Category Archives: gardening

gardening, home, Nature, Uncategorized

Small Wonders

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I stepped onto our deck yesterday and I was greeted by the most wonderful aroma. We have Beta grapes growing up the deck verticles and across the rafters atop the deck. They try to run onto the roof and under the shingles so we have to cut them back every year. They also shade our deck from the fierce afternoon sun. Beta grapes are small and purple and are good for jelly. The grapes are blooming now, and the delicious smell was from the grape flowers.  They are very strange  flowers and it amazes me that something so small and odd looking has such a lovely smell. You can see them in the photo below.

Appearances can certainly deceive. When have you been deceived?  What has been small but mighty in your experience?

 

Family, gardening, home, Media, Music, Songs, Uncategorized

Anger Management

99 Comments

My husband is a gentle, scholarly person somewhat lacking in manual dexterity and mechanical know-how.  He married into a family of impatient, dexterous, mechanically inclined hot-heads. The Boomgaardens are famous for their tempers.  I have a farmer cousin noted for throwing tools. I have great aunts who had hair pulling fights in ditches. I have great uncles who shot at each other with rifles.  I manage to keep my temper pretty well, but last weekend was a challenge for me. I am thankful no one got hurt.

It was hot last weekend. We did a lot of outside work in the yard over a four day period. It involved planting seeds and shrubs, spreading mulch, laying out soaker hoses and sprinklers, digging holes, and maneuvering around piles of bagged topsoil, composted manure, and bales of peat moss with tools and wheel barrows. For each task I saw clearly how we had to do it, in what order, and what physical and mechanical actions had to be taken. I was pretty driven to get it done as fast as we could before the heat of the day made it unbearable to work outside.  When I get like that, I forget my theory of mind, and assume that everyone around me sees the tasks and the procedures that need to be accomplished exactly the same way I see it. I get impatient when the people I am working with don’t seem to get it the way I get it, when they fumble around and look ineffectual and dithering.  As Husband said “You do things and you don’t explain what you are doing until afterwards.”  Why should I have to explain what I am doing if it is plain what has to be done?!! Why can’t you think like I think?!!

A very alarming ear worm took hold last Friday as I became increasingly frustrated with Husband and his inability to read my mind.  I decided I had better sit down and have glass of water and reel in my temper. I have no idea from what odd recess of my brain I dredged this up:

The chorus from this went through my head all weekend.  It made me laugh at myself and my irrational assumptions, and forced me to see how unreasonable I can be.  Perhaps all anger management classes should include Broadway musical soundtracks.

How do you manage your temper? What is the angriest you have been? What is your favorite Broadway song at the moment?

Baboon Achievers, Business, gardening, Nature, Technology, Uncategorized, Weather

Another Spring Planting in the Books

44 Comments

Today’s post comes to us from Ben.

It went pretty well; no serious mechanical issues and, once I finally got going, wasn’t delayed by the weather for more than a day or two.

I planted oats on May 6 and 7th. Then it rained for a few days but that’s OK because I was dealing with commencement at the college anyway.

Then I did anhydrous fertilizer on the 17th. Had college events the 18th and 19th. Started to plant corn on the 20th and finished on the 23rd. (Well, really the 24th, but the field I planted on the 24th is at the neighbors and it’s for the deer so it doesn’t really count).

Started soybeans on the 24th, did get rained out for a day and finished on the 28th. Now all that’s left is cleaning up machinery and putting it away until next spring.

Picture from trailcam of me applying anhydrous with the 8200
A view while planting corn
A view while doing fieldwork. From the “big” tractor, the 8200
m the 6410 tractor with planter, sunset and fields
Me in the 8200 with the mulch finisher, enjoying my work
That nasty anhydrous toolbar (applicator) and tank at the scene of the incident

There was the one incident with the valve on an anhydrous tank but it was pretty minor. Spilled really very little. No one was in danger and no property was harmed.

There were 3 fire trucks, our local ‘CAT’ (Chemical Assessment Team) the Incident Command Vehicle, two sheriff deputies, Gold Cross Ambulance, The “Incident Commander” and his car, a call to the State Department of Agriculture, another call to the state Duty Officer, a visit from the local anhydrous dealer, six fully clad firemen, and, a few days later, an inspector from the State Department of Agriculture.

