Disaster! (or, Attack of the Giant Dogs)

Tuesday afternoon, somedoggy managed to pull the bottom corner of welded-wire fence loose from the chain-link at the end of the patio. Through the hole it created, the Big Sister and the Goofball got into the garden. The lima beans were planted in the area where they broke through, and were completely destroyed. All four of the string beans were trampled on; one was completely destroyed, two were flattened, and the fourth was bruised. One of the flattened ones died, the other is recovering.

The empty dirt in the bottom half of the picture is where three lima bean plants were, including one that was already over a foot tall as it was a survivor from the indoor seedlings. Of the three string bean plants in the top half the pic, the bottom one and the one above it survive. I planted some more limas and a couple more string beans.... I'll be lucky if I get limas by September!

(I rewired that corner of the fence, then put up a new piece of welded wire attached on one side to the welded-wire section of the fence and on the other to the chain-link section, completely covering the "seam" where they were originally joined together so the dogs can't get to it at all. Hopefully that'll do the trick!)

They they also got the smallest of the "new" tomato plants, the ones I only transplanted into the garden a week and a half ago. Oh well, there are two more of the same variety, either in the garden or in pots. The others are doing well, though! The "newer" tomatoes:

The "older" tomatoes are thriving. Here's the heirloom Cherokee Purple, it's almost 3 feet tall already! To the right of it are two very small plants, survivors of the indoor seedlings. These plants are roughly a month or a little more behind the "store bought" tomato plants, but this is a variety that's supposed to produce tomatoes in 45 days from being transplanted into the garden and produce continuously until fall, so they should still yield well. In the background, you can see the cucumber plants really starting to take off.

Here are the two original store-bought tomato plants, one a Roma and the other a beefsteak-type. On the left are the two small "Fourth of July" plants that were in the pic with the Cherokee Purple. In the lower right corner is the Sugar Baby watermelon.

The begonias I transplanted into pots a week and a half ago are doing well:

The pot of impatiens I've got sitting on my air conditioner in the patio is thriving, and I'm so pleased with it.



I had a round clay flower pot I bought years ago when I lived in California. I'd only used it that year, had never lived in another place where I'd been able to have anything in pots outside. I got it out of the box it had been stored in for over 10 years, filled it up, and planted it with cosmos seeds. When the seedlings emerged a couple weeks later, I put it out on the air conditioner. Less than an hour later it was smashed on the ground. (Another reason the dogs are closed out of the patio unless I'm there to supervise!) The seedlings were smashed along with the planter, but apparently there were some still-unsprouted seeds in the soil. I've got cosmos growing at the base of the air conditioner:



The plants on my home-made plant-shelf are filling out beautifully. If you look in the background, you can see some of the roses that are blooming all along the pole barn:



Yes, the grass is long. No, I don't have a working lawnmower yet. I asked my neighbor to take a look at the "new" one on Tuesday; he fiddled with it for over an hour and didn't get any better result with it than my sis and I did. It'll start easily on starting fluid, but then dies quickly as gas isn't flowing into the engine. I'm going to have to take it into the hardware store in town (per recommendation) and have them fix it. I've got to work up to putting it into the car to get it there, though, it's a heavy sucker.)

Finally, a so-far success story: I climbed up on the stepstool yesterday and got a pic of the new clutch. I could see three baby birds in the nest, and all are kingbirds. I'm keeping a close eye on the weather, and I'll do whatever I can to keep this clutch from dying because of heat like the last ones did.

A Working Weekend

Boy, it was a busy weekend! My sis came up after work on Friday to spend the weekend. Her approach to a weekend is "let's get things done!" so the little slave driver ran me ragged for a couple of days. Friday night we got the firewood ring set up and got the firewood transferred to it, then we swept and rearranged the patio.

Saturday morning we drove down to Chris's to get a 6 X 6 chain link kennel panel with a gate in it. When we got home with it, we fixed the end of the fence by the pole barn where I'd had a gate and a couple of crate panels wired in. Took out the crate panels and the gate, moved a couple of poles, and wired the kennel panel in that spot. Now I can get from the yard to the pole barn and vice versa without having to go through the house. If I ever get my new project lawnmower started, I won't have to take that through the house either to get it into the yard. (We worked on that yesterday, got the frozen wheel loosened and rotating again and got the spark plug changed, but it doesn't seem to be getting enough gas. My neighbor offered before to have a look at it for me, I might take him up on it. I don't think it would take long for someone who knows what they're doing to get it running.) I put a lock on the gate, so nobody can open it without the key.

We were still working on the fence when Mom arrived to visit. When we finished the fence we came in, and my mom and sis visited while I cooked meatballs and sauce for dinner. After dinner, my sis did some weeding in the rose bed while I fertilized the potted flowers.

Yesterday we replaced the plastic "feet" on my coffee table with new ones, got the queen mattress off my bed and carried out to the pole barn, and got my old queen mattress into the house and onto the bed. (My mom had given me her spare room queen mattress and springs, thinking they were better than my old ones, but they weren't. I've been sleeping on an uncomfortable bed since January because I couldn't get my comfy mattress in from the pole barn by myself. I slept really well last night!) Got my sis to give me a haircut - I can do the front myself but can't do the back, and have a hard time with the top, so she got the back and top short and I finished the front after she left.

I got tired of seeing the Youngster with a mouthful of cat litter, so I finally installed a couple of eye hooks on my sliding laundry room door and hooked either end of a bolt snap to them, so now the laundry room door is only open wide enough for the cats to get through to the litterbox but the bolt snap prevents dogs from nosing the door open. I brought my "shelf" boards in from the pole barn and got a couple of milk crates emptied; in a little while I'll go empty out 4 more milk crates and then set up some shelves in one half of my bedroom closet, to hold piles of jeans, t-shirts, shorts, etc. I've been trying to switch wardrobes - get my winter stuff stored away, get the summer stuff out, but everything's piled on the counters in the laundry room because I just don't have anywhere to put it. Once I get those shelves up I can put away everything piled in the laundry room and then finish organizing the laundry room. That's this week's major project.

I finally quit procrastinating and mixed up three more stepping stones today. Now that I've gotten one 60-pound bag of quikrete emptied into a bucket from which I can easily measure it (and the other bag standing next to the bucket for easy access), I'm going to try to pour three more every other day and get as many stones made as possible in the next 4 months.

Last Monday I finally transplanted the other little tomato plants I picked up the previous Thursday. They were a little peaked, but man did they take off once they were transplanted! I put 7 more into the garden (two of 3 different varities, one of another) and put another 5 into "pots". (Two of my pots are 2-gallon laundry detergent bottles with the tops cut off.) They've tripled in size in just a week, and the ones I put into the garden have nearly tripled in size. The Cherokee Purple tomato plant is over 2' tall already and is doing really well. The three tomato plants in the rose bed are also thriving. The beans, zucchini, and cukes are doing really well. I fertilized the garden today and thinned out the carrots; I planted too many carrot seeds too close together so I'm not going to have as many carrots as I'd like, but now I know how I should have planted them instead and I'll do a better job of it next year. The peppers are doing well, too.

