Marching Right Along

Today was a beautiful day.  Sunny and warm.  I have the windows open and can here the chickens' beaks hitting the tin as they peck up the chopped apple treat that Ross just gave them. Max is groaning because he wants to go out and play with the chickens and his daddy.  Earlier I planted our large front porch pots with an assortment of annuals. Other than the black flies (oh how I hate the black flies, and I rarely use the word hate), it was a great day to be outside.  Each day seems to get warmer and sunnier!

I walked around and looked at our gardens.  Flowers coming up all over the place.  Most of our hostas have little heads popping up.  Our other perennials are also just coming back to life. Lemon balm that I planted last year must have seeded as it is back and looking strong.  Seeing all this new growth is exciting. Of course, as all these new plants are starting to grow others are coming towards their end.  Our forsythia and daffodils are at full strength. So are the hyacinths and bluebells.  Soon the tulips and allium will replace them.  Time keeps marching right along.

Our fruit trees are also starting to flower.  The peaches are at full bloom.  Our bees, plus some big bumbles, have been busy pollinating the flowers.  The plum has also flowered. The apples, cherries, pears, and blueberries are close behind.  I included a picture of one of the apple buds as I thought it was just stunning.  I have high hopes of getting some good fruit this year as the fruit trees are all now several years old.  Of course, I will have to wait until each of these fruits come into season!  Everything in its own time.

Brambles, Brambles Everywhere

Every year, since we bought our property, Ross and I clear a little more land.  Sometimes this new land becomes part of the yard, and sometimes it becomes something else-like the orchard. This year we decided to clear the land the left of our house.  It is a small tract with several young trees in it and blackberry brambles right along the small, stone fence.  The reason why we feel the need to clear it is that this land is a bit of a hill, and all the young trees are close enough to pose a danger to our roof someday.  We decided to cut down most of the trees and clear out the old, dead brambles to give us better access to the live ones.

I decided today that I would work on the brambles (as this will make taking care of the trees much easier).  The goal was to cut out the dead stalks; blackberries work on a two year cycle where the new shoots (primocanes) do not bear fruit, and the one year old shoots (floricanes) do.  The floricanes will die after bearing fruit so they need removed, or they will turn into a hard, prickly mess designed to tear your clothes and flesh.  I knew going into this that I was coming out scratched and scathed.

The biggest problem that I knew I had to tackle was the Oriental Bittersweet.  This stuff was everywhere on our property when we bought it.  I have cut it, pulled it, ripped it from the ground, cursed at it, and even contemplated doing the old slash and burn on all our land in hopes of killing this crap of a plant off.  It is invasive, and every time I go out to tackle it I secretly curse the previous owners of our property for allowing it to get so overgrown.  I am so used to it I can spot it half a mile away and even can spot it in the winter when it has no leaves.  I am winning the war here, but I had never really attacked it in the brambles-that is until today.  I pulled some and then pulled some more.  I'd turn around and there would be another strand.  I would start pulling out a root that would go on for ten feet.  I hate this stuff, and my recommendation would be to kill it everywhere you see it.  Even if it is in your neighbor's yard!  Tell them you're doing them a community service.  Believe me, it would be better to do it before you're stuck in the middle of a bramble patch getting sliced to threads trying to kill the bugger.

The Purr of the Generator Running...

A freak October snow storm.  That's what the local weather men are saying.  At least that is what I hear the local weather men are saying.  We lost our power Saturday evening-cable too.  The battery backups for Internet, telephone, and cell towers went out Sunday evening.  Ross' cell phone came back up in the wee hours of Tuesday morning.  So for one full day we had no means of communication other than knocking on a door or writing a letter (I still don't think I've seen our mail person since last week though).  We have a fireplace and a generator so we are warm and cozy, our bellies are full, and most importantly, we don't stink to high heaven.

It was a lot of snow, being October or not.  I took the measurement in the picture at about eleven Saturday night.  There is a quarter inch of space at the beginning of the ruler so there was fifteen and three quarter inches of snow on our picnic table.  It continued to snow until about three in the morning so it is easy to guesstimate that sixteen inches fell in about fourteen hours.  What made this storm so bad was that so many trees still had leaves on them.  You could hear all kinds of cracking and thuds from branches breaking and falling.  We had a tree snap in two and fall into our orchard between the chicken coop and a bee hive and right on our electric fence.  It landed on two new fruit trees we just planted this past Spring (they both made it through).  This was just one of several trees and large limbs that fell on our property. Needless to say, we spent the next day with chainsaw in hand.  At least we're ahead for next year's firewood!

Of course we are just two of many people in the same boat.  We reached out to various members of our church and neighborhood making sure they were OK and if not to come over to our house.  Yesterday I was at the local hardware store looking for oil and an oil filter for our generator (both sold out go figure).  While waiting patiently for my turn I ended up in a conversation with a man who just moved to the area a month ago.  He bought a house just around the corner from us.  He said he had no heat so I told him if he needed a place to stay just come over.  Later I thought, "wow, he must think I'm a freak inviting a perfect stranger over."  Possibly.  In realty it's just I love living in my small town, and I love that people are in each other's business here, and the best way to be neighbors is to be neighborly, to genuinely care for the people that surround you.  That doesn't necessarily mean you have to like them, although we are blessed because we have yet to meet a neighbor we haven't liked.

Today we got our phone and Internet back so I am finally able to write thanks to our generator and its ever present humming purr in the background.  The outage has us feeling a bit old-timey lately.  Mainly from our weird, power outage chores, like bringing in the daily firewood and trimming the candle wicks.  I was feeling that Ross was missing TV so this morning I read him some short stories as he cooked breakfast.  It was a good time.  Taking it all in I can say we are making do with the situation given to us, which is the best I guess anyone can do!

Water, Water Everywhere!

Hurricane Katia just passed by the east coast, and thank God that it stayed out to sea!  It unfortunately did give us more rain-rain we did not need.   It has rained for the last couple of days only subsiding today.  The ground is still saturated from Irene so all this extra water is just causing more flooding.  We woke up to an inch of water in the basement; there was just too much water for our sump pump to handle.  Ross and I have discussed adding a second sump pump.  I guess this just jumped to the top of my honey-do list!

Instead of boring you with pictures of us standing in water, or the impromptu brook running through our flower garden or...  (Unfortunately for us we have way too many 'living with water' pictures for our own liking.)  How about instead I share with you some of the awesome beauty all this water can create.

Our neighbor called this morning.  He was working at Kent Falls State Park in Kent, CT and told us we needed to get there.  Normally there is a healthy brook that runs into and out of this park.  In the park the brook drops 250 feet in the span of a quarter mile over a series of falls.  These are stunning on any given day, but today they were massively incredible.  Someone our neighbor was talking to said that this was a once in a decade event (let's hope)!  In the above picture, Max and I are at the lower falls after we completed going up and back down the trail.  If you look closely you can see that I am wet from all the spray that was flying at the top falls.  The force with which the water was running was incredible; the sound of the water was deafening.  It was so cool.  I have compiled a video of the various tiers as we climbed to the top.  I hope you enjoy.