Summer is here, which means afternoons in the pool, heat, and glorious sunshine. Is it any wonder we had a hankering for homemade lemonade? No regular lemonade would do, though. We picked a pound of blackberries yesterday that was just begging to be made into something special. Something that was not jam. Blackberry-lemonade anybody? It […]
I am a very lazy gardener. I’m slowly getting better; I try to use google’s Calendar program to remind myself of things like regular organic fertilizer applications. But I’m not very good at following a schedule. This year everything went in the ground a full month late, for example. I nearly skipped pruning my fruit […]
Our pool chairs have seen better days. They’re just cheap white plastic chairs we inherited with the house, and they’ve been stored outside for years – so they’re badly stained with mildew, oak tannins, and whatever else puddles in their seats all winter long every year. They just look filthy even when they’re clean. Case […]
I hate deer. I really, really really hate deer. Their population is out of control. They cause car accidents and spread disease (Lyme disease, anyone?). They are the aboveground, vegetarian equivalent of the sewer rat. Also, they eat all my plants. These tomatoes should be twice as big. They ate about a quarter of the […]
I made a new banner y’all! I loved those pictures of the hydrangeas and apricots so much that I decided to keep them around for a little bit longer. Doesn’t it look fresh and summery?
We harvested our first home-grown blackberries yesterday. Only four, but larger than I’ve ever seen – the biggest was the size of a spool of thread! I guess the vines must have liked all that dirty chicken straw I kept dumping underneath them. The plants are loaded with berries. They were so flavorful, but still […]
Growth is in full swing. (You can click to really, really biggify.) Wow, everything just looks like a big solid mess of green. Here, what if I labeled all the crops for you? There now, that looks more productive doesn’t it? And I didn’t even label all the flowers. Seeing the farm garden in a […]
I love it when our hydrangeas bloom along the front of the house. They form a hedge of bright, look-at-me blue, just as showstopping as the dogwood in the Spring. Last year I remember them a pure electric blue. This year many of the blossoms have a lilac tinge to them – just beautiful with […]
It was high time I checked on my bees, so I kitted up and lit the smoker today. I hadn’t checked on Lady Grey since installing three frames of brood 3-4 weeks ago; and I’d just installed a brand-new package in a third colony 2 weeks ago. I would describe myself as a fairly “hands […]
I’m trying something new this year with the tomatoes; I’m abandoning those floppy cages and trying out trellising. Since I favor heirloom varieties of tomatoes like Cherokee Purple, my vines have always grown thuggishly huge and escaped their cages way too fast. Long before fruit is even set, the overburdened cages are toppling over and […]