I need to fertilize the herb bed, but it doesn't need watering yet so I'll do it the next time I need to water. Things are growing slowly there, but they're growing. Fertilizer should help. When I bought the extra tomato plants I also got a couple small begonias which are growing quickly now that they're into pots. The purple petunias I got are starting to get new flower buds on them, they should be very pretty in a few weeks. My impatiens baskets and pots are really starting to look nice, they make the patio such a pleasant place to sit! On our way back from going to get the kennel panel we stopped at a "barn sale", and for a buck I picked up a pair of heavy glass votive holders. I put those up on the plant shelf in the patio and they look lovely twinkling away there in the evening. (I'm not going to lose this pair the way I lost the last ones, to dogs knocking them down. They come in and sit on the mantel in the family room when I come in for the night.) I put a pot of impatiens on either side of the center roof support pole on the edge of the patio, and tied the pots to the pole so they couldn't be easily knocked over. So far, so good. I just have to keep an eye on my plant-chomping Goofball, so he doesn't bite all the flowers off.

Saturday morning I climbed up on the step stool to see if I could see anything in the kingbird nest. I can't actually see inside of it, but I can see anything that reaches the top of it and I saw one little yellow beak opening and closing. Saturday evening I could hear at least three different little voices peeping for their dinner. It looks like mama successfully hatched this clutch without being parasitized by a brown-headed cowbird. The weather is supposed to be baby bird-friendly until at least the weekend, but I'll keep a close eye on the temp under the roof and put something onto the roof to block the sunlight, and put a fan on to circulate air if necessary. Mama's become a lot less fearful of me, and will fly back and forth feeding her babies even if I'm sitting outside. I have high hopes for this little family, that the nestlings will make it and the whole family will stick around and help keep the flying insect population down.

Break's over, time to get back to work. I wonder where those other milk crates are.......?

Grow, Little Green Things, Grow!

I went up to Mom's on Thursday to help her with some housework she can't do by herself any more. When we were done, I asked her if she had an extra hose she wasn't using; she said she had several, and I should help myself. So I grabbed what I thought was a very long hose but which turned out to be two hoses, so I don't have to keep switching my long hose from the back yard to the front. I also mentioned that I thought maybe I'd remove the soaker hose from the flower/shrub bed north of the driveway over to the vegetable garden, and mom said "gee, there's a brand new soaker hose in the garage that I'm never going to use - take it!" Don't have to ask me twice, so that hose went into my car too. I also did a little more "shopping" in the garage, and took the sledge hammer (which Mom can't even lift, much less use) so I could use it to pound in fence posts (I had to return my borrowed post-driver), a big tubular ring to hold firewood (when I get it put together, I'll put it out on the patio to hold the logs that are just stacked out there), and a 5-foot step-ladder (I left the 8-footer there) so I can hang a wire-fence canopy over the well-house to keep kitties from reaching the roof, and I can also get up high enough to clean the leaves and debris off the patio roof and make sure the gutters are clean.

I put the soaker hose in the vegetable garden. It had been coiled up so long it wouldn't lay flat, so instead of putting it on the ground I've temporarily draped it over the top of the fencing, back and forth so it would cover the entire area. I may just leave it there - it's not pretty, but it reaches every corner of the garden and I'm not sure it would if I laid it on the ground on the paths. We'll see. In any case, it's been a life-saver and a life-giver to the garden, everything's really starting to take off.


Carrots (needing to be thinned out) in the front, lettuces in the back


Tomatoes in front, peppers in back


Zucchini


Cukes


The lone watermelon vine

There are beans - both string beans and limas - along the back fence, and there are a couple of tomato plants on the left side of the pepper bed. There are also moonflowers coming up along the left fence, and Cosmos coming up along the front fence. On my way home from Mom's on Thursday I stopped at the garden center again; they had all their vegetable plants on sale, a 4-cell tray for a quarter. I picked up 4 more varieties of tomatoes. I haven't had a chance to transplant them yet, but later this afternoon I'll put one plant of each variety in the garden (there's room in the pepper bed) and one plant of each variety in pots, maybe one or two more plants out back, and I'll give the rest of the plants to my neighbor if they want them. I also picked up two trays of begonias (white, I think) and two trays of petunias (two shades of purple, one a single flower, the other a double) and I'll put those into the pots where I'd transplanted my butterfly impatiens which didn't make it. Total expenditure for tomatoes, begonias, and petunias - $3.95. Good deal. The geraniums I got from this place are in full bloom, and are absolutely gorgeous:



And my Stella D'Oro lilies are blooming:



Mama kingbird is still sitting on her nest, so the eggs haven't hatched yet. They should hatch any day now, as far as I can figure it's been about 13 days since she started over. So far, the long-range weather forecast isn't calling for nestling-killing temps, so I have high hopes for this clutch of babies. Mama's not quite as spooky as she used to be, as long as I don't stand around under the nest she'll stay there and not fly off when I come out. When she does fly off, she'll usually come back pretty quickly; she'll sit on the fence and give me the eye for a few seconds, then fly back to her nest. I think she's finally figured out I'm not going to mess with her or her nest.

The Youngster and I had a great time at the dog show on Friday. It was nice to see the gorgeous dogs who were competing, meet their owners, renew the acquaintance of a breeder/handler I really like, and I got the opportunity to meet someone who's been a cyberfriend for about 4 years. They even fed me lunch! The breeder/handler did all the cooking, and he makes the best darn potato salad I've ever had. His grape-and-walnut salad wasn't too bad, either. This attractive, gentle, funny man is single and unless my instincts are impaired - and they might be, I'm seriously out of practice - he was flirting with me. He only lives about a 4-5 hour drive away....... I'm hoping to see him more frequently in the future. A couple of pics from the show:


The beautiful Posey, with her breeder/handler. Posey took "Best Opposite Sex".


The girl who took Reserve


The handsome Best in Breed winner
(Very nice dog, not only gorgeous but very sweet, bred by Posey's breeder/handler)

The little whiskered packages arrived Friday. They're very sweet, and I'm having so much fun with them!

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary...

How does your garden grow? Did you have better luck with your seedings than I had with mine?

Only two of the original tomato seedlings are still doing OK. They're small, but they're hanging in there. Same with 4 of my pepper plants - one habanero and 3 sweet peppers. The others didn't make it, so they've all been replaced with store-bought plants. (I found a place that had a little container of 4 identical vegetable plants for 99 cents. Bought two varieties of tomatoes, two varities of peppers.) There are two Big Boy plants and one Roma out in the rose bed, the other two Big Boys and three Romas went into the garden, as did a larger, single heirloom tomato called a Purple Cherokee ($1.19) . The store-bought habaneros and jalapenos went into the garden too.

Hopefully I'll have better luck starting seeds next year. The biggest problem this year was that I had no heat during the germination period and the indoor temp was too low. It was very hot the weekend in April when I planted all my seed trays and I turned the furnace off so I could turn the fan on to circulate the air indoors. Two days later, when the temp dropped back to normal April temps, I switched the furnace back on and the burner wouldn't ignite. I didn't bother to get it fixed then; since I'm used to cooler temps and the little electric heater kept most of the living space in the mid-60's, I figured I'd wait until later in the summer to get the furnace repaired. (If the problem is what I think it is, it's a quick fix that'll run under $100, but it isn't something I can do myself.) But the cooler temps weren't conducive to strong seedling growth, and cats reaching in through the crate bars to bat at the seedlings that did grow combined with too little light where they were sitting didn't do anything to help. Next year I'm going to start some things earlier (impatiens, tomatoes, peppers) and others later (beans, melons), line the sides of the crate with cat-proof but transparent/translucent material (I'm thinking clear kitchen cutting mats, the kind you can get 2/$1 at the dollar store, might be just the right size), use heating pads under the crate to encourage germination, and hang a grow-light above the seed trays inside the crate which can be raised as the seedlings grow.

