Remembering, Doing, and Looking Forward, All in a Saturday's Work

How's the Hothouse and Market Shed project going?

Well this is where I left you last, the big trees were down,

the little brushy trees got cut out, and I kept looking at what it was going to be.

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Last Sunday, the last day of February, Mr. Leonard, Leonard and Sons Excavating, came for dinner and a survey of what we needed his operator to do. This was how it looked then. And he promised to send us an operator and an excavator on Saturday morning.

Well sure nuff, early (early for us lazy bones) on Saturday morning, Greg the Operator showed up with the excavator to dig out all the stumps so that the site could be leveled, graveled and the building started.

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One of my favorite children's books is Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, by Virginia Lee Burton, (a girl, in case you didn't catch the Virginia part) this was pretty much like living in that book for a few hours.

The excavator began making quick work of the big stumps in the ground. I was in making coffee and so I missed a lot of the beginning work but Anna caught much of it on video and in pictures.

Greg would lift the stumps way up in the air and then open the grip and drop them from up high. All that crazy action to get as much soil as possible off of the stumps before tossing them over the fence.

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The excavator is on tracks not tires, the potential for a lot of underground water to be pumped up to the surface with the back and forth motion made it necessary for the stumps to be shook and dumped in a pile on this side, then the

crazy prehistoric robotic alien jaws would toss them over the fence to be moved one more time after that to the rot pile. No stump burning piles are allowed any more.

Mr. Leonard, holding the coffee cup, has even gone to testify to the legislature that not burning is actually harder on the environment and creates more pollution than just burning them.

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But no, the greeners are narrow minded and insist that if they see a big burn that it is more damaging that all the less conspicuous but much larger carbon footprinting that it takes to have stumps ground instead.

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Oh well, ranting about the current "green" movement is for another day. Or more like days, 'cause if I said it all at once it would be a long post even for me.

Gregg chatting with Bruce, telling us that the thumb broke on the second stump pulling. The thumb is what grips and holds things in the bucket, or "scoopy thing" just in case it isn't called a bucket. Gregg is my new hero!

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We were all in love with Gregg on Saturday, okay some of us still are, Dirt sent him home with a bottle of plum wine (sorry Kimberly, but we had to give away one from your special cache) but I still want to bake him a cake every day, every time I look at my beautiful building site!

In the middle of the excavating lambs began to drop. We ended up with five lambs from three ewes on Saturday. We went out to check on the first batch that dropped just to make sure everything was going well.

But then came back for the final touches that Gregg put on the site. He exchanged the small bucket for a larger one and because the thumb was broke it would not stay back so it got chained up to the "wrist" so that the "fingers" could fill in holes and smooth out the dirt.

Mr. Leonard, with Dirt's help, predicted that the area would be pretty wet and a big mess, needing a lot of special help and $ if we were going to have it ready to build before August let alone by the end of this month. Well, that may have been true on any other year but this one...

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This one is all about me, so if you live in the PNW and are not enjoying our mild and dry winter and spring, blame me.

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Everything is going so well that if I don't make my schedule, I am nothin' but a looser. A blessing and a test all rolled into one!

Justin from up north, joined us just in time to see the leveling of the site and help get the truck unstuck from the driveway, it pays to have an extra truck driver on hand.

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Now for checking on the lambs...

and look more lambs have dropped in close proximity to the first batch! This is a problem! We run to jump in to the escalating issue.

You see, some moms are not satisfied with just their lambs, they want every one's lambs and will attempt to adopt all of them. Sometimes if we are not out there right away it can be a confusing mess to try and get the right moms with the right babies.

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Even though the moms think that they want more lambs, once they get them all rounded up and huddle away from the other mother, they realize their mistake and reject the ones that aren't theirs. It is easy for them to know which ones were really theirs to begin with, one sniff tells it all.

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But after all the ruckus and mixing of lambs it is often too late to get the right lambs back with the right mom.

This is why we take the ewe's and lambs into the barn once they have dried off and nursed. We try to wait at least that long so that the mom's aren't quite so nervous on the trip into the barn. But they need to be in the barn eventually not just to protect them from Bald Eagles and Coyotes, but to protect the new lambs and new moms from the bossy older sister and auntie ewes.

Anna catches the lamb so that Dirt can catch the ewe. Justin is the newest inductee into the world of lamb rustling and ewe driving.

