Happy Days are Here Again

A week ago, it was too cold to be outside more than the several times daily that  I had to be out to take water to the chickens and do other chores.

For the last two days, I have been outside in shirtsleeves, digging in the dirt. Such are our instant weather changes in the Midwest.

This flower bed along the cattle fence has my best soil, worthy of my devotion on my knees. Since the dirt was once worked with the tiller, it is friable and can be worked early. Because it is surrounded by invading grasses, I must do plenty of weeding. The grass roots sneak in at some depth and appear here and there as harmless little sprouts of cute grass. Then they change almost overnight into big nasty clumps, making me consider using explosives to dislodge them.

There are lots of perennials and bulbs in this bed, so I have to work the soil by hand. I believe the worms appreciate the loosening and hand-mixing of the dirt. It's so hard to tell if they are smiling; maybe I'm looking at the wrong end.

It's not apparent, but I dug up a huge clump of grass-choked irises, got rid of the grasses and replanted four nice sections of iris. The steppingstones, pressed into service all winter to hold down the tarp over the wood pile, had to all be re-set, not the work of an instant.

Other ground, only recently freed of snow, remains muddy and sullen.

One of my favorite sounds of early spring is the Peepers. They started their little froggy croaking right after the ice left the pond.

Many songbirds have started to sing and are spiffing up, gradually getting into their breeding plumage. A pair of bluebirds has moved into the birdhouse in the garden.

Weeks ago, I cleaned out the three birdhouses. Looks like I forgot that chore last spring, because I found this inside. Trying to be a better landlord, I cleaned out this double-decker nest for the bluebirds.

This is the happiest time of the year for me. My daughter Isabelle said I'm like a kid in a candy store.

Flowers of Yesteryear

                    In order to survive February, I  must have a flowers fix.

Although I do have a lovely African Violet blooming, what I need is a trip to my past gardens, via my photo books and digital files.

When I lived in the suburb, cut off from my nature trails, I made my yard into a flower garden of impressive scope. It inspires me now to see those lovely beds and plan to plant things I grew there.

The war with the grasses continues unabated up here. Some flowers are able to hold their own against the invasive roots, while others are less strong and quickly lose ground.

Now that there have been months of boring brown grass or snow, it is hard to believe I ever had any flowers here.


So it was helpful to find these pics of my granddaughter Carolyn holding flowers that actually bloomed and flourished in this place last August.

Even though the perennials seemed to vanish with the snows of yesteryear, they are just waiting to spring up, grow and be beautiful once again. The daffodils, tulips, surprise lilies, Asiatic Lilies,daylilies, hollyhocks, irises, Mexican Hats,  gaillardias, butterfly weeds, daisies, Missouri Primroses, Johnny Jump-Ups, peonies, spiderworts, bleeding hearts, poppies, dianthus, roses, yarrow, coneflowers, Siberian Irises, creeping phlox, hyacinths, hibiscus, weigelas, hydrangeas, spireas, forsythias and butterfly bushes will return in a blaze of glorious bloom.

They will all return "when spring brings back blue days and fair," as the poet said.

Just yesterday, when Lis and I were tearing down a rotten front porch railing with a huge crowbar (another fun Mother-Daughter project) I found a gold crocus in bloom! Pay no attention, I say, to the deep snow still on the north side of the house, gold has been discovered in the south side border. Eureka!

A Winter Reminder

Okay, I admit that I was getting a little carried away, thinking spring was nearly here. We had some lovely sunny days in the sixties in late January. I found some Siberian Irises coming up.

Nature had the last laugh, though. Yesterday, the mail brought a big seed order from Park Seeds and an electric hedge trimmer to use on the chicory. Two hours later, it began to snow, the fine steady snow that doesn't look like it's amounting to much.

This was the scene this morning. It was so beautiful it made me gasp. Seven inches so far, and more expected all day and evening.

Because it was so still, it piled up on unlikely places, like the clotheslines.

After I shoveled the porches, I settled in front of the fire to complete my Jung Seeds order. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these gardeners from their blooming plans.

Comet Lovejoy

What fun, I found the comet! It was a lovely big green misty ball, seen through my telescope with my favorite 17mm wide angle lens.

Winter is not my favorite time for stargazing, on account of  I'm  such a wuss. However, the chart that Sky and Telescope had online made it too irresistible. After all, I have to bundle up several times a day to take water to the chickens, cut firewood with the chain saw, carry firewood to the house and take Beau for walks down to the river to check on the ice. One more time couldn't hurt. A comet with such a pleasant name, Lovejoy, called to me through the dark moonless night.

The first night I found it, it was high in the southeast.  In order to see through the eyepiece, I wound up kneeling on a cushion there on the front porch.