On the other hand, the watermelon plant is doing well - it about doubles in size every day. And some of the seeds I planted are starting to come up - cucumber plants, a couple of moonflowers just peeking out of the dirt, and little lettuces all in a row. In the herb bed there are tiny green things coming up all over but I still can't tell which are herbs and which are weeds, so I've been weeding very carefully. (I didn't plant rows there so much as I planted areas, to be thinned out as necessary as seedlings develop.) If I hadn't seen just-sprouted dill at a friend's house yesterday, I probably would have weeded out my dill sprouts today - they look just like little grass sprouts. It should get easier to tell the difference over the next couple of weeks, and if I planted right, the herbs themselves will shade the soil and prevent at least some of the weeds from growing. Four of the bush-type morning glories I planted in the tub out front are still growing, and the three little hibiscus plants I planted along the south side of the pole barn have survived 48 hours inside the yard without dog damage, and have doubled in size in just 2 days. Dare I hope they're going to make it? One of them bit the dust before it ever got into the ground; I had the 4 paper cups holding the little plants sitting next to me while I dug the hole for the first one, and didn't pay any attention when The Goofball came up beside me. But when I looked over to get the first plant to put in the hole I'd just dug, the only thing left in one paper cup was the stub of a stem and The Goofball was happily chewing away. I forgot that one of his favorite activities as a pup was grazing around the yard biting the heads off dandelions. Sometimes I think I live with a herd of big white cows.

The color cartridge for my printer arrived Saturday, so I printed up some flyers advertising classes to start in July. One during the day, one in the evening. I got some of them posted around today, and will get the rest out over the next few days as I go in different directions to run errands. I've gone public, no going back now. I've got a month to get the training center and the office ready for business. Summer's not usually the best time to hold obedience classes; vacations too often conflict with the 6-week run of class. But out here, where there is a large summer population, I'm hoping that between local folks and summer people there will be enough students to have two good classes, and that'll give me a jump start for fall.

I've got another "project" lawnmower. This time, a gas-powered, self-propelled model with a nice wide deck. It's an extra Chris's landlady had, she gave it to me on Sunday when I was there. I haven't had a chance to work on it yet, one front wheel isn't turning and it hasn't been used in a couple of years so it's probably going to take some fiddling to get it started. But I know that the only reason it was an extra is that they needed a smaller mower to make it easier to mow the agility yard (with its tight angles and small spaces), and that the mechanically-capable landlady takes excellent care of her tools so I'm sure that once I get it started it'll run well. It's just a matter of finding the time to work on it.

I've been really busy the last week. I'm tired, but it's a good tired. Tomorrow I'm going up to my mom's, to help her out with some cleaning she just can't do by herself any more. I'll stick around and cook dinner for her, and I know she wants me to stick around to go with her to the community band concert in the evening. I dread the thought - she'll parade me around and introduce me to everyone she knows - but I'll probably go anyway, unless I'm just too beat or too grubby. At least it's the community band, which is a lot easier for me to listen to than the community chorus my mom sings in. (Gad, don't ever tell her I said that! But I can handle instrumental mistakes a lot better than I can off-key singing.) Friday's a busy day, too, there's a big UKC dog show a couple of hours away and some of the folks I know from the rare breed community will be showing their dogs. The owner of The Youngster's maternal grandmother will be there. I need to go down there anyway to meet a cyberfriend who's bringing me a pair of little whiskered packages, a certain torxie and her creamsicle brother. *smile* If I can get everything I'd planned to do on Friday morning finished by tomorrow night, I'm thinking about getting up before breakfast so The Youngster and I can be out of here by 7 am to make the 9:15 am ring time so we can catch up with the breed folks. Good socialization opportunity for The Youngster, great opportunity for us to educate breeders and advocate for placing deaf pups in responsible homes rather than killing them.

Amalie nearly gave me a heart attack this afternoon, she managed to get up onto the roof from the patio. She went from the top of the wellhouse to the roof, and it's a long jump up. I didn't think she could jump that high. She came down pretty quickly when I called her, despite the panic in my voice (or maybe because of it), going from the house roof to the patio roof and jumping down from there. (Scaring the heck out of the kingbird mama, too, when she walked on the patio roof over the nest.) I'm going to have to attach a piece of fencing from the eave of the roof to canopy over the entire top of the wellhouse so nobody can get up there that way again. I don't recover from adrenaline rushes as fast as I used to.

It's All Up To Mother Nature, Now

I finished my garden this evening. I got it fenced in yesterday afternoon, and got half of it planted. Got my bean plants in and planted a couple extra seeds of both regular beans and limas - my seedlings had been in plastic cups indoors for too long, they were tall but spindly, and all but one plant of each type ended up breaking. So there is one seedling of each in the ground, and two more of each kind of seed planted. Those are near the east (back) fence, which is shared with the yard. Along the fence on the south side, I planted zucchini, pickling cucumber, and cucumber seeds. Along the north fence, which is the chainlink fence at the south end of the patio, I planted moonflower seeds, and along the west (front) side I planted flowers - cosmos and bush-type morning glories.

This afternoon, I transplanted 6 little tomato plants. I hope they make it. I'm going to buy a couple of small potted tomato plants, just for insurance. I also planted 2 eggplant seedlings and one sugarbaby watermelon seedling in the same area. I did another area with just peppers - habaneros, jalapenos, yellow banana peppers, and a "carnival" mix of sweet peppers. There are 5 colors of peppers in the carnival mix - red, yellow, orange, pale green-white, and purple. I only had room for 8 of them, I hope I'll get at least one plant of each color. Of all the pepper seedlings, the habaneros are the sturdiest; they're only about 3" tall, but they already have several sets of leaves and look like miniature pepper plants. I had a couple of good yellow pepper seedlings left over, I planted both of them in a large planter and put that in front of the garage. In another area of the garden I planted lettuce and carrot seeds. So that's the vegetable garden, except for the pumpkin seeds. I'm still trying to decide whether to plant them up front, outside the garden fence, or to plant them out back in the leaf pile. There are 10 seeds, that'll make 4 hills (two with 3 seeds/vines, two with 2 seeds/vines), so maybe I'll plant two hills in front and two hills in back.

I also transplanted my baby impatiens seedlings. These are the "butterfly" mix - pastels with deeper colored throats. I had enough seedlings for one large planter (6 seedlings) and two 6-inch pots (3 seedlings each); after they've had a couple of days to get settled into their new homes I'll move them out to the patio with the rest of the non-hanging impatiens. I'm going to bungee-cord the larger planter to the middle post of the patio roof, so it doesn't get knocked over by dogs or cats. My sis had gotten a pot of moonflowers from her MIL for me; she told me to separate them, not to plant them all in the same place, so I split them into three deep, 8-inch pots and put those pots on the north side of the fence, outside the yard. If they make it, they should grow up the fence and give me a little privacy screening in that corner.

