Yesterday's haul

My cornucopia

I used my bicycle basket to gather all the veggies. It's pretty deep. Although you don't see all the string beans here, I collected a full pound of 'em, plus cucumbers that are mostly hidden from view.

I spent some time yesterday cooking a 4-pound spaghetti squash in the microwave. After it cooled, I used a fork to tease the strands of squash free from the rind and filled two quarter-sized freezer bags with it.

My freezer "larder" is becoming quite full with excess from the garden, including that spaghetti squash, tomatoes, chunks of zucchini and wineberries.

There's a nearby farm where someone I know invited me to help myself to the (organic!) peaches growing there (on a single tree). I collected a small bag of moldy, green and hard peaches last week. I dropped them on the kitchen counter and forgot about them for a week.

I checked on them yesterday and they were suddenly very ripe. Two had to be thrown away. I decided to adapt my late grandmother's recipe for apple crisp, substituting the peaches and a bag of frozen wineberries I'd collected in July.  The peach skins, partly covered with unappetizing black spots, had to be skinned, and I did find one small worm crawling up my hand as I washed them. It was a messy job, but one doesn't come across organic peaches that often.

The peach/wineberry crisp, however, turned out great and was well worth the effort. I like to add raisins and walnuts to the oatmeal mix.

Floral Scanner Art

I've been interested in trying my hand at scanner art for a long time. I've seen some beautiful "floralscapes" that are arranged and composed en masse on the top of a flatbed scanner. I picked this Queen Anne's Lace flower by my mailbox. I figured it would work well because it's fairly two-dimensional. (Daisies and asters would work well, too, I think.)

Isn't it pretty?

Here's what the same flower looks like with a black cloth draped on top of it.

The stem is not actually attached. I cut it so the flower would lay flat, and then added the stem below it.

If this is what a single flower looks like, imagine how great a small bouquet of blooms would look, carefully arranged (face-down) on the scanner glass.

I'm So Berry Happy

That's because I've picked 32 cups of wineberries in July.

It's a brief season, so I've been making a point to pick at least 2 cups nearly every day. I always save a quarter cup of so for my breakfast cereal, but I freeze the rest and anticipate enjoying organic, homegrown berries all winter long.

It's a simple three-step process. After picking about 2 cups of berries, I put them in a screened basket and rinse them well under the faucet. A colander would do just fine. Then I shake them so they're evenly covering the screened basket and I put them, with a tray underneath to catch drips, in front of one of my floor fans which are constantly running in this hot weather.

Once they're dry, I gently drop the berries into the tray, making sure to wipe it dry before doing so. Then in it goes in the freezer. After a few hours, I'll take them out and store the frozen berries into zip-lock sandwich bags. This way, I only need remove a small amount of berries at any one time. When I use them for my breakfast cereal, there's no need to dethaw them; they warm up quickly.

In other news, I found the large, plump woodchuck near one of the burrows, dead as a doornail. I think it likely, given the recent sighting of the coyote pup, that a coyote, perhaps the pup's mother, killed the woodchuck. I should have buried it, but it smelled pretty bad, and flies were buzzing around it. In fact it was that dead animal smell that led me to look for the source of that odor. So I've just avoided the spot. Pretty soon it'll be history.

I must admit to feeling some relief, as I hoped I could perhaps now be woodchuck-free for at least the rest of this season. I was relaying the news about the woodchuck to my father yesterday on the phone. Just  a few hours later, I spotted a baby woodchuck in the backyard. That's a really big disappointment. Maybe the coyotes will return again, since I've seen their scat, with wineberry seeds, in prominent spots in the side yard, including on top of a rock under the hemlock tree.

Thinking About All the Lovin' Spoonfuls to Come

 Spaghetti Squash on the Vine

Zucchini

Wineberries

Current garden pickings include zucchini and wineberries, which grow in abundance in the back of my property. How much I pick is limited only by my energy level on a given day. Of course, I always don my hip boots, acquired for me by my sister as a (requested) birthday gift, as tick protection as I wade into the brambles.

I've picked about 12 cups of wineberries so far, rinsing, air drying and then freezing most of them for winter use on my breakfast cereal. The season is brief, lasting only a few weeks.

I believe I'm up to about 8 or 9 zucchinis picked, with many given away.

There are 4 or 5 spaghetti squash like the first image above forming like fat loaves of bread on the hay. They can't be picked until they mature in the fall and turn yellow. Right now, they're a virginal shade of white.

I'm waiting (not so patiently) for tomatoes, string beans, acorn squash, cucumbers and potatoes.

