There's a Rebel in Every Pack

The new seeds were supposed to look like this....

It's true for people as well as plants - there's a rebel in every pack! Thanks to my friend Lisa Ritchie for the title for my essay today written for Main Line Gardening, in which I celebrate the surprise of a new and different Gaillardia among the 100 seeds that were supposed to be alike.

When I bought the seeds, I expected 100 identical plants. But nature had another thing in mind and provided me with one unique plant. I have choices; I could rip it up and insist on my little pink border being "perfect," or I can celebrate the unique and different. I can rejoice in the new and exciting.

I choose to rejoice. Celebrate with me!

...but I got a little of this...and that....lemon yellow REBEL Gaillardia

And if I get seeds? Yes, I'll share...but I can't guarantee they'll grow true. Maybe yours will yield surprises, too!

Please enjoy my essay on Main Line Gardening's website - There's a Rebel in Every Pack.

And yes, the picture is of my latest rebel...

Petunia Pizzazz

I managed to score a whole bunch of "Wave" petunias as well as many other types at Lowe's yesterday, each for 50 cents a pot. They're going to need some TLC, but I think they will recover quite nicely.  Below are photos of the last batch I rescued from Lowe's discount rack. A little water, a little talking to and some love, and lo and behold, abundant flowers!

With 3 inches of rain this past week, my garden is green and glorious just when Virginia's hottest summer weather rolls around.  Thank God for rain!


Enjoy the petunias...once the stragglers recover, I'll photograph them too.

Last petunias 'rescued' from the discount rack, and looking good!

Some Serious Thinking-Type Stuff

Tonight is one of those nights when I'm glad I didn't spring for the next most expensive television package from our satellite provider. My house is HBO deficient, and that means I will miss the docudrama,  "There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane," about a family from my home town of Floral Park, Long Island, who went through the unimaginable tragedy last year of losing not one but all three of their children in a car accident on the Taconic Parkway.

Many of my friends from grammar school stayed in Floral Park. It might be Long Island, it might be just 20 minutes from midtown Manhattan (by train), but it still retains the charm of a small town, albeit a town with about 16,000 residents and jets screaming overhead as they descend to Kennedy Airport.

One of my childhood friends who lives not far from the Hance family sent me a link to the story when it broke last year. The photos haunted me for weeks - the Hance home on Vanderbilt Avenue, which is a few doors down from a childhood friend's house and site of many a high school Friday night fun with the gang, the scenes of mourners marching across town to the doors of my old church, Our Lady of Victory, where my parents were married, where I was baptized, confirmed and married, too.

Prayer vigil last year for Emma, Alison and Kate at Our Lady of Victory, my former church

But what haunts me more and more is the growing sense of deep, bitter sorrow for all those affected by drugs, alcohol, and other addictions. Addictions claim more lives - both literally and the lives wrecked around the addict - than anyone can count.

In the Hance family case, the children went off for a weekend of camping with their aunt Diane and uncle, their cousin and the family dog. The grownups took two vehicles, and Diane drove home the three Hance girls and her own child in the mini van while her husband took the equipment and the dog in the other vehicle.  During the ride home, the oldest girl called her father on the phone and uttered the unforgettable sentence,  "There's something wrong with Aunt Diane" line and told her father that Aunt Diane was acting "funny" and driving on the wrong side of the road. The panicked dad jumped into his car while his wife called the police, but by the time they found them, it was too late. Diane's mini van hit another car head on. Killed in the accident were all three adults in the other car - a grandfather, his son, and his grandson. Killed in the mini van was Diane and the three Hance girls, Emma (age 9) , Alison (age 7) and Kate (age 5). Only Brian, Diane's son, survived, and has no memory of what happened.

The story has made the national news. Oprah even covered it.  It's unthinkable. A family lost every single child in one bizarre accident. At first, the Hance family thought that Diane had suffered a medical event - heart attack, stroke, something. Then the coroner's report shocked them even more. Diane, it seemed, had the equivalent of 10 shots of alcohol in her bloodstream and was over the legal limit, along with high amounts of whatever active ingredient is found in marijuana. In other words, sometime between leaving the campground and the accident, she drank and drugged, then got behind the wheel of the car and drove three children to their deaths, while killing three other people in the process.

