For about the last two months, there’s been an American toad looking for love in our pond. This guy has a call that is like a long, low, trilling whistle; one note (or near enough for my ears), somewhat insistent. People would think it was a cricket, but it’s lots louder than that. There have [...]
Archive for June, 2008
On water life
Posted in nature on June 30, 2008 | 7 Comments »
More fluffy cuteness
Posted in Uncategorized on June 28, 2008 | 10 Comments »
You know, they only are cute and fluffy for such a short period of time! The typical scene. What you are not hearing is me doing the mothering harangue. “Honey, don’t squeeze them. No, you should put that baby down. Honey, he’s cheeping, he’s scared, please set him down.” Chick complete with egg tooth Ducklings [...]
On new fowl
Posted in chickens, etc. on June 27, 2008 | 10 Comments »
So yesterday we rounded out our meat-bird experiment with the early-morning phone call from the post office. There are now 22 birds chirping at my feet in my office on the back porch. My gosh, are baby turkey poults CUTE! It’s their wild googly eyes, I think. The goslings do not so much cheep as [...]
On the canning season
Posted in Uncategorized on June 26, 2008 | 18 Comments »
This is the time of year the above two devices get found in the junk drawer, washed off, and used. Marital aides? Child behavior modification tools? Nope. These are a cherry pitter and a strawberry huller. It’s funny: we went to three stores before we found the cherry pitter. It was in a local hardware [...]
Flowers in the veg garden
Posted in seeds on June 24, 2008 | 11 Comments »
I confess the last two seasons I have spent zero time with the perennial beds around here. It is quite shameful, really, but my pursuit of subsistence farming has been…all-encompassing, let’s just say. I do, however, have some ornamentals growing in the veg garden for their ability to attract polinators. Some of them are even [...]
The greenhouse in early summer
Posted in greenhouses on June 23, 2008 | 11 Comments »
6/14/08: It’s an issue of timing: the big things going to seed need time to do so (leeks, left; beets, right; parsley, rear right) and the little things need time to get big. I spend a little more than a usual amount of my worry-energy worrying about the soil in the greenhouse. Without the cleansing [...]
On tradition
Posted in sweat on June 21, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Leek blossoms When I was young(er), I spent long hours in my post-work world doing things like home renovation. Having neither spouse nor child, these hours, spent sometimes with a friend or significant other, were usually fun but exhausting: it was usually around 11 that we (or I) would call it quits and order a [...]
On fencing
Posted in sweat on June 19, 2008 | 7 Comments »
Barbarians at the gate One of my biggest problems in the garden is not simple weeds taking over the beds. Oh no, as that would be easy to remedy. Nope; my biggest problem is the meadow keeps wanting to reclaim the garden. Gene Logsdon (whose The Contrary Farmer is a great read for anyone considering [...]
On helping along the little seeds
Posted in seeds on June 18, 2008 | 9 Comments »
I’ve told you what a bear our clay soil can be. It’s especially tough on small seeds, like carrots and onions and almost any herb. Surprisingly, though, most seeds are pretty tough: there’s a lot of energy needed to break out of the tough shell and sprout, and even more needed to break through this [...]
On doing without
Posted in soapbox on June 17, 2008 | 17 Comments »
Gratuitous cute-ducky photo Monica tagged me for a meme that I have seen a few other bloggers respond to lately. It has to do with what is it you would refuse to do without, should things really take a bad turn. I have read hers, and mostly agree if one had to make choices, hers [...]
On coming around to a point of view
Posted in nature, sweat on June 16, 2008 | 12 Comments »
About 8-9 years ago, I was helping my friend Jason in his backyard NE Minneapolis garden. The yard was an interesting one: sloping steeply up to the alley, it had been filled by a previous owner with all manner of garbage like railroad ties, broken-up concrete, bricks and pavers. We could only speculate it was [...]
On clay
Posted in nature, sweat on June 14, 2008 | 12 Comments »
Clay soil: it absorbs water and expands, then expels water and contracts. This ability is called “plasticity.” I can’t throw a pot with the stuff, though, thankfully. I thought rather naively that I would have sand at our farm. Being this close to the beach, I figured it was a part of the picture. Glacial [...]
