Baby Acer - Foliage Close-up 4, Day 4 from planting, 25.9.12

Kitty, I am so sorry that you lost your little bunny. It is so hard to give up on them. This has been a very difficult summer for our animals. Horrendously hot and so very dry....we are way behind on rainfall. The hot spell was off and on (seemed mostly on) for July and most of August with 108 being the highest temp we reached. The past week has finally seen a bit of a turnaround. We have had three spates of rain with a total accumulation of about three inches. Things have turned green again. We lost four of my little grey Japanese bantams one day despite regular water changes and a box fan blowing on them. Then, the youngest of our three peacock chicks just faded away. The other two are doing great, though, and I just had to giggle when I saw one of them "courting" the other one. Wish I could have gotten a picture. He was draggging his wings, with his tiny little tail stuck straight into the air while he was slowly circling the other chick. He was just about a month old so they do learn early in life. On August 19th the last of our summer's guests left for home so we have been trying to readjust our lives a bit. The first arrived the second week of June and we did not have a dull moment for two whole months. Three sets from Florida and finally, my son & family from North Carolina. While they were here we did some house searching for them and his wife did some job interviews. They are planning to move here in November. We did find an old farm house for them to rent about six miles from us so they will have a place to land until they get their house built. Great fun. I fell late in July and fractured my right wrist. Am a bit osteoporotic and the break was not cleanly across the bones but caused some splitting. It has been the most painful break of my life. And, having a cast on my right arm (am right handed, of course) during this 100+ degree weather has truly been something I do not want to repeat. Even with the guineas working tirelessly we have had a bumper crop of teensy-tiny, little ticks this summer. Just out in the yard a half an hour today and got two on me. Looks like we will wait until after frost to finish cutting the winter's wood supply to avoid the ticks as much as possible. Am sending in reinforcements! We just turned twenty lavender and pearl guineas out of their pen for the first time today. Here's hoping they can find the little blood suckers! My young americaunas will be the next of our little group to be "freed". We got ten little pullets in May that look fully grown now. Funny looking girls, with those fuzzy faces. Jude, would give a bunch to be able to pick blackberries with you. Ours burnt up on the vines before they got a chance to ripen. Here's hoping for next year. Sure good to catch up with you all again. More later!

Hi Mulberryknob - I agree with your assessment. I do have a somewhat more elaborate plan than having the vines grow up the handles. I'm not very handy, though so I'll have to see if it really works out. I have several five gallon buckets that I'll be planting in this summer. I thought what I'd do is sink a handle into the side of each of two fully planted buckets, put the planted buckets about a handle-distance apart from each other, and then affix a horizontal handle across the top, connecting the two uprights together. This would be my trellis handle-frame. Then, I plan to hang trellis netting from the handle-frame for the pea-vines to grow on. I'll be building a small berm in which to plant the peas, which will take up the ground space between the two buckets. I'm not sure, but I may also have to stake out the buckets to keep the handle-frame trellis contraption from keeling over in the wind. This is either going to work or flop fantastically, but I'm up for the challenge! Given that almost everything I'm using this summer is salvaged and scrounged, I figure what's the worst that could happen? Hmmmm. . . Carrie

Jennifer, When I worked full-time, I had to have a book-sized Day-Timer planner with 2 pages for each calendar day, and a week-at-a-glance page, and a month-at-a-glance page, copious notes on every day so I wouldn't forget scheduled appointments, Chris' activities at school and also in after-school stuff like his Cub Scout group, etc. I never would have survived without it. That was the same time frame when I had the beautiful leather-bound garden journal where I jotted down everything I could in the space available. Back then it was essential, and I can see how similar list-making, calendar notes and journaling areessential for you now. I sort of miss those days, but then I realize how much more care-free my life is nowadays, and I don't miss the old days at all. Nancy, Making lists works for me when it comes to grocery shopping. I have a tendency to take off to the store without the lists (ha ha) but just the act of making the lists makes me remember what I needed to get. I always wonder why I make a list I'm going to forget to take with me, but I do think the act of writing out what I need to get does make it stick in my mind even without having the physical list in my hand. Rebecca, I find plant heights relative to the weather in some years and try not to sweat them too much. Sometimes certain plant varieties get taller (or stay shorter) than expected, so I take plant heights as estimates not, not as something engraved in stone. So, if I mess up and put a taller flower, like one of the zinnias, on the south side of the peppers, I just declare that surely the peppers need the shade the zinnias will give them in late summer and don't beat myself up over it. Most years it works out fine even if I have a taller thing of one kind shading a shorter thing of another kind. Sometimes it looks planned as if I meant to deliberately shade the shorter plant, but truthfully, it usually means I thought I planted a zinnia that gets 6" tall on the south side of a row of peppers but instead I planted a zinnia that gets 30" tall. (grin) The world doesn't end and we all survive. The nice thing about containers is you can spin them around (or get the handyman to do it) to suddenly move the taller plant to the north side instead of the south side. At times I wish my whole garden was in containers for just that reason. Kim, What I have learned from many years of gardening, including when I did keep journals, calendar notes and so forth, is that our weather varies so much in my specific location that keeping notes from year to year didn't help me much as far as knowing when to plant and when to expect a harvest. Was 2012 going to be like 2011? like 2005? like 2001? Or, none of the above? (It probably was most like 2002 or 2004, but warmer than 2004, but I couldn't figure that out at planting time---only when looking back much later in the year.) So, each year I just watch the air temperatures, the soil temperatures, and the forecast and try to figure out when it is safe to plant. It basically is a guess, though, because of the strongly inconsistent nature of our springtime weather. It is crazy that some years I can put tomato plants in the ground the first week of March with little fear of them freezing, and other years I am having to plant them late in April and still cover them up in May. There's just no way to guess what the weather will do in any given year here because it varies wildly from one year to the next and there's no rhyme or reason to it. I wish I could say I've seen specific patterns and learned how to adjust planting dates and times accordingly, but honestly what I've learned is that anything can and will happen and you cannot predict it. I wish we had more consistent weather, but we just don't. I see plenty of people around me who just wait and plant their whole garden in May, which makes no sense to me for cool-season crops, but I guess they've waited and waited for the weather to settle down, and in May it finally does. Everyone has to find what works for them. For myself, I think I've found it, so I'll keep on not keeping notes and making plans until my mind leaves me and I have to give up gardening altogether, which hopefully is still a long way off. Dawn