Kaylee in Gabe's Garden

I need to make a garden for her one of these days.

Gabe's Garden

Ice, Day 2

So, this was the day after everything iced up. The sun came out and glowed through every tree. This is the view of Gabe's Garden in front of our house. There is a slide right in the middle, there. And note the mailbox.



Shiny trees! This is the trench leading to the front door.



This giant stalactite should have been a tip-off that we had an ice dam forming on the shaded rear roof. Not too long after this, we had water dribbling in a couple of windows.



Here is the view up our little street. Note the mailboxes.



I snapped photos on the way to work.



Ice on the power lines.



Cows. Note that they are staying very close to that barn. Two feet of rock-hard snow is tough to walk through even when you are a side of beef.



Typical street scene.

We tried to get someone in to remove our house's ice dams, but every company but one was booked up. They finally started returning my calls a few days later, after the leaking had stopped. Chris did a fantastic job improvising a way to melt a relief channel through the ice dam, and I rigged up plastic bags and buckets to minimize the damage. Finally, warmer weather brought rain and melting. You would think that the rain would have made things worse for a while, but thankfully no. And I suspect that the water damage is just cosmetic. Thank goodness we didn't shell out the $1800 that could have bought us emergency services from the one company that wasn't booked up!

A Big White Blur

Welcome to our house!


This will be the winter we talk about for decades to come. It's been one storm after another all through January. Multiple storms dropped a foot of snow. Gabe's Garden is under the snow in this picture.


An early-morning view of Gabe's Garden from the front window. That dimple in the middle is his slide.


The trench leading to the front door is taller than Gabe.


The raspberry row. . . see? See the fence in there? No?

Several kindly neighbors have been by to assist with clearing the driveway. I love our neighbors! Chris is upstairs baking a giant quantity of blueberry muffins as I write this, as a thank-you.

Chris is pretty much recovered from the walking pneumonia now, hooray! And my placenta previa has cleared up - hooray! So we have both been able to do some shoveling. Some. Bless our neighbors!


You might think this was taken out in the wilderness somewhere, but it's a view of one of the snow heaps from the street. That was a few days ago. The heaps are much bigger now.

Yesterday, I had an early doctor's appointment. In one hour, two inches of snow piled up on the car. I slid into an intersection on the way home. We decided it was wise not to go in to work.


This was taken several days ago, as Chris fought his way to the garden to excavate his squashed little greenhouse. I have been venturing out there once a week to take out the compost. That's as much cross-country walking as I am willing to do right now.



And to think we thought this was deep snow!


Can you see the bench now? Neither can we.


Here was the mailbox a few days ago before the plow dug close to it. We are one of the lucky people to still have an upright mailbox. The continuous piling of snowbanks by the plows is rough on mailboxes.


They said on the radio that flat roofs are in danger of collapsing under the weight today, because it is raining, and the snow is soaking up the rain like a sponge. Chris, wisely, removed the 28 accumulated inched from the sun room roof yesterday, as another foot was beginning to fall. We're not as worried about the deck. . . or rather, we're both secretly hoping that the snow will squash it. Hopefully the rest of the roof will be able to withstand the load.

Mmm, I smell muffins!

Snowpocalypse 2011

Wednesday, January 12, 2011. We all stayed home. Chris is still recovering from walking pneumonia, and I am still under doctor's orders to do no heavy work, so we asked a neighbor to clear our driveway. But for most of the day, were were well and truly snowed in.



More than a foot of snow accumulated on the railings.



The branches were so loaded with the sticky snow that you couldn't see into the woods.



Looks like some sort of hunched creature now, doesn't it?



Gabe's Garden, the view from the front door.



Chris' veggie garden.



Check out the fence. Chris had to go dig out the Mousetrap. It was squashed under the weight of the snow, but sprang right back up.



I took these pictures from the windows. I just don't have the energy to be slogging around through knee-deep snow right now.



It's good hibernating weather. Poor crow.



The plows built us some magnificent piles. Gabe would run to the window to watch them work.

I considered opening the door and dipping him into the snow, but he wouldn't have appreciated it. Instead, I brought a bowl of snow inside for him to eat.



My poor shrubs are getting squashed, but I don't have the energy to shake them free of snow. Oh well - they look so pretty like this anyhow.

The Pre-Christmas Snow

Snow fell for my parents over vacation, right before Christmas. This is a view of the veggie garden as the light was fading on the first day.




View of Gabe's Garden from the front window. Nana helped Gabe to make the wreath as a surprise gift for us. So sweet!





Gabe's Garden as seen from the front door.




The veggie garden, the following day. This was before Chris opened up the box to harvest his delicious and absurdly out-of-season greens.