Anna makes sure mom knows where her lamb is. Then the slow dance begins. Around and around we go, closer and closer, less and less tense around Mr. Vick...

and snag! the ewe is caught so she can be taken in the barn. This first batch will go in now. Then we will do some other farm work and come back and get the other ewes and lambs.

Bet, Anna and Justin spread lime on the front pastures, Dirt and I ran into town for some lunch fixins' and seed potatoes. We ate a lovely lunch and then headed out back to spread more lime and minerals on the hay fields out there.

Dirt is really diggin' on having the PTO driven cyclone spreader on the back of the tractor. It sure beats having a hand driven-hand held spreader, makes a week-long job get done in an hour or two, one of a few reasons, excuses, as to why the pastures and fields were a bit on the neglected side lime wise.

Bet asked to be chief tractor driver for this job, we were all good with that, especially since the lime is virtually dust free!

The rest of us gave the dogs some well needed entertainment and exercise, and the some of us just lounged around thinking of how tired we were from all that stump pulling. Man, my back hurts.

It was a splendid day, the sky was clear and blue, the mountain was in all his glory, just a great day to accomplish a ton of work and visit with a friend from way up north.

Definite difference in flinging styles.

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After all this hard work and picking up more lambs and moving everyone around in the barn, it is rest time. A great simple supper, review of the day of excavating on video (thanks Peanut Butter) and a movie capped off the day.

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Hey, about that pen, the ink pen, you have all asked about, it is a Uniball 207, marketed for anti-check fraud, but really it is for me, remember it is all about me, and writing notes in the mist and rain that I am sure we will get back to as soon as I need some rain in my life. Remember, it is all about me right now.

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Oh, how does the site look? In all the excitement over lambs and spreading lime I forgot to take pictures of the finished site. Anna went out early this morning, a cold frosty morning and got a few pictures of it.

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Brrr, we got cold here, even snowed a bit yesterday, but not to worry, anything that was tender is protected and the apple blossoms haven't begun to swell, neither have my fruiting cherries, just the ornamentals, so I'm thinkin' were still okay.

The site? She is lookin' pretty stinkin' good!

And ready for the next phase, Building!!!

Here at Vicktory Farm and Gardens, we have all been bitten by one type of bug or another, just not this one!

North Garden, Poly Tunnels and Phenological Events

Good morning Dear Reader. Got your boots on again? I was thinking I would take you on a tour of North Garden. But instead of doing it all in one day I would stretch it out all during the week.

North Garden is not the most northern spot on the Farm, north and south speaking it lies rather in the middle, and very much on the east line, save for the driveway. But it is the most northern of the permanent garden beds and so has been dubbed North Garden.


This is what the exposed garden soil looked like this morning. It has been clear and warm during the day and clear at night. Because of the clear nights the nightly lows have dipped down past thirty-two and so we have been waking to a good frost these last few mornings.


However, I have a low poly tunnel on one of the beds here in North Garden as a season extender.

In past posts I showed how I construct these: short rebar sunk in on the each edge of the raised beds about five feet apart or more; ten foot pvc pipe arched over the bed and slipped down on the exposed foot and half to two feet of rebar; six mil poly placed over the hoops; extra at the ends to cover and lap over; two x twos stapled to the bottom edges of the poly to hold it in place (this works way better than the clip system I use to use).

This is a shot of the soil under the poly tunnel, taken at the same time of day as the soil picture above. I didn't take the thermometer with me to get an actual reading but the soil is soft and not the least bit effected by the frost outside of the tunnel.

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If the temps got much lower or if I had frost tender things under here (right now I just have some spinach and beets started) I would put floating row cover directly on the bed to add five to ten more degrees to the soil temperature. In fact the floating row cover is under there it is just scootched over to one side. I wanted to see how the poly tunnel would do all by itself now that it is getting way more sun during the day with the trees gone.

The late winter and early spring beauties that normally take winter on the chin so well are really doing nicely with the sorta winter we are experiencing here in the PNW.

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The buds on the fruit trees are still very tight where they need a bit more time and protection which makes sense because even in a normal year the apple trees bud nearly two months after daffodil season with the cherries blooming just before the apples.

The only buds I see swelling are the ones that can take it in stride. I'm no expert and there is always room in my life for flukes (understatement of the year eh? beings that I'm nearly a fluke depend-er) but I really think that we have more chances of having a bad bud-damaging freeze on the fruit trees in a more "normal" winter than this one.

