Greeting the Day

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a sunrise. I’m still not really watching the sunrise, but I’m up for it. I’ve been up working all night. All week, I’ve almost made it but then had to go to sleep. Tonight/this morning, I’ve had, just had, to finish this book I’m working on, so when Mike left for work at a little after 5, I went ahead and opened the front door, opened the window on the screen door, and opened the curtains on the living room window facing east. The birds have been fantastic to listen to. They are absolutely raucous. I’ve heard so many that I couldn’t even pick out many of the individual songs. I hear crows and owls, and some chirping, some singing. Early, before it started to really get light, I heard one song that just made me think of the shooting sounds in an early ’80s video game.

And the smell! Nothing beats the smell of an Indiana summer sunrise. The humid, cold air are crisp but almost cloying, but there’s a heavy scent, almost of iron, to go with the smell of lawn clippings and damp asphalt and damp earth. Soon, the corn will be tall enough to offer its own musk to the blend—one of my favorite smells in the world, corn in the middle of an Indiana summer, though its smell is usually strongest and best in the evening, just around sunset.

I just wish I were more awake and didn’t have to work right now, so I could REALLY enjoy the morning with a nice walk. I guess I’ll have to be content with my cup of hot, strong, very sweet English breakfast tea while the birds sing to me as I edit, stealing glances out the window to see one narrow strip of sky slowly change from purple to pink to powder blue to baby blue…

And I guess I’m going to have to eat some more strawberries for breakfast.

* Stringham high: Sunrise
* Stringham low: Sleepiness
* Stringham super-high: Caffeine and sugar
(It's the simple things today...)

Everything's Gone Green (Again)

Aside from last week's rain possibly drowning out our newly planted corn, that rain and the heat of the past couple days have been great for everything else we're growing (intentionally or not--we've had a bunch of potato plants pop up in the corn this year...guess we didn't get them all dug up last fall). Here are some pictures.

This is the rose bush that was moderately small when we moved in and grew mostly UP last year, past the eaves and producing just a few blooms. We snipped it, getting tired of walking into thorns, and this is the result...

This is one of the four rows of potatoes--our early producers. Already, this row has more plants (and healthier) than we had all together last year. (If you look closely along the very right edge of the picture, you might also see some of the bush beans coming up).
I'm not going to post pictures of the things like greens and root crops that have just barely sprouted; the sugar maples, which have had to struggle mightily against nibbling deer; or the "flowering trees" Mike planted this winter that arrived from the Arbor Day Foundation as nothing but sticks in December, ready for planting (those trees are still barely more than sticks, and most probably won't make it). I have, however, posted a picture (left) of the orchard and berry patch. The long shot is the only way to get everything in the shot, and I left out quite a bit of strawberries patch and the dwarf pear tree to get the rest of the berries and trees in. (The tall grass in the background is just stuff we aren't mowing yet...it'll eventually get taken over by trees--probably nuts and some more fruits--and more berries if we have our way.)








Nothing is REALLY big yet, but the trees are clearly visible against the grass this year, whereas last year they were mostly just sticks with some green. This dwarf 5-in-1 pear tree is a real overachiever. Everything in the second shot is new growth this spring.

Garden Update (Ain't Life Grand?)

We’ve done really well with tomatoes and squash and green beans from the garden. Everything else, we’ve done OK on. We have a big learning curve, which we knew. We’ll probably plant all the same things next year, but we’re going to try using more organic matter in the soil to loosen up the soil. (Our root crops were all stunted this year because of the clay…it’s like they were all able to grow to about the size of the holes we dug to plant, maybe a little larger and that’s it.

But the tomatoes have more than paid for themselves. With me working and trying so hard to catch up and make a little extra money, M’s been doing the canning. We’ve managed to can 4 or 5 pints of pickles, 4 pints of spaghetti sauce, 4 pints of salsa (2 of which we’ve already eaten), and 4 pints of hot salsa. M’s going to harvest our third bunch of green beans today. Our first two batches each yielded about 2 pounds, so we just cooked them in the crock pot. But it looks like there are so many on the plants now that we may actually have enough to can green beans. I sure hope so. And we should have some more tomatoes so we can make another 4 pints of something in 3 or 4 days. All the tomatoes are just ripening—and we’ve got more buds started. We’ve gotten several peppers (Wenk’s yellow hots, jalapenos—though they don’t get very large and aren’t very prolific, cayennes, garden salsa hybrid). By far, the Wenk’s and the Volcanoes are the most prolific.

