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Monthly Archives: May 2008

The drama of daisies and stuff

Daisies are so humble, but it’s flattering when they choose to grow in the weedpatch beside your driveway. Around here people mostly mow them down. Every morning and every evening I go out for a walk to see how the grass and clover are coming along. It’s chiefly in the morning that you notice a […]

Vidalia onions

The real thing I would continue to testify that, awesome though California’s produce is, there are three things grown in the Southeast that California can’t duplicate: Vidalia onions (from Georgia, of course), proper summer tomatoes, and mountain cabbage. Vidalia onions are showing up in all the stores here. The large ones can be expensive. The […]

Today's photos, in no particular order

The local power company, Energy United, has been clearing trees around the power lines up on Duggins Road. I stopped and had a nice chat with the two supervisors about going as easy on the greenery as possible. They were very nice and didn’t disagree at all. Part of what they’re doing, though, is an […]

Rain today = tomatoes tomorrow

The reddest part of this squall missed me, but it left an eighth of an inch of rain yesterday. Today we have real rainy-day rain, and it may go on for hours. What I last lived in thunderstorm country (17 years ago), Internet radar didn’t exist. Now you can easily see when rain is approaching, […]

First day lily

May 24, 8:45 a.m. What could be more exciting than the first day lily to appear on an acre of scraped-over but slowly recovering land. There was an eighth of an inch of rain during the night, enough to make the cover crops pretty happy for a few days.

Speaking of miracles…

Cartoon by Sidney Harris I came across this quote a couple of days ago at survivalblog.com: There are only two ways to live your life. One as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. — Albert Einstein I don’t think Einstein was deluded about the all-knowingness of science. […]

The miracle of May

Mountain View Road, Stokes County, May 23. This is the kind of grass I want — deep, unmowed grass that swallows pickup trucks. Note the color of the sky close to the horizon. That is Carolina blue. More of Mama’s roses, May 23, Yadkin County. The amazing thing is, these blooms had not even started […]

Cover crops: slow going

I have many spots where silt collected after rain, and the soil looked flat and barren. But there was grass seed under there, and eventually the grass breaks through with a vengeance. It’s been a constant challenge to get cover crops going on more than an acre laid bare. The overall result is still far […]

From Mama's house to my house

Mama’s roses All these photos were taken yesterday. I let the GPS device pick a route from Mama’s house to my place in Stokes. I told the GPS device to pick a route that led past a particular place along the Yadkin River where I’d remembered seeing an old mill 30 years ago, and I […]

Bonjour, bluebirds

Zero percent financing! I finally put up my two bluebird houses. At the base of each post I planted some English ivy. Now if I could just figure out where to put my bat houses, and how to mount them. The bat houses have to be much higher than bluebird houses. The tomatoes are starting […]