starting to have a little trouble remembering what day the last time I mowed my lawn was. There has been plenty of rain coming each and every day which means when I get home from work, the grass is too wet to cut. I see lots of growth in the grass, especially since I did my weeding and feeding a while back. Unfortunately, the weed and feed didn't do too much to my weed issue, except for keeping the dandelions at bay. I still have many non-grass things growing quite happily throughout my yard.

There is a funny side to this - Sparkie isn't too interested in walking on the wet grass. Probably because his legs are so short and the blades are tall enough to poke him in the gut. He changes his interest quickly, however, when he gets sight of a bird, chipmunk, squirrel or rabbit about. They are all intruders as far as he's concerned, and they are perfect creatures to run after as fast as he can. Of course, he never catches up to any of them. Sometimes I see him darting off one way and them darting off the other way which reminds me of a Warner Bros cartoon and is so funny because a good hunter Sparkie is obviously not! Wow, no pun intended but that was a rabbit trail. Back to topic.

Yes, I will make my way home tonight, bend over to look closely at the grass and hope that it is dry enough to cut. And if it is, I will walk the property, pick up all the nasty branches that have fallen from the wind and rain storms, fire up our big, bad, loud riding lawn mower, and go to town.

Lawn and Garden battles......

I am told that the time to spread your weed and feed fertilizer is when the forsythia bushes are in bloom. You know what forsythia bushes are, right? The ones that get covered with the yellow blooms and whenever someone sees one they get all warm and fuzzy inside and say, "Oh my, look at that. How beautiful! Spring is here!". For those of us who have, or have ever had, a forsythia bush know how weed-like they are and will only be blooming beautifully for about 10 days, and then you are stuck with something that looks more like a dwarfed, green, hyper-active yucca tree for the rest of the year. Thankfully, I do not have one of these things in my yard.

Well, besides all that, I saw the yellow blooming forsythia bushes in the neighborhood, trucked myself over to the store and got my bag of weed and feed. I could barely lift it because it weighed around 45 lbs and I never have to lift anything by myself that is heavier than my very overweight 15 pound cat whose name, oddly enough, is Mouse. After getting home with the granules that will transform my lawn into a sea of luscious green goodness, I barely lifted the bag out of the trunk, poured it into our handi-dandy spreader and went to town. Oh man! I was a-weedin' and I was a-feedin' and I was so proud of myself because it was going to rain that evening, and my timing was just perfect!

It has been a week since I put that stuff down. It has not rained. I can only hope that the morning dew has made it ever-so-slowly dissolve into the ground so it can do it's work. My spreader adventures are not over, though. The next thing to administer is the grub-ant-flea-tick-spider-chigger-webworm-whitefly-earwig-aphid-mealybug-mosquito killer, all of which live quite happily in our yard and Sparkie manages to come in contact with on a regular basis. I will not elaborate on THOSE stories.

Lawn and Garden battles......

Well, I officially pulled out the ol' riding lawn mower and mowed the lawn this week...
after I picked up about 927 sticks out of the yard....
it actually took me about 45 minutes to clean up the sticks, branches and limbs (yes, limbs) from our little plot of earth...
the whole time I was doing this, I was thinking of how we used to pick rocks from the fields before we could do plantings, and how much of a lousy job that was, and somehow this was just as bad.....
only sticks are lighter than rocks.....
after squatting, standing up, and tossing the sticks to the edge of the yard about 100 times, I eventually resorted to staying squatted and hiking them through my legs, like a football player throwing the football to the quarterback or the kicker...
some of the sticks fell to the earth with enough speed to impale into the ground 4 inches...
Sparkie was with me the entire time, but was absolutely no help to me...
at one point, I felt like those army guys who were sent to Roswell to clean up the debris from the crashed flying saucer on Mack Brazzell's ranch....
there were bumble bees all over the place....
I hope I don't have a nest of them somewhere close by...
I really hate bees....
last year, there was a bumble bee nest in the ground in our backyard...
the only thing that kept me going was the notion that when I was done picking up the sticks, I could ride the mower....
kind of like a reward at the end of a horrible time of torture...
and that's what I did when I was done....
I got to mow over some bumble bees...
did I mention that I really hate bees?....
regardless of all my work, there were still lots of sticks on the ground that I mowed over.....
I will have to pick them up next time.

Lawn and garden battle

My neighbor has one of these in her yard. When it is in bloom like this, it is time to put your fertilizer on the lawn.

We do not have any fertilizer yet, so we'll have to go pick some up and get it spread over our choppy, nasty looking lawn.

It's hard to believe that it is almost time to start mowing again.