Part of me is wrenched with pity for her, pity for all the alcoholics and substance abusers out there. The Aunt Diane of the title of this story isn't some hideous monster the way I have seen some people portray her. Aunt Diane could, but for the grace of God, be any one of us so in thrall to the god of the bottle (or the refrigerator, or the craps table, or the needle) that we would do anything for the little god of addiction. Anything.

We're all one or two steps away from that, some of us closer, some of us further, but all of us reading this, I am sure, know at least one person among our family and friends who could have been Diane, now or in the past.


No, I won't watch the HBO show tonight, and not because I don't have HBO.  And it's not that I won't watch it because the scenes from Floral Park, if they actually did film outside my old church and on the streets of my childhood, will make me sad and nostalgic.

I won't watch it because I can't stand all the suffering that continues due to drugs and alcohol and every single kind of addictive behavior out there.  So much suffering, which compounds others' suffering.  It becomes unbearable to think about it all, and one has to cling to the hope that God will take the bitter and wring some sweet from it.

If you can, pray for the three little girls and the three adults in the other car who were killed.  More importantly, pray for Diane's soul, and for everyone alive still stuck in the hell of addiction today or who hide their pain and suffering behind substances, whether it's alcohol, food, cigarettes, drugs or you name it. Hell in a bottle brought hell to others.  Let it end there. Let all who need the light and grace of sanity find their way out of the hell of addiction today.

Whatever Happened to Refrigerator Box Fun?

Whatever happened to refrigerator box fun? I'm talking about those days when you'd be running amok through the neighborhood as a kid, and you'd spot the holy grail....a refrigerator box. Out at the curb. Pristine, not smashed up, not smashed down flat, but waiting, tall and proud for the garbage men. The joy! The plotting, the scheming to drag it back to your yard. The begging and pleading with your parents not to throw it out. Watching the skies to make sure it wouldn't RAIN on your cardboard castle and crying when the morning dew flattened the thing.  Remember that?

The New York Times ran an article today that's being shared among my acquaintances on social networks. It's a paean to excess; parents who spent $50,000 on a playhouse, complete with DVD player, flat screen television and fully stocked mini fridge, for their sole 4 year old child.  Here's a link to the original article:  Playhouses.

My initial reaction was disgust at the spending. Then I thought, "Well, who am I to say that? If I spent $50,000 on a greenhouse or to build a horse barn, some people might think that's excessive, too." But that didn't feel right either. So I sat and thought about it, and I realized my reaction was more about spending this much to create a kingdom for one child than it was about the money itself.

I understand the need to give a child "everything." These parents could certainly afford it - the father is an oil company executive, the mom a former Playboy model of all things.  So they aren't hurting for money.

Then I started thinking about a 4 year old child who could run around the backyard in her very own magical kingdom, and what she was missing.

Remember finding the box by the curb?  I remember one time when I found a dishwasher or dryer box on Magnolia Avenue in Floral Park. I couldn't budge it by myself, but oh boy I wanted it. I used to turn cardboard boxes over on their sides, cut windows out on the sides and use crayons and paints to create mini vignettes or rooms for my Barbie dolls.  A dishwasher box could be a palace!

I couldn't budge it myself. I couldn't drag it the blocks back to my street. I had to coerce, beg and cajole my older sister to help, and some other buddies on the block....but they were all boys and not at all interested in Barbie dolls!

So we had to reach a compromise. I had to negotiate.  "I'll let you boys play in it for a while, say, an hour in the yard, then it's mine."  It was a deal.  We dragged the box back and it was only a bit worse for wear when the siren went off a 6pm near the railroad tracks, signaling the end of the day and time for dinner. Then the box was mine.

I remember laying on the sweet smelling grass in the yard, and making Barbie doll furniture out of old toothpaste cartons for my newfound treasure.  If you glue two boxes together, you can make a couch. My sister gave me old fabric and I glued it to the boxes.  I bought an egg cup at my neighbor's garage sale for a quarter and it was like a beautiful golden bowl on the 'table' in the middle of the room. I spent countless hours decorating the box, creating a mini kingdom, inventing stories about who lived there and what was happening.

