February??!!?? When did it get to be February!!??

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My azalea is blooming again. This little plant was a gift sent to Jack while he was in the hospital more than 10 years ago.  It was from a distant business associate and the relationship wasn’t all that cordial so it made the gift all the more surprising.  Anyway, the azalea was lovely and when it stopped blooming I kept it just to see what would happen. Every year it blooms without fail although both blossoms and leaves are fewer.  I suppose I should repot it and maybe remember to fertilize it during the year. It always helps me get through the winter doldrums and I don’t repay it with very good care.

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I’m not really sick of winter but I tell ya I’m sick of wearing heavy clothes. Tired of woolen coats, gloves, hats, scarves, boots, wool socks, sweat shirts and long pants. I feel clumsy and encumbered all the time, keeping track of where I left my gloves and what hat to wear to balance style vs. warmth.

I’m tired of having to dress up to go outside, to put on shoes just to feed the birds on the deck. I feel like the Michelin man when I get all my clothes on, barely able to move and my arms swing two feet away from my body.

I long to fret over whether my bare toes need a pedi or if they’re fit for sandals as is. I want to go shopping for this year’s flip flops. /sigh

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So I was laying in bed yesterday morning contemplating leaving my blanket-cocoon (it was a two-cat night) for the frigid floor (OK, I know at least one person who will laugh because it was probably 65 degrees, hardly frigid by her standards — but I digress) and I realized I haven’t had a Diet Pepsi for a week. A week. I have been a daily soda-for-lunch person for as long as I can remember and have several times tried and failed to break the habit.

Not sure what happened except that I’ve started drinking caffeinated tea or coffee a few mornings a week and now have little desire for soda. Or maybe the cold weather has turned me off  ice-cold drinks.

Just for kicks I opened a DP for lunch and it was…OK. Nothing I couldn’t live without. We’ll see if it lasts when spring comes.

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Work is leveling out. I’m more comfortable in my role and while the tech issues aren’t resolved they’re inching to a resolution. No wonder they don’t hire and fire very often, it’s complicated and exhausting to bring on new employees.  I almost had my first business trip but then my boss’ boss decided he needed to attend the meeting so I’ll stay home and mind the store. OK by me really since they’re traveling to the frozen northeast and I’m guessing the trip will be a nightmare.

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Some kind of hawk landed on our deck yesterday to check out the avian buffet we were attracting. Since said buffet scattered on his arrival, he didn’t stay long. Neat to see one so close but I’d prefer not to be in the business of fattening up his luncheon.

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I’ve been knitting and spinning a little but not as much as usual this time of  year. There are nights after dinner that I sit down to read the paper and wake up in time for bed. It’s a tired brain more than a tired body and I’m simply reacting to stress. Since it does me no good I’ve started hitting the elliptical for half an hour after dinner. It never sounds appealing but I always feel better afterward so I just Do It. Now to add some strength training in there to counterbalance the effects of sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day. And knock off the desserts.

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Speaking of spring, — we were, weren’t we? — Evie and I got together last weekend to talk Garden. What we’d like to plant, how we’re going to organize the beds, what we have room for. Despite opening the conversation with “we’re going to keep it simple this year” by the end of the two hours I of course had Big Plans.

We’re hoping the organizing group is a little more proactive this year but since the website hasn’t been updated since last September I’m not betting the farm on it.

I keep meaning to do an update on the straw-bale gardening we did last year and perhaps I can get to that this week. It was fun to leaf through the seed catalogs and realize that in about 6 weeks we should be able to plant early crops. Maybe.

~~

Today is the official end of holiday over indulging for us. It’s Super Bowl Sunday, marked in this household by our annual pilgrimage to KFC-land, home to sodium, fat and cholesterol. Please don’t tell me how bad this stuff is, I know. For this one day, I don’t care. Tomorrow we’ll break out the fish and salads again and the damn-the-calories-full-fat-ahead attitude will be stuffed back in the closet until next winter.

Original recipe, white meat, potatoes with gravy and a side of cole slaw. Water, no soda this year.

If they ever stop playing the Super Bowl (hah) KFC will be dead to me.

Ten ways to Lighten My Mood. Are you insinuating I’m cranky???!!!!?

