Happy Sunday

It's been a good Sunday. I went to a welcome home/birthday party for a good friend and got to catch up a bit with my sister-from-another-mother who has been busy with her daughter's end of eighth grade craziness. On my way to the party, I noticed a sign for Coon Hollow Farm, alpaca and sheep wool, honey and herbs, so I stopped on my way home and met Dawn, the very nice owner. She's just opened the farmstand for the season. We chatted for a while and then she uttered a phrase that was pure music to my ears,"free alpaca poop." This stuff is garden gold!
Today's pictures are pea blossoms in my little garden and wild bedstraw that has grown up under the back porch. If you want to try a bit of natural dyeing, bedstraw roots have the same dye element as madder roots, just not as concentrated. This would usually be harvested in the fall when the color is strongest but if it's getting weeded out now I thought I'd save the roots anyway.

On The Garden Front

This year "Quackgrass Acres" has moved from the community garden to our back yard. Community gardens are wonderful things but it just didn't work out for me. Now I can walk out the back door and do a bit of gardening whenever I feel like it without getting in the car for a ride across town. So it's starting small, as a container garden on a small cement and flagstone patio area that we didn't use. The process of removing our son's dilapidated treehouse and the dead hemlocks has begun. Ultimately, that will give us a bigger space for the garden but I'm happy with this for the time being. Good soil for the containers is the big need now.
I still have my DIY Japanese wind bells (furin) from last year, much to my amazement. I foolishly left them out all winter but they came through it just fine. All I had to do was replace the tails. They were a fun project and I'm thinking of making a tutorial on how to do it. The one in the picture is made from a thrifted votive glass. I have others made from porcelain teacups. The wind has been blowing like mad here so I hooked the tails on the fence posts to stop them from ringing themselves to bits.

The Osprey Have Returned!

Wow, what a gorgeous weekend! As usual, I heard the osprey pair before I saw them. I'm so happy they're back. I've resolved the issue of how to garden this year. Quackgrass Acres has moved from the community garden to our back yard. In the long run I'll have 4x4'raised beds but the spot needs to be cleared first. We have a row of hemlocks on the side of the house that have been killed by insects. Our son's old tree fort is up there too. We need to take down the fort to recycle the wood and get rid of the hemlocks. This isn't going to happen overnight. So for this season I'm container gardening in 18 gal. storage bins. I got the first one going today with peas and lettuce. A dead hemlock branch made a nice trellis for the peas. The soil is so nice, a combination of soil from a decomposed wood chip pile and some manure leftover from last year. And it's darn near rock free. Community gardens are great but not for me. First, it was just too big for me to manage on my own. Second, it was across town. I'd rather be able to wander out and garden for 15 min. a couple of times a day. This is going to be a lot more manageable. Now if I could just remember where I put the leftover seeds from last year.

I Believe in Spring

After a winter that seemed endless spring really has arrived. These daffodils are in the warmest spot in the yard so they open first. I am so happy to see them! Every time I walk the dog I keep looking to see if the pair of osprey have returned to their nest on top of the cell phone tower down the street. I usually hear them before I see them. Having them for neighbors compensates for the ugliness of the tower.
Our home is a bit odd because it can feel like two totally different places depending on if you're looking out the back windows or the front. The back drops off steeply to the Naugatuck River, a spit of land with the rail line that runs between Waterbury and Bridgeport and then Coe Pond. Since we are high above that, the view is wide open, a great place to look for summer rainbows. By contrast the front yard is small, the road is busy with a stop light close by and there is a big restaurant across the street. We have a vacant lot on one side and that's where the garden is going this year. Last year I had a space at the community organic garden but it really got away from me. If I have the garden right here I'm much more likely to keep up with it.