I look back at the child I was, and the woman I've become, and how I got there, and things like summer afternoons decorating old dryer boxes don't sound at all like what goes into a summa cum laude college graduate who founded two businesses, but it is.

• I learned hard work and the virtues of working for what I wanted.
• I learned how to negotiate; I learned that you must give people something in order to get something in return.
• I learned to share my box with the neighborhood kids. You can't go back on a promise like that or they'd beat you up.
• I used my creativity and imagination to create the cardboard kingdom.
• I made do with what I had, and learned that a clever use of what you have on hand is more satisfying than buying what you want as soon as you want it.

You know something? I wouldn't trade my old cardboard box for a $50,000 playhouse for all the world.

Start Thinking Spring: Squirrel and Deer Proof Your Tulip Bulbs

Think spring! My latest article provides several humane ways to discourage deer, squirrels and rabbits from destroying your tulips bulbs.  And if all else fails? Plant daffodils!

Please click the link below to read the full article: Gardening Tips-Critter Proof Your Spring Flower Bulbs

What? Are You Crazy Adding Plants to the Garden Now?

Yup. Totally crazy. Actually....no.

Adding plants in July is fine IF you commit to watering twice a day and sometimes even shading them during heat waves.  I wrote an essay today for Main Line Gardening, the online gardening community hosted by Giverny Gardens, and talked about all the great reasons for adding plants to the garden in midsummer. Yes, there are reasons - great ones!

Please click the link to enjoy my essay:  Adding Plants to the Garden Now

The Experience of Fresh Peaches

Last night, my husband came into the living room with a small plate.  On the plate was a peach sliced into quarters.

"Here," he said. "From the garden."

Gingerly, I picked up a slice. It dripped with juice. I bit into it. The initial flavor burst was a fresh, light peach taste, followed by an aftertaste of vanilla.

It was heavenly.

"This one was pretty good!" he said, happily munching on the rest of the slices.

We have four ripe peaches from the trees this year, a minor miracle considering:

• We were told that the young trees would take several years to establish before bearing fruit.
• The wet spring, followed by a hot and dry summer, seemed less than ideal for peaches.
• We remembered to use the organic spray only twice - once in February, once after blossoms formed. I think the ideal is every two weeks. (But only one insect found in four peaches. Pretty good!)
• Most of the peaches on the tree became moldy before ripening and fell off.
• Some critter got hold of most of what was left and disappeared with them overnight.
• Japanese beetles feast on the tree leaves every year.

But if this is a hint of things to come, I am glad we planted the fruit orchard. We have 27 trees total right now - apples including Golden Delicious, Stayman Winesap, Lodi and Jonathan; four Elberta peach trees;  Methly and Burbank plum trees, Bing and Black Tartanian cherry trees, Moorpark and Early Golden apricot trees.

When we see fresh fruit now, we rejoice. We sample it and marvel that we can actually pick fruit right from a tree in our yard.  I'm a city kid at heart, and nobody I knew in Floral Park had fruit trees. My grandma's Bellerose Long Island garden, with its apple and pear trees and European kitchen garden, was considered an oddity in our suburban area. If people grew food at all, they grew a few tomatoes, since everybody knows that fresh tomatoes always trump store bought ones!

Once the trees produce fully, I'll can the fruit, and we have plans to purchase a dehydrator so that I can dehydrate as much fresh fruit and fruit leathers as possible.  But that taste of amazing peach flavor was a taste of achieving a dream, one step closer to producing even more food right here on our own land.

Three Native Perennials for Southern Gardens

Butterfly Bush

A weekend spent moving buckets of rocks and slates for the paths gave me quite the workout. I also weeded and spent time noticing which among the flowers growing on the hot, sunny slope of the flowers beds thrived, and which struggled. Hands-down, the winners are always native perennials here in the garden at Seven Oaks.