The wire crate I kept the seedlings in is empty now; if I get a second wind I'll get it cleaned up and taken down tonight, otherwise I'll do it in the morning. It'll be nice not to have it up on my dining table any more! I still have a couple of little plants in paper cups on my bedroom windowsill, I'll get those planted out in the yard tomorrow. If I plant them along the south side of the pole barn they'll be inside the yard, but the dogs aren't bothering the daylilies there so hopefully they won't bother these other little plants either. I'm going to plant some catnip there, too, and more out in back of the yard. I still have some perennial herb seeds to plant. I decided today to plant lemon balm and peppermint in the flower bed on the south side of the house along the bedroom wall, there isn't much there now and it'll be nice to have the lemon balm under the bedroom windows, it's got such a fresh, lemony scent. I'll do that tomorrow, too.

It's all up to Mother Nature now - all I can do from this point on is weed, fertilize, and water! Now I can turn my attention back to the lawn. *sigh* I'm not going to try to cut it all at once, I'll just do a little every day until it's done, wait a week, and start over again.

I found my stash of lye, so I got the soap made for Weim Rescue today, too. By tomorrow afternoon I'll be able to unmold and slice it, and I'll take it down to Chris on Sunday - I'm going down for the monthly open house - and it can finish curing at her house. It smells good in here - lavender and lemongrass. Yum. I'll get at least a couple of soap balls out of it, from the trimmings, they'll smell great in a guest soap dish in the bathroom.

I'm behind on housework, and I've still got some unpacking and organizing to do, but now that I don't need to be outside working on getting the gardens set up, I'll have more time to work inside. This week's projects are to get the living room, dining room, and kitchen carpets steam-vacced, get some blocks made to raise the foot of my bed and then move it back to the outside wall, and get my summer and winter clothes swapped out of and into storage bins. The printer cartridge I ordered should be here soon, maybe tomorrow, and I'll get to work on advertising flyers for obedience classes to start in July.

I think I'm going to put clean sheets on the bed, take a shower to get the garden dirt off, then have a nice soak in a tub full of hot water and scented bath salts. Then I think I'll have a cocktail or two. I've earned an evening's pampering.

If At First You Don't Succeed.......

try, try again. All last week, I kept looking up at the kingbird nest on the patio rafter, thinking "I really need to take that down and dispose of it," but I never got around to doing it. I hadn't seen the kingbird pair anywhere, I figured they'd started over elsewhere. While I was working outdoors on Sunday I saw mama kingbird a couple of times, perched on the fence. Last night, when I was sitting out on the patio, mama buzzed my head on her way in to the nest. And she sat on it overnight. She's trying again, in the same spot. Fortunately, it's not hot enough to be a problem for her or the eggs, and the 7-day forecast doesn't include any high temps that would threaten the new family-to-be, so I've got a little time to work out a way to shade the roof panel above the nest and work out placement of a fan to circulate cooler air upward to dissipate the hot air that collects under the porch roof when the sun's shining on it. I wonder if just a large sheet of aluminum foil, shiny side up, over the nest area would help keep it cooler there to begin with. I could probably just put little rocks around the edges to hold it down in case it gets windy. I think I'll try that first, then develop a "Plan B" if it doesn't work. I've got one small oscillating fan, a very old one which can be adjusted to aim from straight up to about 135-degrees downward, that I'll try first to provide air circulation. It could be problematic simply because the Big Sister is a little OCD about things that flash - as the blades of fans do as they rotate. I know she's OK with box fans, though, so if the little oscillating fan sets her off I can always use one of the box fans instead.

I've been a little "off my game" the last week or so. I'm not sick, no major problems, just a lot of little stuff combined that's had me operating at less than full productivity. I haven't gotten as much done as I wanted to, but at least I've gotten some things accomplished. I stopped at the lumber yard on Friday and picked up two 60-pound bags of Quikrete; that's enough for about 22-24 stepping stones. (Last night, I finally wrangled one of those two bags out of my car. 60 pounds in such a small, compact package is hard to lift!) A new 3-stone batch of plain stones is on today's schedule. I also picked up a ten-foot 1 X 10 board and some shelf brackets. Sunday, I got the board cut to the right length, covered it in light-tack Contact shelving paper, and hung up on the chain-link fence at the yard end of the patio. It's crooked; it is, at least, level from side to side, but it slants downward from back to front. I don't care. It's not so bad a slant that flower pots will slide off, and the flowers should eventually hide the slant. I sat on the patio and finished potting the last of the two flats of impatiens I got a couple of weeks ago and got those up on the shelf:




I also hung up the plastic-bag hanging planter that I transplanted impatiens into late last week. Once that really starts to fill out it's going to be gorgeous:





The hanging basket of impatiens I hung up under the patio a couple of weeks ago is really starting to take off, and I've got enough baby lettuces that I can have a small, fresh salad every day:





I went to visit with my mom yesterday, and once again I stopped at the little rural garden center on my way home. I wanted a couple of geraniums. I was thinking I'd get red ones, or orangey-red, or maybe even white, but then I saw these:



(I seem to be on a pink kick lately. Hot pink flowers, hot pink pitcher and glasses, hot pink plastic ashtray for out on the patio. Plus a pink depression-glass sugar and creamer, an addition to my sugar/creamer collection and my very-small-but-destined-to-grow collection of depression glass.) Now I just have to go out to the pole barn and find a couple of planters for the geraniums and get them transplanted. Also on my schedule for today.

Sunday afternoon I got the raised bed re-cultivated and got my herb seeds planted. Tarragon in the middle, Rosemary on each side of it and in front of it. Moving outward from the sides is a row of lavender, and then a row of Blue Hyssop closest to the side rails. In front of the tarragon and rosemary is two rows of German Chamomile; in back of the tarragon (no rosemary behind the tarragon) is a row of Dill, and behind that a row of parsley. In a week to 10 days I should have a lot of little green growing things in that bed.

I've just about got all the sod clods out of the vegetable garden. By the time I get that finished, and get my seedlings transplanted and my direct-sow seeds in, I'm going to be about 10 days behind schedule. Getting this patch prepared has been a lot more work than I anticipated. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this area is going to work out for the vegetable garden and I'll be able to plant there again next year. Parts of it get a little more shade than I'd calculated on; if I plant carefully it should still be OK, not everything requires 8 hours of full sun and that can be planted in the areas that get shade for a couple of hours mid-day or in the early evening. The center gets full sun from morning until early evening, so the tomatoes and peppers should do well there. If I get a lower-than-expected yield this year, I'll probably prepare a different area next year - now that I know for sure what the sun/shade pattern of my yard is - and plant flowers in this year's vegetable garden instead. It would actually be a pretty good spot to have my perennial garden.......

