November 2019, Week 2
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November 2018, Week 2, Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow....
Comments (42)Lots of lady bugs made it into the mudroom Friday, and there's some in the sunroom. A few made it into the house. I told the girls Friday night that I was going to vacuum up the lady bugs and put them back outdoors (I use the shop vac and they survive being vacuumed up, so no harm is done to them) and the 4 year old was very upset. She told me I couldn't vacuum up her favorite 'pets' in the whole world and send them back outdoors to die in the cold, and she said she wanted to play with them and talk to them. (sigh) So, I told her we'd let them stay indoors for at least the weekend, meaning that as soon as she leaves Sunday afternoon, I'll have the shop vac out, searching out every one of those little beetles and returning them to the outdoors. I'm not sure what good it does---on every sunny day they are swarming around all the doors, trying to come in every time a human, dog or cat goes in or out. I don't really want to spray any sort of pesticide to keep them away from the house, so am resigned to them continuing to fight to come in and to me having to vacuum them up and put them back out until it finally gets so cold that they stop swarming. We even had a couple of them in the car yesterday. Oh, and true to her word, the 4 year old will pick one up if she finds it, carry it around and talk to it. She wanted to catch some and have them sleep with her, but we overruled that little plan. I think somehow they are even getting into the mudroom around the exterior door frame, which I thought Tim had re-when we repainted the exterior of the house 2 or 3 years ago.....so, we need to examine that area and see if there is a gap somewhere that isn't filled. I am so happy to see lady bugs of any type outdoors in the growing season, and they surely do eat tons of small pests because I rarely have any issues with things like aphids. However, their garden usefulness still doesn't mean they are welcome to come into our home for the winter. They can overwinter in the garage or greenhouse all they want, but I don't want them indoors. We still have butterflies, despite multiple heavy frosts and nights as low as the mid-teens. At this point, I'm not sure how they're surviving, but the garden does still have dianthus and salvia farinacea in bloom, so at least there's that. I've seen various butterflies flying low over the now-brown pastures searching for something, but I can't imagine what they're finding there, if anything. Even the native autumn asters are frozen and gone, as is the native blue sage, the helenium and all the other late-season fall wildflowers. We have the girls all day today, and then a funeral in Fort Worth tomorrow, so my brain hasn't even thought about Thanksgiving much yet, except the meal is all planned and taken care of. So, really, it is just a matter of cleaning house Tuesday, and then spending Wednesday getting ready. Oh, and squeezing in a trip to the grocery store sometime, perhaps Monday on the way home, before the stores get too crazy. The house has been decorated for Thanksgiving ever since the day after Halloween, so at least that part of it all is done. I know some people have Christmas trees up already and all that (why? why so early?), but I redecorated the mudroom's pencil tree, changing it from a Halloween tree to a Thanksgiving tree on November 1st, and I love that Thanksgiving tree with its Thanksgiving decorations. I think it looks a lot prettier than the somewhat scary Halloween tree did. The girls adore having a holiday tree in the mudroom, and both they and Tim have lobbied for me to keep it up year-round, changing the decorations with each holiday and season, but I am not inclined to do that because I am not crazy, At least I don't think I am crazy. It is one thing to spend a little time decorating an autumn tree for Halloween and Thanksgiving, when the rain is falling almost daily and I cannot be outdoors anyway, but it would be another thing to let decorating a tree seasonally pull me away from gardening time any at all once the gardening season starts, so after Christmas the tree goes back into its box and into the attic. Winter is my least favorite season, unless we have snow on the ground (which we almost never ever do) and it already looks like and mostly feels like winter here. I have tried to learn to appreciate the subtle variations of color in the wheat-colored, brown, and tawny golden fields, but I just cannot. All I do is look at those fields and long for the green plants and flowers of the growing season. When we drive past a field of winter wheat or rye grass and I see the green, that makes my day. Our dog yard does have a nice carpet of winter rye, and it is the best-looking part of our property at this point. It looks awesome, undoubtedly because the dogs fertilize it daily. It is small enough that it is easy to mow in winter, which isn't true of the yard in the years when we overseed it with rye grass, which we didn't do this year because the rain never stopped falling. It is hard to overseed the lawn with free-range chickens because they'll run around and spend days eating all the rye grass seed before it can sprout, and I'm not inclined to keep them cooped up in the chicken run for a couple