What are native perennials, and why do they do so well? First, you have to understand that not all flowers are created equal (neither are trees, shrubs or vegetables, for that matter.)  Before people planted gardens, all sorts of plants flourished on their own. Time and natural selection ensured that the healthiest, hardiest plants survived in whatever conditions they lived. If you live in a northern climate, for example, anything growing in the wild can survive your coldest winters. If you live in the south, native plants thrive in the heat. And so on and so forth.

Gaillarida, "Punch Bowl" hybrid

This is a very simple way of describing native plants, but it gives new gardeners a clue as to why native plants are so great for the garden. First, they're uniquely adapted to whatever the climate in your area throws their way - heat, drought, snow, rain, ice, whatever. In my part of the world here in south central Virginia, the climate varies from hot and dry to mild and rainy (or snowy).  Our town is at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountain and the climate can vary a lot from year to year.

I've noticed that the flowers that flourish in my garden are those that are native to the United States, and especially to the hot, dry plains regions of the USA.  My soil is different, but the heat and drought conditions are the same.

Native plants that love my southern garden include:

• Gaillardia - I've talked about the hardiness of these beautiful flowers, but when you see seeds sprouting in hard-packed, blistering hot gravel driveways, you know the stuff is tough. It seeds freely and you can easily transplant the babies.  
• Echinacea - Purple coneflower is the old standby, but bet you didn't know Echinacea comes in other colors? There are purple variations such as my Cherry Brandy Echinacea, with chocolatey-rich center and bright red-purple petals.  But there's White Swan, with white flowers, and a yellow one too. They all flourish in the garden here in southern Virginia. 
• Buddleia or Butterfly Bush - there are species native to both the New World and the Old World.  These towering, fragrant and freely flowering shrubs attract bees, butterflies and hummingbirds, and provide such welcome color in the garden. They are also so hardy that they seed wherever and whenever they can. I pick seedlings out of the walkways, the driveways, and even a pile of rocks we had delivered.  I just keep moving offspring of my main butterfly bushes into other parts of the garden or pot them up and give them away.  They don't mind heat and drought once they're established, and they bloom throughout the summer.

There are many other fine native plants for southern gardens - too many to list in one spot, really.  These three are my favorites for the garden here at Seven Oaks. What are yours?

Traditional Purple Coneflower

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Conserving Water in the Garden

This week we changed the irrigation sprinkler out in the vegetable garden for soaker hoses. We added soakers just to two beds, both tomato beds.  The other plants got a little thunderstorm shower last night.  What I was finding was that the heavy duty irrigation sprinkler - the kind that goes "ch-chc-chhhhhhhh" as it spins around and shoots water at you like a water cannon was also watering the grass between the garden beds. I don't want to water the grass, just my vegetables.  So we tried a little experiment with the soaker hoses and so far it seems to be working out just fine. 

I did, however, manage to douse myself with our old soaker hose.  We stopped using it in the garden in Long Island, and neither of us could remember why. Oh, I remember why now. It's got some sort of crazy flaw; the last 7 feet don't work and water doesn't flow out of it, but it SHOOTS out of the tiny holes along the rest of the hose length. I made the mistake of standing over it while I turned on the spigot. Use your imagination. I looked like I wet myself.  I may have too, since I was laughing so hard....

Water is a precious commodity and I never appreciated it until I moved to the country and we had to pay to install a water well.  If the well runs dry or a problem develops, I also have to pay to fix it. Water doesn't flow into the house when the electricity goes off, either. Back on Long Island, if you lose the electricity in a hurricane, it didn't matter, you still had flushing toilets and water to wash the dinner dishes.  Not here.  That's why I keep a stockpile of bottled water in the house at all times and old plastic milk containers filled with water to use for other necessities.  And if we heard of a snowstorm or hurricane coming, we have about half a dozen big pails that we fill with water and line up in the garage for toilet duty.  Plus the creek out back, which in a pinch I could do the old fashioned thing; haul water up to the house for the sanitary system should the need arise.

It's all so important, yet we take running water for granted. Then you look at the news and the south, the big states that raise a lot of food such as Texas, Oklahoma and the like have such bad droughts that their farm wells are running dry and their creeks and ponds too. 

