Not a Toy

Here's my fabulous new telescope. It wasn't an impulse buy. Back in 2012, I started a special savings account to purchase a 10" DOB  'scope.

There were many reasons I wanted a bigger 'scope, but I remained loyal to my 4" refractor.

In the interim, I managed to amass rather a number of star atlases. The reason we amateur astronomers want bigger scopes is we want to see even more of the heavens above. It's called Aperture Fever and it is incurable.

I tried getting others in my family interested in stargazing, but they mostly just said NO. Even after seeing Saturn and her moon, Titan, they were able to walk away from astronomy. The exception was my granddaughter Molly, now twelve years old. She really gets into it when she comes to stay with me. Once, we were lying on the front porch, just looking up at night sky overhead, when a big fireball whizzed across the dark sky. We laughed and hugged each other in our excitement.

There is no quicker way to clear the room than to discuss astronomy. A couple of years ago, at Molly's house, the big kitchen table was filled with family and friends. She was showing a star atlas, pinpointing our recent discoveries. No sooner had we started talking than suddenly it was just Molly and me and her dad. He would have drifted away, too, but she was sitting on his lap. She and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. Her mom, my daughter Isabelle, says we are Not Normal.

A word of caution about visual (not automated) stargazing: a person gets into it thinking they can just have a quick look at the stars occasionally. Then they start splitting double stars and searching for fuzzy spots called globular clusters. They find comets currently in the news. They move to a place with darker skies. They buy more eyepieces and filters for their baby. They lose sleep. Friends drift away.

I started in 2005 in a town with much light pollution from nearby gas stations and other sources. I rigged up a tarp enclosure on the clotheslines. I kept my nighttime vigil accompanied by feral cats, in the dead of winter.

After all these years, it's apparent that I'm never going to get over my fixation on the stars. It's okay, I'm retired now and can nap the next day. It's amazing how I can be sleepy at 10:30, step outside for a quick look and suddenly it's 2:00 a.m. and I'm enthralled. I hear myself saying, "Oh, Wow," a lot.

In order to not become addicted to astronomy, do not check for exciting displays of the Sun's antics on spaceweather.com. That can only lead to buying a solar filter for the telescope.

Whatever you do, don't read read Starlight Nights, by Leslie Peltier, especially more than once.

Wayward Plants

It hasn't been an easy season for the gardens, but they seem to not have read my Master Plan for them, anyway. Rain came as two early deluges and then nothing for about a month. My hopes for rain finally culminated in lots of it on the day of the Solar Eclipse.

It was a day of adventure for the family, meeting at Lissa's old place, where it rained. Then we drove in three vehicles through some torrential rain to the first sunny rest area off the main highway. There I was able to set up my 'scope and solar filter.

I'd bought glasses for us all. We got to see the first half of the eclipse, then clouds moved in at the precise moment of totality. Everyone got to look at the sunspots through the telescope. I was too entranced to take more than the one picture. Izzy is having a turn at the scope and Molly is draped over the hood of their car.

Only a half of inch of rain up here, so the garden has continued to struggle on. Early this season, I found a volunteer growing next to the snow peas. I guessed it was a zucchini, so let it be. In the spot that had been the compost heap last year, I planted a few Butternut squash seeds.

The volunteer  grew about ten feet before finally setting some baby Butternut squash. The plant charged on, setting more and more squashes before hurtling over the metal barrier, where it put on more babies. It also sent branches out to wander through the tomatoes and overtake the cantaloupes.

Where I deliberately started some, they struck out in all directions, going through the fence, up the fence and out into the grassy area. I put down some cardboard to make life easier for them.

The tomato plants quickly grew out of the top of their big cages, promising a bumper crop. The heavy rain, about six inches,  must have been what made their leaves dry out and drop off, leaving the exposed tomatoes subject to sun scald. They put on a second growth, careening over the cages, which listed drunkenly.  One of the tomato plants was labeled as a big type but turned out to be a cherry tomato. My fault, since I grew them from seed.

I was left with hundreds of cherry tomatoes and scant others. I managed to can up seven pints of regular tomatoes, all with lots of green insides that I had to cut out.

I used the old TV antenna for pole beans. With such dry conditions, they took all summer to get started bearing. Then the aluminum pole snapped at the base in a high wind. Now I have a pile of pole beans.

These Morning Glories reseeded from some I unwisely planted along the fence last year. It turned out they are vining types that don't take well to climbing up chain link fence. This year, they grew over the shoulders of existing plants and finally demanded I give them a fence post to continue to the skies.

It's a good thing that I transplanted some marigolds early from Izzy's garden, because they give the garden less of a defeated air. The bell peppers, mild Jalapenos, and Anaheim chili peppers are doing fine, as is the one big basil plant.

Some big red zinnias promise to brighten up the landscape while I yank out weeds and things past their prime and prepare the ground for next season.

The late peaches were big and sweet. I had plenty to share with the family and froze some slices and even made some peach leathers in the dehydrator. They ripened mach later than the others, as if to make up for the disappointing tomatoes and green beans.