of weeks until winter rye can become established. After Thanksgiving is over, I'll take down all the autumn decorations and put up the Christmas decorations. That's how I spend Black Friday, as I simply refuse to step foot in the crazy stores. Oh Lordy, I do not want to sound like my mother or grandmother talking about how things were different back in the olden days, but I remember how, way back in the 1980s when Black Friday was a big day, there were truly great sale prices you never could get on any other day of the year---and people still were civilized and didn't fight over the last Christmas Barbie Doll or Cabbage Patch doll or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toy. We'd run into friends while out shopping the Black Friday sales and would stand and chat and be perfectly relaxed and in no big hurry, trading info on what gifts we had found in which stores, and I miss that sort of thing nowadays, with the way Black Friday has become more like a competitive, winner-takes-all battle of some sort. I refuse to participate in it at all. This year I've noticed a big trend by the retailers to be pushing us all to go out and Christmas shop this weekend for the Pre-Black Friday Day sales in order to beat the Black Friday crowds. Oh, give me a break! The retail world drives me nuts any more. We try really hard to keep the Christmas gifts simple and to focus on Christmas as a time of togetherness and making memories apart from the gifting. I feel like we often lose the spirit of Christmas if we pay too much to the retailers and their endless pushing of the "hot toys" or "hot gifts" of the current year. If the retailers want to get me into their stores at this time of the year, they need to have big displays of potted, growing amaryllis or paperwhites, Christmas cacti, etc......or maybe they could be sneaking the spring-planted bulbs into a corner of the Christmas-oriented garden center madness we have now That, at least, would get me into a store. It is deer gun season now, and even though we don't allow hunting on our acreage, it is a scary time with people firing off guns everywhere. We try to make a point of wearing red or orange every time we step foot outdoors during deer season so that nobody hunting on adjacent property will think we're a deer and shoot us. I had a bullet whistle by my head one day years ago, so close I could hear it go past me and am grateful to God to this day that the bullet, fired by a teenager two properties away from ours, missed me and our next door neighbor both. It was very scary, and our next-door neighbor immediately went next-door and read that family the riot act about irresponsible firing of weapons in such a way that the bullets are a threat to innocent people on their own property. Since that day, we keep the dogs indoors as much as possible because Jersey is the same color as a white-tailed deer, and she runs like the wind and leaps like a deer. Fortunately, gunfire terrifies her so it is easy to keep her indoors in deer season because she doesn't even want to be outdoors. The two smaller dogs probably have learned their gunshot anxiety from her, so they cheerfully trot outdoors to do their doggie business and they run back, pawing at the back door and barking until I let them back in as soon as they hear gunfire, no matter how far away it is. As far as we're all concerned here, deer season cannot end soon enough (the current deer gun season ends December 2nd, if anyone is wondering). The garden still looks pathetic and will for several more months, but at least the rosemary, sage and parsley remain green. Oh, and the onion chives and garlic chives, dianthus, salvia farinacea, autumn sage and malva sylvestris 'Zebrina'. The asparagus still is green too, which is quite vexing. I like to cut it back to the ground after it turns brown, but so far it is refusing to help me out by turning brown so it continues to live on, green and billowy, swaying gently in the wind....See MoreNovember 2019, Week 3
Comments (44)The wildflower seeds I've gotten from Wildseed Farms in Texas have performed well here, and I usually don't buy wildflower seeds from further away unless it is for something they don't carry. I have ordered seeds from Native American Seed in the past, though it was quite some time ago, and they were fine but I only order seeds from them if Wildseed doesn't carry them because Native American Seed tends to be pricier. Most wildflowers reseed themselves just fine anyway in an average year, so all I have to do is plant them and let them do their thing. Since our climate can be difficult, some years the wildflowers fry in the heat and drought before they even set seeds and that usually is when I order seeds to overseed that area to make up for the seeds they didn't form. A lot of people burn their pastures and say it gives them better wildflowers the next year, which I do not doubt at all---fire is restorative to prairies after all, but because we're surrounded by woodland that also could burn, I tend to avoid burning our pastures. We spend enough time putting out other people's so called "controlled burns" (which so rarely seem to remain under control) and don't need to deal with that at our own place. If I did do a prescribed burn, I'd plow proper firebreaks and such first and only would burn on a low-wind, high humidity type day. After two days of