Category Archives: Flowers

Welcome To August

Black-eyed-susan, Flowers, Hibiscus, Prayer Garrden, Reflections, Wild Flowers

Garden Work

In the past month we spent many hours working our way through the prayer jungle garden. The work included weeding, deadheading, pruning, thinning and even relocating some plants. Some areas even got a top dressing of mulch to finish it off.

It looks so much better but as we finished it up we made note that it was time to start weeding again because weeds had started to pop up again in the end where we started. A never-ending battle! Our next project is to put a small wire fence around it to keep chickens from scratching the mulch out. Chickens have no boundaries!

Mom Smiled At Me

Last Saturday, August 10 was my mom’s birthday. She would have been 79 this year. She was on my mind a lot that day especially when I was working in the Prayer Garden and saw the beautiful hibiscus in bloom.

Two years ago, on August 10th, I was having a rough day. I was really missing mom, so I went to my favorite greenhouse to buy something to plant in her memory. I bought a hibiscus. I wasn’t sure what color or variety it was because it was from the previous year’s stock and wasn’t labeled. It didn’t matter. I planted it in the prayer garden. It didn’t blossom that year, but I was thrilled when it blossomed last year – a beautiful pink but a different variety from those I already had.

It had a lot of buds last Saturday but none had opened. I was just thankful for the others that had.

Sunday morning when we arrived at the farm to finish up work on the prayer garden that hibiscus was blossoming. It felt like mom was smiling at me. 🙂 I will now look forward to seeing flowers on that bush each year around mom’s birthday.

Flowers Gone Wild

Last year I decided that panting black-eyed Susan’s along the fence might be a good idea. They are very prolific, compete well with other weeds and wildlife (deer and rabbits) don’t eat them. They spread through their underground rhizomes and by self-seeding and are often included in wildflower seed mixes. They are also beautiful and large patches can have a stunning effect.

This is the patch that I planted last year. They have really filled in that corner. I planted another area along the fence this year and may continue propagating them until the whole fence is lined with them. 🙂

Thanks for visiting.

Catching Up-Farm Update

Apples, Blueberries, Chickens, Chicks, Flowers, garden, Gardening, Grapes, Pond, Reflections, The Farm, Wild Flowers

To get caught up on my posts I’ll start with a look around the farm These pictures were actually from last week so I’m still a bit behind. 🙂

Chickens

Our youngest chick hatched on June 29th.

My husband named her or him (it’s still too early to tell if this is a hen or rooster) Strawberry because when he took the flock some strawberry tops that I had trimmed she grabbed one and gobbled it up. Strawberry was probably less than two weeks old at the time. He or she still sticks close to momma, not necessarily because it is still being trained or cared for by momma, but it doesn’t have anyone its own age to hang out with.

These are 2 of the chicks that hatched on May 12. They are beginning to look more like adult chickens and we are certain that one is a rooster. My husband even heard him try to crow one day.

Rex is our roo from last year. He is the daddy of all the chicks that hatched this year. He is a bit of an odd bird. He does the normal crowing sound of a rooster (Ur Ur Ur Ur URRRRR!) but also makes a loud cawing sound (Arrrr!) that I have never heard a rooster (or any chicken) make before.

What’s Blooming

Hibiscus in bloom.

Cosmos.

Wild flowers

The Pond

On some of these hot days I’ve found a dip in the pond quite refreshing and a pleasant way to get in a workout.

Garden News

Keeping the gardens alive has been a huge challenge this year. The weather has not been kind. Both June and July were very wet and all of the plants have been stressed at best. My husband has spent many hours weeding and fertilizing. Doing anything he could think of to keep things alive and growing.

I think he’s done an amazing job. I really thought we would have more crop loss than we have.

Acorn Squash

Another type of winter squash.

Sweet corn and Melons

Tomatoes (they may be small but they taste great!)

Sunflowers

Cucumbers and Eggplant

Green beans and Beets

Fruits

We had an amazing blueberry crop this year. We began picking in June and just finished picking last week. I lost track of how many we harvested as we were eating them fresh, freezing some and having friends and family pick and take what they wanted.

We have some apples that are looking good and if we can keep the birds away, we should have a decent harvest.

We also have a lot of grapes that are looking good.