The grass is getting very long again. I'm having difficulty getting motivated to get out there with the little electric mower and cut it; pushing that little, dull-bladed mower around is a lot of work. I'm actually considering buying a brand-new push mower, and using that instead. They're pretty light weight these days, and take less effort to push than my electric mower. I was reading an article on organic lawn care, and it suggested the way to a lush lawn is not to mow any shorter than about 3". That cuts off the tops of the weeds (which is where they get their nourishment) but protects the roots of the grass (which is where it gets its nourishment), strengthening the grass so it can choke off the weeds itself. Keeping the grass a little longer also keeps it from drying out later in the year when there's less rain, and should reduce and maybe even eliminate the need to water it. I'm thinking that just trimming off the tops of the grass with a push mower might actually require less physical effort than using the electric mower. Before I get a push-mower, though, I'm going to adjust the height on the electric mower to the highest setting and see if that takes some of the work out of pushing it around. Not today (it's supposed to rain in a little bit) and not tomorrow (supposed to rain most of the day), but I'll pencil it in on Thursday's schedule.

I've got to find my storage box of soap-making supplies/tools; I need to make a batch of lavender/lemon-grass shampoo-soap for Weim Rescue. The Weim National Specialty is being held in MI in a couple of weeks, and Weim Rescue will be making up small decorative bags containing essential oil room spray, essential oil mosquito repellant spray, and a bar of the essential oil shampoo-soap for sale. Weim Rescue supplied the oils, I'm supplying the other ingredients. (I'm donating my labor, and trading the essential oils I'll use in the soap in exchange for a microchip for the Youngster.) I need to get that delivered within the next week, and it needs to cure a few days before I pack it up. I originally wanted to do a color-swirled-into-white soap but I'm going to be molding this soap in cardboard quart half-and-half containers because I'm not going to be making the 10-pound batch my box mold holds. The half-and-half containers mold a soap shape I like, a rounded-side square that fits nicely in the palm and is easy to hold onto. It would be really tough to swirl colors in a tall, narrow mold so I'm going to dig out some old, colored practice soaps and cut them into "confetti" pieces and add to plain white soap before pouring it.

Rest in Peace

My baby birds are dead. It got very hot here yesterday, 95 degrees in the shade. Under my covered patio, it was even warmer. The "roof" of the patio is make of green corugated fiberglas-reinforced panels; they're translucent and let the light in. The nest is only a couple of inches below the roofing. I think it got so hot up there either yesterday or Saturday that it killed the babies. I didn't see or hear any activity from the nest yesterday, and haven't seen mom and dad since Saturday, so I think the babies are gone and the parents have abandoned the nest. I was beginning to think the Kingbird babies were dead, anyway - one baby was quite a big larger than the others, and when I climbed up on the step-stool to have a peek on Friday I could only see the big baby. I'm guessing he was from an egg that a bird other than the Kingbirds laid in the nest. Since there are so many Brown-Headed Cowbirds around, and since they're notorious for nest parasitism (http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/birds/manbook/nestpara.htm), I'm guessing the bigger baby - the one in the picture below - was a Brown-Headed Cowbird.

I'm going to wait another 24 hours, and if I still don't see/hear anything from the nest, or see the parent birds, I'll take the nest down. I'm sad about the baby Kingbirds, but not so sad about the baby Cowbird. Cowbirds are really not nice, they lay their eggs in everybody else's nest and are often the only babies that survive, while the babies of the birds who built the nest starve to death.

I hope the Kingbirds have time to start over, in a better location.

What happened to Spring?

It was cold here this Spring. Temperatures averaged 10-15 degrees below normal. As late as last week there were frost/freeze warnings, and it got down to about 30 degrees one night a couple weeks back. It was cool and rainy earlier in the week, too. But Summer has arrived with a vengeance. Yesterday it was 90 degrees, sunny and humid, without a breeze to make it more tolerable. Today, it was 95 degrees in the shade, less humid though (thank heaven!) and there's a nice, if not steady, breeze. The Big Sister and the Goofball are napping quietly in their crates, enjoying the central air-conditioning; the Youngster and the Senior are relaxing in the shade of the big pine tree out back, enjoying a frozen venison bone.

The Youngster had a big day, yesterday. He's been here a month, but we haven't done an awful lot of socializing yet. I've been teaching him some manners both at home and in controlled-distraction environments, and teaching him to walk on-leash. He led a sheltered life his first few months, and there's a whole big world of things he's never seen before. He was very cautious when I got him, but he's been gradually overcoming that as he's bonded to me, learning to trust that I won't deliberately expose him to something scary and I'll handle the situation if something does turn out to be scary. My little town is having an annual Spring festival this weekend, there are lots of activities and lots of people around and I thought it was time the Youngster got out and did a little socializing. So I gave him his first bath (and he did very well, relaxing once he realized the spray hose wasn't SO very scary and there was lots of skritching involved), trimmed his nails, grabbed a slice of Natural Balance roll out of the freezer and put it in a baggie in my pocket, and he and I went to town.

He is a delight on a leash. He learned very quickly that rushing ahead or pulling off to the side wasn't permitted, and he did very well at walking along by my side on a slack lead. I have him in a martingale collar, and when I did need to give him direction with tiny tugs on the leash, he responded beautifully. He's naturally a very polite fellow, it doesn't take him long to catch on to what's expected of him in the manners department. We stopped and watched kids on a pony ride, and on little carnival rides. Then we walked the length of town and back, through the car show. (There were 104 cars entered in this show! That's huge for such a little town!) He met lots of people who wanted to say hello, and was very polite - didn't jump up, and either stood or sat politely for petting. He met lots and lots of children, and it was love at first sight (on both sides) with every single one. His soft kisses generated a lot of giggles. He saw bicycles, and wagons, and scooters, and strollers, and roller-bladers, and running kids, and wheelchairs, and canes, and walkers - lots and lots of new and potentially scary (or reaction-provoking) things. He responded to all with a reserved curiosity but no spookiness or shyness. He's got a lovely, solid temperament and he's going to grow into an absolutely awesome adult. He's got the makings of an exceptional therapy dog, he's very sensitive to peoples' size and strength. Sometimes he really had to struggle to keep all four feet on the ground as I've been teaching him, but he always managed to do it without prompting from me. Even when one man sitting in a lawn chair wrapped his arms around the pup and was smooching him, the Youngster kept his front feet on the ground. He acquitted himself well yesterday, and I was very pleased with, and proud of, him.

Wednesday, the Youngster lost two of three remaining baby canine teeth, an upper and lower from the same side. I was checking out his teeth, saw that those two baby canines were very loose, so I pinched them out with my fingers. Along with the baby tooth he lost the day I got him, that makes three I've gotten. He's got one more baby canine still, even though the adult canine is half grown-in already; I'm watching that and hoping the baby tooth will fall out on its own. Sometimes they don't, and need to be removed by a vet. Maybe that venison bone he's gnawing on will do the trick. I'm keeping an eye on his baby pre-molars, maybe I'll be able to get one or two of those when they fall out, too. He's got the first of his big-boy molars - holy cow are they BIG! And very, very white. He has a beautiful bite, he's going to have a very nice, correct mouth. He's beautiful, period, and going to be breathtaking. (You don't think I'm in love with this pup, do you? I'm wondering if he's The Man reincarnated.)