Water conservation was on my mind this morning when I sat down to write an entry for Hub Pages' summer article content. I hope you will click through the link and enjoy my article. Give it a comment or a vote if you feel so inclined and share the links, please - the more the merrier!

Here is my article on: Be Water Wise: Water Conservation in the Garden

Lehmans the Ultimate Homesteading Store

Lehmans has got to be one of my very favorite stores and catalogs in the whole world. (See how things change? Used to be Chadwicks of Boston for the career clothes - now it's Lehmans for their non electric utensils and old fashioned cooking supplies.)  We went on vacation to Ohio one year, and while it sounds boring, like "What in the world can you do in Ohio?" that Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia vacation was one of the best we've ever taken. Two highlights from that trip were Baltic Mills and Lehmans Store, located very close to one another in the heart of the Ohio Amish country.

Many people think of the Amish and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, as synonymous, but there are Amish communities right here where I live as well as in upstate New York, Indiana and Kentucky. We almost bought a beautiful Amish farmhouse but the challenge of bringing in electric wiring and plumbing scared us off.  It was in Kentucky, and so sturdy that it was almost - but not quite - worth the effort to us.

Baltic Mills is an old-fashioned grain mill and country store. Their freshly ground red winter wheat made the best loaves of homemade bread I've ever made and even with the great flour from my local country store, Miller's, I haven't been able to replicate the experience.

This morning I saw an ad for Lehmans and it made me think of their store. They focus on non electric goods and have everything for homesteading!  Canning supplies are hot right now but they also sell kettles, and soap making supplies, and all sorts of kitchen gadgets you thought only your grandma knew how to use or you could buy at an antiques store. Nope, Lehmans probably has it.

You can send away for their free catalog here.

Now why all this gushing about Lehmans? Because I'm frustrated with modern technology. Yet another appliance in this house - brand new, mind you, since we only moved in four years ago - malfunctioned, resulting in a service call, and I guarantee you it will set me back at least another $250 or more.  This is the third major items to go zonky in the new house since we moved and I'm annoyed as heck about it.  And it's not like I can blame one manufacturer; all different companies. But it's like modern appliances are made now to BREAK.  And what is breaking? Mostly the stupid computer sensors in them. Shorting out, whatever.  I am tired of it.

Whatever happened to making quality that lasts? And why, for example, does my stove need a computer board inside to rival NASA? I'm not launching the space shuttle from my kitchen. I am making a cup of tea.

Honestly....it is so tempting to flip through my Lehmans catalog and think about that Amish farmhouse these days.

Although I'd miss the hot showers, flush toilet, and air conditioning.

Is a Garden Ever Really Finished?

Last night after supper, and after the sun ducked low enough so that the pines could provide shade, John and I finished cementing the stones together to complete the paths. The landscape fabric is down. We'll haul pails of pebbles from the pile where the truck dumped them onto the pathways, but the hardest part of creating the garden is complete The hardscapes are in place.  My dream of no longer weeding pathways is complete...or at least weeding them once every few weeks, instead of every weekend!

To celebrate, I found a picture of the original garden, taken April 2008.  I had mapped out the paths that March using rocks.  Do you see the little pink phlox planted on the hillside? That and a handful of daffodils were the only plants in place.  The trellis at the entrance was added that month, too.

Flower garden, April 2008

And now today, three years later -

Flower garden, May 2011...from a slightly different angle, but this is the same slope.

Is a garden ever really finished? Do you ever put down the trowel and say, "Glad that's over, now I can go back to watching reruns of the Andy Griffith Show on TV Land?"

We completed the main pathways this weekend. But we now plan to extend the pathway, clear a bit more into the woods, and I have already mentioned - loudly, repeatedly - that I want a huge statue of the Blessed Mother. I want to build her a grotto, actually, a la Lourdes. In my imagination, I see water splashing through a grotto or a rill.  Maybe if I win the lottery and can afford some workers to dig it for me....!

