May 30th pictures
1. Strawberries!
May 29th pictures
Some phone pics today.
1. The grassy strips between the fields at the farm are a-glow right now with these pretty blue flowers. I think this is flax.
May 27th and 28th pictures
1. Soon I will be like unto this fish. Oh, no, not immortalized on a lantern to be sold in hobby stores across this great nation, like this one was. Rather, I’ll be swimming like this fish in the little pool off in the background. We just got this pool yesterday. It will make this summer bearable.
May 26th pictures
1. Lady beetle on day lily leaf
May 25th pictures
Here are some pictures from today’s bike ride on the ole backroads. Slightly contentious weather, but warmer than yesterday. It rained midway through this, but not too badly. I thought it was quite nice, actually.
1. Yarrow and grasses growing on the roadside
May 24th pictures
Today was quite cold and it rained on and off from about 11 on. I made two unsuccessful picture-taking attempts, only lasting about ten seconds outside before the cold and rain scared me back in. Funny how it was alright to bundle up in 87 layers back a few months ago, but now if the temperature dips below about 60 I become mildly affronted and stay inside. When I finally did make it back out, the wind did everything it could to interfere. Well, I’ve got your number, wind. (Literally, 31mph gusts. It felt like about 81. Of course I am easily fooled by having my own hair whipping about in my face.)
1. Water droplets on day lily foliage
May 23rd pictures
I will probably be including regular corn updates from here on out, with such folksy commentary as, “Wull, heck, thad’ll be knee-high by da fourt’ a JuhLY fer SHUR.” By the way — well heck, that corn will be knee-high by the fourth of July for sure.
Here’s a post for all you hand model scouts that I know are reading my blog.
So I’ve got this cool garden/farm manicure going.
I never cared too much about my hands looking pretty, although I do like to paint my nails sometimes (color, it’s fun). It is starting to make less and less sense, though, the more time I spend playing in the dirt personally and professionally. In a phenomenon that may be related, I can’t seem to completely wash the dirt off of my hands these days. You can see that on my index finger in the picture below. So don’t scold, because I’m trying. It’s just not coming off.
My thumbnail is a little messed up because I kind of hit it with a mallet this afternoon.
But it’s alright. For contrast, my palms still seem pink with laziness and disuse.
In other urgent news, the next door neighbor’s cat is getting pretty bold. Here she is on our deck.
May 21st (roadside) pictures
Went for a short walk this evening just along the road near my house. As always, I found much there to interest me; lots of pretty grasses in bloom. No clue what any of it is, though, and I know next to nothing about grass so I’m not even quite sure where to begin in trying to ID it. Maybe I’ll spend some time over the summer working on that.
1. Horsetail
May 21st (garden) pictures
Let me touch briefly down in three different garden-y areas today.
This first picture reveals a wealth of differences in today’s garden compared to last week’s. For one thing, the hose. Feast your eyes upon it. Because of the hose (and its cart) I no longer have to make twenty thousand trips to the spigot every day. I must say there was something kind of nice about watering everything by hand with the watering cans. It made me feel just that much more involved in the care of my plants (or seeds, as the case may be). But with ever-expanding gardens and many other things to do besides irrigate, I had a hankering to cut down on that time a little bit. Not to mention I craved the power afforded by a bajillion-option hose nozzle. Shower, cone, flat, MIST…MY GOD, MIST, FOR MY TENDER SEEDLINGS.
Got a little excited there. Anyway, so aside from the mini watering revolution, there are also some new thin, mulched paths. And there’s a chicken wire fence (in progress). And the beet seedlings are getting bigger (foreground). And the onions are getting really big (background).
1. Things are happening in this picture!
I mentioned the other day that I have seedling-related anxiety. Someday soon I fully expect this to be recognized as a legitimate condition for which I can receive some kind of wicked awesome prescription medication. In the meantime, I just bite my nails and wait. The peas though exceeded my wildest expectations by beginning to emerge, oh, a week ago, I guess it was. I mention all this to let you know how I’ve been procrastinating on the Tippy Teepee Stabilization Project. I’d been meaning to follow up on some good advice from Emilio/The Dispersinator (sorry) on making my jerry-rigged teepee sturdier, and I wanted to do it before the peas had emerged so that — hopefully — I wouldn’t disturb their little root systems too badly. Anyway, today I finally got to it, a goodly week and some days after I planned to. No, I still haven’t learned how to really tie good knots or lash. Yes, it could charitably be described as wonky. But I believe in it! Do your worst, peas. And wind.
2. The Shaking Teepee of Invasive Splendor. (It’s made from buckthorn.) And no, peas — don’t really do your worst. Although do produce a fair amount. Do.
3. Over in Brassica Town, things are going okay, I think. Here is a new kohlrabi leaf.
Now down to the more ornamental garden in the backyard. I haven’t put up a ton of pictures from this garden, because it’s kind of a mess right now. Runaway daylilies and globe allium, invasive crown vetch, some dandelions up to your waist….It needs work. In the middle of it, there’s a trellis, and it’s pretty, only the clematis on one side (formerly doing great) is in terrible shape. But the clematis on the other side looks great.
4. Clematis bud the first
5. Another view of the clematis
6. Clematis bud the second
7. One last view of the clematis. Because why not.
8. In the same garden, the Chinese lanterns are doing simultaneously great and awful. On the one hand, they are spreading like crazy, as they are wont to do. On the other hand, they’ve got spittle bugs, and something is eating them (surely not you, little beetle?), and some of them kind of look like they’ve got a virus.
9. We are going to have a crazy boatload of raspberries one of these days. One of these early, early days. I should mention we are very lucky in having inherited a lane of raspberries, like, eight feet across and fifty or sixty feet long. Maybe longer. I’m pretty crappy at estimating distances. But we have a lot of raspberries. Believe me.
Inspiration
"If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I'd say Flippy, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong, though. It's Hambone." Jack Handey