Like last year, I'm tracking everything I harvest so that I can ultimately estimate with a fair degree of accuracy the retail value of my organic produce, based on what Shop Rite would charge for the equivalent in the store.

Thank god for today's rain; it was so needed. My soaker hose, which allows water to trickle into the ground slowly instead of splashing the leaves, inviting disease, burst a small pinhole into a much bigger hole. I bought a repair kit but haven't gotten around to using it yet. I also had a plumber over here today to fix a leaky fitting on my water tank, which supplies the well water for my outdoor water use. (It doesn't supply drinking water anymore as it's a shallow well and i have since hooked up to municipal water supply.) The bill was $192. Ouch. But now I can water my garden again without that well pump cycling on and off every 2 minutes.

Are Coyotes Denning in My Yard??

It's not quite 10:30 a.m. It's an overcast, dank and humid day.

I just saw a coyote pup in my yard.

As is often the case, my cat Luther's behavior as he looked out the window caught my attention. I thought it was perhaps a catbird in the mulberry tree, but when he jumped off the bench in front of one window and jumped on a chair at the other window, I knew it must be something good.

As we both peered out the window, I caught sight of a very small coyote pup grabbing a green apple that had fallen from the apple tree. He gnawed at it a bit, then hurried on, looking like he was exploring/foraging.

See his head in the grass, to the left of the thick mountain laurel trunk?

But where was Mom? And should he be exploring on his own? How far had he ventured from his den?

I lost sight of him after he trotted over to a brushy area on the north side of the house, not 10 feet or so from one of the three woodchuck burrows I'm aware of on my property.

Yes, there are three burrows: the oldest one is behind a thicket of overgrown forsythia on the south side of the house. I went to considerable trouble in April to severely cut back the forsythia, and now that I see how quickly it's recovered, I regret not pulling it up completely, but of course there was the question of what to do with that space so it wasn't simply overtaken by weeds or brush.  The second burrow, the newest one, lies six feet from the north side of the house (!) in another admittedly overgrown area bordered by a waist-high picket fence. It's the area that always comes last on my list because of its large size.  The third burrow is also on the north side of the house, about 25 feet further from the house.

The north side, it seems, has become a little Shang-gri-la for critters, as it contains a productive apple tree that drops fruit from June through fall, a gooseberry patch and a mulberry tree.

But back to the woodchuck burrows. In an effort to get the woodchuck moving on somewhere else, I threw used cat litter into each of the 6 burrow holes. (There's always a front door and a back door for each burrow.) I did that the day before I left to visit my father in New Jersey, and I haven't seen the woodchuck since.  It's possible it's still around, as I haven't been outside much due to the extreme heat.  But now I'm wondering if a coyote discovered the abandoned burrow and adopted it as her own.

Some quick research on coyote ways told me that coyotes will den in a rock pile or hollow tree, but sometimes enlarge the burrow of another animal. And that there are usually three to nine pups to a litter. I am going to have to go outside and look for scat.

Much as I enjoy wildlife, I feel more than a little uncomfortable at the thought of coyotes possibly living so close by.  I've always known they were in the neighborhood. They killed the dog of my neighbors who live behind me.  Maybe once a week I'll hear them barking and yipping late at night, but they seemed to stay up higher on the hillside behind my house.Well, there was that time (noted on this blog) about a month ago that I spotted an adult coyote, during daylight hours, passing through the extreme rear of my property in back.

My other neighbors, next door, just acquired a goat.

Every once is a while, you hear a news story about a coyote attacking a small child or pet. I just started berry-picking at dusk along the perimeters of my yard. The wineberries have begun to ripen. I stand 5'4". I hope I'm big enough to dispel any coyote thoughts of an attack. I think now I'll limit my berry-picking to daylight hours.

UPDATE: An hour after I posted this, I went downstairs to make myself an early lunch. Guess who had returned to eat more apples? The coyote pup. He ate a lot of them. I watched him for as long as he was out there, until he walked past the burrow and up a narrow path. From there, his travels were lost to my view.

The Arboretum at Georgian Court University

My dad and I had occasion to visit the arboretum at Georgian Court University yesterday. Located on the grounds of the former winter home of George Jay Gould, millionaire son of railroad tycoon Jay Gould, the school is located in the Pine Barrens town of Lakewood, New Jersey.

The style of the buildings, grounds and statuary is that of an English estate of the Georgian period.