We have put netting over them to try to save as many as possible for us. Homemade grape juice is one of our favorites!

Thanks for visiting.

An Explosion of Color

Flowers, Prayer Garrden, Reflections

Suddenly our prayer garden is busting with color.

I suspect the hot days we are having have something to do with it.

Pink and red rose bushes. Sorry I can’t give their formal names. My husband rescued these from a nursery he was working at a few years back. They had been left to die.

Evening primrose. Again, I’m not sure of the variety because a lady who my husband worked for when he was doing landscaping dug some up and gave them to him. I do know that they are a variety that blossom during the day and now that the deer are no longer eating them they are very prolific.

Roses in the foreground backed by lavender, and Asiatic Lilies in the distant background.

These Asiatic Lilies were planted 8 or 10 years ago. Each year they would send up green shoots, then form a bud, but before they even got a chance to open a deer would come along and bite the top off, so we had never seen them flower until this year.

The fence that my husband put up last year, which encloses our entire property, is a deer deterrent. The deer can certainly jump the 4-foot fence but mostly they don’t. We don’t have nearly as much deer damage as we used to.

Another Asiatic Lily that we have never seen flower before.

I had to add at least one new plant this year. This Foxglove was my choice.

My husband came home yesterday and told me that we need to add a white flowering perennial to the prayer garden.

He says we need to go shop for it today. Who am I to argue? 🙂

Thanks for visiting.

September 2023 – Farewell Summer

Apples, Autumn, Fall, Firewood, Flowers, Reflections, Sunflowers, The Farm

Hello and Welcome!

When I last wrote, back on September 13, my husband and I were working on splitting and storing firewood also preserving our apple harvest. This post will pick up there.

Apple Harvest

We had a great apple harvest this year so I was able to can about 16 pints of apple sauce and freeze enough pie filling for six pies. We also gave our neighbor a couple crates of apples as she was canning sauce and making pie filling as well.

Firewood

We continued to work on cutting, splitting and stacking firewood for the next couple of weeks.

Since we use firewood in our fireplace to supplement heat from our gas furnace (trying to keep the gas bill down) this supply would likely last us at least two years.

In addition to moving all of the firewood from our proposed building site my husband spent a lot of time sorting and moving other equipment that we had stored in that area. Much of it was relocated as you see in the photo above.

House Planning

We have spent a lot of time this month planning our “dream home”. Picking the location on our property was something that didn’t take a lot of thought as we both agreed that it would be overlooking the pond.

In the above picture the house will be directly across the driveway. The large maple tree in the center of the picture will have to be cut down, as will two small oak trees behind it. We have also decided to take down the maple in the right-hand side of the picture so it doesn’t cause problems with the house as it gets bigger.

I expect my husband will begin cutting these trees within the next week. This is a big job and is going to take a while.

When I took the above picture I was standing in the area where our kitchen will be. There will be a window above the kitchen sink so I will never hate washing dishes. 🙂 The house will set up a bit higher so the view will be a bit different but at least this gives you an idea of what it will look like.

The above picture was taken from the opposite end of the pond. I zoomed in to try to capture the 4 orange flags marking the footprint of the house. If you look really close, you might be able to make them out. There are two just to the right of the maple tree on the left and two more to the right of the maple that is to the right.

Selecting the location was the easy part. We have also been working on designing the home. Our first thought was to buy a modular home (a home that is premade in a factory then transported to the site in sections and attached to the foundation) but after looking at countless floor plans, we were unable to identify one that we loved. It seems we are not very easy to please.

We are now exploring the possibilities of a stick-built house. It is supposedly more expensive to build this way but by designing our own home we may be able to cut out some of the unnecessary (for us) things that would come with a modular along with wasted space, thus bringing the costs more in line.

I did find this website https://archiplain.com/ that has been a great help in putting our design thoughts on paper. (It was free, and I didn’t have to download anything. 🙂 ) After about two weeks of designing, measuring, discussing, revising, measuring, revising, discussing, revising and so on, we met with our potential builder earlier this week to give him the rough plans. We did meet at the farm so he could see the proposed building site as well. We hope to hear back from him in the next few days on what it would cost to build the basic shell.

We also met with an excavator who would build the septic field and prepare the area for the home foundation. We are looking forward to getting an estimate from him soon as well.

