The garden is FINALLY all planted!
Now to get some straw down for mulch and water retention.
I’m growing several new varieties of things this year. The one interesting looking one so far is the Japanese Black Trifele Tomato, which is a “potato leaf” variety. I’d never seen a “potato leaf” tomato before!
I still need to cage up the Black Plum tomatoes. At the end of last year I tossed all the cages into one aisle of the garden. This year, as I started working my way around to planting I noticed that I was getting yelled at by a Song Sparrow. Turns out there was a reason for him or her being pissy:
While the nest is nicely snugged in the wedge between two tires, it’s also in the row with all the cages. I pulled out what I had to for the less sturdy varieties, but I’m leaving the Black Plums as long as I can, in hopes that the cages will help protect the nest a bit. Unfortunately the Song Sparrow may be out of luck. As of yesterday the number of babies had dwindled to 1. Not sure whats happening to them, but I’m crossing my fingers the last baby will survive!
Speaking of birds, there are wild turkey’s ALL OVER this year. These two wandered across my front yard the other day, to Apollo’s disgust:
The same day, while I was hurrying to an appointment, I hit a not small bird that lunged out the road side ditch as I passed. All I saw was a flash of a not small wing over the front passenger corner of the hood, felt the thump of the bumper smacking the bird, and looked in my rear view mirror to see a cloud of feathers in the air, but no bird. It was raining, and I was late, so I didn’t stop. When I got where I was going I took a minute to check the front of my car, no dents, can’t a been a turkey then, if I hit a turkey it would have left one hell of a dent…..except there were feathers caught in the corner of the hood, and they sure look like turkey feathers:
At a guess the impact was glancing enough to push the bird sideways instead of into my bumper. There was no body on the roadside when I checked on my way home, so maybe he or she even survived it!
The Bluebird babies are still there:
Last spring/summer, between being sick for a month, plus the broken arm, plus life, I never got the strawberry tire weeded. Hell, we ate like two strawberries out of it. So this last week I set out to get the weeds out of the tire. Unfortunately the neglect may have done in the strawberries. After pulling all the weeds there was barely any strawberry plants at all! After some back and forth I spent a couple hours today digging up the remaining strawberry plants, as well as the flowers that were also planted in that tire, and planting them elsewhere in the yard. The tire needs a refill of dirt/compost, and then I’m going to cover it with black plastic and burn out the weeds. I’ll plant new strawberries next year.
I also did a half-assed weeding of the hosta bed:
They’re filling in nicely, can’t wait till they fill in enough to cut down on my weeding!
Anyone know what these big ferny things are:
They’re trying to take over that corner, not sure if I like that or not……
The ferny things are wild ferns that love damp soil and will be a bear to get rid of, especially if you let them go for a while. OTH, they don’t do any harm there and if I remember you were looking for something that would grow well in that area (hence the hostas). They will crowd out most weeds – don’t know if it could do the same to the hostas though.
I hit a huge turkey about 20 years ago with a rental car. Only evidence was feathers and if I hadn’t seen him try to launch into the air and fly across the road, right into my 50 mph speeding bumper instead of over it, I would have never believed I could hit something so big and not get a dent.
I guess I’ll let them go for a bit. They’re mostly in that one spot, and I’ve been pulling them up for a couple years, and not getting anywhere, I guess I’ll see what they do!
Turkey’s are occasionally highly lucky birds…..