Pileateds were here

Photo courtesy Wild Lands League

I saw two Pileated Woodpeckers in our woods this week. They were screaming their calls and flying back and forth between a couple of dead trees.

I haven't seen them in a couple of days but I am still hoping that they'll nest nearby.

Excellent Easter

Owen Erica

It was a great weekend with Phil and the kids and Adam and Martha. When we are in Mexico it's not going to be as easy to have this kind of get together so I am really grateful for every time we are able to pull it off! Here are a few pictures...more are on the Pictures page.

Winter Wonderland

We had a bit of snow yesterday, and more last night. It is supposed to get into the teens tonight. I hate it when it gets that cold - it is a struggle to keep the house warm.

I guess I shouldn't complain, though, since the ducks stay on the pond in every kind of weather!

The glass balls were a Christmas gift from Suki and Pete and the girls. Don't they just add some cool style to the pond? They are from the Museum of Glass in Tacoma.

There's No Place Like Home

I love my morning walks with the dogs. We usually head out as soon as the sky is starting to brighten - we cross the highway and go down the hill to walk along the road next to the water.

In this picture you can see the middle part of Mt. Rainier. Starting my day with a walk outside by the water with sun on my face and the presence of an ancient mountain makes me feel incredibly rich.

This is one of my favorite views from my morning walk. I know I've put several pictures from this location on my blog already, but each seems more stunning than the last.

I'll stop being a smart-ass now.

If you read the post below you will see that I made fun of our local TV news as well as taunted the weather. (The post remained unposted until now due to "weather issues.") Well, that should show me. That's because Thursday night around 8 pm our power went out, and it just came back on at 1 pm today - Sunday!

There was a huge windstorm here with wind gusts up to 90 miles per hour - or so they say. To me, it sounded like a 747 was caught in a giant mixer and it went on and on all night long.

We're grateful that we have two propane fireplaces and that we cook with propane. We're not so proud of the fact that we didn't get the generator repaired like we intended to all summer.

Living way out in the dingles meant that our lights came on much later than others further up the Peninsula. I won't make the mistake of taunting Mother Nature again!

And We Thought It Rained A Lot Here Already...

It's been stormy all week here and the TV news people are just praying that it will get worse. They are doing their best attempting to appear as though the wind is about to knock them over while giving us warning after idiotic warning. I wonder if I am just brilliant or if they believe the entire area is occupied by idiots?

Or maybe that idiot WOULD be me. Why am I here in this god awful soggy weather? The months of June, July, and August aren't enough to make up for this!

I did take the dogs for a walk today, braved the weather for a shopping trip, and dug trenches outside for an hour trying to get a car-sized puddle in the grass to drain down to the lowlands. So I'm not just cranky from being stuck inside while it rains and rains and rains.

The picture here is of the two cedars by the pond that we had limbed up recently. We love the way we can see the pond from the house now. Amazingly, when I took this picture a couple of days ago, it WASN'T raining! Imagine that!

How long is it until June?

Wintertime Fun

I have had such a wonderful time the last few days! First, we had the tree people here to do a ton of work. They removed three sick ornamental cherry trees and a very old and badly pruned pear tree. They limbed up three of our giant cedars - one that is next to the driveway and two that blocked our view of the pond. Then they proceeded to prune two dogwoods, two Japanese maples, two Italian plums, three apples, a crabapple, and a chinaberry tree. The whole place looks so awesome!

I had already spent some hours on a couple different days blowing leaves into piles and then raking them up. This year was a tough year for leaves because it was so wet...and the mower just can't pick them up unless they are dry.

Once the tree people left we got busy outside. It's been around 40 degrees and foggy so we were able to get quite a bit of work in today before it started raining.

Having the two cedars by the pond limbed up has just transformed the pond...I spent the morning today planting a ton of daylilies around the back border of the pond. They will get enough sun there now and should be just perfect. Then I transplanted an unhappy hydrangea and relocated a rhododendron. I have two more that I am going to move to the far side of the pond - hopefully tomorrow. It should be absolutely beautiful there in the spring. The tree people left us an incredible mountain of wood chips to use for mulch...which should make the place look all tidy once we spread it where it needs to go.

So, that is how we have fun at the Black Dog Farm!