Last night, before I went outside,  I adjusted the tripod legs higher. That made it so I could sit to view from my adjustable office chair. This is the angle it required. It looked like it was ready to launch. The red dot is probably Sirius rising. Not locating my quarry at once,  I got in the right neck of the woods (a term not used by real astronomers) and then scanned slowly back and forth and up and down. There it was, Comet Lovejoy, looking slightly dimmer than four nights ago, or maybe just more spread out.

It's hard to explain how finding a fuzzy green object in the sky could be so exciting. It has to do with what a tiny spot is visible through a 4-inch lens. We're not talking Hubble here. The finder scope, a baby telescope that is attached to the mother scope, shows a bit more sky, but even that isn't much.

Over the years since I got addicted to stargazing in 2005, I've learned to point the main scope a lot better. Now, I don't use the finder scope as much.

"First light" is what astronomers call their first time to look through their telescope. I'm afraid my first view was somewhat disappointing:  I saw nothing. Taking it back inside the house, I found the focus knob, which made all the difference.

Even so, it took lots of practice to point the blessed thing, due to what you see isn't what's up there. Things are reversed and upside down through the finder scope. To make it more confusing, the view through a refractor telescope is only reversed but not upside down.

I feel it's been a lot more fun to not use one of those Go-To gizmos that get the telescope to turn right to the object. A mere ten years is all it took for me to find my way around the Galaxy. Captain Kirk would have been proud of me.

A Winter Visit

Time for a visit from a flock of  Cedar Waxwings. They come to eat the fruits from the nearby Bradford Pear tree.

They are never seen the rest of the year, so I get the feeling it is some sort of Progressive Dinner, and my place is on the food-hopping menu.

Avoiding the cedars, of which there are many here, they probably do not have wax wings, either. They would surely melt if they flew too high.

Midwinter Mushroom Hunt

Lis got me Missouri's Wild Mushrooms for one of my Christmas gifts.

The day turned out to be one of the welcome mild ones we sometimes get on Christmas, with a temperature of  50. We set out to identify a mushroom on a stump that looked interesting when it first appeared weeks ago, after a rain.

This one would have been edible had I plucked it when it first showed up. We tentatively identified it as an Oyster Mushroom. Best of all, nothing poisonous looks like it in Missouri. New ones were forming at the bottom of the Tulip Poplar stump. It's in a convenient location between the house and the chicken coop, where I can keep an eye on it.

There were three different fungi on that stump.

We had already had feasts and candy and presents with the kids, so a long walk in the woods was most welcome. Our family is one of the odd ones who never go to the movies on Christmas. Long walks are much more to our liking.

These little ones were growing inside a hollow stump. 

We found lots of these on really dead trees in the woods. False Turkey Tails on the left, I think.

Reading the book made me glad I hadn't tried some red mushrooms that appear every in fall under the oak tree. I found their picture under Emetic Russula, with a little skull and crossbones alongside the name.

Best of all, the book greatly extended my mushroom-hunting season. Another outdoor hobby, what fun.

Lissa enjoyed finding mushrooms in winter, too. She dragged back a long sycamore limb for the fire. Another fun mother-daughter outing. I know, we really must learn to get in step with the populace and go to the movies on Christmas.

More Little Brown Bats

When Fall came, at first there was one Little Brown Bat clinging to the fruit cellar cement wall. It made me wonder where the other one had gone. I imagined it was the female of the pair, who refused to spend one more winter in such a cold cave. "I'm heading south, thank you very much. That woman who owns the cellar keeps opening the door and letting all the cold air in, and wakes me up when she gets wood out. Remember how I wound up in her bedroom the night of the blizzard?" Neither of us were likely to forget that. (See Bats as House Pets.)

Who could blame her? So it was with a bit of a jolt that the next time I went down there, to fetch my first sauerkraut crock, I found four bats.

One of them decided to hang from the ceiling. I took this pic yesterday when getting the last dry firewood, since I had to disturb them anyway. So that's going to be it for me using my own fruit cellar. I am leaving the door open a few inches for them to fly out on mild days, maybe to get a drink from the river before it freezes. I covered the air pipe with an old crock pot I found. The outer door, up the stairs on the outside, never will close all the way.

Whenever there has been a tornado possibility,  I've taken shelter in the cellar . The inner door is an old one with an oval glass. Glass would not be my choice for a storm cellar door, but there it is. Hopefully, a tornado would suck it out, away from me.

While trying very hard not to bother the bats, I do find them fascinating . I wonder if my little cellar will turn out to be a gathering place for rather a colony.  It appears there are even more than four of them. The guano would be useful for the garden, at any rate.

As long as I don't accidentally carry any in into the house, I'm fine with them. They are so furry and cute.

I must admit, however, that watching critters hibernate isn't terribly exciting.

Instant Winter

A great motivating force for action has always been a change in the weather. When we lived at the farm, my daughter Isabelle and I whipped ourselves into planting frenzies in springtime, just ahead of lowering rain clouds.

So, when a big cold front was forecast, I found myself in a dead heat to finish some fall projects before it arrived.

