Purple Bearded Irises

Irises, or Irisi, or Iris - whatever you call more than one Iris!  There is a bed of them about 16 feet in diameter in the front yard near the porch.

Funny thing is - there are only blooms around the very outside edge - none in the middle. 

Being the flower amateur that I am, once I figured out what they were I did some research on Irises.  It turns out that they are probably now planted too deep from all the leaf much that has been accumulating over the years or decades. They are probably too wet from all the mulch too, and as they have multiplied over time they are now too close together.  All these things diminish the blooms.  So the ones out at the edge are not crowded, are drier with little or no mulch right at the edge of the bed, and therefor are not too deep as they haven't been buried more and more each year under a carpet of fallen oak leaves.  In September I will need to dig them all out, divide up the rhizomes and replant them at the surface about 18-24" apart with no mulch in the bed.  Spreading them out like that I'll have extras to plant in a new bed somewhere else.  Local folks tell me this property was a showplace many years ago.  It's easy to see the remnants of that former glory all around.  It will be nice to bring some of that back.

Raccoon

Well - not really, but that is what I call this calf in the neighbor's pasture next door.  With her large black patches around her eyes she reminds me of a raccoon.  If the two black patches were joined together into a mask she would look more like a raccoon, but I would probably be calling her 'lone ranger'.  She is the only 'white face' calf among a herd of Angus cattle and is a bit ostracized by the other calves.  Like Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer - they don't always let her play in calf games.

Mowing

Coming out of winter the weather has been cool and wet, which means the lawn has been growing like, well - what it's mostly made of - weeds!  But it's not all bad.  The lawn behind the house erupted into a sea of violets.  Purple ones and white with purple centers.

I't hard to tell just how many tiny violets are in the grass, but there is about a 1/4 acre patch of clover, violets and lawn grass between the back of the house and the garden.  The chairs under the pecan tree are where we rest when working in the garden and enjoy looking over our little bit of heaven.

There - a close up of a couple of square feet of lawn.  Now that's a lot of violets!  But mow we must to keep control over the property or it will become a jungle and a spa resort for bugs which we don't want - especially ticks.

So we have a new toy.  A 24 horsepower 50"cut Cub Cadet lawn "tractor".  It's big enough and stout enough to mow the 2 1/2 acres we have, but is not really heavy enough or strong enough to be called a garden tractor or subcompact utility tractor.  It's really a very large riding lawn mower.  It should work nicely for us for mowing and hauling around anything with wheels, like a fertilizer spreader or large garden cart and the like.  For digging in the ground we have the BCS tiller.  In the background next to the pick up is the other new toy - a 5'x8' utility trailer for hauling equipment, hay, and building materials.  The flower bed behind me is getting ready to bloom.  I thought the plants were Gladiolus, but now I'm beginning to think they are Iris.  I'm not sure yet.  Time will tell.

Compost!!

Because the soil here has lots of clay in it, although it's much better than the brick red heavy clay in many parts of the South, there is very little organic content in it from years of farming with deep tillage and industrial synthetic fertilizer.  What I'm saying is - there is NO topsoil.  The answer is COMPOST!  Lots and lots of compost.  I can make enough compost from the abundance of fallen leaves plus grass clippings, veggie trimmings, and a future supply of chicken manure, but I can't make enough to give the garden plot a good dose to amend and improve the soil initially.

I attempted to have 70 cubic yards of compost delivered from an outfit about an hour north of here, but despite long and involved phone conversation about our narrow country road, long narrow driveway and so forth they sent an 18 wheeler with an extended wheel base cab hauling a 53 foot open gondola used to haul sawdust from the saw mills.  There was no way he could make the turn off the road and onto the property.  Back he went up the road without delivering the compost.

I found a much better supplier, very professional, who delivered 60 cubic yards of beautiful black compost in 3 loads of 20 cubic yards each using a quad axle dump truck that could make the turn onto the property and dumped the loads right at the edge of the garden behind the house.

60 yards of compost!

Now 60 cubic yards of compost is a pile 10 feet wide, 30 feet long and 5 1/2 feet high.  It seems like an impossibly huge amount to till into the garden, but actually is only a layer 2 inches thick over the entire plot when you scatter it all out.

As always - my very helpful and generous neighbor came by the next day with his son and two tractors to disk harrow the previous deep plowed ground, load the compost into a manure spreader, scatter the compost over the entire garden plot, and very lightly disk harrow the compost into the top few inches of native soil.