It's Cold Here

It's something like 20 degrees here. The fireplaces are going and the dogs and I rotate from one to the next. The grass has such a strange feel - rock hard instead of a slurpy wet surface that your shoe sinks into! At least I'm glad to not be up in Bellingham with Phil and Jen - not because I don't love them - but because it is way colder up there.

The pond is about three-quarters of the way frozen. I thought I'd put a little movie here for your amusement - it's of the ducks walking on the ice.

Now it's time for another cup of hot coffee - our trip to Mexico in February can't come soon enough!

First Frost

Today was our first frost. It's always a bittersweet time for me....I love the change of seasons but I am not looking forward to our usual rainy winter.

After I took this picture it got very windy for several hours and there were a ton of leaves on the ground. Paul mowed up most of the leaves on the property in probably less than an hour - enough to cover two of our raised beds.

We also cut down the two crazy bananas that have overtaken the path. My plan is to relocate them sometime this fall...I haven't figured out where, yet.

Happy Lady

So this is the sight that greeted Paul when he drove in from work today...the dogs and I having a walk on the property while we waited for him to come home! Hey, it is such a treat for me to be here when he comes home, that I want him to have his whole pack greet him with big smiles!

Of course you'll also notice the way-cool boots that replaced my old farm boots this year and that my hair is really gray now!

Wet Weekend With The Last of the Garden

This last Sunday Paul and I were busy harvesting and putting up produce. Check it out below!

Here is a bit of the garden bounty! The grapes in the basket were a surprise - we didn't even know we had seedless grapes out there! (I put some of them in the dehydrator and am hoping we end up with raisins...)

Here is the last of the Roma tomatoes. We had a bumper crop this year, and I have done a lot of drying....Tiko and I both LOVE dried tomatoes.

Here they are getting put on the drying trays.

12 hours later they are dried!

The final product!

We have some crazy grapevines that have climbed all over the place this year, including up a whole row of apple trees! It was a challenge to harvest these, but look how many we got!

There were more green grapes than purple, and since we wanted to make purple grape jelly, we were a little unsure about what to do with the green ones. In the end we decided to combine them and hope the purple skins stained the whole thing so it would come out nice and dark.

Here is a picture of Paul getting started removing the grapes from the bunches. The Seahawks were on so we stayed entertained.

After they were all removed, we washed them and then cooked them. Then we strained them through cheesecloth until we just had juice.

Then we combined the juice with sugar and pectin, cooking that together; putting it in jars, and using the water-bath canner, canned them all in batches of seven.

Here is the final product - 33 jars of grape jelly! And it is wonderful and very purple, so the addition of the green grapes didn't matter!

I should have taken some pictures of the kitchen while we were actually doing the canning as it was a total disaster area.

So that is what we did last weekend!

Yummmm!

We have only four raised beds planted with vegetables this year, but we can't complain about the harvest!

We've been eating peas and zucchini and cucumbers pretty much non-stop for months. The peppers, onions, basil, and beans are really going great, and the heirloom tomatoes are about to bury us by the bushel-full. Ok, so maybe not more than one bushel, but quite a lot.

The fig tree is covered with fruit - thank goodness they don't all ripen at once! We also have a bumper crop of grapes - this time the green grapes are the most prolific instead of the purple ones. Should I make juice, or wine?

Day-O

Does anyone even know who Harry Belafonte is anymore? Do you associate the song Day-O with anything other than an ad for the (former) Bon Marche? (The song is about loading bananas for those of you born after 1965!) And of course the reason I thought of the song is that we are growing bananas in our very own Western Washington back yard! Bring the ice cream and chocolate sauce in about October for a banana split made with home grown bananas! It would be nice if I wasn't kidding...but unfortunately we can already feel the change in the air as our world hurtles towards fall.

Yes, We Have No Bananas...Yet

Those of you familiar with the Black Dog Farm know our crazy bananas - most years they grow taller than the year before. From their current appearance you'd never know that we thought they'd died in the harsh winter we had this year. There was barely any green showing even into the month of June!

Now they are both around 15 feet tall, with healthy, lush foliage. In previous years one of them flowered, but it was in late fall and there was no hope of fruit.

The shocker now is that we have a flower and since it is late July, maybe there is actually a chance for some bananas from our decidedly non-tropical Washington State garden.