Here is Chris, my intrepid shoveler, demonstrating the depth of the snow piled on the bench. My father did most of the shoveling because Chris was sick through their entire visit. (And I am on on doctor's orders not to exert myself.) Poor Chris is still sick - the cold has morphed into walking pneumonia.

I just noticed that in the photo, you can see a ball of snow flying through the air from my father's shovel!

First Snow

This pretty little snowfall came down about a week ago.

Busy weekend!

That's not really me watering the grass, in the above photo; it's me, watering my son. It was a hot day and he really wanted to be wet. The end result was a two-year-old, soaked to the skin, beaming as he hauled the spewing hose around "watering" for Mommy.

Anyway, that was one of the photos I used for this week's native plant post at Franklin Matters.

Today we visited, for the first time, Old Sturbridge Village to check out agricultural practices from 200 years ago. I am so exhausted from the outing (and from an unusually hectic week at work) that I can't properly hop up and down while bubbling about what a truly awesome place that is. It's like a renaissance fair, but with dignity. We'll post pictures soon.

In other news, I'm officially a member of the American Chestnut Foundation now, and I'm so geeked out about the tree that I scrutinized the buildings at Old Sturbridge, because, surely, some of them must be made with chestnut wood.

Native enough

Kapow!

I'm not a purist when it comes to natives. As long as it comes from North America and doesn't have a history of being invasive, than it's okay in my yard.




This is Allium stellatum, or prairie onion, and it's native a few hundred miles west of here. This was one of the flowers I started from seed the winter before last for Gabe's Garden.



I wanted hundreds of little onion flowers, but only a few germinated. And then I lost most of the seedlings among the grass weeds, finding them only when the "grass" I pulled up had a little bulb on the bottom. Only a few made it, and the three that bloomed are visually lost beneath the serviceberry saplings. As a bit of color in the garden, they are ineffective.




But up close - amazing! And they have withstood almost two months of drought.

State of the Yard Address

The miserable dry spell had put me in a torpor of neglect. I'm not going to list everything that I killed, because it makes me ill to think about. Time to move on. We've had some rain, it isn't so brutally hot, and the plants are growing again. I finally emerged from my summer dormancy and tore into the yard.



Gabe's Garden: scraggly and patchy up-close, but overall it's full of green stuff. The bee-balm needs to be moved out to the meadow. I don't know if I will stick to my original intent to make this area super toddler-friendly, since it fails at keeping Gabe contained. The biggest problem is that it's just so very dry up here in the front.




The big winners in Gabe's Garden are the tall grasses, especially paired with ground covers. Sadly, the native ground cover, common cinquefoil, Potentilla simplex, shriveled up during the drought. I'm hoping that those long roots have saved it from death.

The creeping thyme, on the other hand, is a bloody thug. That's it blooming at the foot of the grass, above. It came through the dry spell looking fantastic, and it is swallowing up a small clump of my native prairie dropseed, Sporobolus heterolepi, which I am not pleased about.




These clumps are Shenandoah switchgrass, Panicum virgatum 'Shenandoah'. They are getting wide enough to hug. I may divide them for use elsewhere.




I still kick myself for losing the plant tags for these, but I'm pretty sure they are big bluestem, Andropogon gerardi. They stood unwilted and gloriously green through the drought. The switchgrass also performed admirably.

Have I mentioned that I water almost nothing up front? I hate the idea of dumping potable water on the ground. I would have neglected more of my new plants to death, had Chris not stepped in with the hose a few times.




That rockpile on the left is my new desert bed.



Among other things, the bed contains yucca, prickly pear, hens and chicks (not native, but I couldn't resist), flame flower (a West-coast native), false blue indigo, violets, and some fantastic volunteer spotted spurge.




In my absence, the lawn made serious progress in reclaiming my new beds here. I removed ten gallons of weeds. My many, many little creeping phloxes that I so painstakingly planted in a snaking border along the edge? There were massive casualties. The next time I am tempted to work with such puny pail-order plants, I'll be starting them in pots.




You can see the spent liatris there in the rear, in one big floppy mess. But I have to give them credit: they started this Spring as enie-weenie corms. I didn't expect them to flower this year at all. Maybe next year they will be more dense. I may not mind the flopping, if it looks like a giant purple octopus is climbing out of the dirt.

The nearer bed represents what happens when I walk into a nursery when I'm feeling weak. I don't know what half of the plants are. Most aren't native. There is bearberry in the mix, but I did it some serious damage by not watering during the dry spell. Wormwood has stolen my heart, but it is also smothering my birdsnest spruce. I'm learning so much about gardening, and I see the magnitude of what I have left to learn if I ever want to get this right.