rain we're still slightly under a half-inch in the rain gauge, so we haven't gotten nearly as much rain as they said we would, but I'm not complaining. It is gray, gloomy, wet and cold, which is not my favorite autumn weather. It is muddy outdoors so our floor is decorated with muddy paw prints. Tis the season for that! The dogs get bored indoors and want to go out, so I let them out, and then after 5 minutes of mud and cold they want to come in again. I just wait until the end of the day and mop up all the pawprints after they've been out for the last time right before bedtime. That way the floor gets to be clean and look good for a few hours (while we sleep) until the dogs, cats and people wake up and go outdoors again. Raised wood beds are essential for us because they stay in place. We do hammer in rebar to hold the boards where they are because, in our strongly sloping garden, everything moves downhill if not held firmly in place. For that reason, concrete blocks wouldn't work for us unless we used rebar to hold each and every block in place and I'm not willing to invest that sort of money in rebar. I love low tunnel hoops but am halfway over them. When I cover them with frost blankets, Micromesh netting or, in hail season, with deer netting/bird netting for protection from hail stones, the cats think we've built elaborate cat hammocks and sleep on them. This generally does not end well. Gardening with pets is such a challenge. We still have parsley and fennel that are green, and dianthus and snapdragons, though all of them suffered some freeze damage when we went down to the 15-17 degree range a couple of times. They're bouncing back though. Our asparagus still is 75% green---it just doesn't want to give up and turn brown this year. Just think, in an average year, we'd be having our first freeze around now at our house. This year it was so abnormal, but not unheard of, to have it in early to mid October. This week the kittens have been having a bottle every morning and every evening and canned kitten food thinned with water to a sort of gruel consistency the rest of the time. After a week of eating semi-solid food, they are doing great, so we've cut them down to only their bedtime bottle now, and that only will last a couple more days. They've developed sharp teeth and are biting holes in the bottle nipples but sure do hate giving up their little bottles. They put their little paws up and hang on to the bottles while eating now. It is the cutest thing. I'm also mixing less and less water with their food so that we can help them move from semi-solid food to solid food. I cannot believe how quickly they grow and change. Obviously it has been a long time since we've raised newborn kittens, and you forget how quickly they grow up. The cat corral that I put them in last week has kept them contained and in place for a whole week, but now when they get bored, they climb over it. I do put them back in it, hoping they'll decide it is futile to keep climbing out. I'd rather keep them contained a while longer so they don't get lost underneath furniture or get stepped on by people or dogs. I spent all day yesterday, as time, chores, and pets allowed, getting our Christmas tree put up and decorated. I'm not done with it yet, but am getting close. The cats and dogs make having a Christmas tree set up indoors pretty risky, so mostly we use unbreakable ornaments, largely because I'm afraid to put the breakable ornaments on the tree. Our house looks odd now with mostly autumn décor in the dining room and on the living room mantel, but the Christmas tree and other decorations also in place. Still, I'm glad I'm getting it done now. I bet the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas will fly by. As soon as Thanksgiving is over, it is just a couple of days until December. That seems crazy, yet here we are. Two of the amaryllis plants are opening the first flowers now. I'm happy to see them. A third is a dud with abundant foliage for some time now, but no flowering stalks. The others remain in various stages of growth. My goal for today is to finish the living room's Christmas tree and to decorate the mudroom's skinny tree. I feel pretty organized now and think I'll be able to get both of these done. I hope so. I'm already over having the storage tubs of Christmas decorations sitting all over the place as I empty them out and use up the stuff inside of them. Chris finished decorating the exterior of his house yesterday and sent me photos that he took last night. I think that Jana and I offended him by calling him "The Grinch" because he insists he doesn't like holiday decorations, so he set out to prove us wrong apparently. He sent me photos with a hash tag "NotTheGrinch". lol. Tim and I hope to get our exterior decorations up on Sunday, which looks to be the nicest day of the weekend. The 6-10 day Temperature Outlook is pretty favorable: 6-10 Day Temperature Outlook The 8-14 Day Temperature Outlook doesn't look quite as favorable to most of the state. 8-14 Day Temperature Outlook Dawn...See MoreNovember 2019, Week 4
