The first day lily of the year bloomed today. This is a hybrid lily. My common lilies, which I call railroad lilies, should start blooming any day now.
In a cat's world, things change
Hmmm. Another gate.
Cats really know their territory. I had kept Lily indoors for more than two weeks, mostly to try to get her to adjust to Ken’s presence. I let her out this morning. I noticed that she immediately started checking out the changes that have happened outdoors while she was trapped indoors. She walked the fence, found the gates, and noticed all the other changes.
Something’s missing.
Where’s the trailer, my old home?
What’s that over there?
Someone’s been busy here.
This is not so bad.
The straw bale experiment is under way
Ken and I planted some tomatoes and basil in the straw bales yesterday. We’ll see how it goes. The vegetable garden is going to be very limited this year. The fence-building project got in the way. Not to mention that to start a garden before the fence was up would be to take chances with the deer (again). Last year, for example, the deer pretty much wiped out all my tomato plants in one night.
This year, however, there will be a weekly farmer’s market in Walnut Cove, and a farmer’s market every other week at Danbury. I’m hoping those two farmer’s markets will make up for the smallness of the vegetable garden.
Sardines?
I had never eaten sardines until yesterday. But lately sardines have been showing up on such lists as “the top 10 healthiest foods that you aren’t eating.” I bought a can at Whole Foods.
How do they taste? Not all that bad. Kind of like canned tuna, but with a stronger flavor.
Fence-building is hard work
For more than a week, Ken and I have been hard at work on the deer fence. The posts are all in place, and the corner reinforcements are done. We’re ready to start putting up wire. I’ll blog the whole fence-building process when the job is done.
First magnolia bloom
Two years ago, I cleared an acre of pine trees to make room for the house and garden area. I was amazed to find a magnolia growing among the pines. It was tall, spindly, and starved for light. The loggers worked around the magnolia tree, and in the last two years it has started to fill out. It’s about to bloom for the first time.
The coreopsis, which I planted from seed a year ago, is flourishing.
Strawberry preserves
The sign marks the spot on Brook Cove Road.
It had been 20 years since I’d made strawberry preserves. Ken was eager to make preserves for the first time. Monday, May 10, was an unusually cool day, perfect for picking strawberries. So off to Mabe’s Berry Farm we went. Mabe’s Berry Farm is on Brook Cove Road near Walnut Cove.
A strawberry field worker loads berries to be sold already picked.
The berries are cheaper if you pick them yourself. Here’s Ken with the three gallons of strawberries we picked.
Our berries are transferred to boxes for the ride home.
Back at home, the jars and berries are almost ready to start. The jars will go into the dishwasher to get them clean and hot.
Ken caps strawberries.
Washed and capped and ready to cook
The strawberries are boiled with sugar. The preserves use a lot of sugar — five cups of sugar for each quart and a half of strawberries. The lids are boiling in the pot to the right.
All done.
Skink on the window screen
This summer at Acorn Abbey…
David and Ken use a rented machine to drill post-holes for the garden fence. The trailer is gone now, by the way. I sold it the same afternoon this photo was taken. The trailer was my home while Acorn Abbey was under construction.
Now that the house is built, much outdoor work remains to be done. The first priority is a deer fence. There is an overpopulation of white-tail deer here, and they can destroy a garden overnight. There also is a great deal of planting and landscaping work to be done. I was despairing of how all this work would get done, so that my vision for Acorn Abbey can continue to unfold. Much of this work — especially the fence-building — requires two people. It’s hard work, and I am not a young’un anymore. It would be possible to pay someone to do this work, but that wouldn’t be frugal, would it, if alternatives can be found?
The alternative turns out to be Ken Ilgunas. Ken, you may recall, visited Acorn Abbey during the winter. Part scholar and part adventurer, Ken was looking for a frugal summer situation that combined peace and quiet for reading with old-fashioned outdoor physical labor. Am I lucky or what? As I mentioned when Ken first visited Acorn Abbey, he has become quite a celebrity after he wrote a piece in Salon Magazine about how he lives in his van while attending graduate school at Duke University. Here’s a link to the Salon article. Many media outlets picked up Ken’s story and interviewed him. Here’s a link to an ABC News video. A literary agent recruited Ken, and they’re working on a book proposal about Ken’s experience living in the van while going to Duke. Ken brought 50 books for summer reading from the Duke library.
On Monday, we picked three gallons of strawberries at Mabe’s Berry Farm and put up 17 pints of strawberry preserves. Photos of the preserve-making will follow soon. We also started building the garden fence. It’s an ambitious fence project. The fence is to be 365 feet long and almost 8 feet high. It will surround the garden area, the chicken house, and my small orchard of 11 trees. After several dawn-to-dusk workdays, the fence posts are all planted. Next week we’ll work on the wire. I’m planning to save the fence-building photos and post them all at once, hoping that our fence-building experience and methods may be useful to someone else who needs to build a deer fence.
I’m exhausted from a week of hard work (though Ken doesn’t seem to be). I’ve declared that we’re going to take the weekend off from hard labor outdoors.
Ken caps strawberries.
The mystery bud blooms
The mystery buds have bloomed. However, I still don’t know what they are. Can anyone identify them?
Update: My sister has identified them: coreopsis.