After the Snow

Look at these gorgeous tulips my dear husband gave me! It's so nice to have happy, bright flowers in the house on these gray winter days.

 

I spent this weekend cleaning up after last weekend's storm. So many scattered small limbs and pinecones! Some went on the mulch pile and some got put in yard waste cans. Because of the consistent cold, some things I hoped would be perennial, like lantana and Mexican heather, froze out. But, here and there I saw little promises of spring flowers.

I spent a little bit of time on the body of my sweater--and I think I am going to be okay with the colors.

My students (and me too!!) were all hoping for another snowy day on Friday, but it was not to be. School was on as usual.  

The pond repair men came and patched the leak, but 24 hours later, the water had dropped again. Boo! They will have to come again and replace the whole liner in the upper pond. Until then, the stream remains dry. The Kinglets and the Eastern Phoebe were dip diving into the remaining water before it sank too low and then pretty much dried up altogether. I am going to fill up my birdbath saucer (it used to be a hanging bird bath, but I lost the chain and hook in the move). I'll  put it near the stream. Haha. That seems like an old lady thing to do! But, I am kind of an old lady I guess.

Happy End of January to you all!

In the Garden

 So, the vegetables:

We got lots of peas before the powdery mildew and heat did them in. I just pulled out all the plants yesterday. We'll plant cowpeas there next, which should go good for the rest of the summer.

The cucumbers exploded. We've been eating them every day. I canned a few jars of bread and butter pickles and my husband made some jars of half sour spears. There are still plenty to put in salad and give away.

We've also got a bunch of eggplants coming and pablano peppers and bell peppers and jalapeno peppers too. (We love peppers!) If we can find them, we will add some shishito peppers. We love to pan roast them in olive oil, salt them, and eat them as a snack.

And of course we have tomatoes. We just picked the first one yesterday. This year, we are trying the string between posts method to keep them upright. Last year, they were huge and out-of-control. We hadn't anticipated that. The plants quickly grew out of their spiral tomato cages and I had a mishmash of garden frames and stakes holding them up. So far, the string and post method is working well.

And then, the flowers:

Well, everything is just happy as ever.

Lace cap hydrangea. We have loads of these in white and purple.

I had to stretch and hold my camera up over these six foot beauties.

Gorgeous ones like these only last a day or two!

Cat whisker reseeds itself

and grows like a weed. This year, I am letting some of them stay in certain areas of the garden.

We have few plants growing in the pond this year. Last year they were sucking up so much water we felt like we were refilling it nearly every day.

I had to stake these hydrangeas this morning because they were blocking the gate. We've also go an incredibly huge patch of blue one.

I know it's not for everyone, but I am so happy to work outdoors nearly every day. I love going out and pulling weeds and smelling gardenias and listening to the birds (or my audio book). I love staking overgrown plants and de-heading and trimming back and fertilizing. I love that bees come here and butterflies and hummingbirds and dragon flies. I love all the many bird regulars who nest around here. I love to see (or hear!) the occasional frog.

I hope you have a great rest of your week!

Spring

 Oh my goodness! Is it May already?

April was a fast and busy month. I finished knitting my Stopover sweater! I am super excited about how well it turned out.  These colors were suggested by the pattern. I am not good at dreaming up my own color combinations or adapting other yarns. Often, I am attracted to a pattern because of the colors in the picture. I loved these colors.

I am excited to try another sweater like this, but I'm going to wait until the weather cools down. Right now, I'm working on a little rabbit.  He came as part of a kit.

So far I have the head and one ear done. 

I haven't been knitting too much because I wanted to get the garden planted. I have spent a lot of time working on the vegetables and planting lots of flower seeds.

The plants just love this sunny space and it has been fun to watch everything grow day by day. 

It has also been irritating to find plants (though not the vegetables--thank goodness) devoured by slugs. I trap them in jar lids filled with beer. Most of them are very small (but they are plentiful). I did find one mack-daddy of a slug though. (Alas, he never made it to the 'bar').

School is winding down and everyone is tired, teachers and students. It will be good to see an end to this school year. We are all on a countdown. I am looking forward to a long break.

Days of Motion and Energy

So,  my darling little bully, the bluebird has continued to bang into the glass on the door.  For now, I am trying this  method--the snake.  It seems to help a little, but I think I need to move it so that it actually appears to be crawling up the door. !

It was a week for eating out.  I really love to eat Poke--an Asian flavored mix of raw fish and fresh vegetables.  Kind of like deconstructed sushi.

I also went out with this crazy young naturalist to eat Pho--one of our favorite Vietnamese soups.

Don't you like my editing of the other guy in this picture?

Meantime, school is winding down and I am getting ready for summer.  It is wonderful to get up in the morning just before the sun, instead of in the deep dark mornings of winter. 

Each day after work I come home to this lovely garden. I breathe in the trees and flowers and recharge and refocus.  I feel so lucky.