Everyone was very nice and very professional and the firemen gave me a Gatorade when it was over.

But really. It was just a little vapor from a valve that hadn’t sealed.

And no breeze so I couldn’t manage to get ‘up wind’ and just enough leakage that I wasn’t comfortable trying to get back up there and try to tighten the valve myself.

I thought if I could just get 1 guy with a respirator, they could close the valve tighter. It wasn’t supposed to turn into a big deal.

But anhydrous is dangerous and can’t be taken lightly. Just today I talked with a guy whose brother got a burst of anhydrous and inhaled just a little. He’s got a couple small, minor burns (freeze burns) and was hospitalized for a couple days because of issues with his throat from inhaling that bit. He’s lucky too.

I pushed my luck a couple times this year. And I wasn’t even trying! But that’s a story for another day.

 Had any experience with the fire department?

books, gardening, Nature

Mother Nature – The Great Equalizer

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Thanks to Mother Nature’s prolonged temper tantrum this spring and the bad brakes on Ben’s truck, I ended up getting my bales from Bachman’s this year. I should have made two trips, but I only ever say “I should have made two trips” after I’ve made just one trip and it hasn’t been the best idea.  Case in point – four bales of straw in a teeny little Honda Insight.  It took me 40 minutes and the vacuum to get the car clean afterwards.

As I was conditioning the bales, I was drawn to gardening books. I read Joel Karsten’s latest straw bale gardening book as well as The Potting Shed Papers by Charles Elliott and a fascinating book, written in 1870 by Charles Dudley Warner – My Summer in a Garden.

He could have been writing last week and he had a way of looking at gardening and nature that resonated for me. Here’s one bit I really liked:

“I am more and more impressed, as the summer goes on, with the inequality of man’s fight with Nature; especially in a civilized state. In savagery, it does not so much matter; for one does not take a square hold, and put out his strength, but rather accommodates himself to the situation, and takes what he can get, without raising any dust, or putting himself into everlasting opposition. But the minute he begins to clear spot larger than he needs to sleep in for a night, and to try to have his own way in the least, Nature is at once up, and vigilant, and contests him at every step with all her ingenuity and unwearied vigor.”

Who are you doing battle with these days?

gardening, Stories, Uncategorized, work

Defeated Efforts

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Today’s post comes to us from Crystal Bay.

I made a big mistake. I decided to paint plastic stackable lawn chairs to match my flower boxes, shutters, and screen doors. I spent three days painting them. They looked great and I loved having everything match. The first time I stacked them, most of the paint peeled off. I was disheartened after all of that work.

Not to be defeated, I googled “How to paint plastic chairs”. Off to True Value to buy a special cleaner, primer, sandpaper, a scraper, and a quart of paint closer to the color I wanted. Then, I set upon laboriously scraping paint off one chair. The first one took 1.5 hours. I decided that since these chairs only cost $5 each, I’d just order six more. $5 dollars aren’t worth 1.5 hours per chair!

In the background are 70 bags of cypress mulch. I’m still trying to find some guys to spread them. My age is catching up to me, and after 15 years of doing this myself, I really do need help! Spring on the lake is labor-intensive and I can’t keep on top of it anymore, hard as I try. I’ve learned to ask for help. This winter, I couldn’t find my cell phone in the house. My neighbors are all in Florida for the winter, so I walked out to the county road and flagged down a car. I asked the man to please call my number. I lost my car in a parking ramp, walked to the door and asked the first person out, “Are you in a hurry to be somewhere?”. She kindly drove me around until I found it. I guess that with age comes with people who feel good helping me?

Now, I’m looking for someone to shovel up a dead, maggot-filled raccoon on my yard.

Do you ask for help?

Business, gardening, Nature, work

All in a Day’s Work

55 Comments

I blew through four cashiers this afternoon!

It’s straw bale time at my house – I’m doing the conditioning of the bales right now, which means I need to add fertilizer to the bales twice a day for six days. This morning I used the last of the bag of fertilizer so needed to stop at Bachman’s on the way home.