Imagine This

Sometimes I wonder what other people's lives are like...what they do when they get up, what they eat, what their daily routines are, etc. So, in case you are interested in living vicariously, here is a picture of our world right now:

• It's 6 pm. We've already eaten dinner because we have both been very hungry all day so we decided to eat early. Paul and I are in our office, each on our computers. He is looking at Jetta information on the web, probably to 1) fill in his knowledge of the car and 2) to make him feel even better about his decision to buy (as if that was even possible!) I am obviously working on my blog.

• Lucy is asleep on the rug, ignoring the cushy, expensive bed. Angus is sleeping at my feet, probably because this is one of the hottest days of the year, and while it is 95 degrees outside, our heat pump has managed to keep the house at about 83. He's decided the chair mat under my desk is a cool place for a dog to sleep.

• Henry is out in the hallway, playing with toys from the toy bucket. With the exception of a couple of toys, the bucket has been put up for the last couple of weeks since he scatters a couple of dozen toys around the house if he gets a chance. This is quite an opportunity, and he's not going to let it pass!

• Maya is on her stand on Paul's desk. She just loves Paul so much she can barely take her eyes off him, or her next favorite fellow, Tiko.

• Tiko is on his rolling stand between our desks. He is crawling up and down, ringing his bell, and in general being the goofball he always is.

We'll probably hang out here for another half hour and then go outside and see if it's gotten any cooler. If it has, I imagine we'll climb into the hammock for a bit of togetherness as the weekend winds to a close. Later.

To Live Is To Change

The Black Dog Farm is quite a different place now than it was several years ago. Back then our vegetable and flower garden was twelve raised beds rather than three. We grew lots of corn, and one year had a bumper crop of bottle gourds to use for crafts. I dried, froze, and canned produce all through the summer. We had only two dogs...and no parrots. Rickie the cat was still alive. Sweet Pea, the miniature donkey, shared the pen with two pygmy goats, and even let them ride on her back! Our chickens clucked peacefully and produced more eggs than we could eat.

Now our outside animals have been reduced to one rabbit and two ducks. We gave the goats to a family down the road a couple of weeks ago. Inside animals are the three dogs, two parrots, tropical fish and ourselves.

What happened? For one thing I am working more. Back then I worked four hours a day. Now I'm full time Monday through Thursday and Friday is spent taking Angus to the vet, etc. That means that our weekends are crammed full of errands, weed-whacking, mowing and housecleaning.

I don't mean to make it sound like it's a dreary life, because it's not. But my original plan to be fully in control of my life has been altered and compromised. I just wish I could do it all, because I love my job AND I love my garden. Sometimes I go out to the garden and even though the beds we have planted are growing well - when I see the remaining beds all covered with plastic it makes me sad.

But all of this reminds me that I still need to work on living in the present. Enjoy every minute of what I have and not think about how things once were or may be in the future.

Birdland

This is the second or third year in a row that a mama robin has made a nest in the wisteria on the porch on the West side of our house. The babies cheep when she comes and goes, but we haven't seen them yet this year. Our parrots Tiko and Maya spent the day outside today, and I'm sure they enjoyed watching her. If you look closely at this picture you'll see Mama Robin herself watching to make sure I am not coming too close!

A Whacky Weekend

This weekend was another weedwhacking weekend for Nannernoo! As you can see from the photo, an entire hillside is now clear of blackberries and Japanese Knotweed. Paul helped me move all the poplar stumps that were in the way of my whacking. Now we just need to replace the fence that was taken out when they removed the huge poplar and of course keep on top of them this time! This is the second time I've cleared this hillside in six years!

Spring is Here!

Every spring I am astounded by the newness and beauty of nature. Just as we didn't think we'd make it through another dreary winter - and did - so did nature. The bright green revives my spirit.


Another thing that revives my spirit is the wonderful pack we have here at the Black Dog Farm. The addition of Henry, with his high energy and happy disposition has even had a positive effect on Angus. We have another oncologist checkup Friday, but from all outward appearances, he is still in remission. He runs around with Henry, chasing and teasing, and they have a good old time pretending they are all puppies again. I don't think it works the same way with humans - when I am around teenagers I feel even older than I am!

A Trio of Trillium

Nothing says spring like the trillium. They are all over our place this time of year...and just looking at them makes me want to play hooky from work and goof around in the garden. You won't tell, will you?