But in all seriousness, gardens are never finished.  My beautiful garden took three years to coax from the hard clay soil. It was so damaged from years of tobacco growing and pines...so acidic the laboratory who did the soil analysis called me and asked me where the soil came from (I'd taken the sample in Virginia but brought it back to where I was living in New York to have it tested; the poor lab guys wondered where the heck it came from!) It was so devoid of life I couldn't find a single earthworm in the soil for years.

Today I watered the petunias with the garden hose and out hopped toads - several of them - a mad scramble of amphibians dancing under the hose. Mockingbirds, kinglets, goldfinches, hummingbirds and cardinals play among the flowers, landing on the larger bushes and on the trellis. Bees of all types hum among the flowers and butterflies are busy sipping nectar from the butterfly bushes.

I don't have a magic touch and I don't have a magic wand. I don't spend hours out there every day, either.  If I could tell you anything at all about gardening, it is this; nature is forgiving.  Flowers add joy.  Don't hesitate to try something, anything, to get your garden growing!  It is the most worthwhile thing in the whole wide world.

No, gardens are never done as long as there is a gardener who loves the garden.

Summer Gladiolus in the Garden

Do you love gladiolus - or hate them? They do tend to elicit that kind of reaction. I personally love them. Sure, part of that is the nostalgia factor. My mother grew them underneath her bedroom window in a small, narrow spit of dirt next to the screened in porch, where it formed a sort of L-shape with the house. My dad ripped them all out and planted a yucky leucothoe shrub instead. I'd much rather have flowers than shrubs.

The glads I have growing here at Seven Oaks came from the good old dollar store. Each spring they sell little packages of 5 tiny corms for $1 and I'm a sucker whenever they get gardening stuff in.  I'm always amazed that they grow - and seem to multiple each year.  I found out that the trick to growing them so that they don't topple over is to plant them very deeply, something I'm terrible at, which uses soil to support the stem as the flower grows. That's probably why most of mine are flopping this way and that in the garden.

I have gladiolus growing alongside the shed and under my kitchen windows. They take over after the daffodils complete their blooming cycle in the early spring.  I had so many flopping this way and that I was forced to snip a bunch for cut flowers, and now I love having a vase of them in my kitchen.  If you do grow gladiolus, don't be afraid to bring a bouquet indoors. Why grow flowers if you can't enjoy them?

And speaking of enjoying flowers, I've discovered something new with gladiolus too; hummingbirds love them.  When I sit out on my back deck, I always catch a glimpse of a whir of iridescent green as the hummingbirds find the peach and orange colored gladiolus.

Please enjoy my latest article on Growing Gladiolus as Cut Flowers here on Hub Pages. 

Homesteading and Self Sufficient Living

Potatoes from the garden

Last night I tackled some vegetable garden chores and reflected on both homesteading and self sufficient living.  I pulled up the insect infested squash, cucumbers and zucchini; they're ruined, but I do have a bowl full of cucumbers begging to be made into cold cucumber soup, a delicacy I love each summer.

Dried beans

 
I harvested dried bean pods and thought about what it would take to grow food for completely self sufficient living. I planted one 4' x 8' bed with beans solely for drying - Dutch Brown and Jacob's Cattle.  Dutch browns make baked beans, and Jacob's Cattle supposedly keep very well.  After all my hard work, this is what I have so far -


Maybe enough for one meal?






Then I dug spuds. Potatoes. This is the first year I've grown potatoes. After a spring of plentiful rain, the drought and heat came.  I grew Yukon Gold potatoes from seed potatoes my neighbor Mel gave me and Russets from a $2.50 bag purchased at the local discount store, Roses.


Here's what I harvested so far - about 10 pounds of potatoes. The biggest ones are the size of baseballs, but most are the size of ping pong balls.  There are about a dozen plants still green and living in the potato bed, so I left them there.

First potato harvest on drying tray

I harvested herbs last night and placed a tray of catnip in the garage to dry. Pierre doesn't like fresh nip, so it's safe until dried. Then all bets are off.

Herbs solar drying

Here's what I realized from spending two hours last night harvesting and shelling beans, harvesting onions and cucumbers, weeding vegetable beds, throwing tomatoes with blossom end rot over the fence, pulling up bolted lettuce, and digging potatoes until it got too dark to see: homesteading is hard work.