An Aging Body Is a Pain in the Shoulder

I spent some time yesterday afternoon shaking dirt out of the sod clods back into the garden area. Today, I finally finished pulling up the rest of the sod in there. I won't be able to finish de-dirting the clods it until at least tomorrow, probably not until Saturday, because there's some really nasty weather brewing and it's supposed to last through at least tomorrow afternoon. At least the sod-pulling is done. When I finished, I sat and weeded the flower bed around one tree in the front. (The bed around the other tree needs very little weeding, it's planted with Bishop's weed http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/horticulture/components/7566-49.html which grows before the weeds get started and prevents the weeds from getting any light to grow.) Now my hens-and-chicks, violas, and mums have some room to breathe. But after leaning on my left hand yesterday afternoon to de-dirt clods, and again this afternoon to weed, my left shoulder hurts so much I can barely lift my arm. Time for some ibuprofen. Getting old stinks.

While I was weeding I kept thinking of how I'd do anything to get out of weeding when I was a kid, and how I don't mind doing it now. I could practically hear my mom, "You hated weeding when you were a kid, how come you like doing it now?" Well, I don't hate bugs any more (for the most part, anyway, there are still some bugs that give me the shudders - like the grubs I saw in my garden today, I'm going to have to break down and get some Grub-ex), I don't mind getting my hands dirty any more, and I don't have a gazillion other things I'd rather be doing, as I did during summers when I was in school. Besides, the flower beds are mine now, and I like when they look nice.

My beautiful oriole kept me company while I was weeding, sitting in the other tree and singing to me. He's spectacular, and his song is so clear and sweet. I stopped weeding and just sat and watched him for a bit. During the time I sat and watched the male cardinal visited the feeder, as did a blue jay and the house finches and goldfinches. So much avian color! Bright red, blue, orange, yellow, and rosy purple. I don't think I'll ever get tired of bird-watching.

And speaking of bird-watching, I haven't gotten up on my step stool to peek at the kingbird nest since Tuesday, but there were at least 3 babies in there then. I managed to snap a pic just as the oldest one stuck his head up and cheeped for his mama:



When I took my mom's dog back to her on Monday, I stopped on my way home and picked up a couple flats of impatiens. My impatiens seedlings are still small, and I wanted to get a couple of hanging baskets planted with already-flowering impatiens for my mom. I planted one basket (for myself) Monday evening, and did all the rest on Tuesday. That used up one flat. The next time I go up to Mom's, I'll take her baskets up to her. I also did one planter for myself, and have another half-dozen or so I'd like to do with the remaining flat, and some other planters I'm setting aside to fill with the seedlings I've started. The ones I started are pastels with deeper centers, they should be beautiful when they finally get growing.

This weekend's projects are the gardens. Once the heavy rain is gone, I'll get my herb seeds planted in the raised bed. Then I'll get more sod clods de-dirted, get the soil in the vegetable garden amended with peat moss and a manure/compost mixture, and get it fenced in. I'm hoping to be able to get at least some of my seedlings planted by Sunday, and the lettuce, carrots, zucchini seeds into the ground. My heirloom tomato seeds have finally sprouted, I need to get all the little seedlings out to start hardening off before I plant them. I'm hoping to be able to get everything into the garden by mid-week.

Here comes the rain! Hmmmm..... the dogs are sleeping quietly, I can't get outside to do any work... I might just have to take a nap. *grin*

Welcome to the World

The Youngster woke me up early this morning, needing to go out. As I stood in the doorway watching him, I heard a tiny cheep-cheep-cheep coming from overhead. I looked up to see a wide open baby beak above the edge of the nest on the patio crossbeam. One of the babies hatched overnight! He hasn't been joined by any others yet, but I'm hoping to see siblings by later today. I found his shell on the patio a little later this morning, either he or his mama had kicked it out of the nest. And thanks to that shell, I've finally been able to identify the breed - they're Eastern Kingbirds. http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/id/framlst/i4440id.html Their diet consists of flying insects; they'll find lots to eat around here!

I love the variety of birdlife here. The populations are different from the front yard to the back. Out in back are the robins and this pair of kingbirds. I've never seen the kingbirds out front, and I've seen a robin out front only rarely. There are other birds in the woods in the back that I haven't identified yet. Out in front, the goldfinches, house finches, and purple finches that were eating me out of house and home for the last couple of months have been visiting the feeder much less frequently. They still come around, but only one or two at a time and they don't stick around all day the way they did. The chickadees, nuthatches, titmice, and juncos are also less frequent visitors; they must all be sitting on nests. (Gosh, just as I typed that sentence, a titmouse flew up to the feeder!) The cardinal pair is still coming to feed in the early morning and the mid- to late-evening (they are breathtakingly beautiful, even the duller female), and the sparrows and brown-headed cowbirds are still hanging around. The male red-winged blackbirds have apparently found their mates and begun their clutches; until the last few days I could just about count on seeing a male red-winged blackbird displaying out front, strutting around on the grass surrounding the feeder, wings half-spread and the colored bars fluffed out for maximum exposure, bright red epaulets on the shiny black cape of his wings. But now they, too, fly in to eat and fly out again. I sure did enjoy the show while it lasted, though, and I'm looking forward to an encore performance next spring.

(Postscript - I just went out to take the pic above, and saw two baby beaks in the nest, so at least two eggs have hatched so far.)

I Hate Lawnmowers!

The gas mower turned out to be a pull start. I primed it. I gave it a shot of starting fluid. I finally cleaned the spark plug. After working on it for half an hour, I got it started. Yay! I got about 36 square feet of my front yard done when something caught the blades and it quit. Now the pull cord is all messed up. I sat on the lawn for an hour taking the darn thing apart and trying to fix it, to no avail. Just when I'd given up and was sitting there shaking my head, I heard the sweetest birdsong coming from directly behind me. I turned around to look and sitting there on a tree branch was an oriole! He was watching me, and singing. What a handsome, bright orange fellow! As I watched, he flew to the oriole feeder and had a little snack. Since he apparently doesn't mind my company, I'll have to sit out front for a bit when I get a chance, and see if I can get a pic.

I'm tired and even more sore than I was earlier, but I don't care. That oriole made my day!

Oh, My Aching Back

I ache. All over, not just my back. In fact, it's my forearms that hurt the worst. I worked on the vegetable garden-to-be on Friday, pulling up sod. I'd worked on it last Friday and only gotten about 1/4 of it done; last Saturday, my lats ached so badly I could barely move. It rained most of the week so I didn't get a chance to do any more work on it. I really want to get it finished so I can get it fenced in and start transplanting seedlings into it next weekend. (I borrowed a fence-post driver on Thursday that's got to be returned this coming Wednesday, so I need to have at least the fence poles up by Tuesday evening, if not the fencing itself.) I had to go into town Friday morning, so I swung by Tractor Supply Co. and picked up another 100-foot roll of fencing and 5 more fence posts.

The first thing I did when I got home was drive one of those fence posts outside the fence in the stretch between the house and the lamp post for the backyard vapor lamp, which I'd tied the fence to. It was a little too long a stretch to go without additional support, and I always intended to put another pole in when I was able to buy more. While I was at TSC, I splurged and bought myself a really good pair of needle-nose pliers with wire cutter. These pliers have cushion grips, and spring action. Sweet. They made getting the fence attached to the new pole with fence clips so easy! Fencing the garden is going to take a lot less effort thanks to the new pliers.