This is the Apollo Fountain, a birthday gift from George to his wife, Edith Gould.The statue depicts Apollo riding a chariot amid sea horses, cherubs and fish. Water for this fountain and others on the school campus are turned on only for special occasions and is drawn from nearby Lake Carasaljo.

This ornate, marble bench is in the Renaissance style. It's a copy of ones found at the Vatican Gardens.

The sunken garden and lagoon, which is fed by the lake, features four eight-foot marble urns on either side of the road. A pair of lions flanks the entrance.

Dear old Dad strikes a pose.

The statuary and grounds distracted us for a while, but what we really came to see was the dimunitive Japanese Garden. Just one acre in size, it featured some lovely, bonsai-like Japanese maples (Acer palmatum), weeping Higan Cherry and paperbark maple (Acer griseum) to form exquisite views at every turn.

A small footbridge with Japanese yew.

These Japanese maples have leaves with a fern-like appearance.

A Japanese teahouse can be seen in the background.

Careful pruning encourages a gnarled look to the branches and an ancient, windswept appearance.

On the way out, the local population of geese seemed unfazed by anxious drivers.

With school in recess, we had the place to ourselves and came away with a colorful booklet detailing the history of the arboretum. There is no charge for admission. It was a great trip and an unexpected find on the New Jersey shoreline.

Monday Musings

A good investment

Alas, my plans to paint the tool shed are temporarily in abeyance. As I approached the tool shed to inspect its condition a few days ago, a little house wren popped its head out of the bird house I'd forgotten was nailed onto the front wall. She has little ones in there, so there will be no painting until they've fledged. Case closed.

Not a lot of gardening has been going on in this wretched heat and humidity. A little weeding, a little pruning. A few forays down to the vegetable garden in early morning to see if there are any female squash blossoms I can hand-pollinate. So far, I've had only male blossoms, which I'm told is not unusual early in the season. I'm not confident that local pollinators can do the job without me as I've had very poor fruit production on my squashes in previous years, despite excellent plant growth. So, around 6 a.m. on most mornings, you can find me traipsing down to the veggie patch, q-tip in hand to do some in vitro fertilization. I have such high hopes for my zucchini, spaghetti squash and acorn squash!

I have seen blossoms on the potatoes and bell peppers as well. The tomato plants have small green tomatoes but nothing yet on the pole beans or cucumber plants. The pole bean tendrils have already topped the 6-foot-high tripods I erected in spring and they have nowhere to go!


The apple tree outside my office window is steadily raining down green apples that are now the size of jumbo clementines. A doe arrives nightly at dusk. If I sit quietly on my front stoop, I can here the sound of her teeth crunching on those apples. I've also spotted squirrels and the resident woodchuck grab the prized fruit.

Last night, the coyotes were making a ruckus. What makes them bark and yip and carry on so late at night? Me wonders.

I never got around to establishing a compost pile this year, something I regret each time a plum pit or watermelon rind goes in the trash. I don't have a container, so it would have to be a freeform pile which I fear would simply attract scavengers the way that apple tree does.

One of my two elephant ear plants grew a second, humungus leaf:

How cool, how tropical! I adore these elephant ears! I see all sorts of outdoor decorating possiblities for them. They are like the outdoor version of the ficus plant, I guess, useful for softening the hard edges of a stone wall or flanking either side of a pair of outdoor lounge chairs.

Miscellany & To Do List

I have no "honey" living here with me, so instead of having a "Honey Do List," I keep a "Get Your Butt in Gear" list.

I've been thinking, for instance, that I should try to paint the tool shed this year.

I painted it oh, maybe 5 years ago (?) and at that time could tell it needed two coats, but I was tired of the job after the first coat and figured I could let it go. I only plan to paint it if I can use paint already sitting in the basement. I'm fairly sure I have more paint in the same colors as shown.

Also on my list is WEEDING the various beds in the back yard. They are quite overgrown. In danger of being wholly consumed, in fact. I've been spending most of my time in the front yard, which is more open and sunny. At times, I prefer the privacy of the back yard, but my neglect there is obvious now.

I cleaned out the second bluebird nest box now that the house wrens have flown. If you compare their coarse nest of branches and twigs to that of the tufted titmouse nest I cleaned out earlier this month, the difference is quite striking.

This is the house wren nest....

And here is the tufted titmouse nest...

The titmouse used moss and leaves, plus a bit of clear plastic, in its nest.

I have a pretty ground cover that grows easily among the cracks and crevices of my stone walls.

It's in bloom now, as you can see, but I've forgotten what it's called.

Here's a closeup:

And now for a bit of eye-popping color on this overcast day...