Meet Taffy

In August my dad lost his companion dog, Baby, to cancer. Dad lives alone and doesn’t get out much. He has close neighbors, but Baby was his best friend – the reason he got up each day. So, when he called me a couple weeks ago and said he needed another dog I wasn’t surprised. I was a bit nervous because I knew it would have to be the right dog – an older dog who was content to spend a lot of time lounging around. I began looking at the website of our local shelter but also began praying about finding the right dog.

When I read the description of the dog named Taffy, a 7-year-old, lab/boxer mix who is a couch potato and loves to give kisses, I knew she was worth considering. I didn’t want to jump into anything so I decided to wait until the following Monday to see if she was still available. I talked with my sisters and my husband about the situation and we all talked to God about the need to find the right dog for dad.

On Monday I contacted the shelter and made an appointment to meet Taffy. Since I didn’t see any reason that it wouldn’t be a good match, I called dad and asked if he wanted to meet her. That afternoon I picked him up and returned to the shelter. It didn’t take dad long to decide that she was going home with him. Since she was scheduled to be spayed on Tuesday, we couldn’t pick her up until Wednesday.

On Wednesday afternoon my husband and I went to the shelter to pick up Taffy and take her to her new home. I was glad that he offered to go along since A) I wasn’t sure how Taffy would do riding in a vehicle (she did fine) and B) I wanted him to meet (and like) her. (If it ever comes to the point where dad can’t take care of her I’d like to be able to give her a home.)

She been at dad’s for just over two weeks now and they seem to be doing well. In talking with dad over the last couple of weeks I found out that he had seen Taffy’s picture and profile online around the same time I did. He had also been praying about whether she was the right dog for him.

I do think that this dog, who had been at the shelter for at least a month, and was grossly underweight, needed dad as much as he needed her and with all those prayers going up, I can only believe this is a match made in heaven.

A Few Fall Pics

We discovered a new wildflower on the farm.

There were several plants tucked away in a corner that we don’t visit too often. I took some pictures and showed my husband. The next day he went to see them and found a tree frog sitting on a leaf of the plant. 🙂 He came home and got a wildflower identification book off the shelf and discovered that this flower is called closed gentian, bottle gentian or closed bottle gentian. It’s a good thing we didn’t wait for the blossoms to open to try to identify it because they don’t, hence the name closed gentian.

It wasn’t our best year for sunflowers. The mammoth sunflowers that I planted didn’t have a chance. They first battled against too much rain then the ones that looked like they might make it got eaten by deer. The variety pictured above were in a fenced area and managed to survive the overabundance of rain. It was lovely patch which the bees and the birds appreciated.

The weather remained warm throughout September and most of this first week of October, but we’ve been seeing fall colors for several weeks now.

The rain that came two days ago ushered in cooler, more fall-like, temperatures that will hopefully bring an end to our mosquito plague. I expect leaf cleanup will begin soon.

Recommended Reading

Last month I mentioned that I would possibly do some posts about books that I have read. Since I normally read when I go to bed at night, I read several books in September. They included The Carousel and The Looking Glass both by Richard Paul Evans, an author whose books I have come to enjoy. Both are books that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys a heartwarming love story.

A third book which I really enjoyed was Bad Ground by W. Dale Cramer. It’s more than just a love story and I think it would appeal to a wide range of readers.

The Synopsis reads:

Poignant and thought provoking, this is a down-to-earth, sometimes humorous novel filled with suspense, action, redemption, and even romance. Seventeen-year-old Jeremy Prine decides to honor his mother’s dying wish and seek out his estranged uncle who was badly burned in the accident that killed Jeremy’s father. He finds the man working as a hard-rock miner in the south, an extremely dangerous occupation. His uncle seems a bitter and lonely man, but Jeremy senses more beneath the surface. Against his uncle’s wishes, Jeremy takes a job as a miner and soon his young faith is tested by his rough and gritty co-workers, the threat of danger…and the possibility of love.

It has a 4-star rating on good reads, and I would give it 4 stars out of 5 as well.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/184446.Bad_Ground#CommunityReviews

Thanks for visiting. Has autumn brought cooler temperatures and colorful or falling leaves to your part of the world?