Potatoes gave a decent yield, but not a good return on investment. We basically ended up with “new” size potatoes. And the peas just didn’t do well. Cucumbers are still producing, and we can make a few more jars of pickles. One of our biggest fights this year has been the weeds. It’s been so temperate and wet this summer (very unusual) that the weeds have thrived. We just couldn’t keep up. We even did companion planting that’s meant to keep the weeds down, and it didn’t help much. So we “lost” most of our greens and our root crops (we hope to possibly reclaim the root crops—aside from potatoes and onions—after the first frost, because most of them taste better after the first frost) in the weeds. And M just tramps through the weeds around the beans (which don’t seem to care about the weeds) and the herbs (which also don’t seem to care about the weeds). We are still trying to figure out a plan of attack for the sunflowers, as we know that the snakes liked to curl up in the weeds in that patch earlier this summer…

Like I said, everything else fared decently (the corn cross-pollinated, as did our squash, so, yeah…we have a lot, but it’s all non-standard). The sunflower patch has all opened now, I think, though there is a wide variety in size. One plant is easily 8 or 10 feet tall with a huge head, and some are only about 3 feet tall with heads that have just opened. But the bees and butterflies have taken off on them. One day, not long after that first (now gigantic) head opened, it had at least 1 butterfly and 3 bumblebees on it. And all the other heads that were open at the time had at least 2 bumblebees each.

So all in all, not a bad harvest we’ve been raking in. Much better harvest than last year, and we’ve been learning a lot about what we can do, what is going to be problematic (cross-pollination of tomatoes, corn, and squash; raccoons; cabbage worms and caterpillars; bean beetles), so we should be able to do a lot better next year. We won’t be building raised beds as we had intended because we’re going to have to put up a fence around our overall intended garden area to help keep out the freaking raccoons. Although with all the fields around us being planted corn next year, we shouldn’t have a problem; it should be like last year, unless the coons have figured out that we have sweet corn and the fields don’t. After all, when they got into our corn this year, the ears that weren’t sweet just had a bite or two taken out of them and then were tossed aside, but the ones that were sweet got stripped—the husks strewn away from the garden and the cobs gone completely.

* Stringham high: Tomatoes and squash and beans, oh my!
* Stringham low: Weeds
* Stringham super-high: 16 pints canned!

Oh, and another mouse fatality yesterday. M saw one running across the living room floor and couldn't get the cats' attention on it, so he killed it. So far, our cats really aren't such good hunters (but really, why would they need to be?). This mouse was fairly small, so we think we've got a fairly new litter around here somewhere...

In the Garden of Eden

To quote M, “RacOONs!”

They ate quite a bit of our ripe sweet corn. Last night, apparently, during or after the rain. So much for squash leaves keeping them away…

And cabbage worms overnight have decimated our broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower plants.

*sigh*

These critters have to cross several acres –and maybe even the busy highway--to get to our garden. Looks like our plan for next year is to build a fence instead of raised beds…
Of course, M likes the idea of an electric fence. Call me crazy, but I’m not real keen on the idea of an electric fence taking up the backyard, where I’ll always have to mow along and where we always have to go to dump our compost…and, you know, with planning a family, and all…an electric fence as soon as you step out the back door. Yeah, gotta go with my wife veto power on this one.


* Stringham high: tomato plants so productive that their falling from the weight of the tomatoes
* Stringham low: cabbage worms and slugs
* Stringham super-high: March 2010

Oh Deer, the Carnage Has Begun!

It's official--I am now a full-time freelance editor! *gulp* Yesterday, the final day of my contract, was bittersweet, as I left behind some good coworkers and friends and some...not-so-great coworkers (I found a great piece of advice a few weeks ago: If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.), knowing that they'll be a little (well, a lot, for a while) worse off without me.

As I helped water the garden last night, I discovered that quite a bit of our corn has sprouted, and our tomato plants are getting bigger and healthier. As we did our walk-around last night, M and I were also extremely excited by the green strawberries he had found yesterday (that's his finger behind one of the berries, for scale, and his cell phone takes blurry pics) and the blossoming of nearly every fruit bush we have. Despite the unseasonably cool weather we've had the past couple of weeks, our plants seem to be doing exceptionally well. We may even have some salad greens sprouted from some planting we did 10 days ago.

Oh, and the deer have been nibbling the sugar maples and the Bartlett pear as they've walked through our yard. We got some blood meal today to put around the trees, and if we need more help, we might get some hair clippings from our hair dresser. I've read that the combination of blood meal and human hair is very effective.... Of course, I've also read that stopping deer from eating plants is difficult and requires a 3-pronged approach and that it varies from location to location, depending on the type of deer and the type of plant. So why should our deer "problem" be any different than our other issues? ;) We don't want to harm the deer, and we don't mind sharing--we just want to give the trees a chance to get large enough so that some nibbling doesn't do them too much harm. We'll keep you posted as we experiment.

* Stringham high: Full-time freelancing!
* Stringham low: Building raised beds and storage bins for our root crops is more expensive than we'd like.
* Stringham super-high: Corn growing much better than last year!