Weeded the Piazza
All of a sudden I noticed the moss growing between the pavers on the Piazza in front of our house.
Ashfield Firewood – Holz hausen
Holz hausen, a German system of building a fast drying wood pile. Click here to see an artful woodpile in Hawley. Click here to see more Wordlessness on Wednesday. OK. Almost wordless.
Henhouse #6
There was nothing photogenic about our chores this glorious autumn weekend - mowing, weeding, cutting back - so I'll concentrate on an exploration of another Heath henhouse. Joey built, overbuilt he said, this 10x12 foot henhouse for his ten hens. You can see he has a lot of help! He read a lot and looked at a lot of henhouses, and talked to a lot of people before he built his. The forethought shows. His luck shows too.…
Fall Planting Season
The gardening year really has two planting seasons, spring and fall. Spring planting season is all a-rush with excitement because you can finally get your hands in the dirt, carefully chosen plants are arriving and a casual browse through the local nurseries has sent you home with a truckload of new plants and plans. And then there is the bliss of working beneath an ever warmer and brighter sun. Fall planting season tends to be less exuberant, with…
Spoons and Quills – Mums that is
Nurseries and roadside stands are filled with tidy pots of tidy chrysanthemums, but I planted a collection of these fall bloomers in my Circle Garden this spring. The chrysanthemum family is so various in form, as well as color, that I wanted to branch out a little. My collection of six from Bluestone Perennials got whittled down to three because of rabbits! Fortunately, a reader suggested black netting which discouraged the bunnies, but ineptly placed as it was,…
Heath and Heather
Yesterday, in the rain, I visted the gardens of Melanie and Ray Poudrier and paid special attention to their collection of heaths and heathers. These two evergreen shrubby plants are often mentioned together in the same breath, but I never really knew how to tell them apart until Melanie made me look at the foliage closely. Heaths and heathers are both members of the Ericaceae family, but heath of the genus Erica has needle-like foliage. The foliage of…
Festival of the Hills – A Crop of Authors
The Conway Festival of the Hills is a grand autumnal event in our region. This year I got to share tent space with other authors like Marie Betts Bartlett (left in blue) who brought her book The (true) Story of The Little Yellow Trolley Car and Heidi Stemple (right oogling the baby. Heidi is the daughter of and co-author with Jane Yolen of many books, true, mysterious and delicious. In the center is Jessica, owner of The World…
A Heathan Muse
On a Tree Fallen Across the Road by Robert Frost (To hear us talk) The tree the tempest with a crash of wood Throws down in front of us is not bar Our passage to our journey's end for good, But just to ask us who we think we are Insisting always on our own way so. She likes to halt us in our runner tracks, And make us get down in a foot of snow Debating what…
Seeing Trees
In our part of the world we are surrounded by trees. We are so used to seeing trees that we don’t really look at them anymore. When we do attend to them we see them in their entirety, trunk and an undifferentiated mass of leaves. As autumn approaches some of us pay a little more attention, the flame of maples, the sheen of dark oaks and the gold of birches, but still we are not seeing the whole…
The American Grove
Our house is surrounded by fields, and the fields are surrounded by woodlands. Trees are an important part of the New England Landscape and I just learned that Massachusetts is about to join Connecticut, Vermont, Maine and 34 other states in an online organization called The American Grove. Their website is full of useful information about planting trees, even coming at how to choose a tree in an unusual way. We have planted trees for our each of…
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