Buzzzzz

I recently had some fun watching the interactions of some Bumblebees and Honey bees in my two Red Bud trees. In the smaller tree the Honey bees appeared to be trying to chase off, unsuccessfully, the larger Bumblebees. In the larger tree the bees just ignored each other.

Since I took these pictures with a small point and shoot digital camera I had to get within inches of the bees to get the pictures. I knew they would just ignore me, but it made me jumpy anyway.

Spring Birdie Story

This morning I was inspired to take another picture of this lovely pair - the Texas Red Bud and the white Daffodils - because they looked even prettier than a few days ago. The morning sun was making everything sparkle and shine so beautifully. I really wanted to capture the moment, but alas I am a terrible photographer. I point and click and hope for the best. Nothing ever looks as beautiful in the photograph as it did in my eyes.

Anyway, I took the picture, and was hoping for the best, when in flew a little Bedwrick's Wren wondering why I was standing so close to his birdhouse. I never expected birds to nest in these birdhouses. They are just for decoration really, they are too close to the house and the cats, but, for reasons known only to Wrens, the Wren chose the old dilapidate birdhouse closest to the Red Bud. We had provided a new certified Wren house (they have a tiny opening that keeps out Sparrows) in another, safer area of the yard, but the Wren has nested for four years now in the birdhouse that a squirrel chewed a very large opening in. The entrance hole is big enough to put your entire fist in. The cats could easily get these birds, especially as the Wren makes such a conspicuous production about protecting his nest, but somehow they survive. I have the privilege of watching this spectacle from the window you see in the picture. My desk sits right behind it.

Meanwhile, looking out the opposite window from the dining room, I see that the sparrows have been driven crazy trying to get into the wren house! It has stayed empty all this time, but every year a male sparrow will chose it and vainly sit calling out for a love to come inspect his chosen home. The sparrows cant get inside. The birdhouse is wedged up into a corner near the roof of the porch, so there is a little bitty space too small for a sparrow to stand up in on top of it and a little bitty space in the corner behind it. 

The male sits outside our dining room window calling and calling. The females come and look. They try to get in and can't. They try out the little bitty space on top, and with difficulty wedge themselves behind it. They reject it. This is our dining room dinner hour drama.

Well, I thought to myself recently, "You know I am tired of watching all this disappointment. I am sort of anti English Sparrow, but I can't take this poor male sparrow's frustration any longer. Wouldn't it be better for some bird to use the house if the Wrens wont? It would be kinda fun to watch, even if it is just sparrows." So, Garry got out the hole saw and sawed a bigger hole in the Wren (now sparrow) house, and the hapless male sparrow now has a lady love to share his home with. (It is fun to watch too.)

Back to the Wren that flew into my picture. Of course I panicked! I took a very crooked picture where the Wren is all blurry. He is hopping all over the Red Bud giving me a look. I am franticly fumbling with the camera, chanting ZOOM ZOOM dumb camera! but I did manage to get a picture of him even if it isn't the best. Enjoy!

1. 

First Spring Flowers

Daffodils

Dandy Lions are the first flowers bees find in the spring and are very important for that reason. The low growing pretty ones like this I like to leave, but I chop the tall ugly purple ones.

Peach blossoms

Front walk. The purple flowers are grape hyacinth. I bought 50 bulbs wholesale and they have really filled in.

White daffodils under a baby Red-bud Tree. This is the tree that I kept having to save from the wood ants last summer.

Wild grape hyacinths under the peach tree in the front yard.

I planted one hundred day lilies and one hundred daffodils that I bought wholesale under the two Red Oak trees. The day lilies are doing great, but only 40 daffodils came up and bloomed this year. The daffodils come up first and bloom, then as their foliage dies they are hidden by the day lilies as they grow. The idea works well, but I did not buy the right kind of daffodils for Texas.

Grandmother's Iris blooming under another Red Bud tree. This is always the first iris to bloom. The rest of the flower bed looks pretty bare, but lots of things are sprouting up and soon it will be full.