Comments (15)I hope that everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving. Jennifer, Plumbing problems seem so common at this time of the year. I hope y'all are able to get that slow drain running properly without calling a plumber. Those fires were so bad. I hate seeing evacuation warnings when there's wildfires like that. I don't worry about the people at home---they usually have at least enough notice to hop in their cars or trucks and go. I worry about all the animals at home whose people might be at work and who cannot get home to make sure the animals are evacuated or otherwise sheltered (cattle or horses standing in a farm pond, for example, as the flames go around them). We were lucky here. Earlier in the day when our dewpoint and relative humidity were very low, we didn't have the strong wind, and then our dewpoint and Rh values went back up. THEN the cold front came through and then dewpoints and relative humidity values fell sharply but by the time fires started, the wind had moved on through already, so we never had all the components for really bad fires in place at the same exact time. Still, there was a series of fires---arson fires---set east of Marietta towards Lake Texoma in late evening. The somewhat surprising thing about this was that it occurred either 1 or 2 days after another arsonist had been arrested setting multiple fires along I-35 in broad daylight. You'd think one arson arrest like that would deter a copycat, but apparently not. Rebecca, So far, every tomato variety I've tried with so-called EB resistance or tolerance has been a total dud and the plants got Early Blight anyway, and at the same time other surrounding plants got it. So, I have found limited value in any of those. They might show some form of resistance or tolerance if planted in an area that does not have a recurring problem with Early Blight, but in an area where EB is a persistent problem, I haven't found them to be any better than plants with no known tolerance of or resistance to EB. I used to love the Totally Tomatoes catalog, but haven't had much luck with any of their exclusive varieties the last 10-15 years, so I'm sort of over them too. This year I had much better luck with tomato plants in containers in an area of the yard where we hadn't had tomatoes in recent years. Those plants survived the whole summer and produced well and stayed 95% EB free (it is windborne, so I never expect plants to be 100% free of it). The plants out back in containers did much better than the tomatoes in the ground in the front garden where I've grown a plethora of all nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, etc.) every year since we moved here. I'm going to leave the whole front garden free of night-shade veggies for the next few years to give the EB a chance to clear the soil there. This is one form of crop rotation since there's no bed in the front garden that hasn't had nightshades in it at some point over the last 3 years. I'm just rotating to a whole new area instead of rotating to new beds in the existing area. okmulgeeboy, I hate the Persephone days but just stay busy with indoor plants, grandkids, the holidays, etc. and before I know it, we have made it through the Persephone days and things are looking up. Amy, Y'all had more wind that we had. I think our max gusts were either in the upper 30s or lower 40s and were of short duration, for which we were grateful. I love, love, love decorating for Christmas. Every inch of our house gets holiday decorations, and we like to joke that our living room is just two Christmas trees, three wreaths and a little pine garland short of being a Hallmark Christmas movie living room. If you've ever seen all the over-the-top Christmas décor in the Hallmark Christmas movies....well, we do not measure up to that by any means, but we do have a lot of Christmas décor. I haven't even finished decorating yet---only the downstairs is complete, but I'll do the staircase and the upstairs next week. The girls are coming over in a couple of hours and we'll have them all weekend, so I'm sure we'll be busy with other stuff that does not include breakable Christmas ornaments. This year for Thanksgiving, we had three Amaryllis plants in full bloom---one Minerva and two Red Lions, and one of the Red Lions had two stalks up with 4 blossoms each on them. That one was especially spectacular. They all bloomed earlier than normal, but I am not going to complain. I have four more taking their pokey old sweet time that probably won't bloom until Christmas itself, so we'll have more then. These three amaryllis plants that are in bloom were grouped on one end table and looked so spectacular that Chris stopped and stared at them when he walked in the door and said something like "I know they are real, but they are so perfect this year that they look fake". lol. He was right! I was worried about the safety of the Christmas tree with Jesse and the new kittens, but Jesse is too busy with his basket of dog toys to even give the Christmas tree a second glance. He just runs by it on his way to get a toy out of his basket and doesn't even stop and look at the tree. Having said that, we don't leave him unattended in the living room with the tree because we fear what might happen if one of us isn't right there in the living room with him. The kittens are too little to care---they still are perfectly happy playing with each other, their scratching post and their cat toys and don't seem to have noticed the tree either. They play near it, but not on it or directly underneath it. So far, so good. Of course, it isn't even December yet and they still have lots of time to discover