Yeah, I know: "Duh!"  But seriously, did you ever consider as you pile your shopping cart full of Bush's baked beans, canned peas, plastic-wrapped loaves of bread and cartons of milk the sheer WORK that went into producing the food you buy so casually?

Self sufficient living sounds great on paper, but what do you do about droughts? I have a garden sprinkler on a tripod, but I don't like tapping into the household well too much. When you realize that if you drain your well you're going to have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars for a new one, not to mention dig up your lawn and garden, you treat water like the precious commodity it is.

Vegetables pickled for the pantry

I look at the beans and think about our pioneer ancestors for whom homesteading was a necessity, not a luxury.  Those dried beans formed the winter staple diet. The beets I pickled and canned last month, the peppers waiting to be canned along with things like the onions and potatoes dug last night, the beans drying in the kitchen - if I were truly homesteading, I would have to survive on this. Those herbs that looks so picturesque in the garden would be my medicine; the flowers I love to look at would supply medicine too, the Echinacea roots. The peaches in the orchard would need to be canned, dried, preserved to feed my family.

Not just a pretty face; if I were homesteading, this would be my medicine.

Could I actually feed my family from the garden like a pioneer woman? Yes, I could...but it's true; our ancestors did indeed work sunup to sundown. Think about tending the gardening, harvest, drying, canning, preserving the food. Think about sewing clothing and cleaning the house by hand.  Think about it.

Peach in our orchard today. The mesh keeps deer from the lower part of the tree.

As I consider the work needed to produce the scant vegetables, fruits and herbs I've managed to grow this year, I wonder how difficult true homesteading is in reality. We play at self sufficient living; we play at homesteading. Gardening is a hobby, albeit a passionate hobby for me.  What if I had to live only on what I could grow? What then?

And Baby Makes Three Plus an Egg

On July 4th, John found a mockingbird's nest in an apple tree in the orchard. There were four beautiful blue speckled eggs.

July 4th - four eggs

Today he was watering the trees and realized we have three delightful new fuzzy additions - plus one who's still hiding in his shell! Look very carefully into the nest - they have dark, fuzzy feathers and are a bit hard to see, but they're there. One poked his head up and opened his beak wide, probably hoping my camera would drop a worm or something to him. 

July 6 - three babies and one egg left!

Surprises in the Fruit Tree Orchard

We have 17 acres total here at Seven Oaks, but only 3 are cleared, and of the three acres that are cleared, about 1/2 an acre is dedicated to the fruit orchard. We ordered and planted 26 trees from the Arbor Day Society, carefully noting which varieties needed pollinators and how far to space them and what not.  We have 10 apple trees, 4 pears, 4 peaches, 4 plums, 2 cherries and 2 apricots.  One peach tree that looked as if it was dying was moved to an ornamental flower bed behind the house; we expected it to die, but were astonished when it regained its vigor. Now it's the largest peach tree on the entire property.

One lonely pear, but it's a start!

Peaches starting to ripen

When we planted the trees, we knew we were in for a long wait before we'd harvest the first fruits. All of the gardening books said that standard size trees (which the apples are, for example) and semi dwarf and dwarf (all the rest) take 5 to 7 years before reaching a size capable of bearing fruit. So we wait, and tend them lovingly. Each year we spray them with organic oil sprays and weed around the bases. We trim off the suckers growing near the base and we trim up the branches.  John hauls the hose out to each one during the annual summer drought, watering them carefully.  It was while watering the apple trees this weekend that he noticed a lovely surprise visitor; a bird's nest in the lower branches of the apple tree.  A quick search online and putting two and two together identified the eggs as mockingbird eggs.

In the mornings when I sit on the front porch with Shadow, I often see the mockingbirds fly from the flower garden on my right across the empty field to the orchard on the left.  We've heard crows and mockingbirds battling near the orchard, but I assumed the mockingbirds had nested among the pines.  They've chosen the apple tree to raise their young, and this morning, the mother bird was guarding the nest.  John was careful not to disturb her; the poor apple tree will have to wait and let nature water it.

