finding the borders after and under late winter detritus

About 3 inches of daffodils are up. Most of the snow is gone. So I couldn't resist being outside a bit today; I know it's too early but... or maybe it isn't.

Anyway, I raked some, just dumping slightly-mulched the leaves into either one of the garden-beds-to-make* or under the white lilac and excessive roses**. They don't need the mulch at this time of year, but I figure those beds need more soil eventually and this should slow down some of the silly spread-themselves forbs. Wish I knew more about what's native or not.

I pulled old stems and leaves and bits of gravel and some persistent spreading ground cover off the rocks that edge the flower beds (the ones with shrubs and perennials along the road). I cut away old daffodil leaves, sedum plants, peony stems. I'm not much of one for annuals unless they self-seed. I have mixed feelings about sedum and some of the geraniums, 'cause they spread so. And the snow-on-the-mountain! If only it would be well-behaved ... but it tries to take over and isn't even as useful as mint. I planted bee balm with it last year, that should teach it . Let 'em duke it out. The bee balm (non-native varieties, though I tried to find those) is nice for the Ruby-throated hummingbird when the lavendar (er, lilac?) lilac isn't blooming.

The daffodils come up through years of gravel dumped via snow (carried in snow shoved onto these beds by the plow) mixed with whatever I toss in the previous fall (generally their own old stems and leaves). Once I tried to move them. I dug down at least six inches and never found the bulbs. I figured they must be alright enough then, and put the dirt back.

I am a very haphazard gardener. And lazy... no, no, I mean efficient. (Thus choosing perennials.) Well...

* We're gradually, year-by-year, adding beds for vegetables or herbs or whatever. Some are raised beds; this area will be more terraced with river rock "walls".

** Moved from my Mom's; some are transplants of her old roadside roses, which we "pruned by the plow" every year. Some are just random things she moved or divided. I do not pamper roses (indeed, I barely give them any attention), so mine are thorny, leggy, sometimes buggy, and smell wonderful.

Not So Small Measure of Wood

Big Truck, Small Road

This year, R took care of ordering wood and arranging for delivery. It all happened faster than in previous years, and more cheaply (although it will be more work on our end). Yay. R ordered logs, which turned out to be seasoned ones (a good thing), so we'll have to buck them up to stove length, and rent a splitter to make them small enough to stack.

Using a boom with claw to lay the log lengths on a pile

M was thrilled to watch the Murray, the wood tech, use the grabbing claw on the end of the boom to lift the wood off the truck and lay it in the cleared space near our shed. One at a time, carefully!

Five, maybe six, cord of wood

When you go by logs, it's a lot harder to estimate cordage. This is somewhere between 5 and 7 cord of wood (we stack pretty snugly, and a cord is a volume measurement, so I'm guessing not quite 6 cord.) Our woodshed holds just over 5 easily. We'll have to rent or borrow a longer chain saw (some of those logs are about 20"-24" in diameter!) maybe, as well as the splitter.

The photo suggests the wood is leaning on the apple tree; it's not, but it's close. Aside: that poor apple had its top lopped off by the power company, clearing branches off the lines. This was a good precaution against the storms—we've had fewer power outages since they really started keeping up with that—but I wish they'd told me they were going to do this to the poor tree!

And our winter's heat is mostly here!

feed the birds!

Just added a membership/donation form (PDF) to Birds of Vermont Museum's site. If I can get them up w/ PayPal we can do online memberships as well!

Great Backyard BirdCount 2009

They also send out a newsletter as well. Click, click! Find out more!

Hinesburg-Huntington Christmas Bird Count

This Saturday Jan 3

from eBird Vermont:

The 109th Christmas Bird Count will run from December 14th through January 5th. Last year, thousands of volunteers counted nearly 60 million birds across the Americas and beyond. Each count occurs in a designated circle, 15 miles in diameter, and is led by an experienced birder, or designated “compiler”.... The longest running Citizen Science program in the world, the count originally began on Christmas Day in 1900 ...

The Hinesburg-Huntington Count will be January 3rd. Contact: Paul Wieczoreck mgcpw@gmavt.net

Wood of one kind and another

Pressure treated (bleah) is a third the cost of cedar. Guess which one we went with? Right. Oh well! Over the weekend we made two runs for materials, attempted to put poor K-dear to work (thwarted in some sense by me thinking we knew what kind of railing design we were doing, and then discovering R didn't think we knew yet), and generally made about an average-for-us amount of progress. Thus:

R and LittleBirder carry decking

So far, so good!

R spent this evening getting the back deck prepped (ripping off fungus-ridden plywood, bleaching, and cutting the first couple of decking boards). Might get as far as posts tomorrow!

Today I stacked what wood we do have as well, which is something. And paid our neighbors for it. I'm a pretty good stacker, if I say so myself, and this is nice wood, all one cord or so of it (might be a tad less; our neighbors asked us to stack it and check because they weren't sure how much this truck held). I didn't feel up to decking with just me and LittleBirder, so we didn't.

our very own lettuce for dinner tonight

I mentioned R had built us garden beds. At the end of May we filled them with dirt (topsoil/horse manure mix -- I think 75/25), some old seeds (varying ages) and new seedlings.