it and destroy it. Larry, I think the quail restoration project sounds awesome. I do know we hear and see a lot fewer quail here around us than we used to. There used to be a guy up the road who raised and released them, but he no longer is with us and I don't know of anyone else local who has taken on that task. All we have had the last couple of days is rain, mist, drizzle, fog, clouds, cool weather, and mud, mud, mud. I've over it already and we have another half a day or so of this November gloom to go before sunshine returns. Perhaps somewhat ironically, we go straight from today's/tonight's rain to tomorrow's return to high fire danger in the afternoon. Since everything has frozen repeatedly, none of the dead or dormant plants will hold moisture any length of time at all after the rain stops falling, so we face having dry vegetation in bad fire conditions tomorrow (and possibly Sunday as well) while the ground is muddy enough to slow down and even stop firefighters trying to fight wildland fires. It is a bad combination. Some of our worst wild fires historically have occurred on the weekend after Thanksgiving, and we find ourselves at that same point in the calendar again. It has been about a decade, maybe 11 or 12 years, since we had horrific wildfires on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and had to fight hard to keep those fires from burning through the town of Thackerville from two directions (west and east) simultaneously. We don't need a day like that ever again! We had our Thanksgiving at our house on Wednesday with Jana, Chris, the girls and us since Chris had to work on Thanksgiving. Then, on Thanksgiving Day we went down to Texas for Thanksgiving at my sister's house with siblings, their spouses, our adult nieces and nephews and their partners/spouses, kids and grandkids. Oh, and an assortment of friends. So, we had a mob of people and it was fun, and three of us siblings were together for the first time since Mom's funeral (with 4 of us kids, it seems like we always can get about 3 of us together at once, but hardly ever all 4 at once because there's always someone who's gone out of town to visit in-laws or kids/grandkids in another state, or whatever). It was a lot of fun, but I have to confess that I looked around the table and missed all our grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and several cousins who no longer are with us. We had such huge, fun, family gatherings when we were children, and I am sure none of us ever looked down the road to the point in time decades ahead of us when all the ones who were the "older ones" back then would be gone and we kids would find ourselves in the strange role of being the older ones now, with children, grandchildren and one great-grandchild gathered around the kids' table where we once sat. Time marches on rather relentlessly. I enjoy sitting at the adults table, but also think it would be fun to be an innocent child one more time, sitting at the kids' table laughing and eating while wondering when we finally would be old enough to graduate to the adult table. Somehow that happened a few decades ago and, being busy with life, we really didn't even notice it. We still try to fix the same dishes we remember in the same way our grandmother, mother, and aunts made them, but at the same time, nothing tastes quite the same way as we remember it from our childhood. Have a good weekend everyone. Just think---tomorrow is the last day of November! Dawn...See MoreNovember 2020 Week 2
Comments (63)Danny, I am afraid a bird will get its feet caught in the fiber. I started using hay binding twine some years ago, because it was cheap, and most often free. I would use it to tie the tomatoes to the trellises, or any other task that called for a good strong twine. After a short piece of the binder twine goes through the lawn mower if makes bundle of fiber, which the birds love. I found a bird hanging from one of my blue bird houses. It had gotten its foot tangled in the twine and could not get free. I found it hanging about 10" below the bird house, it was dead by the time I found it. I have tried to keep anything with long fiber picked up . I have had no dealing with the jute fiber before, but I don't want the same thing to happen again. I always have plenty of nesting material without having the long stringy stuff laying around. I have looked on some of the off-shore seed sites, I would like some different kinds of cabbage and greens. It seems that many of them have a milder taste. I am not surprised that the green briar taste good, when I was much younger I liked to hunt around an area that had a lot of green briar and/or honeysuckle. The deer seemed to love both plants. Yes, I am ready for spring, just like every other year. Even though I am in a rush for spring to get here, I seem to always get a late start on the garden. I am going to try to do part of my garden like I did years ago. I will start tilling the area I want early crops in late winter to help dry the soil. I live in a low area and my soil stays too wet too long, so part of my garden will not have a cover crop this year. I would like to try a living mulch this year. Austrian winter peas are what I have in mind, hoping they will die back when the hot weather gets here, leaving the soil shaded....See Moredbarron
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