Red Bud Blooms

First Garden Plantings

I finally got to get out in the garden last Thursday and get some planting done. Anna and Claire helped me plant all the onion sets, three packs of yellow onions and one pack of red onions, in the bed I had prepared earlier.

 

I am changing the garden from long rows to 8' by 4' blocks with narrow rows in between, so it has been necessary to move some dirt around. Also I am switching over from soaker hoses to subterranean waters, so that necessitated burying a few more milk cartons down the centers of the 8 x 4 beds.  I had prepared two such beds for the onions, and one more bed was needed to plant all the transplants I had raised in the kitchen. In this third bed we planted green cabbage, Chinese cabbage, swiss chard, and some lettuce.

Back in the Garden

Today I was back in the garden again for the first time in a long time. This February has been the coldest and wettest that I can remember. We had a record 10 inches of snow while John was here on leave (of course.) Usually we have a lovely indian summer in February, but this time I was stuck indoors until now. Finally some pretty weather, but alas the garden is too wet to do any digging. I must get my onion transplants in!

Here is Garry, John and Claire with the snowman they made. For comparison purposes, Garry is 6'3''.

What I did today was rake back the leaf mulch from the area where I intend to plant the onions and I put an additional 6 subterranean waters (aka milk cartons) in the ground. I am going to plant my onions in large blocks this time, instead of long rows, in an attempt to save space.

I had such a good time being outdoors and looking over the garden. I picked a whole colander full of Brussels Sprouts! I also learned that it was not a good idea to cover the sprouts with a row cover. The B. sprouts that I left uncovered where fine, in-spite of the snows and freezing weather, but the ones I had covered with a row cover were full of aphids. They hadn't hurt the plants any and washed right off the sprouts though. My mustard greens are still going strong and my garlic looks good.

Brussels Sprouts

Here is a picture of the transplants I am growing for the garden. The set up is on the kitchen table and you can still see we have a few pumpkins left. I am growing tomatoes,  3 kinds of peppers, lettuce, two kinds of cabbage, and swiss chard. I found that I had no broccoli seed when I started this, but then remembered that I had a bag of seeds for making broccoli sprouts (for eating in the salad) so I only have one broccoli plant! I am only growing a few transplants because of space limitations, but this will give me a head start on the garden. When I plant these transplants, I will also plant seeds for a later harvest.

As soon as the garden dries a bit I can transplant the cabbage, lettuce and swiss chard.

Another indoor gardening activity has been to grow sprouts for our salads. I bought a little sprouter and some seeds for a mixture of sprouts and have had great success with this. Everyone loves the sprouts on a variety of dishes.

Winter Garden Work, Winter Plans

This has been a very interesting winter so far weather wise. It has snowed three times already and one day of snow was on Christmas Eve. Thus this area had its first white Christmas since weather records have been kept! We usually do not have snow or freezing weather until January, but we get our first frost in November which kills out the summer garden. I have always taken this hard when our first frosts are followed by such nice weather afterwards. Now that I am learning how to grow cool weather crops more successfully I am hoping to fill this void time with lots of new vegetable experience - like growing cabbage for the first time this last year. One way I plan to extend the season is plant these cold whether crops under a row cover.

I have actually still been working in the garden, although I am only now getting around to writing about it, and I actually picked some small broccoli off-shoots and mustard greens in the beginning of January! Currently the Brussels's sprouts are snugged down under an old blanket due to our "extended" (for us) nights of freezing weather this past week. I need to replace the blanket with a good row cover so that I do not have to keep taking the blanket on and off. Surprisingly enough the mustard greens are still going strong even though they were uncovered and the temperature was in the teens.

The last bit of garden work I am doing is finishing the clean up of the old summer garden, and raking all the leaves from the property and piling them on the garden. That way I will not have to weed so much and hopefully the leaves will contribute to the build up of the soil. Everybody is supposed to do three loads a day and so far we are staying ahead of the weeds.

