Some people curse the falling leaves. Not me. Of course, since the wind blows all the leaves off my hill, the only labor I have is to collect the bags of leaves from industrious neighbors. I can never get enough. I learned the technique of Cold Composting from the late Larry Leitner. He collected leaves and pressed them down into fence wire frames that he made in various sizes and shapes. He prepared these cold compost piles in…
The joy of living in the country is that the men get to have neat toys. Henry has a complicated relationship with his Allis Chalmers tractor, which needs constant tinkering, born as it was in 1950, but it is good for working with a grandson and taking care of big chores. But there is that tinkering. Lately Henry has been fighting with the carbeurator and the gas tank, both of which have rusty interiors. The rust flakes off…
The Monday Record was intended to show what I had accomplished in the preceeding week, possibly including Monday itself. However, this week I spent a lot of time looking out the window at rain, and wind, and even snow muttering that if I were a Real Gardener I wouldn't let poor weather stop me from attending to all the chores that needed attending to! After five days of below freezing tempeatures, the low temperature today was 27 degrees. After the…
‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockleshells, And pretty maids all in a row.’ Illustrations of this familiar nursery rhyme tend to show proper young ladies in beribboned batiste holding colorful watering cans with clean hands, but while the students at the Heath Elementary School do all they can to make their garden grow, there is no sign of batiste. Real modern children favor denim…
Our Frog Pond is beautiful. And useful. When our dilapidated barn was struck by lightning in the middle of the night, July 5, 1990, the volunteer fire department was able to pump water to help put out the fire. In fact, the previous owners had enlarged the pond which is stream and spring fed to make it a fire pond. The frogs like it, and so do the grandchildren. So do we. It's good for swimming and catching…
You never know what you'll run into as you surf the garden blogs. Or where. Yolanda, in the Netherlands, on her beautiful blog Bliss is celebrating vegetables with a Beach Boys serenade. Check it out.
This Columbus Day weekend the dawns were beautiful, if only briefly, but it was a nice change after a cold, dreary, damp week. This is the view from our bedroom window. The long weekend means a short but intense Bake Sale Season. There were bake sales everywhere. Henry took my apple pie down to the Shelburne Falls Area Women's Club Pie Sale, and dodged 6th graders in the parking lot at Avery's. They weren't quite ready to sell, but…
Regular visitors at May Dreams Gardens know that Carol is an afcianodo of hoes. Her October 7 post was her final Hoe-tober Fest for the year and she asked about the hoes other bloggers use. I have two hoes that I use, very occasionally, and when I dug them out for this shameful photo it was clear that a trip to OESCO in Conway is in order. I need a sharpener. I can arrange a cleaning and oiling cloth right here…
When I visited Marie Stella at her house, Beaver Lodge, she took me out onto the deck overlooking the woods and beaver pond. She said The Birch Woman was a sculpture done by Sally Fine. I looked, but did not see. Although the birches were beginning to lose their leaves, my eyes had to adjust to the shifting light and shadows as the leaves danced in the autumn breeze, until suddenly the Birch Woman materialized. The Birch Woman…
“We live where there is so much possibility in the landscape,” Marie Stella said to me as we stood on the deck of Beaver Lodge, her house in Ashfield, looking through the woods down to the beaver pond. Stella has entered into most of those possibilities, using native plants, planting vegetables and fruits where a lawn might be expected, harvesting rainwater, using stone from the house site to…