A One-Eared Elephant

My elephant ears are growing very, very slowly. Is this normal?

I bought two tubers (bulbs?) from Wal-Mart in April and this one, watered nearly daily and kept in a shady spot that gets morning sun, has finally produced one giant "ear," which I think is quite lovely.

But I want more!

I pictured a profusion of lush, tropical-looking green leaves. The other elephant ear is still showing little sign of above-ground activity. When purchased, I couldn't tell which end was up on this tuber. So I planted it with a wing and a prayer. A week or so ago, feeling increasingly impatient that nothing seemed to be happening, I began digging up the soil around the tuber to see if perhaps I had planted it upside down. I saw a number of delicate, white roots just under the soil's surface, so I let it be and hope that this one will figure out how to reach the sun.

In other news, I noticed an interesting four-petal clematis in my garden the other day:

Pretty, isn't it?

Late Spring Cleaning

The tufted titmouse that was nesting in the bluebird box has fledged its younster(s), so I decided to clean out the box in the hopes of getting another pair of birds in the box.

Here's what it looked like before I removed the nest.

There was even a strip of clear plastic you can see hanging out from the bottom of the nest. Here you can see a lot of white animal hair woven into the top. I regularly release the hair from brushing Luther and Waldo outdoors, but neither has white hair. I wonder if this was from a skunk.

A house wren has settled into the other nest box and has been feeding its voracious young for weeks. 

Today is the kind of murky, dank day when I feel like doing nothing. The humidity's high, the air's not moving and the sky is sunless. It's hard to work up enthusiasm for gardening on this kind of day.

Here's the kind of delicious salad I've been eating these days. I used plentiful salad greens from my garden with strips of teriyaki chicken, a chopped hard-boiled egg, toasted sunflower seeds, tomato and cucumber. Yum.

An Abundance of Mountain Laurel & the Value of a Friend

I counted 17 mountain laurel shrubs on my property today. Yup. Seventeen. It was easy to count them now, because they're in bloom. I never realized there were so many. I can't claim responsibility for planting them because they were all here when I moved  in 15 years ago.  There used to be 18, but, sadly, one died due to being completely shaded out by evergreens.

There are mountain laurels to the north...

...and to the south...

...to the east...

...and west...

This one is my favorite. Its flowers remind me up frosting on a pink cupcake. It has become dome-shaped, like many of my rhododendrons, due to deer grazing.

I asked an old friend of mine if he would help me change the battery in my lawnmower. It's a rechargeable Black & Decker with a battery that's lost its ability to hold a charge in this, its fourth mowing season. I really can't complain since I mow about an acre of my acre-and-a-half here.

My friend R. had indicated he might be able to come tonight. Instead, I received a phone call mid-day from F., an old friend of his, offering to come over and help with the mower. Though both F. and I have been friends with R. for over 20 years now, I never really knew F. and had only met him once or twice, years ago. Now he's living in my hometown, quite close by.

This is actually the second time he's been to my house. A month or so ago, I had a sudden, complete clog of my kitchen sink. While trying to loosen the pipe below the sink to clear the trap, a section of copper pipe came off in my hand, totally rusted through.

It all happened on a Friday, and I suffered through the inconvenience of washing dishes in the bathroom sink (and breaking a glass on the tile floor in the process) so I wouldn't have to pay top dollar for a plumber to come out on the weekend. Actually, since I've been out of work for months, I didn't relish paying a plumber at all, so I called my friend R. to see if he could help. He and his dad came over and spent some time on it, but the pipe replacement he attached still leaked. He left, but next day sent....you guessed it.... F.over to see if he could improve on R.'s work and still help me avoid a plumber. He did get the pipe replaced and installed properly, but the clog remained.

So I caved and called a plumber. I figured that while he was here, I might as well have him fix a leaky toilet that had been out of commission for over a year too, so the whole deal cost me $300 ($80 for the clogged sink). Most plumbers around here charge $100 an hour. And why did I get a college education?

So, back to the mower. After a few minor issues and a bleeding cut on his hand, F. got the battery in there and it's working fine. As before, he refused to let me pay him something for all his trouble. But R. must have told him I was a big gardener, because he asked me if I might have any bee balm. He enjoys watching the hummingbirds. I don't have bee balm, but I did have an extra hummingbird feeder, which I offered to him with instructions for sugar water-making. He accepted it as "payment," though Ron had a great idea that I plan to follow up on. I'll share some produce from my garden with him. My only concern is that F. won't be conscientious enough to change the sugar water every 3 or 4 days to prevent mold and possible sickness to any hummingbirds who drank it. I tried to impress upon him the importance of keeping that water clean.