Here is the winter Garden.

If you remember the three dark green pumpkins I brought inside after the first freeze, well here they are on my breakfast table, all nice and orange now. We put them outside only for a few days when the weather was nice, and they turned orange with only the light that came in the kitchen window.

My plans for the winter are to continue to cover up the garden with leaf mulch to keep down weeds, and to start some experiments with gardening indoors and seed starting indoors.

I bought a tabletop florescent plant light from Gardens Alive and am setting it up today. I am hoping to grow all my own garden transplants and see what else edible I can grow indoors this winter - herbs and lettuce come to mind. Believe it or not now is the time to start some vegetable plants indoors!

Another thing I am going to try for indoor gardening is to grow some sprouts. I have done this before and it worked out fine if you can remember your sprouts every day.

I'll leave you with a picture I took of a little Inca Dove, my favorite doves, who is looking out over my garden. A little flock of them sits in the sun in the garden everyday. I am greeted by the surprise of them all flying off all at once each time I walk to the garden, because they are so perfectly camouflaged sitting on the ground.

12 Frozen Cabbages

Well I played chicken a little too long with winter and had to run outside Wednesday night and bring 12 frozen cabbages inside. The big outer leaves were stiff and unbending, and very cold to hold in our bare hands. The cabbages covered up one side of my kitchen counter completely.

It was late and no time to do anything with them then. I just hoped that when they defrosted they would be fine on the inside and that I would be able to get some use out of them. The next morning I checked on the cabbages and they looked perfectly normal. No burned or wilted leaves. After school all three of us women got to work and started making cabbage rolls. We had never made these before and it was quite a bit of work, but fun.

There are tons of recipes for these on the net and we just picked one that we liked. We used the big outer green cabbage leaves to line the bottom of the pan. The big but light green leaves were used to roll up a meat and vegetable mixture (after blanching them in boiling water to make them pliable) and the tomato sauce was made from  my stash of ripening garden tomatoes. I used my vitamix so I did not have to peel all those tomatoes, just threw them in and blended with the spices. The tomato sauce was poured on top of the bundles and the whole thing was topped off by more big outer cabbage leaves.

The most work of this whole affair was cleaning and preparing the cabbage leaves for the dish. We had to clean off dirt, fallen tree leaves, moths and other dead bugs, plus a few live caterpillars. The kitchen was such a mess afterwards! We were left with a big pile of unusable huge outer leaves (that felt like a big waste throwing those in the compost) and twelve little round inner cabbages, about 5 lbs worth, (and water and dirt everywhere!) At least I can report that the dish was a success, yummy, and lasted us for three meals.

The next day we were gone to band until the late afternoon when we tackled the rest of the cabbage. We had decided to make homemade sauerkraut. This time only Anna helped me. We chopped and chopped and chopped until I got tired and got out my kitchen-aid attachment that would shred the cabbage. We shredded cabbage and carrots and an apple, we pounded and pounded, added spices and packed it all in a big sun-tea jar. We added whey from yogurt to start the fermentation process, and set the jar on our counter to start working. Now I need to go to the store to get some wide mouth jars to pack the sauerkraut in for storage. I stupidly got rid of mine last time we moved. I will write another post soon all about using lactic acid fermentation as a way of food preservation at a later date.

Sauerkraut in gallon jar. The cup on top is a weight to hold down the cabbage under the juice. Its hard to believe that 5 lbs of cabbage only makes half a gallon of kraut. In front are some pumpkin muffins.

I checked the garden today and the broccoli and brussels sprouts are still doing fine despite the freezing weather. I even have another broccoli to harvest and a few broccoli side sprouts coming along. The brussels sprouts are still only as big as my pinky fingernail so I dont know if we will get any of those before it gets really cold. The mustard is just fine. Next thing on the schedule is garden clean up and processing 4 more pumpkins ( I have to get them out of my kitchen before the big church Christmas party at my house this Sunday.)