Always starting with the easiest job, I emptied the rain barrel onto the garden, put the cover on the hole in the downspout, rinsed the barrel and carried it down to the playhouse for the winter.

That day, it was 72 degrees, really too hot to run the chain saw. After crocheting the broken gaps in the cucumber trellis netting, I took it down for the season. Much to his dismay, I gave Beau a bath outside. The bees were seen sunning themselves out on their little deck, in their tiny lawn chairs.

Since I'd had two unproductive seasons trying to grow veggies without supplemental water, I already had decided to abandon the Remote Garden. Getting the big Troy-Built down to shelter turned out to be no mean feat. First, I mowed a path up the hill through the tall grass. Then I carried up the compressor and aired up the tires. Otherwise, I have had the challenge of getting a low tire back on the rim. That's what happens when the rubber tires are over thirty years old. When they feel low, everyone has to suffer. Everyone being me.

The last part of the journey was a little tricky, navigating the steep hill down to the outbuilding. There's no stopping Big Red if he decides to lay over on his side like a stubborn bull. Even though the old tiller acts tough, he has always been kept out of the rain until these last two forlorn years, when he was almost abandoned up at the Remote. I believe I heard a sigh of relief from Red when he was safely tucked into the outbuilding with a good roof.

Late in the the afternoon before the cold came, I decided to zip up to the closest field and mow a path around it. however, I managed to get Rosie the ride-on mower high-centered over a hidden telephone pole lying in the grass. I used the chain saw to cut off the pole but the part under the mower deck was embedded in the ground, quietly rotting. Sweat was dripping down my glasses as I struggled to free Rosie from between two hills. I did not succeed.

The next day,  it was 27 degrees. The cold wind brought tears to my eyes. It isn't the cold as much as the sudden stoppage of warm weather that is a pain in the neck, like whiplash.

Not a soul was around, but nevertheless I felt embarrassed because I couldn't remember how to unwind the cable from the winch I bought the last time Rosie got stuck. At the local hardware store, I bought a length of stout chain.

Finally recalling where I put the winch instructions, I pounded in a fence tee post. After that, I was able to winch Rosie uphill, off the pole. I must say, it gives a woman a sense of being powerful to use a winch. There's nothing like a wench at the winch.

Assorted Excuses

At this time of year, I have the farmers to thank for curtailing my outside work around my house.

Grain trucks, combines and trucks
towing combine heads stir up so much dust that it briefly looks like the Great Dust Bowl. Here is a combine head parked at the neighbor's place. It's longer than a truck. It seems to attain supersonic speeds, too fast to photograph in motion.

The gravel road is entirely too close, only kept from getting closer by the fence. This is one of the small grain trucks, a minor dust-raiser. Most of the trucks are semis and rolling pretty darn fast, notwithstanding the sharp curve before the bridge. I took the pic through the storm door because I value the camera lens. Not surprisingly, dusty wind  is a big reason to not hang out laundry, mow leaves and mulch the garden beds. I've tried working with a dust mask, but the dust still stung my eyes.

As I've mentioned, the wind is usually from the road. The ironic part is the farmers only get on the fields when they, and the road, are dry.

That got me to thinking that it's helpful to have a supply of valid reasons for putting off outdoor chores.That way, no guilt is attached to what otherwise might be viewed as indolence. The following excuses are valid and have stood the test of time.

     Digging soil and pulling weeds are only possible when it isn't too dry or too wet.

     Planting can be put off because of the above, plus unfavorable moon signs.

     Burning the brush pile can be postponed when it is too windy, there are dry leaves in the nearby trees, or it is too cold to hook up the hoses.

     Watering is not sensible when there is rain in the forecast, even days hence.

     Fishing is out of the question when the river is above Fishing Beach. Also when it's too windy, the moon is not favorable or the river is frozen.

     Running the chain saw is out when the poison ivy is in leaf or it is hot.

Beau is glad when the road is dusty because we usually go for a long walk in the woods, where the dust can't reach us.

Harvesting is one thing that brooks no excuses. Even pouring down rain doesn't qualify as legit. However, relying on the "Rain before seven, dry by eleven" will allow an extra four hours of slothful behavior indoors. This time can be used to iron curtains, or work a puzzle, whichever needs to be done the most. Ironing, of course, is more pressing.

Swimming in My Bee Suit

In ordering a bee suit, I had to take into consideration the suits are made for tall thin men. That's despite the fact that many women are beekeepers. Some of them may even be on the short side. I got a medium.

The crotch droops down around my knees. The legs cascade in folds above my boots. If needed,  I could wear the suit with short stilts underneath, for a clown parade. Despite my advanced age, I'm good on stilts.

The hat and veil combo allow for extended growth of my neck, say another two-thirds of a yard.

I say two-thirds of a yard for clarity, instead of two feet. As everyone knows, necks cannot grow feet.