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Sunny Yellow Daffodils

March 26th, 2010

Daffodils are workhorses when it comes to flowering spring bulbs. They’re tough as nails and seem to take whatever you throw at them. I have a few planted in dry sandy areas and some in wet clay areas and they all do well.

On Wednesday morning I noticed the first daffodil blooming in the front garden. This is a bulb that I planted last fall. It looks like the wild daffodils you see blooming along the roads here in rural Ohio.

Daffodils are lovely spring flowers, their sunny colors seem to come when the days get longer and brighter. It’s like they bring the sun with them when they bloom. I have several different kinds of daffodils, so I will have these lovely yellow blooms for many weeks in the garden. Since they contain a poisonous crystal, I don’t have trouble with the local wildlife feasting on them like I do with tulips and crocuses. I’ll keep adding more to the garden since I know they’ll actually make it to the blooming stage.

Personally tulips are my favorite spring blooming flower, but with the deer around here I don’t get to see many of mine bloom. I have to resign myself to going to the Longwood Gardens tulip show to see them and settle for growing daffodils in the gardens here. But according to the National Daffodil Society: Depending on which botanist you talk to, there are between 40 and 200 different daffodil species, subspecies or varieties of species and over 25,000 registered cultivars (named hybrids) divided among the thirteen divisions of the official classification system.

Looks like I have a few more varieties I can incorporate into the gardens. Old House Gardens has so many wonderful heirloom varieties. Perhaps this fall I’ll buy a few new kinds.

What’s your favorite spring blooming flower?

Signs of Life in the Garden

March 25th, 2010

This past week I’ve been spending the lovely warm days cleaning the thick mulch of leaves out of the perennials beds so the plants can emerge (I don’t clean out my flowerbeds in the fall, I wait until spring). I cut back all the dead foliage from the perennials and often discover the plants springing forth from the roots. I spread some rock and mineral dusts on the flowerbeds and work compost and some organic fertilizers (like kelp meal, fish meal, etc) around a few heavily blooming plants. This time of year it’s exciting to get out and work in the garden. Things are starting to emerge and promise a summer of lush green plants and colorful flowers.

The catmint is making promises of mounds of soft billowy purple flowers buzzing with bees and other pollinators lasting from early summer to late fall.

The daffodils promise sunny spring color that will be seen in the garden very soon!

The lenten rose is currently blooming in it’s demure way. Not showy and colorful, but so brightening up the shady spot in the garden.

The peonies are showing the promise flowers in all shapes, sizes and colors filling the garden in June.

I can’t name a favorite plant in the height of their summer glory, but I think my favorite plant to see emerging in the spring is the sedum. I don’t know what it is about how they come up, but they’re so interesting to me. The texture is fantastic, the waxiness of the little cabbage type buds are so lovely!

What’s your favorite thing to see coming up in the spring?

Heirloom Recipes

March 24th, 2010

Last week my mom and I went down to my grandma’s house to go through some of her things. We went through many boxes and looked through so many things. Often the things that are valuable when someone’s gone aren’t tangible and often are not worth anything to anyone else, but they’re priceless to the family.

I’ve been wanting to collect some of the family heirloom recipes for quite a while to make a special cookbook. While we were visiting my uncle & cousin, I spent some time looking through my grandma’s recipe boxes. They were small metal boxes stuffed full of index cards and clippings from the newspaper and magazines. I was able to get some photos of some of my grandma’s favorite recipes, some of them in her writing. My cousin also had my great grandmother’s recipes book, which was a collection of recipes in an old railroad ledger book.

Throughout the rest of the year I’m going to collecting more of these family recipes. I’ll make the recipes and take photos of the finished products. I’ll try to find some photos of my grandma cooking or of her kitchen the way it used to be. For Christmas I’ll make a nice printed cookbook at Lulu and give it to family members. What a lovely reminder of what is really important; things that can’t be bought or sold. Most often the simplest things in life mean the most to us.

I can’t wait to try my great grandma’s tomato butter (which was most likely their version of ketchup) and my grandma’s pickle recipe.

Do you have any family heirloom recipes? What are you doing to preserve them?

I Need New Gardening Shoes!

March 23rd, 2010

I’ve been saying that I need new gardening shoes for a few years, and yet I’m still wearing these old ones. I have a hard time replacing something until it’s completely unusable (remember those jeans, I’m still wearing them and they’re much worse now). You see my shoes still have some tread, although I slip often if the grass is wet, and they still can be worn, although not without pain. (I must add that I bought these shoes for $9 eight years ago)

But I must break down and buy a new pair, my feet ache after wearing them. In the warm summer months I often wear sandals, but if I’m mowing, if it’s wet, if I’m doing something to get really dirty, I need a pair of real shoes. I’ve been looking around trying to decide what kind of gardening shoe would be good, I was considering something like this. I have a few things that are a must for me:
1. they need to be slip on/off, I am often running inside when I’m gardening and I like the slip on/off shoes since we don’t wear shoes indoors.
2. the uppers must be made of natural materials, no plastic shoes, can’t stand them!

I thought I’d throw it out to all my readers, see if I can find the perfect gardening shoe. What’s your gardening shoe of choice?

Spring Cleaning is for the Birds

March 22nd, 2010

We do all we can for our little feathered friends, trying to make them at home here at Chiot’s Run and that includes feeding them all winter long and putting up birdhouses all over the garden. This is the time of year when you need to clean out all those little birdhouses, and get them ready for the new chicks.

Mr Chiots is also going to be fixing up the little condemned birdhouse that the wrens just loved last summer. It needs a new floor, good thing we have a bunch of scrap wood in the garage, perhaps a nice new cedar floor.

I took all the wren houses down and cleaned them out. We also have a bluebird box in a side garden, it didn’t get used last year, but I still checked it to make sure it didn’t need cleaned. The bird houses we have attached to the back of the garage also got a good cleaning, we had some black capped chickadees nest in them last summer.

Cleaning out the birdhouses is an educational experience. You can see how different kinds of birds build different nests. The wrens build tiny little nests out of lots of twigs. They filled up the houses with extra twigs to make their nests a specific size. The chickadees used lots of moss and other soft items from around the garden, even a bunch of dryer lint and wool rug fuzz from the vaccuum cleaner that I put in the compost pile.

Look how cute this little nest is. This is just about actual size. This past summer I could hear the little wrens chirping away in this box.

Do you put up birdhouses to attract birds to your gardens?

About

This is a daily journal of my efforts to cultivate a more simple life, through local eating, gardening and so many other things. We used to live in a small suburban neighborhood Ohio but moved to 153 acres in Liberty, Maine in 2012.

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