Long Division

You can still divide carrots. I was talking to someone on Friday who'd been lying in her garden, thinning carrots. She gardens like me: toss out the seed, let the beasties grow until they're pressing in on each other, then thin, transplant, eat, etc. This way you get a lot of plants to work with. See Victory Garden

Yesterday it was lovely again. I thinned my carrots in my dreams and then sat by the water for about a half-hour and watched some kind of duck swim about. My friend said they were buffleheads. I don't know ducks--but I loved how they lifted off them landed again. Their little feet were so cute, sticking them forward like a cartoon character coming in for landing. On the way, we walk the rails to Post Point, trees were full of singing birds. It was lovely. And there were many kayakers out; the water so calm and the kayakers gliding along. Ahhhh, hopefully more sunshine will return today. So nice compared to all that drizzle we had last week.

So back to transplanting. I always transplant the minitures. It works well for me. Although I'm sure there are the planters who dish out the seed along rows in units. These folks have their ways too. Giving garden gifts for Christmas is a good idea. Once a got a little cart that I could pull around on wheels. I could sit on it in the garden and inside were my tools: trowel, pronged thingy, digging thingy, seed, string, knife, iron slug bait.

Always in love with life,
Flower

Ruby-throated Hummingbird

Ruby-throated Hummingbird
Originally uploaded by geekinthegarden (in the woods with no internet!)

Don't you just love them when the do that loopy thing, chattering at the top of each arc of their matting dance? And boy are they showing off for their gals. They're pretty feisty little things. I've seen them fight off other hummers. I have had them come right up to me and drink from the hose I'm watering from--too cool.

Last spring, when I still had a husband showing off for me, we had a hummer feeder hanging outside our kitchen window. We also had several bird feeders that the raccoons would get into at night and make quite a racket. And during the day, the chipmunks and rats would help themselves.

We get rats around the water--I mean they are a problem here. They hang out in warm compost heaps and outbuildings and under houses. And they can get into very small spaces--like a knot hole or between boards where the don't fit together tightly. We had them come in the exhaust vent from our furnace and make a nest inside the ducting. The house started to smell bad and the husband decided to look elsewhere for fun, and I said I smelled a rat; I was right.

Rat poison in the outbuilding and lots of cleaning out nest stuff and droppings. Lots of folks don't like to poison them, but what can you do? They ate my dad's leather ice skates when he was a kid, and they ate my friends books--just last week. She'd stored them in her garage. We never had a rat problem until the cat died. Ozzie, boy I still miss the dude--he was a good hunter and a real sweetheart.

Well, tomorrow it is the first day of summer. Can you believe it? Summer. And colder than a... Happy day anyway, and don't forget to get those seeds in the ground. They'll sprout eventually.

Ciao!