A little sunshine

Well, the time between posts is getting long, because time it's self is getting a little squishy.
It's not "Sunday" anymore, it's "Facebook Church and Google Meet with Mom Day".
It's not "Tuesday", it's "YouTube Live from Alton Brown's Kitchen Night".

But I've got a ton of pictures and maybe I can string together a bit of a narrative with them.
Here goes!

We got a bit of snow back a while ago.
About 6" - I only figured that out by realizing how tall the grape hyacinth were.

It was beautiful in an austere sort of way.

The wild weather threw the bird off. I found this intact robin's egg under the forcythia and left it for a few days.
Nothing ate it or smooshed it, so I cleaned it thoroughly and set it in my indoor primrose.

After the snow melted I discovered my poppy survived it's transplant!
But it was not surviving the Bunny that has moved in.
I used this old fire pit screen to protect it until I could hose it off with a new shipment of Bobbex.

A friend gave me this electric chipper last fall, which I promptly jammed.
I took a nice day to take it apart, oil the moving parts (remove the jam) and put it back together.

And it worked! I had no left over pieces!
This little unit is drastically under powered for my needs (and pops the breaker every time it jams)
I'll be looking to upgrade it to a gas-powered model in the future.
For now, I'll just chip and curse every time something slightly oversized falls in.

I took up the pavers from out in front of the house, and all the left over mulch,
and made myself a decorative path to the compost pit. (the old barn foundation.)

With the good weather coming on, it was time to get serious about raised garden beds.
And my struggle against the Bunny.

Rather than have them on the ground (as I first intended) I made these freestanding.
I'd just read a book called "Square Foot Gardening" which makes more sense on my property
than to try to do a traditional row garden.
I also double dog dare the Bunny to scale this bed.

All in all I made 3 - the one on the far left is for herbs only, the long one in the middle is for misc. veggies,
And the one on the far right (double deep) is for rood crops like potatoes.

Around this time I noticed a new roommate. Not the best choice of siting, Robin friend.

The ground has been tossing up more bits and bobs.
This tiny intact glass bottle (it's smaller than my thumb) came from a flower bed.

I don't know what this was, but the area between the barn foundation and the shed keeps spitting out bits of metal.

I found this old door latch while trying to dig out some compost/dirt from under the brush pile.
It snapped in half when I pulled on it, thinking it was a root.
There really is no rhyme or reason to where I'm finding debris.
There were a few 1" white square tiles with it, and bits of cut off green tiles that match the bathroom.

These did not bloom last year, so I can only guess the intense liming and bonemeal-ing of the lawn has helped a little.
These are called "The Poet's Daffodil" or "Pheasant's Eye" and they smell really nice.

I turned over a bit of a ground bed for pumpkins, and amended it with 160lbs of of Alpaca Poo from a local farm.
$20 bucks gets you 160 lbs and an afternoon's worth of entertainment.
Added bonus: rumor has it deer don't like the smell of Alpaca poo!

I had also gotten a few bags of MiracleGro Compost from Home Depot.
Be careful playing in dirt. :(

I'e been taking a lot of long walks - 2-4 miles a day on the local trail system.
Someone tucked this by the trail to find.
We could all use a little more these days.

So there you have it. Lots of outside garden activity. In the last week or so, the beds have gone from brown to green. I've been dividing more hosta, but that's pretty much ended now. I need to get a little more soil for the raised beds, but planting can't happen until they stop talking about snow (seriously, they are talking about snow again.)
I do have a new product on order for stripping trim on the inside of the house though, should come in this week sometime. Then I'll have more pictures!

Speaking of pictures, I've started a little project over on Instagram - #100plants100days. It's a nod to my middle school bio teacher/project.

Stay safe. - Sarah

Staying busy

Progress photos.
Progress... photos? Progress?
I don't know what day it is half the time. I'm marking the days on my calendar by the number of contacts I have with people outside my house. The last time I put gas in the car was a month ago.

Things are getting a little squishy here, folks. Not going to lie - the Betty Crocker box brownies are the way I'm getting through all of this.
I have managed to wrestle my brain around a few things. Mostly outside stuff now, because that takes very little active brain space for me. I did get the mudroom as done as it's going to be without appliances.

So much spackle.

Paint!

Dry fit of the access panel, no top trim yet.

Painted panel, trimmed out, and upper trim!

Ta Da! This room is DONE.
Except for you know, the fridge.
And the washer/dryer.
(Come on, Covid check. I can stimulate the economy with one phone call.)

After that, I did do a little work on the office, stripping trim. Stripping trim is dirty, tiresome and tedious. Particularly trim that's been caulked together.

Scrape, scrape, scrape.

What's this? They put the top bit of trim along the upper edge of the older bottom piece of trim,
but because the house had settled and the lower trim wasn't even anymore, they filled it with caulk?
Oh Hey Look! I see what a case of caulk disappeared!
I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't worth ripping this nonsense off the wall and just replacing it.

Ahh, the poor alligatored windowsills.

Stripped. I must have pulled 8 coats of paint off of this.
Or maybe they just upended the can when they were done with the room on the sills.
More gaps, full of caulk.

I mentioned the gaps full of caulk?

The cat is perfectly over this "Working From Home" nonsense.
Me too, sweetie. Me too.

Last weekend, I tired to right my mental ship by doing outside things. I ordered 3 yards of mulch, because the smell of mulch makes me super happy, and I was intent on spreading it hither and yon. But the beds needed tending before I could do that, in good faith.

My mulch replaced the gravel that had been in this very spot.
Here it is, weighed down before the big blow monday.

This is the part I dealt with last year, so i could just put a nice 3" coat over the top.

I don't often consider my house from this angle. I wish that darn radon pipework wasn't there.
It's a smart little house from this side.