Just as I was finishing the last twist of the fence clip my doorbell rang. Mom had arrived. She stopped by for lunch - and to drop off Daisy, so I could watch her for the weekend - on her way to my sister's house. Mom, my sis, and my brother left yesterday morning and drove to a suburb of Buffalo, to attend the wedding of the son of my mom's cousin. They're coming back today and mom should be home by early evening, but she's going to be too tired to stop and get Daisy so I'll be taking Daisy back to Mom tomorrow afternoon. I would have enjoyed going to the wedding too, but weekend trips just aren't do-able for me. Even over-nighters aren't do-able. When I'm finally earning enough money to pay a pet-sitter, and if I meet someone I can trust to pet-sit, I'll be taking a couple of small one- or two-night trips I've been wanting to take for a long time. I want to go visit with Elaine, and I'd like to be able to go down to Linda's for the weekend with Chris every now and then, too. Anyway, Mom and I had a nice lunch together, then she left for my sis's. Poor Daisy didn't stop looking out the window for her until yesterday morning. Daisy loves me, she gets so excited when I go to my mom's that she can't keep still and does zoomies in circles. But Daisy adores Mom (the feeling's mutual), and is desolate when Mom leaves her here.

I put Daze out into the yard with the Senior dog and the Youngster, got my 4-pronged long-handled cultivator out of the garage, donned my suede work gloves, and attacked the garden-to-be. I pulled up sod until I was dizzy, then took a break. I went back to it, and worked at it until I didn't have the strength left to pull up a single more clump. I didn't get it finished, but it's more than 2/3 of the way done. You can't see it in this pic, but in addition to the larger area I did a 2-foot wide strip along the fence to the front edge of the area I want to clear. That's where all the long grass was, the stuff that was really tough to pull up. So when I get back to it - hopefully tomorrow - I should be able to get it finished in one work session. Then I'll have to de-dirt all the sod clumps. (Most are in the garden area, but you can see a pile by the first green fence post, some of that is from the garden area and a little of it is from a thin strip of sod I cut out along the fence line from the first green pole to the second. I planted morning glories in that strip early last week, but they haven't come up yet.)





My forearms ached too bad yesterday to even attempt to get back to work on that project, so I did some other things instead. The "grass" in the patio area was getting pretty long, but I was still trying to decide on the best way to get it cut. I didn't want to use the electric mower, with its narrow deck and dull, chipped blades it doesn't handle thick grass very well. I would have had to bring the gas mower I got from Mom in through the house to get it into the patio area, and I didn't want to do that either. And there is still chicken wire under the dirt/grass in half of the patio, and it sticks up out of the ground in places. That would wreak havoc on either mower. I finally decided to use the weed wacker I brought home from Mom's when I got the lawnmower.

It did a pretty OK job, but it's not something I want to continue doing for the next 20 years. I've decided to pave the entire patio area with stepping stones, except for a flower bed at the end. I'll plant perennials there. (Chris has a perennial flower bed that's absolutely gorgeous, from the first crocus in the spring to the last mum in the fall. She's put years of work into it, I've watched it fill out gradually over the years, always wishing I could have something like that myself. When I was there Thursday, the iris were starting to bloom.) Now I've got the room and the time to make it happen; I'll put annuals in there this summer so I'll have color and blooms this year, and get started on the perennials by planting some bulbs there in the fall. I also found my Moonflower seeds at TSC on Thursday, I'll plant those along the fence at the end (maybe this afternoon) so I'll have blooms and perfume to enjoy when I sit out on the patio in the evenings.

I only have 4 plain stepping/paving stones made at the moment. While I'm out tomorrow I'll get a couple more bags of concrete mix so I can start making more. I decided I might as well get at least those 4 stones set, so I did that yesterday afternoon.

I need to adjust the stone on the right, to raise the lower left corner just a tad. That corner's a bit tricky - it's high where the threshhold blocks are set in, so I need to slope the stones down a little in that corner to meet the rest of the patio (which I'll level before placing stones in). I checked out the threshhold blocks to see if maybe I could lower them a little so they'd be flush with the patio and the yard, but they're really dug in deep and they're helping support the fence posts, so I think it's best to leave them as they are and just slope the paving stones to meet them. When the prior owners poured the cement patio slab (you can see the edge of it on the right) they didn't bother to level it first so, like all the rest of the floors in my house, the whole slab slants. In this case, it slants downward from back to front; I had to put some shims under the front legs of my glider so it would be level. I want to make sure the stone-paved area of the patio is level, so I can put a table and chairs out there eventually. I think it'll look nice when I get it done.

Then I spent some time rearranging everything in the roofed part of the patio. I took my 3 windchimes down from the end opposite the fence and moved them over to the fence end. Mama bird was off the nest but I still didn't want to do any more nail-pounding than was absolutely necessary, so I used medium screw hooks to re-hang the wind chimes. (By the way, I think mama bird is a titmouse. I got a pretty good look at her and her mate yesterday, I'll have to try to get some pics.) I left room for the big chime that I need to re-string when I get a chance to look for the pieces and get it done. I moved the bamboo shade over into that spot, and put the wider plastic mini-blind in the spot where the bamboo shade had been. At night, my neighbor's vapor light illuminates the sitting area on my patio, shines right in my eyes, and spoils the ambiance; the mini-blind completely blocks it out and the bamboo shade helps, so now I have a private little sitting area I can illuminate with luminariae and little oil lanterns. If I ever find my string of pendant star lights, I'll put those out there too. (I'm sure I bought two sets. I gave one to Chris last year for her little pool area, but I know I've still got the other set. It's probably in my box of Christmas decorations, but I'm not sure exactly where that is at the moment. I need to go out to the pole barn later and get a bigger crate for the Youngster, so I'll look for that box while I'm out there.)

It's partly sunny and cool today, it would be a great day to finish de-sodding the garden, but my muscles just aren't up to it. I think I'm going to try to get the gas mower started; I haven't had a really good look at it yet so I don't know if it's an electric start or if I have to pull a rope. If I have to pull a rope, it's going to have to wait - there's just not enough strength in my aching forearms to pull anything. If it's an electric start I should be in pretty good shape; I'll probably need to use a couple squirts of starter fluid, but I should be able to get it going. When and if I do, the front lawn is going down! That, and getting the Moonflower seeds planted, is about all I'm planning on getting accomplished today. Then I'll give Daisy a bath, and once she's dry I'll trim her. She's getting a wee bit shaggy. At least I won't have to start her schnauzer-type cut from scratch with 3" long fur all over her body, I'll be able to just zip along and it shouldn't take too long. Then she'll be clean and pretty when I take her home tomorrow.

Hordes of Hummers

Well, maybe not hordes. But my hummingbird feeders are now well-established among the local Ruby-Throated hummingbird population, and they see a lot of activity. One feeder is about four feet from me as I sit here at my desk; it's just outside the window, hanging on the brace bar for the metal awning over the window. This feeder has perches - the one in the back at the end of the patio roof doesn't - so I get to see them not only hovering and flitting around, but resting on the perches while they eat. They know I'm here, they watch me between sips at the feeder, but seem not to be bothered by my presence.

