Hi Everyone, especially my new GW friend Judye! Judye is absolutely right, I have to name names. We took a little excursion to TN last week and we got back on Friday. As you can see by my post about Roosters I had a small problem with some that my friend/neighbor has and I was trying to help out. PJ and I went to Tennessee basically for the ribs, yes you read that correctly, ribs. We wanted to check out smokers and get some knowledge about them from the locals down there. Well when we came back, PJ HAD to have one, so we spent the entire weekend working on purchasing, setting up and learning to use a smoker. I will post pics of that later in the week but first I have to name the peonies. I do not have the digital card that those pictures are on here at work, they are at home nice and safe. When I get home I will feed the family (that entails PJ, my two dogs and various wild birds out in the yard), water all of my plants, help PJ finish his little Smoker patio (basically going to the local Home Improvement store and saying 'Yes dear, you can buy more bricks') and then I will post the names, this morning a woman that I work with came up to me and said "Hey, I thought you were going to post the name of those flowers Friday? What happened?!" I asked "what are you talking about?" "On GardenWeb, aren't you the one who posted those pictures two weeks ago? I would like to know the names of some of them so I can keep and eye out for them." I didn't know that she knew it was me. So I cannot hide behind my monitor because someone can really scold me in person about this. So be on the lookout tonight for my newest update. Wendi Judye--Thank you, I will leave a little thread in the Peony Forum right now about this. A big thank you for the heads up about the Bouquet Perfect.

(Duh! it occurred to me that I should just cut and paste the narrative so it doesn't get separated, so here it is. Sorry for confusion.) This is the house that was torn down in 1922 in order to build the new brick-veneer bungalow. (Also please see my other picts, as well as the thread, "1922 farm house landscaping," for history.) Much of this old house was recycled into the new house, as we have seen in the plaster wall lathing, some structural wood, and the upstairs doors. Plus, I'm still finding foundation rocks and bricks and even parts of teacups as I work my "rainbow garden" soil (which see), that I located on the slope of the lower terrace that they built up by filling with sand and all manner of things. Not much time or money for landscape gardening back then. I'm sure they had their "garden," meaning the vegetable garden, and they also would have had fruit trees and bushes (not considered part of the garden), but if they wanted beauty, these people as they sit here would have been viewing their own time period's version of my present-day view from the porch (which see). The elderly lady in the rocker on the left is my great great grandmother; the 15-year-old boy on the far right is my grandfather. His parents are the couple in the chairs, and his three older sisters are shown with their children. (The great great g'mthr and her son, my great g'fthr, would die six years later, putting the responsibility of the farm onto my grandfather.) The picture was dated by deducing who the babe-in-arms on the porch was. These folks are Germans, by the way. A bough from the black pine can be seen on the left. The tree can be seen in other pictures in this series. My father said that my grandfather reported that the tree was always pretty much that same size all the years he was growing up. Once it gets to a certain height, it just flattens out on top and grows only wider and wider. (I've planted several more black pines in recent years scattered here and there--partly for sentimentality, and partly because white pines aren't an option with my penchant for planting different varieties of gooseberries, which are known in some regions to become co-hosts for white pine blister rust.) Egyptianonion

I have a lot of blackberries getting ready to be ripe in a few days. I'm also thinking of blackberry preserves. Yum! But, that is only if they don't get eaten off the vines first by my youngest son who goes out to inspect them every morning once they start to ripen.

When I lived way up north eggs were like nuggets of gold. This is 40 years ago so I expect times have changed but the eggs were frozen and placed in a barrel of water. As they thawed they floated to the surface. Or sort of floated. Or didn't. They were all consumed though. Never mind the CN rail freight cost, the trip from the rail head into the reservation was a penny per pound per mile. That made a single egg 50¢ in 1970 dollars. So that would be $6 the dozen or about a bazillion dollars in todays money. It wasn't uncommon to see someone who had been in the bush for some time on sabbatical in a southern town eating 6 eggs and a quart of orange juice just for an appetizer in some diner I don't recall that we worried about the provenance of the egg or the oj back then.