Here are a few of this week's treasures:

My youngest flew in from Chicago late last night and is now driving out to the beach.  Ah! I remember those days. Days of motion and energy.  I remember once driving from Florida to St. Louis and then on to Denver and Salt Lake City.  Driving through a night of meter showers and grabbing some sleep in a gas station parking lot only to be awakened by the shrieking of pigs in an enormous truck that pulled in alongside us.  Haha!  I still remember when we pulled into Denver Phil Collins was on the radio singing "I can feel it coming in the air tonight--haha HA!" 
It seems a long time ago.  And then again, it could have been only last week.  Isn't time funny like that?

July

July has been a difficult month.  Nothing bad happened; it is just hard to sell a house and think about moving somewhere else.  It is hard to have to constantly anticipate someone stopping in and judging what you love. It is hard when no comes by to see your house day after day.  It is hard to look at houses and find one that will be good enough to make you okay with leaving your old place.  It's hard to find a house like that and be rejected because your house is still for sale.  It is an odd limbo land and I will be glad when it's over.

One thing I do love though--my house is CLEAN.  I am naturally a tidy person, so I have LOVED having a decluttered, tidy house.

Tomorrow I go back to school. Yes! In JULY. Unbelievable. I will be glad to get away from this house business and focus on other things. --At least, I think I will.

Somehow this month, I managed to crochet a scarf.  It has been a long time since I made a simple crocheted scarf and this project was just the thing to ease my mind after that complicated forever-taking sweater.  I always love mohair too, so that was fun.  It is a silk mohair blend, very light.  I love all the fringe on this.

I am now wending my way through my first ever pair of knitted socks.  I am following the Winwick Mum pattern.  So far, so good.  But I know I'm just at the easy part.

The garden this year has been going like other years--some vegetables do better than others.  This year we lost all of our tomato plants to some kind of pest who gnawed through the stem at the base and killed the whole plant in one go over night. Awful! The beans, eggplants, and peppers have done well.

And the zinnas are really starting to bloom.  Flowers always lift my spirits. I can't imagine a garden without flowers!

It has been good to spend time with my boys and with my two dogs.  I've been on dog rotation all summer and worry a little how this will play out when I am working so much away from home.  When I was teaching summer school and taking out the dogs one at a time, it was nice to be up right before daybreak when the birds where chorusing in full.  I guess I'll be back to that.  Which it nice, though early.

I hope I will be back next weekend rather than at the end of next month! 

Spring Flux

Old man winter seems to finally have given up and moved on.  The best of spring's blossoms have passed and now it is the sweet, swift slide to summer.

Life is in flux right now--like the season--and I am trying to keep myself calm and reasonable.

The flux:

• School is almost out and the students are like ponies anxious to leave the stable.  It takes all I've got to keep them engaged. 
• I am hunting for a new job closer to home, and my window of opportunity is closing in.  
• The bathroom re-do is still in the works.
• My youngest son is having housing problems in a town far away where I can do little to help.  
• The house next door, connected to many nostalgic memories, is scheduled for tear down later this week.

• Also, the house on the other side of us sold and may be torn down as well. 

These tear downs unsettle me.

Our part of town is a hot little market right now--little houses on lots of expensive land.   I called this blog 'Notes from the Buffer Zone' because this neighborhood was a street of small, old houses smack between a few streets of stately old homes and a street of scraggly unkempt and condemned houses.  When I first moved here 30 years ago, we laughed and called it the Buffer Zone.

Well, of course the condemned houses were torn down (along with the woods behind them) and developed and now my street itself--which used to be students and artists and senior citizens in the Buffer Zone days is rapidly becoming something other.  It is odd to watch this transition.  I never would have thought that houses on my street would sell for over a million dollars.  It is a disturbing kind of gentrification.

But, on the be calm and reasonable side of things--I am very happy in my little house. And happy that at last, the garden is in!

It is not too lovely to look at with fencing all around, but I've spied wild rabbits in the yard. Last year they devastated our beans and cowpeas right as the seedlings came up. So, what better way to keep bunnies out, than to use a pen (well several pens) designed to keep them in? 

While gardening, I found this little nest made partly with soft rabbit fur.  I wonder what kind of tiny birds lived here?

Also, I have been s-l-o-w-l-y knitting this little fair isle cardigan sweater. I am finally up to the yoke.  I need to finish this as I have lost some of my motivation for it.  It really shouldn't take as long to make as it has taken me.  It's just that I only get to do a few rows at a time because bits of it take focus--like sit in a straight backed chair at a table kind of knitting focus--and I just don't feel in that mood very often.

I have also been knitting another hitchhiker shawl at the same time which has slowed progress on this little cardigan as well.

I am sure that by my next post here in the blogisphere, many of my concerns will have played out.  I'll just keep my eyes on the small delights of the season, keep breathing, and have faith that the universe will smile kindly on us all.