May & June in the Garden
Flower Photos
Tag Archives: garden
Early Spring Garden
Finally a bit of rain after some gloriously sunny and warm spring days.
Russel is doing a burn today, and hopefully this weekend..slash from tree cuttings that just seems to pile up so fast.
He is getting the fencing in place on the new flat, don’t think we will be able to get a greenhouse going this year though we will plan for next. I have some lettuce and salad greens in the garden, the beds are amended, the raised beds ready to plant. The mounded beds still need to be shaped.
I hope to plant most everything else out as soon as I get home. (another Michigan trip)
I will need Russel to look for specific veggie starts in early May.
Home at last
We had a few glitches and Kaya had to live out side in the heat and smoke while we were gone, but we came home to a good garden:
Harvesting: 4 kinds of summer squash, basil for tons of pesto, eggplants, tomatos, red and yellow potatoes, lots of salad greens.
Peppers on – waiting for them to go red.
Carrots, beets and green beans a bit slow, planted late.
Peaches so heavy breaking the tree limbs, but I have my doubts as to whether they will ripen.
We also made it to Reggae on the River at Benbow, a one day event this year and quite comfortable, good food, good music and a great crowd.
A couple of visits to Eureka,saw “Iron Man” and “Hancock” on 2 separate visits. Got sushi and bought some stuff for the house, including a door for an interior room.
It has been hot and smoky this past week, but we had good cool weather and little smoke for several weeks.
We also got the storage shed cleaned out and BIG NEWS Russel got the electrical water pump to work with our little honda generator… this means that I can pump water from here… no having to go down down below to the holding tanks with gasoline to run the pump. (he always does that job)
So this is a good thing, it has been in the process for a couple of years, lots of lines and wires to run between here and there and lots of little issues… but it’s working!!!
I haven’t been swimming all year. Most days I wanted to go up to the Van Duzen River, it was too smokey. And the Eel is so low and full of algae I wouldn’t put my toe in it.
And that’s about it for now. I will leave you with Bucky-boo…
who is sporting a much larger rack now than when this was taken a few weeks ago!!
Homestead in spring
Very stressed about the Michigan trip coming up in June. Not writing much here.
This is spring time on the land before we leave:
Winter
The holiday season brought with it winter weather. From freezing temps and water lines to snow to hurricane force wind and rain back to freezing again. There has been some sun in there as well, but weather is dominate this year.
A murder of crows:
With so many gray dark days I haven’t had as much power as I would of liked. But mostly the big storm was just a windy event that took out our internet satellite tria.. the dish was ok.. and that took a few days to get replaced. We had a few small water leaks where it shouldn’t be issues too. Still have a couple of those.
Solar Power is wonderful to have though. So many people here and across the state were without power for days on end. We were warm (wood) and had lights and phone and internet and directv most of the time 🙂 Being off the grid does have its advantages.
Dad is not going to get full range of motion back into his left shoulder. The pain is getting less and they are planning a vacation to white sandy beach for a week here soon. So that is good. Meanwhile, I really need to plan the Michigan trip for the summer now. With all the news of airline mergers and prices going up, I don’t know whether to wait or book soon??
I have been archiving and jacketing dozens of live Bruce Cockburn shows that have been sitting here waiting for that for a couple of years!
I also got the Ion Cassette Tape to PC and the Ion turntable to PC. I have only used the cassette to PC so far.. finding out that many of the cassettes I wanted to get onto cd are just too far gone to be worth the time. I fear how the albums may sound!? But it’s a project that I have wanted to deal with for many years.
Hopefully by spring it will be done and new space will appear in this small house 🙂 [not done yet!]
Then I will tackle the vhs to dvd tapes that I want to keep and get rid of or store somewhere out of the house the rest.
Went to Eureka last week and we saw Cloverfield. A monster movie.
Doesn’t really live up to all the hype and yes it has all been done one way or another before…yet it was gripping edge of your seat 90 minutes of ..”What is that!?” Great monster.. 🙂
And life moves on…
So after 2 weeks of being totally down, I could finally do a little work, not much.
The site I had been working on really wanted to go live by June 3 and we made that date! There is still much work to do on the site, but it was together enough for her to start telling people at the annual Summer Arts and Music Festival.
Go visit Seinensilk.com and see what I have been up too! (check out her gallery!)
This is Margriet at Summer Arts Fair:
As part of the moving from the town house to the land full time, it meant selling my 1971 VW bus. Well, selling is the wrong word, I practically gave this one away to another lover the VW bus world:
It was a end to an era, sort of sad. I used to live in my bus, travel, go places …but once I got here, that life style seem to end for me. Even leaving the town house after 16 years was also an end… lots of new beginnings though, and no regrets.
I will miss the town garden though, it takes care of itself now, and I can’t really have that type of planting here. All we have going now is the veggie garden with a few poppies and a few plants in pots I brought out. The sun here is like a blast furnace lots of days, so lush we won’t ever be, especially with having to pump our own water.
So this is where we are now.. made all the dead lines we had, and now we are unpacking, sorting, storing, and moving stuff from the shed to the house and back to the shed.. lots going to thrift store. Many things have been packed for many years, and we need to make room in the stoage shed for the stuff from town that we want to keep.
I have a feeling this type of thing will be on-going all summer, making this place really home. Getting some art up and textiles on the walls. We will get satellite TV soon and satellite internet by fall. I am still overwhelmed, not fully healed, and antsy to be done with it all, but hey living in paradise makes up for it.
Buck just outside our bathroom window. He had his whole crew with him that day..5 of ’em just laying around chewing their cuds. 🙂
Spring Garden
We have a small garden this year.. our peach trees in pots have peaches on them! The poppies are in full bloom, I’ll try and get a good picture of them. The sage and wild lilacs are fading.. but I planted a few marigolds and calendulas, as I just love the orange color:
Home Interior Shots
Here are a few small pics of the interior of the house. You can easily see that it is totally not-finished, or for that matter really started, except for the paint and the absolute necessities of living. We have a long way to go.
No pics yet, but we did get a new mattress, sleeping on broken down 5″ of foam was hurting both of us. We got a Spring Air with a tempur-pedic pillow top.
But the biggest step ahead has been… A NEW PROPANE REFRIGERATOR …!!!! A Servel, and now we are out of the 5 coolers we had going and the constant upkeep and runs for ice, pics next time maybe. The kitchen area is really not ‘too pretty’ right now.
That’s about it from the ‘living in the hills’ files. We are working on the water system, our pressure pump keeps dying and even the replacement pump does too, so we need to rethink how that is set up. And I am researching the whole home generator we will need for the battery array and inverter for the power system. I bet we end up with the generator first, which isn’t the way I wanted to go, but … time will tell.
And, Russel enlarged our fenced garden area in front of the house. He has wanted to do that for a long time. Raised beds I had planted years ago, had gone fallow due to either summers blast furnace heat and the deer. Now that we have all that enclosed, I may just get a bit of the gardening energy back that I used to have.
As for deer, we have a small herd of about 5 bucks who visit us almost daily. If my windows were clean enough to shoot through, I would have gotten some great shots. We have a couple ravens who we feed as well as juncos. The prettiest bird we’ve id’d though has been the Varied Thrush, which is much more striking than the common thrush that looks a lot like a robin.