Now I can finish the seed bed preparation and maintain and improve the soil over time with my rototiller by adding adding more homemade compost and tilling in cover crops of clover, buckwheat and winter peas. Hopefully in a few days we will be ready to plant the cabbage and broccoli seedlings, plant the onion plants and seed potatoes and plant some spinach, peas and lettuce.  With the exceptionally cold winter and wet spring we are about 10 days to 2 weeks behind schedule with planting.

Spring Has Sprung!

A couple of days ago it looked like this.

Today it looks like this!

Daffodils are coming up in lots of places all over the property.  These are the first ones to bloom near the base of one of the huge oaks on the east side.  Another clump is coming up at the base of an old oak on the west side.  I rescued a large clump from being plowed under way out in the garden plot.  I'll replant that somewhere today.  Spring has sprung - at least today.  It will probably be winter again in a few days, but today is blissfully warm and sunny and I am going to enjoy every minute of it.

Oh - the seedling farm in the dining area looks like this.

The seedlings are up and running.  Cabbage, Leeks, 2 varieties of Broccoli plus Broccoli Raab, Cauliflower, 2 varieties of Eggplant, and 8 varieties of Tomatoes.  About 280 seedling total so far.  In the next week we will sow all the peppers and some of the herbs, maybe around 100 more seedlings.

Is it Spring Yet?

Another month has gone by without a posting to the blog.  I'm tired of winter and am so ready for spring.  We keep getting these teasers that spring is on it's way and then SLAM! the weather turns cold again and we hunker down once again.

Well here is a sure sign that spring is coming - at last that's what the calendar says.  We have been sowing our veggie seeds that need to be started indoors.  These a cabbage seedlings.  We have also started eggplant, broccoli, leeks, 8 varieties of tomatoes, and cauliflower.  In another week or so we will start all the peppers.  Onion plants and seed potatoes will be arriving in three weeks and should be in the ground at the end of March.  Peas and spinach will also be direct sown about that time.

The soil has finally dried out enough to plow.  My very generous neighbor - Allen Green came by with one of his tractors and a 3 gang plow yesterday and turned over the ground where the garden is going to go.  Now I can get lime, blood meal, bone meal and greensand spread on the garden and order a truckload or two of organic compost.  Once that is all down Allen will till it all in for me and we will be ready to plant.

Joe Green and I supervising while............. 

........Allen plows the garden plot.

and turn over the ground like this.  It's about a 1/4 acre

So yesterday it was spring - 73 degrees and sunny.  This means, of course, that today it is Winter again.  Big time Winter!  AT 7:00 am it was 32 degrees and a mix of rain and sleet was falling.  It never got past 39 for the high and now it's 17 degrees at 10:00pm on it's was down to an expected low of 8 degrees.  YIKES!

Brrrrrr..........!! It's Cold!

It's shocking that it's been almost a month since my last post.  It seems like the days have flown by with most of the days spent indoors keeping the fires burning, literally, to keep the house warm and the cold drafts at bay.

We had our first snow storm last week, blanketing the ground with just over and inch of snow.  Not really that much but it stayed very cold for several days and only finally melted away yesterday.   I love the stark shadows of the trees on the bright white snow.  I've tried to take some publishable images of the black angus cows and their newborn calves in the stark white landscape, but have been unsuccessful.  The contrast is so extreme the cows have no recognizable form unless they are in absolute profile - otherwise they are black blobs.  Anyway - there are several new calves between 1 and 2 weeks old.  They are very curious and will come right up to the fence to check out what I'm up to when chopping firewood or whatever.

Tracks in the snow all the way from the woods across the road, up the driveway, onto the back porch, lots of tracks around the doorway to the cellar, and back down to the woods again.  If they were just a bit bigger I would say they were Bobcat, but I know they are from a very large feral House Cat I have seen around a time or two.  There is a small cut-out corner of the cellar door so cats can and do get into the cellar (they keep mice from invading the house).  The coming and going tracks were made close together time wise so I don't think he/she hung around very long.

We are expected to get another storm of about an inch or so tomorrow so it will be another 'indoor' day with the high temp expected to be about 25 and the low about 12 with the snow expected to fly in the afternoon and evening.  I'll split a little more kindling in the morning and bring some extra wood in next to the fireplaces and the wood stove.  Then maybe bake some banana walnut muffins for breakfast.  During the day I can either spackle the dry wall defects in the bathroom so I can paint the room or I could build the stands to hold the grow lights on the work benches where the seedling flats will go..... or I could do neither and read a good book and take a nap in front of the fireplace.  I'm sure that is what Mosa the cat will do.  Well - the napping part anyway.  I'm not sure what book she might be reading right now.