Another lovely surprise was finding fruit on the trees!  Given all that we'd read, we were ready to wait another year or two before looking for fruit, but we have one pear maturing on a tree; about 6 odd looking peaches on another; and 2 peaches on the tree in the back of the house. The peaches seem to be exuding some kind of sap, and one is rotted at the bottom, but the others are turning peachy-shades; I have no idea if we'll get to enjoy them or if the squirrels and deer will beat us to them.  My sister has an apple tree growing in a pot on her back deck and waited patiently for the lone apple to mature, but just as it turned ripe, she found it abandoned on the deck with telltale teethmarks and one chomp taken out of it. The squirrels had found it.

One of the joys of living in the country now is finding wildlife like the bird's nest.  Oh sure, you can see birds' nests in suburbia; my friend Janet, whose apartment is near Central Park, even had hawks nesting on a door lintel near her apartment building, and she used binoculars to watch them. You can find birds everywhere! My brother on Long Island had cardinals nesting in his front bushes, and when my brother and sister were little, they watched a robin raise her young on a maple tree branch right outside their bedroom window.   But I love attracting birds to the garden, and it is finding little surprises, like the nest in the orchard and the few first fruits of the season, that make country living so much fun.

Growing Sunflowers

I couldn't resist! I woke up this morning feeling the urge to do some creative non fiction writing, and my thoughts immediately turned to gardening. I feel like I haven't written a gardening article for publication in quite some time. As I drove down the driveway this morning, I saw a cloud of goldfinches rise from the towering sunflowers along the southern side of the house, and thus an article was born. Researching this topic was a lot of fun, too; I learned that the sunflower is one of the most popular flowers to grow, and did you know it actually removes arsenic, lead and other horrible stuff from the soil? Japan is now encouraging farmers around the site of the Fukushima nuclear disaster to plant sunflowers, and sunflower helped reclaim land spoiled by the Chernobyl disaster because they actually remove cessium and uranium from the soil (all of this from Wikipedia and the National Sunflower Association.)

Truly magnificent plants and now beloved additions to my garden every year. I grow them for their beauty and to feed the birds; do you grow them? Do you eat the seeds or save them for the birds?

Please enjoy my latest article here: About Sunflowers-Grow Sunflower Plants

(All of the photos today are ones I took of plants in my garden.)

Happy Independence Day!

How often do you think of independence? Freedom?

I confess that I take my freedom for granted. This morning, I took a few hours away from work (I'm self employed so it required just a bit of schedule juggling) to go to St. Theresa for Eucharistic Adoration and Benediction. I ran some errands, dropped clothes off at Good Will, then met a friend for lunch.  Never once did I stop and think about freedom although I caught myself smiling and singing along with the car radio as I zoomed past the sunny fields of Virginia. Freedom sang in my blood, freedom glowed from the candlelit altar as I freely entered my church, knelt and prayed with my church family our first Friday devotions. I never once thought, all that time I was there, of the many people around the world who cannot worship freely;  in some countries you could be killed for kneeling and saying a rosary, or owning a pair of rosary beads.


Like many people, I gripe about politics. I don't like any politicians at the moment here in America; those I held out a glimmer of hope for turned out to be shallow and feeble, and I yearn for the days of Reagan (or maybe just the fashions, child of the '80s that I am.)  But I am free to complain; free to vote!  I remember reading of the early suffragettes. Many were declared insane for wanting to vote! Why should I complain when just three or four generations ago, women were thrown in jail, beaten and declared insane because they wanted....to vote?

As we head into a three-day weekend....oh, glorious three day weekend! Sun, friends, barbecues, fireworks, parties, relaxation...let's not forget that the freedom we have to enjoy all of these things - freedom from a state-imposed religion (which is really what 'freedom of religion' means, not 'an atmosphere free from any mention of religion because it might offend someone'), the freedom of speech, self expression, the right to vote - let's give thanks to Almighty God for the America of the past that spawned a new concept of freedom and human dignity; the America of today that remains the most visible symbol of freedom in the world; and the American of tomorrow that may help others realize that dream, too.