A Piece of Chiot’s Run
Our nieces and nephew were planning on visiting this week, but the trip got cancelled for a few different reasons. Since they can’t make it up to Maine, we decided to send them a fun activity. Over the past few months I’ve been gathering feathers as I find them in the gardens. Most of them are from our birds, the ducks, guineas, and chickens. There are, however, a few wild turkey feathers in there as well.
I put all the feathers in a bag and made a poster with photos of all the different birds the feathers came from. The kids will are supposed to try to match the feather to the bird it came from. Some will be easy, like the polka dot pearl guinea feathers and the big wild turkey feathers, but others will be more difficult. There are about 50 feathers in the envelope.
Hopefully they will have fun with this activity. I remember that I loved collected feathers when I was a little girl, hopefully they enjoy this collection as much as I enjoyed mine.
Did you ever collect feathers as a kid?
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The Last Hurrah
The fall asters are blooming, this is the last hurrah of blooms before the snow starts to fly. The bees are busily gleaning as much nutrition as they can for their long winter naps.
I have a good amount of this lovely plant blooming in the flowerbeds and around the edges of the woods. It’s not the neatest or tidiest plant, but it sure is nice this time of year.
Eventually, the plants in the flowerbeds will be moved to the woodland edge, they definitely seem more at home in that location. They will be replaced by something that isn’t quite to floppy. The good thing is that I’ll still be able to enjoy them and so will the bees!
Do you have anything blooming in the garden?
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Friday Favorite: Sprucing Up
Back in Ohio, we had pretty much redone everything in our house to make it just like we wanted. Moving to Maine meant we were starting at the beginning once again. We haven’t really done any sprucing up besides cleaning until last week.
Our garage/barn is desperately in need of a coat of paint. It probably could wait a few years, but by that point the siding would have needed ripped off and redone. Eventually, it will be sided in cedar shakes or something else. We didn’t want to do that in a year or two, so we decided to paint the garage to keep the siding viable for another 10 years or so. We had the same issue with our garage in Ohio and the paint was still going strong after 11 years with no sign of new siding being needed.
We finally settled on black as our color of choice, the red barn color just isn’t my thing. Black barns with white trim were fairly common back in Ohio.
Mr Chiots washed the garage well and we got started. It’s tedious work, painting the grooves in the siding with a paint brush, we’ll use a roller on the main walls. The garage is two stories high at the peak, so we’ll probably rent a little lift for the weekend to reach those spots safely.
It’s not necessarily the job we would have chosen as our first project, but it needed to be done. Hopefully next we can paint a few walls inside the house, though after painting this we might not want to paint for a while.
Any big home improvement projects going on at your place?
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Sweet Potatoes
This week has also found me digging some of my sweet potatoes. There are so many, it will take me a while to get them all out of the ground. Luckily, there is only a little vole damage on them. Next year I must remember to plan castor beans in the garden, they seem to do a fabulous job keeping those pesky critters away.
The piggies are loving the sweet potato vines, I love that they take something I’d usually compost and turn it into bacon and ham. Not only that, it saves me on their feed bill as well. They will also eat most of the sweet potato tubers that were half eaten by voles!
Do you grow sweet potatoes?
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Pesky Wireworms
I’ve been harvesting my potatoes little by little as I have time and nice weather. There is a light at the end of the tunnel and I have potatoes coming out my ears. Luckily, all the animals love them. There are a decent number of culls this year, the voles were particularly fond of the big main crop type potatoes. Most likely this is partly due to the fact that they’re in the ground longer and later. There are also a decent number of potatoes with wireworm damage, which is always annoying.
Wireworms affect crops more when there are grassy weeds in the garden or in an area that was sod the previous year. I’ve been very good about keeping the grassy weeds pulled, which means my wireworm population will decline in the coming years. I’m also planning on putting the chickens into the garden after all the potatoes are out of the ground to scratch around and eat any that they can find. Luckily any potatoes with wireworm or vole damage can still be fed to the animals, they’ll no doubt enjoy feasting on potatoes for the coming week.
Have you ever dealt with wireworms in your potato crop?