1. Plant sunflowers in your garden.
2. Go out to lunch with a friend.
3. Change the routine. We all need a little variety. So that would be peanut butter on the English muffin instead of jam.
4. Spend time puttering in the garden. As long as there are no aphids. Bastids.
5. Read an entertaining book. Fiction is best, although I just read Laurie Hertzel’s memoir News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist about growing up in the newspaper business and loved it.
6. Soak up some Vitamin D from the sun. Definitely need sun.
7. Get rid of that one thing that’s been nagging you because it’s not done, needs work, is a mess or is a constant irritation (We’re not talking husbands here, people. Stop it.) Throw that project in the trash and stop feeling guilty about it. You’ll feel so much better.
8. Clean something. It works to have my space tidy and organized. Because mostly it’s not. So when I get it organized I give myself a pat on the back.
9. I generally don’t eat to make myself feel better, but if I did it would be coffee ice cream in the summer and a baked potato with lots of butter and cheese in the winter.
10. Move. Go for a walk, a bike ride, stretch, do yoga, whatever it takes to get those endorphins flowing.

Go see Carole for more ideas.

~

Life is busy, busy, busy. I got approached to host a get-together for a local political candidate and turned that down only to get sucked into working for the campaign. Should have seen that one coming.

There’s been very little time to play with the Ladybug so the bonding process is slow. She’s beginning to grow on me but so far I haven’t been tempted to name her. Either she doesn’t need a name or Bug will have to do.

The garden is sort of winding down for the year. There’s not  a lot to do except water occasionally and watch things grow. And attack aphids. I’ve planted fall crops of carrots, spinach, beets and Swiss Chard so hopefully we’ll get a harvest of some sort later this year. The straw bales are decomposing nicely. While straw may make good compost, as a growing medium my considered opinion is that it sucks. Or maybe I’m just a lousy gardener.

/sigh

Next year.

We’re all hiding from the heat today. The temperature is 98 degrees (36 degrees Celsius) and the heat index is 112 (44 Celsius), the hottest day this summer. Upstairs, the drapes are all drawn so there’s a shadowy coolness, perfect for cat napping. Me, I’m in a sweatshirt downstairs where it’s at least 5 degrees cooler.

Through the heat, and maybe because of it, the garden is thriving; the squash are beginning to grow, the green zebra is finally producing tomato babies and the smart-ass pepper has actually started flowering, even though it’s only about 8 inches high. In the summer heat, I’m preparing the raised bed for a fall crop of carrots, spinach, beets and maybe bush beans.

The garden is peaceful in the early morning when it’s just me, the geese flying overhead and the blue birds chasing each other. There are dragonflies sunning themselves, bees doing their thing and an occasional humming bird. When the wind is just right I can hear a train going by on the tracks half a mile away. This morning, the train whistle and the 8 o’clock church bells were perfectly synchronized, one beginning as the other one ended.

School starts in another week here. I grew up in the generation (or maybe the area of the country, I’m not sure) that went to school until after Memorial Day, and started the next year after Labor Day. Somehow, it made school more special to have its closing and opening marked by holidays. Now, it always catches me by surprise to hear mothers talking about school clothes and bus schedules in early August.

It’s hard to believe summer is fading, but the seed pods on the butterfly weed are beginning to break open, taking advantage of every stray breeze to sow next year’s plants. The cantaloupe vines in the next plot over are dying back to reveal a hidden harvest of six small cantaloupes. The gardener has been showing them off to everyone, she’s tickled with her success after her corn failed to produce.

Someone else has one fully grown pumpkin to show for their efforts.

There’s still plenty of time for the garden this year, but I can’t help but see a difference in the light, the air and the plants themselves.

Fall is coming.

My feet are cold, I need some socks.

Sunday Supper
There won’t be any cooking today. I briefly toyed with the idea of turning on the oven to bake cookies and then decided Pepperidge Farm would do this week. I made scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast and even that seemed too hot to eat.

There’s leftover pork tenderloin and a marinated cooked chicken breast in the fridge so it’ll be a pickup dinner. Cheese, tomatoes, a loaf of good bread and ice tea sound like the right combination. Peaches, early apples and cherries are sweet enough for dessert. The combinations are endless.

What’s on your plate?

I thought about toning down the yellow, but these marigolds look just this bright when you walk by them. Blinding.

Today’s forecasted temperature: 92
Heat index: 103

This is the second week in a row where there’s been no water for the community garden because of a break in  the water line. It was fixed and then it wasn’t. I went to the garden last weekend to find water gushing from the ground, unfortunately none of it near our beds.

So we’ve been hauling water all week, mostly Evie, and we’re about to make another trip. Straw bales need a fair amount of moisture.