I've been enjoying huge salads from my garden in the last few weeks. I imagine it will bolt soon. Tonight for dinner I had greens with toasted sunflower seeds and walnuts, cherry tomatoes, a sliced hard-boiled egg and teriyaki chicken slices from the most incredibly tender chicken breasts I discovered at Costco. They're pre-cooked, frozen, and take just 4 minutes in the microwave to heat up in the teriyaki sauce. Mmm, really good salad.

I usually add feta cheese or chopped cheddar, but I figured I had enough protein here. But guess what? I'm still hungry! Time for peanut brittle ice cream!

A Visit to the Bellamy-Ferriday House in Bethlehem

Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of summer, seemed an appropriate time to knock off the first of at least four Connecticut gardens I've been wanting to visit this season.

We headed for the Bellamy-Ferriday House in nearby Bethlehem. To get there, we passed through Woodbury's antiques alley and then headed north on Rt. 61, a lovely secondary road that meanders through some pretty country. We were pleasantly surprised to see we had the place all to ourselves upon our arrival.

Thanks to an Entertainment Book coupon I had, admission for the two of us was just $4. We skipped the house tour and headed for the main attraction behind the house.

They may not be natives, but Chinese peonies do look lovely when planted en masse. I have fuchsia peonies in bloom now, but here at the garden, we also saw pink and white peonies.

Here's a view of the back of the house with the central garden.

Siberian iris lent striking bursts of color.

I was quite excited to see generous plantings of the mystery wildflower that is thriving in my lawn. Thanks to the plant ID cards, I learned it is Ragged Robin (Lychnis flos cuculi).

When it's done blooming, I think I'll transplant them to a sunny perennial bed. My research told me it's a European wildflower that has naturalized in the United States. It''s partial to damp or wet meadow, likes full sun and attracts butterflies.

I've been wanting to get some red coral honeysuckle for my garden. It's a native, non-invasive and attracts hummingbirds. I don't know if this is red coral though.

A vacant one-room building intersects a mowed walkway along the perimeter of the Bellamy-Ferriday property.

The Bellamy-Ferriday House is named after two different owners of the property who played a significant role in shaping its character. Joseph Bellamy was a local pastor and a leader of the Great Awakening religious movement in the 1740s and is the person responsible for building the house around 1754.  Later, in 1912, New Yorker Elizabeth Ferriday and her husband, Henry, purchased the property as a summer home. It was the Ferridays' daughter, Caroline, who restored the house, filled it with antiques and maintained the beautiful gardens.

Lupine and white irises.

I always feel so inspired after visiting little gardens like this.I have so many perennials in need of dividing. But what I really need to do next is figure out how to replace the battery in my lawn mower!

Garden Impostors and Interlopers

Let's take a walk in the garden and see what's blooming.

These ground phlox look lovely against the stone wall.

 Here's another shot from the driveway.You can see some hyacinth leaves sticking up out of the phlox and behind them, astilbes.

Does anyone recognize these wildflowers? They've sprung up here and there in previous years and are quite delicate. I try to mow around them in the lawn.

The mountain laurel blossoms are ready to open.

Can you guess why this azalea has both pink and white flowers? Actually, there are two shrubs planted so closely together that the branches intertwine and appear as one.You might say they're garden impostors!

 

My many rhododendrons are in full bloom as well. 

I have beautiful views of them from north, south, east and west-facing windows!

Here's another view of those ground phlox. 

You can see a wayward basket of gold is growing from between the stones in the wall

and a fern has sprung up from a crack between the asphalt driveway and the stone wall.

I'm happy to report that everything I plan to eat this summer has been planted in the vegetable garden. The potatoes, both red and russet varieties, are already coming up and some have been mulched. I see no evidence of the terrible slug infestation I battled last year.

Tomato and bell pepper seedlings are in. I've been enjoying a variety of red and green lettuces here and there, and have also planted acorn, spaghetti and zucchini squash plants. I hope I'll have better luck with pollination this year. 

Having loved my homemade pesto sauce so much last year, I bought five more basil plants this year and hope to freeze some.

Cucumber hills have been seeded as well as yellow and green string beans. I put up three tripod-like structures for the beans and some vining annuals, including rudbeckia, morning glory and, just for fun, some miniature Halloween gourds which will look nice filling a bowl this fall. The poles are made out of long branches I pruned from my burning bush in late winter. They stand 5 to 6 feet high.