Liberate the hosta! There's a metal pipe sticking out of the ground here. (septic in the back)
The pipe doesn't move much - wiggles slightly, but will not come out. There's a few pieces of wire twisted to it.

I cut. and cut. And divided. And divided some more. I save 6 chunks of hosta for me, and put the rest on the road.
I must have made 30 splits between this and the lower part of the upper bed.

With mulch! Yay!

Only part of the haul I put on the road.

Now I'm out of little plastic bags.
I reserved enough for litter box duties.

No good before picture. There was no edge. Just weeds.

This is where the rhubarb lives. I don't know how to use rhubarb,
but I think this year will be the year to figure it out.

Mulched! You can see where the rhubarb is peaking out,
and the rose in the middle that I'm trying to figure out if it's intentional.
I've pruned and fertilized it because there was a little bamboo stake I found in the ground with it,
as well as large old rose (?) stumps. We'll see.

Since I can't go anywhere. I made Jurassic Park in my flower bed.
The slates are heat rocks laid there for my friends Sampson and Delilah,
the ribbon snakes who eat the pests in the gardens.
I'm hoping to get a picture with them and the dinosaurs.

While hauling the hosta around, I remembered it was edible when young, so I tried it roasted. I trimmed and cleaned it all up like a real vegetable.

It was ok. Had a funny bitter back-of-the-tongue quality.

While I was digging all over the place, I kept finding bits and pieces. I put them in a little pile and then cleaned them up.

Things found this Easter weekend:
A jar, intact! Marked "Richard Hudnut New York". Empty of treasure.
A small collection of coal slag, which I couldn't figure out until I stumbled on the half burned piece. (Below jar)
A pair of wire snips, fully rusted shut.
A tiny little coupling thing - brake lines?
A tiny ball, too light to be a marble. A whistle pip?
An amber bottle shard that says "REGISTE..."
A large plate (?) fragment, with the slightest bit of blue glaze at the edge.
2 unmarked shards of porcelain(?) One on right looks to be a child's sized thing.
1 piece of porcelain marked "M_ER\ Porcelain\ FO__Y-_IMO\ FRANCE
1 unidentifiable piece of ferrous metal.
1 brass threaded pipe bit

Quick internet search only turns up Limoges France as a place that
produced hard-paste porcelain starting in the later 1700's.

So that was fun. Nothing was found in any great concentration to suggest a privy. Probably just "fill" from somewhere else. The jar was found wedged in the corner of the old barn foundation on one of my many trips to the compost. It stands to reason that it was the New York perfumer Robert Hudnut, from the late 18-1900's. A quick visual search turned up no identical bottles. Apparently he was a colorful fellow.

So that's about it. Trying to work, stay busy, and not worry too terribly much, though that increasingly difficult. The cat is out of chicken, to tonight I must brave the market.

Or hold up a locomotive.  One or the other.

Stay well, stay safe, stay home if you have a choice.

Let's talk more about plants.

Specifically, let's talk about invasive plants.
My big pains are currently:
Oriental Bittersweet
Multiflora Rose
Privet
Burning Bush
Garlic Mustard
Onion Grass

You will notice that my Arch Nemesis, Poison Ivy, is not on that list. While it's a terror for me personally, it is a native dweller. That it makes me itchy and crazy is not it's fault. It's just doing it's job (too well).

Invasives are just that. They invade a space that was not theirs, usually introduced first as ornamentals to people's gardens, and then escaping into a world that is not prepared to deal with them, where they wreak havoc on the native ecosystem.

 Let's take a look at the first. Bittersweet.

Fruit
(https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/oriental_bittersweet_an_aggressive_invasive_plant)

Foliage
(https://bygl.osu.edu/node/814)

Vine (strangling a tree)
(http://mdocs.skidmore.edu/crandallparktrees/invasives/oriental-bittersweet/)

This has edged out wild grape (native) and Virginia creeper (native) as climbing vines in my yard. It smothers and strangles trees - the birds eat the seeds and spread it everywhere, and it can regenerate from the smallest piece of root left behind in the soil. I suggest going to the links below the photos for more reading.
I've been cutting and pulling this pest since the week I moved in. One of my neighbors tentatively approached me and said, "Just so you know, I cut these vines, some might be on your property..." and I was all, "SIGN ME UP LET ME GO SHARPEN THE LOPPERS."
We've become good neighbors.
Some of the other invasives I try to contain and groom back into submission, but I do not suffer bittersweet to live. I'm surrounded by Land Trust land and trails, and they are choking to death with Bittersweet and Burning Bush (it's too timbered for Rose, or that would be in there too.)

Multiflora Rose is another one I don't suffer to live. Promoted as a "living fence" originally, the birds and rodents also eat the fruit and spread the seeds, and fallow pastures are smothering in it. It's terrible, sharp, and loves forests edges and abandoned fields.

Foliage, flowers
(https://extension.unh.edu/blog/invasive-spotlight-multiflora-rose)

Fruit
(https://neinvasives.com/species/plants/multiflora-rose)

There was a patch of roses I thought was cultivated at the top of the driveway when I got the brush off it last year, but the more I look at it, the more I think it's volunteer Multiflora. I'm keeping a close eye on them this year, and we'll see . There's more two large mounds of confirmed mutiflora that I need to take care of this year, probably this fall. I've already taken two down.
These will also reseed, and regenerate from the root. Generally pulling them up and burning them, or chemicals are needed to deal with them depending on how much of a foothold they have.

I'll scatter other invasive posts going forward. A lot of people don't realize that their landscaping can be harmful to the rest of the world.

(Don't get me started on Japanese Barberry. Luckily I don't really have much of that here.)