lily – grouchyfarmer

Garden Stuff

The hostas loved the cool, wet spring. They’re wonderfully lush this year.

Despite all the water we’ve been getting the gardens have been doing pretty good. We’re still a bit behind schedule because of the cool weather we had up until now, but the gardens at the house are definitely doing better than what the farmers around here have been experiencing.

When we bought this place some twenty or so years ago the front of the house was a mess. The space between the front of the house and the sidewalk was a nasty little border type flower bed mulched with small stones, sort of curved and indented, with some of the worst grass I’d ever seen between that and the sidewalk. It was a maintenance nightmare. The plants up there were some of the worst you could possibly select for a border, and because of the stones it was impossible to properly weed or do anything to improve the horrible soil.

We finally got fed up, went in with the tractor and ripped everything out, scooped up the stones with the front end loader and hauled them to a friend’s farm where he used them for fill, and we put in the cedar rail fence and the hostas. No bushes to trim any more, the fence has weathered to look like it’s been there for generations, and the only maintenance is to go in with a hoe and knock the few weeds growing in the mulch down once in a while. There are a couple of spots where I want a bit better coverage so I might throw in a few more hostas.

The tomatoes are looking pretty good. We put in a lot less of them than last year because we were nearly overwhelmed by them last year. We still have enough canned tomatoes to last us probably through 2019, although all of the soup and pasta sauce got used up.

With fewer tomatoes we had some extra room in the raised beds so we put onions in along the edge and they’re doing beautifully. We tried raising them in a different spot but they never got enough light and didn’t do well. They’re looking fantastic in this new location. They’re big enough now that I can run outside and pull a couple whenever I need onions for anything. I love green onions so they may never reach maturity, but that’s okay.

Every year I have to put in something different, this year it’s this, something that the label says is a “hot salsa pepper”. And that is literally all it says. I don’t know what variety or anything else about it. It is starting to produce pretty little yellow peppers, so that’s something. I picked one yesterday and tried it and it is most definitely not hot. Not by any standards. I’m not one of those people who loves peppers that make your face turn red and your eyes bug out and necessitate a trip to the ER because they’re so bad, but I do like a pepper that bites back at least a little. Jalapenos are about the limit of what I can handle for heat. But these, well, there’s just nothing there at all. Hopefully they’ll get better as they mature.

Speaking of jalapenos, I got another experiment going in pots on the front steps, a “mild” jalapenos. The two plants are doing quite well, both are in flower now and one is starting to develop fruits. The blurb on the tag was “all of the flavor without the heat”. I’ve tried variations of peppers like this before that claimed they still had flavor without heat, and they were disappointing. Usually when they breed out the heat, they also breed out the flavor, alas. But we’ll see what happens with these. They certainly are looking healthy.

And then, of course, there’s the water. Oh brother… The ground is still so saturated that you can audibly hear it squishing when you walk through the grass. And the whole area back by the raised vegetable beds still had standing water under the grass as you can see in that photo. If we didn’t have the raised beds nothing would be growing back there this year. I don’t think we’ve gone more than three days in a row without significant rainfall since April.

Let’s wrap this up with this one:

I end up with dozens of photos of that lily every year because I love the color, the shape of the flowers, and just about everything about that plant. It certainly didn’t disappoint this year.

The New Decorative Raised Bed…

is finally completely finished! We got all of the plantings done and finished up mulching it the other day. Still want to rearrange those slate pavers as stepping stones going through the crushed lava rock. And those dopey lupins. I don’t know about those. I don’t like them there. I think they detract from the effect I wanted. And the things are ridiculously invasive. But MrsGF likes ’em. The two bird houses were made by eldest son a few years ago. We just put the things out there and we’d hardly had the posts in and we had birds moving into the already.

It’s still ridiculously wet around here. We just got another two inches of rain the other day. To give you an idea of how wet it is around here this is my backyard not far from the new raised bed in the first photo. You can see I’m standing in about an inch and a half of water.

The ground is so saturated with water that even this morning, more than 24 hours after the rain finished, even the high ground in the yard squishes when I walk across it.