On sand
Posted in weather on June 12, 2008 | 11 Comments »
putting sand on the compliant pooch Kind of like the tomatoes being in the greenhouse until last week, our dog has kept her winter coat until just recently. The spring has been that cold. “We need to wash that dog,” we said. Which means “let’s go to the beach.” As the crow flies, we are [...]
Chicken-ranching crossroads
Posted in chickens, etc. on June 11, 2008 | 20 Comments »
Sometimes, the best-laid plans… Actually, it IS when life throws you curve balls that the best learning and best decisions come about. There’s always a bit of a wrangle, though. Today I went to place my order for Round Two of the tractor inhabitants. I’d also planned on getting a few geese and turkeys…just because, [...]
Birds and more birds
Posted in chickens, etc. on June 11, 2008 | 7 Comments »
Baby chicks are pretty cute, but ducklings…!
On chicken-food thieves
Posted in nature on June 10, 2008 | 9 Comments »
Do I look like a wild bird to you? I am not sure of the percentage of feed we lose, but we do have a number of critters, other than the egg birds, who love chickenfeed. Ground squirrels and sparrows are the main culprits, but on Thursday, a pigeon showed up at the feed trough. [...]
Yet another greenhouse rave
Posted in greenhouses on June 9, 2008 | 17 Comments »
Okay, really now. I try to keep away from the recipe-and-food-picture circuit because I kind of find food blogs (with a couple of exceptions) braggard-y and full of puff. It’s one of the reasons I shied away from One Local Summer this year, too; I just was not comfortable with the format, for this blog, [...]
Another “I love my greenhouse” post
Posted in food, greenhouses on June 7, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Reason #845 (if I were counting that is): it’s the first week of June and we had a monster harvest of broccoli for dinner last night. Granted, I feel like I only recently made an ode to the last of the greenhouse broccoli…I figured it would be a while before we supped again on its [...]
Attention beekeepers!
Posted in Uncategorized on June 6, 2008 | 8 Comments »
Hum a bum buzz buzz Holy Crap! Just walked into my potting shed (also known as Shed of Dreams, like, I better get this x farm implement for future use and store it in said shed) and I’ve got bees! I stopped (backtracked, blocked traffic) a couple years back to grab a super I saw [...]
Happy Friday
Posted in Uncategorized on June 6, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Here’s to the end of a very trying week. Amongst other woes, I got a new laptop, as my six year old model is slowly giving up the ghost. Unlike a new car these things magically don’t just, you know, start working on their own. Considering I have the patience of a gnat regarding technical [...]
The meat bird wrap-up
Posted in chickens, etc., death, food on June 5, 2008 | 18 Comments »
Note: I will be describing, without pictures, the methods I use to butcher in this post. Come back later if you don’t want to know! The chicken tractor. You can see the blue tow-rope I have attached to the front. There’s a PVC pipe “runner” slipped on the back frame so I can drag it [...]
On one’s food history
Posted in chickens, etc., sweat on June 4, 2008 | 30 Comments »
Mother’s little helper NOTE: This and the next post go together. They’ll be about the meat birds, but this one is not graphic! “SURELY, there has to be an easier way to do that,” my mother said. She had just come outside and has safely seated herself on the other side of the table from [...]
On geometrical tyranny
Posted in greenhouses, sweat on June 3, 2008 | 11 Comments »
This is not where the bodies are buried…yet Sunday was the Big Dig day around here: the day I set up the twelve new garden beds for the new greenhouse. They had to be level, they had to be equidistant from their relations, they had to be…well, they had to maximize the 16′w x 28′l [...]
More on surprising flowers
Posted in seeds on June 2, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Who knew, did you? On Sunday I was trying to find a bit of shade in the garden. I was taking a small break from digging and had an icecream bar in one hand (an upside of having a sick kid) and my jug of water in the other. The only mildly shaded area was [...]
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