February 28, 2026

We are "dry as a bone" so far this year. We've had a couple of limited amount of snow events, and a week or so ago, we got 3.5".  We need a good, slow, soaking rain. This winter has been very mild with more than usual 50 degree and above days. I have some good friends who take and display sunrise photos so here are a couple of mine.

Jim has been building and painting corral fence. I took the photo because the sunset afterlight made a pretty blue sky. It was only after I took it that I noticed how nice the painted fence looks.

 

August 15, 2025

 So far, this has been quite the year. I've been doing more work at the office, looking after Oliver part time, going places and weeding and putting up garden stuff. That stopped after we got back just before August and corn needed to be done up. So we did, five batches of it, three by ourselves and one each with Lorene's family and Aaron. In total we put up 36 and a half dozen ears which produced 94 quarts of corn to freeze. 

I've put some onions in the freezer, we've dug a few potatoes, I've made some pickles, mostly dill and beet. I made one batch of Bread and Butter Pickles that are mostly onions and we've frozen about 3 gallons of beans, and the rest we are just letting go to pot. We are too tired and too busy to care much. The garden didn't do very well anyway and we were gone too much. I put my swiss chard stems in the freezer for smoothies and we are starting to get a few tomatoes, but they are overtaken by water hemp or whatever that hugely tall weed is with the sticky seed heads.

I like photos with my blogs, but I accidently deleted the one I wanted, which was a annual about the color of this darker sweet potato vine that is doing well. There is some yellow thing growing nicely. I guess I better take photos of the plants to remember that way. I want them again next year. 

June 28, 2025

Reading stories about eating "greens" in the spring has always interested me, so we tried some. I think these are swiss chard.  Since I can't taste them, I can only go by the texture and they were tough, and Jim thought they were horrible. He doesn't like any sort of greens, so there you are.

This is a good photo of our garden in June. We never post photos of what it looks like in August.

It doesn't look the same.

This is a gorgeous plant. I put it in the flower garden to be watered while we were gone, but it died anyway. I want another one next year.

When we plant a package of red beets and some of them are white....

 

May 29, 2025

As before mentioned, this has been a strange spring. Right now, we've had several days of chilly, cloudy, sprinkly weather.  Jim planted all the early seeds and potatoes, and most of them didn't come up. It didn't warm up like some years and we had no rain, so we blamed it on that. Jim planted again in early May, we had some warm days and some wet ones and things are coming up. The lettuce, though, not at all. 

I planted these flowers in my flower garden with the intent to write down where I planted them. I didn't so I'm going to try to remember now. The Alyssum I planted next to the iris south of the house because it is supposed to like hot, dry weather. That spot doesn't get watered. I planted one next to the back of the waterfall into the pond, and one some place in the rock garden section, and the zinnas ... I can't remember. It's getting pretty weedy out there and Jim helped me one day getting the rock garden section cleaned up. Then it started raining again. We got 2". It's a big help for the new grass planted where the old septic tank was and the new one is. 

 

April 19, 2025

A new growing season is upon us. I thought we had a pretty mild winter, with a couple of weeks of near zero weather and a total of 9" of snow in the only significant snows we had this winter and they were after the first of the year including the one in March as evidenced in the first photo here. 

Last fall mom shared some spring bulbs with me and I evidently planted them and forgot about them because I was surprised when they bloomed. The funny thing is, Mom forgot about hers, too.

According to my brother, netted iris.

I've never been able to get crocuses to grow, so we'll see how they do in future years. If they look like they are lying down, they are, because the wind is blowing.

I love my scillas. They are the only thing in the garden that is really blue. My blue bells are very blue and are growing into a big clump, but I didn't get a picture.

I love all the different kinds of daffodils and jonquils I have. It has been a strange spring with hot and cold weather at the wrong times and some of my jonquils at the front of the house didn't bloom at all and my hyacinths never came up.

Pear blossoms.

End of the day.

 

July 4, 2024

 I've really fallen down on the job on keeping up this blog.  I've been spending too much time knitting to the detriment of everything else. 

Our garden is going well, so are the weeds.  We've had more than usual rain this spring, 4" in this last week, and plenty before then. Other parts of the state have had more rain, plus tornados, hail and high winds. We've been fortunate to miss all of that. 

I've been putting brown wood chips on the flower gardens. I'm having my usual trouble of getting things to grow. The soil is not the best and it's shady. On a side note, the two ash trees that produce seeds, in the flower garden and the front yard got shriveled up leaves that turned black when they fell off. My son said it was emerald ash beetle. I looked it up and a fungus does the same thing. Emerald ash borer infected trees usually die top down, and fungus damaged trees grow new normal leaves. Ours regrew leaves so my diagnosis is fungus. The tree in the backyard that doesn't produce seeds, was not affected.

I have picked all the lettuce and spinach and put it in the freezer for smoothies. We've had a couple messes of beets before this and I'm using onions.  A few of the yellow onion are already affected by the usual fungus. I intend to pick more at a time than I need and freeze what I don't use. 

Today, Jim braved the mud and picked 1 3/4 buckets of beets. I pickled 5 quarts and saved a few to take to my folks. I got a white beet, the second so far. 

Jim had butchered 4 chickens and plans to do more tomorrow. 

Beet photos:

Beet greens -- not bad

I washed these beets outside, they were so muddy.

 

May 1, 2024

 Gardening season has started, albeit a little late on our end. Jim has been sick with a very tiring and coughing virus and finally has enough energy to get some planting done. He planted potatoes two days ago, onions, beets, peas, lettuce, carrots and swiss chard yesterday. We don't have spinach seed. We got almost 2.5" of rain last week, which was nice, but also hindered the planting. I have been slowly weeding and getting trash out of the flower gardens. It's been windy the last few days and it hasn't been a fun job. Today was cloudy as well as windy, so I didn't go out at all. I planted a couple of perennials. One I don't remember just now and the other was and ice flower plant. Our mix of shade, sun and clay soil limits what and how things grow. 

I have what I think is a spaghetti squash plant growing in a pot in my dining room. The last spaghetti squash we opened to cook had two sprouting seeds and I planted them. One came up and is blooming. Since it grew among all our other squash it could be cross pollinated and who knows what we will get.