Just one bag of fertilizer. The first cashier was clearly just starting out and got hosed up trying to enter my “frequent buyer” number, so enter cashier #2.   When I handed her my Bachman’s charge card (yes, that’s what I said), she looked at it a bit and then swiped it.  The register clearly didn’t like that and I commented (nicely) that for the Bachman’s charge, they don’t swipe it.  This didn’t help so she called over a third cashier who took the card.  I mentioned again that it doesn’t get swiped, but he swiped it several more times but this time pushed some other buttons and got a completely different error message.

All of this was combined with profuse apologies from all three, who appeared to be high school students. Finally they called someone on a walkie talkie.  An older woman came over and immediately said “Oh, with the Bachman’s charge, you enter this here and this here… you don’t swipe the card.”  More profuse apologies.  I was not in a hurry and wasn’t really bothered by the wait and the confusion, although it was really hard not to smirk and say “I told you so” about the swiping of the card.

What was YOUR first job?

Baboon Achievers, Family, Fifty Words, gardening, Nature

More Than Enough

30 Comments

I have a medium-sized yard. Last fall YA and I raked up 22 bags of leaves and yard waste.  Always more bags than the rest of the neighbors.  How can we possibly have this much stuff to be bagged up now?  And we’re not even finished!

What do you have way too much of?

gardening, Nature, Uncategorized

Solving Problems

34 Comments

The weather has been so cold and crappy here for the past couple of  months that I stayed inside and didn’t inspect the yard or the garden beds. Sunday it was very warm and I ventured out and saw this.

Well, I was alarmed. This was a critter hole in the middle of the strawberry bed. Was there still a critter in the hole? What sort of critter was it?  A mole? A skunk or weasel? A bunny?

My initial response was to put a garden hose down the hole and turn it on and see what emerged. Husband said “I don’t want to see what emerges! What if it is angry and aggressive? It might bite!” I looked for a back door hole in another part of the garden but I couldn’t see one.

I am a trial and error problem solver. I like to push buttons and see what happens.  Husband likes to think before he does things.  While husband was putting on his shoes to join me in the garden, I hooked up a hose and drenched the hole. Nothing emerged. It was a fairly shallow hole and I suspect it was abandoned by a bunny after her young grew up. Husband plugged it with brick pavers.  Today we saw a medium sized, somewhat perplexed bunny sitting by the bricked up hole.

The strawberry plants are popping up and I predict a lot of jam this July. What would I have done if an angry skunk or gopher plunged out of the hole? Well, I would just have ran back into the house as fast as I could and purchased a live, humane trap to catch the critter and remove it to the country. What could go wrong?

How do you solve problems?  What kind of critter encounters have you had in your yard or garden?

 

 

 

 

 

Fifty Words, gardening, holidays, Nature

Arbor Day

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The weather is improving, and it is warming up. Today is Arbor Day.  We will be working this Saturday in our church’s new  contemplative garden laying edging pavers and laying out garden beds.  The irrigation system went in on the 26th.

How do you plan to commemorate Arbor Day?  Any yard work or green thumb projects planned?

gardening, Media, Nature, Uncategorized

Too Much of a Good Thing

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Two years ago, husband and I bought cow pots (containers made from cow manure), in which to start our vegetable seedlings. It certainly made sense, since they were advertised to fertilize the plants while they were getting started. Then the plants could be put  in the garden pot and all, so they would continue to be  fertilized as they grew outside.

They sure didn’t work the way the ads said they would. We had the most pitiful seedlings the last two years.  (It didn’t help that last year the cat ate all the pepper seedlings before we could get them in the ground.) The seedlings started out fine, but  6 weeks after of germination their growth came to a stand still as the roots made contact with the pot, and they languished until we got them out of the pots and into the ground.  It dawned on us that the manure that made up the pots was too rich and “hot” for the seedlings to tolerate. We should have known, since we put composted manure on the garden in the fall so it has a chance to really rot and cool down over the winter.  The cow pots were too much of a good thing. This year we used plastic pots to start the seedlings, and they are the best we have ever started.

When have you experienced too much of a good thing?  When has a product (or person) not lived up you your expectations?