I hope to find takers for the bumper crop of Butternut Squash.

Caught By Mistake

Visiting the peach trees in the field to see if there were any left, I saw that not a single peach remained. Also, there were no rotten peaches on the ground, but plenty of clean peach pits everywhere. That seemed to be proof that a raccoon platoon had cleaned out the remains of the crop.

When the cat water on the deck got all muddy the other night, I realized a raccoon was visiting for an after-hours snack of cat food.  I don't mind feeding the elusive tan feral cat that I'm trying to tame, or the possums, but draw the line at the raccoons. No possums had been seen on the deck in a long while, so I concluded that they had gotten tired of being carried around by Beau.

Last night, I baited the trap with a banana and sunflower seeds. This morning, I found I'd caught the possum. Even before I had my morning coffee (heroic action in my case)  I propped open the door to the trap and went back inside the house. Some time later, the possum was still in there.  Apparently it was comfortable in the grass lining the cage.

I knew Beau would go berserk when I let him out, so I gently dumped the possum out. Another time, I lured a possum out of the trap with a peach, only to find it had gotten the peach and taken it back into the cage to enjoy.

This time, I shut the trap door to block an unstrategic retreat. An hour later, the crazy critter was still lying by the trap. Even a small bowl of cat food didn't rouse it. It wasn't exactly playing dead, since it was looking at me, but it held so still that it let a yellow-jacket explore its tongue. Talk about nerves of steel.

At last, it moved on and I let Beau out. Too bad he's nearly useless at patrolling for raccoons. In the ten years I've been here, he's only caught one. They are fierce fighters and he isn't, despite being a Coon Hound.
The possums think that's all to the good.

Rain and Weeds

In late June, thunderstorms brought a tornado warning and these mamattus clouds. They always seem to urge me to go down to the fruit cellar and read a book. There was a lot of rain, five inches in my rain gauge and more than six upriver.


The Grand came over the road on the far side of the bridge and flowed unimpeded through the newly-planted bottomland acres, closing the road for two days.

There was another gully-washer last Wednesday night, over six inches here. The road stayed open. The result of all the rains has been rampant weed growth in all my flower and veggie beds. I did manage to pull up lots of chicory and Queen Anne's Lace while the ground was sodden.

I believe the weeds just bide their time, knowing they will soon present a united front, overwhelming my efforts to keep things reasonably tidy. Once again, I realize I can plant lots more than I can keep weeded.
Their ally in the campaign is the extreme humidity that has descended upon the land like a clammy blanket. Coupled with daily temperatures over ninety and blazing sunshine, I have retreated into the cool, eighty-degree house during the heat of the day.

Molly was here for a few days and dyed some yarn, started knitting a hat and knitted some washcloths. Fortunately, I had lots of good geology and astronomy videos checked out from the library. We also worked two puzzles and baked brownies in the Sun Oven. A couple of nights were clear enough for stargazing until the moon rose. All the while, I knew the weeds were out there gaining strength.

In the mornings and evenings, I give it my best shot, reclaiming small bits of ground. One evening, I pulled five big tubs before surrendering, sweat drenching my clothes and dripping down my glasses.

Even if weeding was all I had to do, I couldn't keep up. Now, the field peach trees, which have never had more than a few miserable peaches, suddenly are producing bushels of the good stuff. Here is last night's harvest, just the start of peach processing season. Molly has gone home, but Lis may come next weekend to help me with them.

Chris fixed my car the other day, but gardening is a supposed fun thing I do because I love growing things. If I even asked for help weeding, I would find everyone had other plans. Serves me right. If all else fails in keeping ahead of the weeds, there is always frost at the end.

In Love with Daylilies

What a happy time it is for me when the daylilies are in bloom! In the mornings, I wander from plant to plant, dead-heading yesterday's faded blooms and exclaiming over today's bouquets. Fabulous.

It's so easy to propagate them, it's easy to see why people wind up with daylily gardens.

All these gorgeous clear yellow blooms are from one plant I dug up, hacked apart mercilessly with a shovel and replanted years ago. I've bragged about them before. Were it not for special fencing, the cows would  have loved to gobble them up. Yesterday, I saw one calf with her tongue poking through in an effort to have just one taste. She almost succeeded, poor thing.

These beauties are in the front lily bed, fenced both from the cows and chickens. I'm so enraptured by daylilies, I almost want to join the American Homerocallis Society.

 

Tiger Lilies have been planted on the weedy hillside with orders to take over and advance steadily downhill..

These Ebb Tide daylilies are my biggest and brightest, but I love them all. My admiration knows no bounds.
 

Hanging Out with the Pansies

When it's this hot and sticky, I'm glad that the plants can carry on in the daytime without me. I prefer to never work in the direct sunshine. After seven in the evening, the trees on the west give lovely shade so I can weed, deadhead and do a little light gardening.

Shade and breeze are wonderful things, just meant for a lawn chair and a good book and/or knitting. Even though it is humid, it's a great improvement over the dusty last few weeks. Trucks with cattle carriers were speeding by, creating as much dust as if they had driven an entire herd down the road.