A garden update is coming, hopefully tomorrow.

The first of the Black Cherry tomatoes are ripening on the deck. We’re having grilled chicken salad for dinner tonight and tomatoes will be a star player.  Yum!

Teddy Update

Teddy has been cooperating reluctantly with entering the trap to eat his wet food. Last night he turned his back on the whole thing and pouted for an hour — it might have looked like he was sleeping but I can tell when a cat is pissed off.  There’s something about the angle of the ears that expresses disgust so eloquently.

I finally put a small amount of dry food near the door that he could eat while checking out the aroma of the wet stuff.  It also helped that I upgraded the bait to the expensive canned chicken in sauce that he craves. I’d say that I’m winning but with cats you never know.

Tonight the food gets moved further inside the trap. The evil plan progresses….

Short and sweet today, I’m a little under the weather and need to go take a nap.

I’ve managed to spin everyday and it’s been delightful. Partly because the fiber is bright and cheerful and partly because a friend loaned me her Louet Victoria. Now I have two wheels in the house (the other is a Louet S10 from the Guild) so I’ve been comparing their action side by side.  I’m spinning some worsted weight coopworth on the S10 and it’s doing a good job with it. The Victoria is producing the closest thing to frog hair that I can manage. Pics in a day or two. In the meantime, have a good weekend and drink a glass of lemonade margarita for me!

Before planting

If the outcome to a problem doesn’t have life and death consequences I tend to adopt a “Why not try it, what’s the worst that can happen?” attitude to arrive at a solution.

When the problem involves gardening, all the better.

This spring as we were figuring out how to garden in a pile of mud and trying to fit too many plants into too little space, we read an article in Fine Gardening about straw bale gardening which sounded appealing. Create a square with 4 straw bales, fill the resulting center hole with compost and add more compost on top of the bales. Sprinkle on some fertilizer, then water every day for 10 days to start decomposition.

Once the bales start to soften up, plant anything you want right in the straw. The deep center hole is perfect for root crops.  At the end of the season, the decomposed straw goes on the garden as mulch or in the compost pile.

Sounds like fun doesn’t it? Instant garden this year, mulch for next year. Why not try it?

We modified the design a little by adding a partial second layer of  bales to allow vines to trail up and over. This should keep the plants exposed to fewer pests, at least in theory. The original design also called for installing a soaker hose but we passed on that.

Peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, and melons — oh my!

A quick trip to the garden center for straw bales, a couple wheelbarrows of compost, water, fertilizer and a little patience before planting.

Sweet potatoes went in the center and are loving their home, they’ll need to be trimmed eventually. There’s a watermelon planted in the straw on one corner which took a while to make peace with its new home, but some  fertilizer and gentle coaxing (“Grow, dammit”) has persuaded it to green up and put out shoots. It’s catching up nicely.

On the opposite corner is a Green Zebra tomato which received its own pep-talk. The tower is developing a definite list as the bales crumble in on themselves, so there may need to be some intervention before the season’s over.

I threw in a leftover basil seedling and pepper plant on top, just for grins. A discarded branch planted for whimsy and some grass clippings for mulching and we’re gardening in straw, baby.

This seems like such a good idea that when we took over a third plot next to our existing two, we decided to make a bigger version of it. Our goal for the third garden was really to get it ready for next year when we’ll use it to plant permanent beds of strawberries, asparagus, rhubarb and blueberries. Yum!

We wanted a quick, low-labor way to combat the foot-high grass that had grown up in the plot. We weren’t interested in tilling or removing grass clods like we’d spent hours doing on the first two beds and we were running out of compost to amend the soil.

Bed 3 ready for planting

Straw bales seemed to be the way to go. Three trips to the garden center netted us 12 bales of straw and a van overflowing with leftover bits of straw. (man, I wish I owned a pickup).

Before positioning the straw we put down layers of wet newsprint to help discourage the grass. I don’t know if it was strictly necessary since the straw should do an effective job of killing the grass, but I had a roll of newsprint that has been gathering cobwebs for years. Problem solved.

Since we were covering the whole 5 x 20 foot space with straw we created a large 6-bale rectangle on one end with sunflowers planted in the (partially-filled) center and squash and cucumbers on the bales themselves.

The opposite end of the plot got a 4-bale square with more sweet potatoes in the center and nasturtium seeds planted in the bales. In between the two bale gardens we fluffed up a straw bale and planted potatoes. They are the only plants that aren’t thriving. Three weeks later, we’re still waiting for sprouts, but haven’t given up.