As luck and remembering my mother's garden and his grandfather's, we managed accidentally do some good companion planting! Carrots (ours are wee tiny things right now) & Tomatoes (very healthy seedling), Marigolds and Melons, Nasturtiums and Cucumbers! Yay us! (Our cucumbers really came up... whew! thinning 'em now, I feel so heartless...) Have seen only a few possible spinach, beets, and beans (old, old and very old seeds); wish us luck for those. We also have peppers (hot and sweet; the driving rain took care of most of the aphids, wow); swiss chard (mmmmm); lettuce; 1 zucchini (who needs more?). I think that's all ... it's a wee tiny garden.

Companion plant links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companion_plants
http://www.lowes.com/lowes/lkn?action=howTo&p=LawnGarden/GardenResults
http://www.ghorganics.com/page2.html
http://www.organicgardening.com/feature/0,7518,s1-2-10-697,00.html

Channeling a Beaver Spirit?

Tried intalling some extension jambs this morning into our office/library casement window. Perhaps because ours have been sitting around for Far Too Long™, I couldn't (by myself) get the top one in. It's a bit bowed and I'm having trouble. Hopefully R and I together can finish it when he comes home ... but that would require not reassembling the office library from it's current interestingly disheveled state. And I want to finish cleaning it up. Hm.

I think I was inspired by Bruno the Carpenter -- LittleBirder and I read it at daycare the other day...

I did kinda go crazy in here. I put together an old oak table that (without the leaves) is 4' x 4' -- which is really darn large for a space only 8' (maybe) wide. Except it would just look wrong in the corner, and finally I have a surface deep enough to be a useful (and beautiful! Though old) desk. (Plus I have a sentimental attachment to it, mostly 'cause I like it better than any other desk or table in the house). Now if I can just figure out where to put the telescope, and swap the metal (skinny) table for the (silly prefab) computer desk, and put the table in the big basement (and more not-useful-right-now computer and telephony equipment on it in case we ever really finish the hardwire networking), and get the old blond veneer bookshelves from the other basement (not so sentimental, despite having been were my grandmother's), then I could put these other papers and crates and boxes away, or sort of...

Owl House

Two or three Christmases ago, Grandpére built lots of bird houses in lots of sizes, and we each chose one. For ridiculously long time, our barred owl house has been sitting either on our front stoop or in our entry area.

Then, we added white cedar shakes over the pine.

Today, we—mostly my sweetie-pie—put it up on a old maple by the creek.

Aside from being perhaps too close to the road, the location is probably pretty good: right by the creek, a mix of dense hemlocks and deciduous, easy flight path down the dirt road to the old meadows...

We may have put it up too late, in that I read in one place that barred owls pick their nesting sites as early as September. Still, we hope! We know they're around...

Christmas Project

On Christmas Day, Grandpére and LittleBirder put together a bird feeder. This is a very cool Christmas present.

The hammer is a present for LittleBirder as well; it came with the kit that Grandpére made.

first snow...man

LittleBirder and his Dadda built this fellow to watch over our woodpile.

I'm not sure whether I love the carrot nose or the hemlock beard more. Just wonderful.

This pic is a little blurry at this auto-resize; you might want to click to see the larger one.

natural and green architecture

Really want to browse through this Natural Architecture by Alessandro Ross (heard of through worldchanging). Maybe you do too? Not to mention maybe folks who are interested in green architecture and/or Andy Goldsworthy's art...

Storage...

LittleBirder, R, and I added some crossbars (perhaps better-termed collar tie or rafter?) to the shed. We've now moved those planks and the ladder up onto them, tucked under the metal roof of the woodshed. Very nice. Pallettes are in. Gotta get the wood stacked!

Now if only I could get a side extension onto the garden shed for the bikes...

Woodshed

Up here in dem boonies, we heats with wood.

Ok, enough of that dialect.

But yes, we heat with wood. We don't have enough land and time to harvest and split our own (although we do a little culling here and there, and will more next year). We buy it. Over the years, I've gotten pretty good at stacking it and covering it with tarps. On the other hand, over the years, the tarps have developed holes. In my wanna-be-irregular thriftiness, I don't replace the tarps perhaps as often as we'd find useful.

Woodshed, about 6' x 14'. Using 4"x4" pressure-treated posts (would recommend cedar, however) and standing seam metal roofing, precast concrete footers, and 1"x4" pine for rafters and roof slats

So this year, we (by which I mostly mean my husband and brother-in-law) built a woodshed. This is a little taller than we'd intended (thanks to my brother-in-law's powers of persuasion). It is in fact (despite the picture) plumb, but as I'm often not, neither is the image... It'll hold about 5 cords, which is about what we burn in a winter, give or take.

It will have some pallets for flooring, presently, and eventually (this year?) we'll add slatted sides for better weather protection.

small beginnings

The property--an acre or so--is roughly triangular, skinny on the upstream end, wider where it goes along an old fenceline. There's still some barbed wire. The dirt road is the second side, the nameless stream the third. It's overgrown ex-grazing and forested stream bank--which means mostly maples and yellow birch--with a couple of somewhat decrepit apple trees, a fabulous white pine that lost its top last fall, and hemlocks along the creek.

And I'm here because my heart is, all involuntarily-like. It's certainly not a useful piece of property, in most senses of the word. But I can sit stone or wander small, and I've got good neighbors, two-, four-, and no-legged ones. It's to talk about them that I'm making this blog. A record, a witness, a celebration.

Well, and maybe the development of ritual for me, too.

Welcome.