Life With The Crew

Frog Days of Summer

This week has flown by!  We started off sick and miserable and have moved on to just slight sore throats and tickles.  The ladies in the house attended horse camp at the barn where our horse is stabled and the man of the family painted a house.  We have all been exhausted at the end of each day!  The hot Summer weather has kicked in and the garden is going strong.  I haven't had any time for taking photos and I haven't knitted in over a week - oh, what has life come to?!  So the only photo I have to share is from last weekend, on our day-after-the-solstice paddle.  This frog appeared to have its eyes open, but we got within touching distance and it did not move.  It was just floating in the water, legs hanging down.  My husband thought it was sleeping and/or waiting for the sun to hit it and warm it up.  

Hope your Summer is going well!  

The Runty Carrot

There was a little carrot that was eaten to the ground, it disappeared so quickly, it didn't make a sound.

It tried so hard to grow so tall, to hide itself from view, but the hungry creatures found it, they somehow always knew.

When the Summer weather ended and Fall was coming near, the little runty carrot was left for another year.

Under snow it stayed it alive, doing its carrot thing, then when the soil started to warm, the carrot said, "It's Spring!"

I knew it wouldn't taste good.  Since it was its second year, it was sending energy up, not down, so I let it be.  It looks pretty and everyone can use more carrot seeds!  I like to think of it as my garden talisman, warding off the hungry creatures this year.  Fingers crossed.  

 

Into the Gorge

Pictures of the gorge at Watkins Glen State Park in New York; the Finger Lakes territory, aka wine country of the Northeast.  If you could be there all by yourself, it would be really cool.  Being there with a bunch of tourists (yes, I realize I am one myself), makes it only so-so.  However, it is pretty impressive to see how many layers of rock the water has eroded through.  There are several waterfalls, interesting deep round holes made by water swirling in eddies, and lots of wet muddy steps.  Don't wear your best shoes or wear white.  Do take your camera and make sure to look over the edge.

No Vampires Here

Along with it being strawberry season, it is scape season too!  I always laugh when I remember back 14 years ago, when my husband and I were in our first apartment and we received a bag of garlic scapes in our CSA box.  (The scapes are the top part of the garlic plant that will form a flower.  You don't want this to happen, because then the energy will go into forming those seeds and not into the garlic bulb.)  We both said, "What the heck are those?!" and then set them aside, to linger in the box until we threw them out.  So awful.  Flash forward to now, and on Wednesday night we had a wonderful dinner of linguini topped with homemade garlic scape pesto along with crisp salad from my garden.  For the pesto, I combined a lot of scapes with a handful of kale leaves, then walnuts, pecorino, and olive oil.  It was pungent and very garlicky - perfect for scaring away vampires!  I have three containers in the freezer, so in the depths of winter, this green garden goodness will be a nice change from root veggie soups.

What have you been picking in your garden lately?

 

To the driver who squashed the turtle on the road today

To the driver who squashed the turtle on the road today, I have been thinking very nasty thoughts about you.

To the driver in the white pick-up truck who squashed the turtle on the road today that I was trying to save, I have been thinking very nasty thoughts about you.

To the driver who was speeding too fast in the white pick-up truck who squashed the turtle on the road today that I was trying to save by hurrying it across the road, I have been thinking very nasty thoughts about you.

To the driver with no concern for life smaller than himself who was speeding too fast in the white pick-up truck who squashed the turtle on the road today that I was trying to save by hurrying it across the road but then had it crushed to death beside me, I have been thinking very nasty thoughts about you.  

It was a snapping turtle, less than a foot long.  It was crossing the road on a beautiful morning in June.  It was in the middle of the road on the yellow line.  I stopped my car and opened my door to try and hurry it across in the direction that it was going.  A large white pick-up truck came zooming up from behind.  It did not even slow down as it flew by my car which was stopped in the middle of the lane with my door wide open, and it drove its big wheel right over that turtle.  

I drove to the other side of the road, waited for cars to pass.  Then I tore a page out of the large US atlas, donned a pair of rubber gloves that happened to be in the car, picked up the turtle and brought it home.  He or she is now in the ground out back, along with the rest of the animals that deserved a good resting place in the end.

 

(This is not the snapper, but a Red-eared Slider who lives a relatively safe existence on campus.  His biggest fear is college kids, not big trucks, though I think they are equally dangerous to wildlife.)

Among the Grasses

The sun was shining, the breeze was blowing, the grasses were whispering, and we were exploring.  It was a perfect morning.

The Little Things - 6.1.19

After what seemed like a week of rain and thunderstorms, but which was really only three days, Friday was glorious!  Less humidity (we were up at 87%!), clear skies and actual sun, so the little babe and I headed up to the state park.  I had just wanted to walk on the boardwalk after a quick picnic snack, but we ended up at the empty beach, the little babe playing in the tadpole filled shallows and myself working on my latest knitting project, which is extremely slow going - DK weight yarn and size 6 needles takes me a while.  After that, we did walk down the boardwalk "into the Tundra".  It is quite a wild and windy place in the Winter and this is actually the greenest that I have seen it.  No birds to be seen except for Red-winged Blackbirds.  It was in the middle of the afternoon, so I didn't expect to see much.  But we did have an exciting sighting.

This is a Pitcher Plant bloom - isn't it interesting!  I have never seen one before, so I was really pumped.  Guess it doesn't take much to get me excited - just some good old flora and fauna!  We also saw this little guy, which is a Green Frog.

If anybody is interested in reading about bogs, the Big Belching Bog by Phyllis Root is a great book that we have read recently.  It is informative and fun with bright illustrations.