If our plan works, our third plot should be grass-free and enriched next spring, ready for crops. We’ll have raised the level of the bed without a lot of work, had fun trying a new way of gardening and perhaps learned a thing or two along the way. The bales may need frequent fertilizing during the growing season but that’s easy.

Experimenting is fun, no? Yes!

~

Don’t ask me why little caterpillars merit a fancy French headline, but since that’s all the burial they’ll get, we’ll go with it.

It turns out that I rescued cabbage loopers as the brilliant Manise (no blog) informed me. Why, if they’re supposed to like kale and cabbage they ate my lettuce plants and why they decided they didn’t like their new home and expired over night without munching a single leaf of homegrown lettuce tenderly sacrificed for their health are questions beyond my ken. But they were shriveled and lifeless when I checked this morning.

Hoping it was just the start of the next phase of their life cycle, I left them alone. But don’t you think 12 hours is long enough to see some change?

Me too.

It solves the moral dilemma that Cookie pointed out: I’m the gardener, they’re the enemy. Why was I giving comfort and aid to the other side? Can I be my own Benedict Arnold?

So Manise says I should be on the look out for a monarch Black Swallowtail butterfly caterpillar on my parsley and capture that instead. Even I know what they look like so maybe I’ll do that. I’d better pick up another parsley plant for bait. (ETA: thanks Manise for correcting my faulty memory).

They were boring pets anyway. And they pooped a lot.

But it’s sort of lame, don’t you think, to not even be able to raise a couple caterpillars for 24 hours. I guess it’s just as well I didn’t pursue a career in life sciences.

C’est la vie.

As a child growing up in Vermont I wasn’t interested in keeping caterpillars or bees or crickets or ant farms. We never would have thought to bring pests in the house to raise. Anymore than we would have put one of the perch Dad and the boys caught into a fish tank to keep as a pet. I don’t remember our teachers ever encouraging this kind of lesson either. Besides I had my nose stuck in a book through most of my childhood. Insects belonged in the great outdoors and were just a nuisance to be stomped on, swatted, sprayed, eradicated.

Fast forward to yesterday when I discovered two little green caterpillars eating my deck lettuce — again. Last year when they chomped down my lettuce I disposed of them sans remorse.  This time  because the lettuce they were chewing had poop on it (who knew they pooped so much?) I cut off the plant and threw plant and ‘pillars in a plastic bag to throw away when I had a minute.  And of course promptly forgot about the bag until this morning.

When I found the little bastids still living, having eaten all the lettuce and pooped all over the bag.

So what was I supposed to do?

Well of course I immediately decided I’d missed a great opportunity as a child to observe the life cycle of insects up close and this was a second chance to expand my knowledge. Wouldn’t you?

I searched for what type of caterpillars these might be and whether they’re going to turn into a moth or butterfly. I got lost on the website and can’t tell if these are hairy or segmented, banded or slashed; except for one being light green and the other blue-green, they look alike to me. Since they’re busy eating, they’re not talking.

So then I searched for how to raise a caterpillar, read some quick instructions for building a habitat and then started collecting materials. (sorry, no link, I can’t find the same site anymore).

I don’t think I got it quite right (ask your kids what I’m supposed to do, mkay?) but I collected cotton balls and a few stones (one had a slug on it, ugh) sticks and of course food and threw everything in a canning jar. Which was too narrow so then I got rid of the stones, cut the sticks smaller, and changed to a wider, shorter plastic container for easier access.

I need to put a screen over it somehow, but haven’t figured that out yet. If they escape overnight, I know where to find them in the morning.

Oh and the cotton balls are to keep them from falling in the water that the lettuce is in. Apparently they like their lettuce fresh.

Meanwhile I thought one of the two ‘pillars had gone to the great garden in the sky but it turns out he was faking it so I rescued him from the plastic pail where I threw him this morning. He seemed happy to have a lettuce leaf all to himself.

Did you know you have to clean out the poop every day (worse than cleaning the litter box) and don’t let the habitat get too wet because they’ll get a fungus or drown and I’m wondering to myself why am I doing this?

I think they’ll pupate in a couple weeks (I hope I have enough lettuce) and then a couple weeks after that they’ll turn into lovely little….somethings.

Which I shall promptly release in the neighbor’s garden.

If you’ve done this or your kids have done this, I could use some advice. What do I need to do to keep these critters alive?