                Whoop-ee-ti-yi-o get along little doggies.

The strong wind, always from the direction of the gravel road, rose up over my house and rained down in sheets on the back side. Not a good time for me to be resting on the chaise on the back deck. It's so hard to sip iced coffee while wearing a dust mask.

My late afternoons were spent watering from the rainwater collection in the cistern.

At last, the longed-for rains came the last two nights. They did bring heat advisories, but one can't complain.

Reading outdoors reminds me of when I was a teen. We had no air conditioning, so the coolest place on a hot summer afternoon was lying on a blanket in the grass under a shady tree. I read Zane Grey, Agatha Christie, Daphne Du Maurier, Jane Austen and countless others.  I saved Dickens for Christmas.

I know, reading books is So Last Century. Come to think of it, it was last century.

Working for Food

The rewards for gardening and raising chickens are not commensurate with the efforts, but even so!  For dinner I had stir-fried snow peas, freshly dug new potatoes and beets and deviled eggs with chives. From the beverages list I selected iced tea with honey. Anyone who regularly is lucky enough to taste fresh food will understand why I don't really like to eat out.



The West Border gets morning and afternoon shade. I pulled up a chair under the flowering plum and feasted my eyes on pinks, Sweet William and Siberian Iris. The latter tended to flop over, so I brought them in to enjoy.

These beauties are food for the spirit. I am well fed. Everyone can see that.

Everything's Comin' Up Peonies

It's Showtime!


These peonies are special because I rescued them from bloom-less obscurity in shady locations. They are like Dog Pound neglected mutts that turn out to be prize-winning purebred show winners.
These ones out front grew surprisingly large. The the irises in the background, perfectly showy in their own right, are vainly trying to peek over them. Also, there is a favorite deep blue iris next to it that didn't even have the heart to bloom at all.  I have promised to move it to center stage elsewhere.

Here are some irises that have been given their own space. I love these nearly silver white enormous beauties with ruffled edges.

The cow fence peonies, just popping into bloom, are the May highlight of this almost-formal bed near the road. They had their own featured story in my blog last spring. All but the dark red one, Red Magic, were snatched from a dismal existence down by the outbuildings.

These enormous peonies are next to the cistern. I am currently painting the milk can blue for this season's petunia pot for the front porch. Peonies grow from nothing in early spring to three feet tall and five feet wide.

Blood-red splotches adorn these jumbo blooms on Festiva Maxima. The other white one is Shirley Temple, also fabulous. They like for me to brag about them, especially their exquisite fragrance.

Looking Like a Garden

Things are coming up, looking promising and resembling a real garden. Some early veggies like the usually easy radishes didn't do well on account of perhaps starting to sprout and then not getting enough water. It was all my fault for being insensitive to what was going on underground.

At any rate, the BSS are thriving. That's what my family always calls Black-Seeded Simpson lettuces.

They are a seasonal treat in wilted lettuce salad, with fresh onions. Like morels, some years they aren't available. They are gorgeous.

The potatoes have been hilled and mulched. The broccoli are getting tiny heads. The chives are in bloom. It hurts their feelings if I don't let them blossom, and they are cheery.

The Early Round Dutch Cabbages are heading up, but the Bravos from Harris want to get bigger and it will take them quite a while to get there. The other two are savoys, with their crinkly leaves. Notice how I gave them plenty of room. They also got a feeding of fish fertilizer not long ago. We had good rains last week but I'll give them some cistern water soon. Growing cabbages from seed never fails to amaze me. All that growth from only one seed; it's a miracle.

At last, I got a good-sized chunk of rhubarb root to propagate. I have high hopes it will provide me with many pies next year. It's put on two new leaves since I planted it in compost in the top tier.

The late frost danger will soon be over and I can get the tomato and pepper plants in the ground. Today. I'll get the Long Season Beets planted, a bit late but I was waiting on the seed to arrive, then I had to wait while the ground dried out a bit.

Most of the compost boards have been put up. I have put enough weeds and chicken poop in here to fill it several times, but the nature of compost is it keeps squashing down, making room for more. Even a two-fisted weeder like me can't fill it up.

Gardening is the best entertainment ever, and promotes deep sleep when the sun finally sets.

Exploring the Great Outdoors

At last, there is enough greenery to let the hens out. Apparently, they feel at home on the range. That's good, because that frees me from picking clover and other greens for them. The apple tree's fallen blossoms get their attention but must not be very filling.

They have wandered through the barbed wire fence into the unoccupied cow pasture. I draw the line at letting them into the garden.

I mulched the entire daylily bed and put up the little fences that I hope will keep the hens from scratching all the mulch away.

Having had my last three remaining hens mysteriously vanish one day while I was away, I only let them out in the late afternoon while I can keep an eye on them. They love their greens but will follow me anywhere for a slice of white bread.

The girls sometimes keep me company while I am kneeling to weed the flower borders. The weather forecast was for rain today, so I was in a weeding frenzy for several days. Even though I can barely straighten up, I consider it a worthwhile energy investment.

They can't be beat for ornamental additions to the landscape. So lifelike.