July 2023 Recap

Birds, Blueberries, Cucumbers, Dragon Flies, Flowers, garden, Mosquitoes, Pickles, Rain, Reflections, The Farm, Weather, Wild Flowers

I feel like I just wrote my review of June and already we are more than a week into August. July 2023 is history but let’s take a look back to some July stuff.

Weather

Our July weather was anything but typical. While we didn’t suffer the extreme heat that much of the country did, we had a very wet month. Typically, we spend a lot of time watering the gardens in July but this year there was no need for that. In fact, we had much more rain than we needed for some of our plants to thrive. My husband saw a report that our area had over eight inches of rain fall in July. Our average rainfall far the month is less than four inches. We were blessed though that we didn’t get any of the large hail or damaging winds/tornadoes or power outages that areas around us had.

Gardens

Blueberries have been our superstar crop this year. I mentioned picking blueberries in a couple of my previous posts and we have continued to pick them into August. I told my husband that since we pray for God to provide for our needs, I assume that God is telling us that we need to eat lots of blueberries.

We have also been picking green beans and cucumbers. Some of the green beans went into the freezer but most we enjoyed with our dinners.

So far we’ve had enough cucumbers for me to make 6 pints of bread-and-butter pickles which makes my husband happy because we only had one jar left in the pantry from last year.

All of the cauliflower died and much of the cabbage either died or is struggling so I was surprised to see that broccoli plants forming crowns.

I would be delighted to pick a few bunches of broccoli this year.

Our squash and pumpkin plants seem to be faring well so far.

We are seeing small squash and pumpkins on many of the plants and even some cantaloupes starting to form fruit.

Colors

The colors this year are beautiful – lush greens and bold colored flowers.

The lavender continued to blossom and was heavily foraged by bumble bees and honeybees throughout July and well into August.

I was surprised to see that this cosmos that came up voluntarily from seeds that were dropped last year is white while all of cosmos last year were all pink. I not sure how to explain that – likely is has something to do with the plant’s genetics. I’m now waiting for others to blossom to see what color they are.

It was the very end of July when the hibiscus began to blossom.

Purple coneflower in a patch of wildflowers.

Early in July I decided to dig up some Black-eyed Susans that were outgrowing their designated spot at the house and plant them at the farm. I wanted them in the front corner of the fence where I can’t get to with the riding mower. My husband planted them for me and for several weeks we’ve been waiting for them to bloom. Now they are. Black-eyed Susans spread through underground rhizomes and by seeds that they drop so my hope is that they will not only fill in this corner but spread some along the fence as well.

Mosquitoes

The wet weather has been ideal for mosquitoes. Did you know there are more than 3000 species of mosquitoes worldwide? Around 60 species in Michigan alone. I found this very interesting article that explains about different types and where and when we might expect them to hatch, grow and live.

The mosquitoes that we are currently plagued with would be categorized as floodwater mosquitoes – these eggs are laid in depressions in the ground that flood or hold water when conditions are right. The eggs may remain viable for up to seven years.

While dragonflies, frogs, toads and many of the bird species that live on, or visit, the farm are known to dine on mosquitoes, apparently there are more than enough to go around because more often than not a trip to the farm means dousing ourselves with that horrible bug spray in order to prevent being eaten alive by these vicious blood suckers. Sadly, I’ve not spent as much time outside as I normally would because I try to avoid the use of chemicals as much as possible.

Birds

Sometime during the last week of July our green herons returned.

Each year the pair shows up in late summer and spends several weeks with us. Since we have never seen their nests or their young, I assume that by this time they have raised their young and then stop at our pond for some fine dining before they migrate south for the winter.

They seem to be pretty comfortable with us, flying up from the edge of the pond to the windmill and waiting there until we passed by.

You might remember this post from July where I showed you the life ring that had become a bluebird house. Well, we have since learned that there are baby bluebirds being raised there. (I tried to get a picture of them but it just looked like a black hole.) We are enjoying seeing the bluebirds coming and going as they care for the young. When doing some reading, I learned that bluebirds commonly raise three broods per season. I also found interesting that sometimes the babies from the earlier brood will stay around and help feed the next group of chicks.

We do plan on getting some new life rings next spring. I think we will also be buying or building bluebird houses.

Thanks for visiting and I you enjoy the rest of August.