Out in the countryside it’s just as bad. The corn is up, barely. At least where the farmers could get it in the ground. This time of year it should be, oh, eight, twelve inches tall, the old “knee high by the 4th of July” saying is reasonably accurate. Almost none of the stuff I’ve seen is more than about four inches at the most.

On the good side, Mr. Spiny, our rescue cactus, is having a grand time tucked away under the eaves of the house. I started to try counting the number of new pads and gave up after I hit 20. We’ve had this guy for what, must be four years or more now after we rescued him from the town compost pile and it’s been thriving ever since.

And my favorite red lily is in full bloom! This is probably my favorite of all the plants we have out in the garden. I think the color on it is simply spectacular.

Lame attempt at a panoramic photo of the wood bridge on the trail a week or so ago.

If you’re wondering if I’m still doing the bicycle thing or if I’ve turned even more lazy than I usually am, yes, I’m still at it. I try getting out every day. I admit that’s been a challenge with the weather the way it has been. I’ve been reluctant to go very far out of town because of the way the rain seems to pop up out of nowhere some days. Because of that I’ve only been out on the trail a few times so far this year. Hopefully we’ll get a change in this weather pattern in the near future.

Let’s see, what else… I haven’t had time to play with radio very much so I still don’t have the new Yaesu up and running with digital. The “new” Lenovo laptop I picked up for $300 that it’s going to be hooked to looks like a real gem so far. It isn’t blindingly fast, but it’s certainly got way more horsepower than it will ever need for the application it’s going to be used for.

We don’t have any other major projects in mind for the gardens and landscaping this season. The next project is to finally tackle moving all my radio and computer equipment down into the basement. I’ve been putting that one off way, way too long already and I really need to get working on that.

It’s Been Busy…

MrsGF had last week off so we took some time to go wandering around in between getting caught up with chores and gardening. We headed down to Fond du Lac, a small city on the southern end of Lake Winnebago. I’ve always liked the town. I used to spend a lot of time down there, and so did MrsGF. When I was a technician working for a POS company I had three clients I worked with down there, two grocery stores and a commercial bakery, and MrsGF worked there too for a while when she was with Aramark for a few years.

We rarely get down there now so we just wandered around town for a while looking at how things have changed over the years. It’s still a very pleasant town, but it’s had it’s problems over the years, along with just about every other city in the country. Like most small cities, trying to keep it’s downtown district from falling apart has been a problem. Fondy has been fairly successful. There are very few empty storefronts, and while you won’t see any big name retailers down there, most of the shops seem to be doing fairly well financially.

We’re lucky enough to live near Lake Winnebago. The lake is big. It’s 30 miles long and ten miles wide at it’s widest point. It’s a hotbed of activity all year long. During warmer weather boating (both sail and power boating), water skiing, swimming and fishing keeps, including some big fishing tournaments, keeps the place busy. In winter the lake has ice boating, snowmobiling, skiing and, of course, ice fishing. At the peak of the ice fishing season, there will be thousands of people out on the ice trying to catch perch, bluegills and, of course, 6 or 7 foot long, 200+ pound sturgeon.

We stopped at Pipe, a small town along the eastern shore with a wonderful little park and boat launch area. Alas, you could have gone surfing on Winnebago that day. There were 4 or 5 foot waves crashing into the shore and lots of whitecaps out there, and very few people willing to brave the waves to try fishing.

Back at home things are growing like crazy, but it was a bit iffy there for a while. We went through a very dry period where we had to water everything on a daily basis, to it being way too wet after we got deluged with about 6 inches of rain in two days.

One sign that summer is here is the lilies are coming into full bloom now.

This pink one has over a hundred blossoms on it. MrsGF didn’t believe me when I told her that so I dragged her outside and made her count them herself.

The real show stopper is this one, though:

The color on this one is so intense it almost glows in the dark.

And the pear tree — good grief…

The tree is so heavily laden with fruit that I think we’re going to have to get out there and snip some of them off or the branches are going to break off from the weight as the pears mature.