On the other hand, the silly bird who made her nest just outside the sliding glass door between the den and the patio flies off every time I open the door. Because the dogs go outside through that door, it's opened many, many times a day. The nest is directly above the path the dogs take from the doorway to the yard. She seems not to mind the dogs coming and going (perhaps she knows they can't reach her), but she's afraid of me. I still haven't figured out what she is yet! She's maybe 6" long, has a white body and breast, slate- grey back, wings, and tail, and her head's a deeper charcoal grey. I can't see all of her when she's sitting on the nest, and when she flies off she doesn't perch close enough for me to get a good look at her, so I haven't seen her head/beak close enough to help in indentifying her. I'm thinking she's either a slate-grey junco, or maybe a titmouse. She's been sitting on the nest for a couple of weeks already, shouldn't be long before the eggs hatch. The nest is above the cement slab of the patio, once the eggs hatch I'm going to put up a table with towel-lined box lids on it, in case a baby falls out of the nest.

I got about 36 square feet of the sod in my vegetable-garden-to-be pulled up yesterday. A little less than a third of the space I'm planning on. I have to admit, I was grateful when it started to rain and I had to quit. I did a little weeding in the plants around the front yard trees after the rain stopped, and I planted some bush-type Morning Glory seeds in the little planter out front, but I wasn't going to mess with soaking wet sod after the rain. I just took 600mg of Ibuprofen, as soon as that kicks in and the muscles I abused yesterday don't ache quite so much, I'll get outside and remove another stretch of sod today. I need to get the front lawn cut, too. My mom doesn't need her lawnmower any more, she has someone come and cut her lawn every couple of weeks and he uses his own mower, so I brought her mower home last week. It hasn't been used in a couple of years, it's probably going to be a little tough to get started. I may just wait on that until the weekend, though, it's supposed to rain tonight, tomorrow, and into Friday morning then clear for 2-3 days. I want to get the garden ready for planting this weekend, the bean, lima bean, and watermelon seedlings need to get out of their pots and into the ground as quickly as possible.

While it was raining yesterday I made up a plan for both the raised herb bed and the vegetable garden. I've decided to plant several of the smaller perennial herbs in the raised bed - rosemary and tarragon in the center, hyssop in a border along each side. The German Chamomile, an annual, will go in front as a double border, the lavender will go along both sides and the front behind the smaller border plantings, and I'll put the dill and thyme in the back section. I've got four perennial herbs I'll be planting along the edge of the wooded areas, outside the fence - peppermint, catnip, lemon balm, and a couple of mulleins. I've got a tentative layout for the vegetables, too, with the vining plants (cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, and zucchini) and eggplant along the patio fence, the peppers across the back, the tomatoes on the side opposite the vining plants, and the carrots, lettuce, and watermelons in the middle. I'll probably plant the pumpkins outside the vegetable garden fence, in 3-4 mounds, and put down straw for them to grow on.

Along the wooded lot-line that separates me from my neighbor to the south, there's a very long patch of violets that goes from the corner of the fence back. They're beautiful. Behind the violets is a big patch of lily of the valley. There's nothing behind that, though, so that's where I'm going to scatter the Dutchman's Breeches seeds. Behind that, and across the back of the yard is where I'll plant the perennial herbs. I might plant some of those this afternoon, too.

OK, the sun is shining, I've finished the last cup of coffee in the pot, so I guess it's time to get outside and get working!

Moms, Dogs, and Cheesecake

I took dinner to my mom yesterday - pot roast done in the slow-cooker, fresh asparagus, biscuits, and home-made cheese cake with fresh blueberries on top. In fact, I got started out of the house almost an hour later than I intended, because I'd made a double-recipe cheesecake (dratted Keebler with their bigger graham cracker crumb crust - a single recipe only filled the shell halfway) and it was taking forever to cook all the way through the middle. Once it was finally ready, I spooned on the sour cream/sugar/vanilla topping, popped it back into the oven for 10 minutes, then went and got everything else loaded up into the car - including a bud vase with Narcissi I'd cut from my garden:



Took the cheesecake out of the oven, waited 15 minutes for it to cool a little, then put the plastic lid onto the pan, put the pan in a cardboard box with a hinged lid, and put that in the car. Then I got a panel from an old wire dog crate, and slid that down between the back of the driver/passenger bucket seats and the folded-down back seat, to form a barrier to prevent the dog who was going to be sitting in the passenger seat (my goofy AB boy) from getting into the back of the car and messing with stuff. Loaded my big boy into the front seat, and hit the road.

I had to make a very quick stop on the way, to pick up the asparagus at a roadside stand I knew would be open. I swear, I wasn't out of the car TWO MINUTES, and that darn dog had squeezed himself over the top of the crate panel into the back of the car, had pawed/nosed the lid to the cardboard box open, managed to get the plastic lid off the cheesecake (folding the pan in the process, flipping one side of the cheesecake over onto the other) and was thisclose to getting his tongue onto the cheesecake itself. I was able to get to him before he did, but my poor beautiful cheesecake looked like a graham cracker crumb omelet. When I got to my mom's I flipped it back open and stuck it in the fridge to chill. It wasn't pretty, but it tasted good when we had it for dessert later.

We had a nice long visit, and before I left I split the leftovers, leaving my mom half of everything. Including cheesecake. I covered the pan with my share of the cheesecake with foil, put it in the box with the hinged cover (along with a few other things), put that and the slow-cooker in the back of the car, my dog into the front passenger seat, and headed for home. I had to stop at the gas station to pick up milk on my way home. Do you know that darn dog got into the back of the car and had gotten the box open by the time I got back into the car? He was going for the cheesecake again!

Next time I'm carrying food in the back of my car, I'm taking a different dog along for the ride! The big girl doesn't touch groceries, and is trustworthy when left in an unbarrier-ed car!

A brief intro before I jump in with both feet......

Shortly after my 50th birthday last fall, I finally realized what I wanted to be when I grew up. I've always loved to teach, and I've always loved animals; after having some success doing dog training and cat and dog behavioral counseling on a part time basis, I've decided to see if I can make a living at it. I also want to retail healthy homemade cat and dog treats, specialty handling equipment, other cat and dog specialty items, plus herbs, herbal salves and ointments, and my cold-process soap. I bought my first house in January, a quirky little one-bedroom house "out in the country" with an acre of land and a large pole barn perfect for a small retail shop/consultation office on one side and a training center on the other.

I've been busy these last months getting moved in and settled, getting part of the yard fenced for the dogs, preparing the raised-bed herb garden and the vegetable garden for planting once the threat of frost is past, starting vegetables and flower seedlings indoors, pruning roses and cleaning up the flower beds, learning to make mosaic (and plain) stepping stones, filling existing bird feeders and adding a thistle feeder, two hummingbird feeders, a small window feeder ("cat TV"), and an oriole feeder. (I don't know whether or not I'll ever see an oriole, but I know for sure I wouldn't see one if I didn't have a feeder!) I'm continuing to teach my "household obedience" dog classes through parks and rec programs while I work on developing the clientele for my new business; I'm hoping to be able to offer a full schedule of dog classes at my facility in the fall.

And here we go...........