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Funny how we have a tendency to run around in late summer and look at the fuzz or the size of caterpillars or the coloring on the birds or when they leave and arrive as signs of how deep our winter will be. But when it comes to spring we listen to a ground hog on a particular day at a particular time and whether or not he sees his shadow. Then we wring our hands with worry, completely doubting the trustworthy phenological events, like the blooming of the Indian Plum or the emergence of naturalized daffodils.

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Lots of things come into play with the phenological events, length of daylight, consistent soil temperatures, chemical reactions (and biochemical reactions) because of those soil temperatures. It doesn't all hinge on ambient air temperatures. It has to all come together.

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I'm still a young pup, I don't have eighty years of experience watching the weather in the PNW, but from the view of the few years I do have, I'd say that the phenological signs are to be trusted. We are several weeks ahead of normal and we'll be okay, despite what the doom and gloom-ers on the weather segment late at night have to say.

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But then again farming and gardening is always gamble and not for the faint of heart.

A Darn Fine Day

The girls and I saw this as we traveled to my non-appointment today. Heads up. March 18 is also on a Thursday. Look closely at month names and dates this month that is all I have to say.

It was an amazingly beautiful day today. The Olympics (the mountain range out on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington not the games) were absolutely beautiful and in full clear view totally worth a drive into town (easier to see them from there).

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We only had space on the camera and enough battery life for these pictures, otherwise we would have inundated you with pictures of our beautiful Pacific Northwest! We saw picture after picture. They are embedded in my brain. It was a good day with my girls. A very good day.

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Okay, I'm goin' all weepy now so I'm goin' to say adieu and get back to you tomorrow and see what your days were like and how your weekend is linin' up. I have a workin' weekend lined up, widow style 'cause Dirt has a conferency, job fairie thing goin' this weekend. Work, work and more work, and hopefully lambs!!!!!

The Weather Outside Is Frightful

Conversation on the phone yesterday morning at five after eight, five minutes after I should have left to go "exercise" with my good friend and across-the-highway neighbor:

"Hey, I'm going to be a bit late."

"How come?"

"Went out to my car and there was this weird white stuff stuck to my windshield."

"Really? What is it?"

"Well, I hear tell from other parts of the world that it is called frost."


The weather here since, oh say, Christmas, has been mild to say the least. I have not gone out to windshield-blanketing frost for nearly a month.

The tulip festival will be done before the Tulip Festival begins. The feed store may run out of wormer for livestock and the coat industry is crashing because of our mild weather.


Just barely enough snow to cover our majestic Rainier. Hardly enough snow for the Olympic Games a few hours to the north of us.

Ya know, I get the whole weather pattern stuff but we should have been able to predict this based not on El Nino, El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), or whatever pattern it is that we are having, but the fact that the PNW is hosting the Winter Olympics.

This is more typical of our weather for the last of January and the first of February this year: sun shining, windows cracked open a bit, buds bursting open. But just enough of these to keep warm and cheerfully tanked up on vitamin D.

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Our cold normally comes in when it is clear, especially at night. The clouds and blustery weather bring in warmth from the Pacific. So we have had just enough beautiful clear skies in the day time to be warm and happy but just as it gets a little chilly the rain comes to "save" us.

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Like this week for instance, a few nearly clear days and a clear night, wake up to frost finally and hours later it begins to rain and now this morning we are in the lovely warm greys. Yes, interior decorators you heard me correctly, warm greys. I know! an oxymoronic statement eh? But that's the PNW for ya.

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So why my title? Because here in the PNW we are all holding our breath hoping that we don't all of a sudden get winter in the middle of March, or worse April. We have had snow and ice that late in the year many times and on top of somewhat mild years, but rarely on top of a year this mild, but it has happened. And when it does we lose our fruit crops and other produce is set back quite a bit.

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Right now, with the way the temperatures are, I can't imagine that we would get much more than some frosty mornings but things don't always go as they usually do and definitely not as you'd like 'em to. That is why folks are fascinated with statistics, not to see how things always stay the same, but how every once in a while things bust out of the norm.

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So this could be a year to grow things PNWeners usually can't without the expenditure of significant amounts of energy. Or, it could be the year we get no fruit. Frightfully exciting, wouldn't you say?!

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It has definitely brought out the gambler in me. Oh wait, what is it that you say Dear Reader who knows me well? I'm always gambling? I guess that is true, very true to my nature for sure. Random change and risk taking keeps the blood flowin'. But really, I don't gamble with the stuff that is important, like my very soul or the souls of those I am responsible for, that would be idiocy, not exciting and fun, not even exhilarating.

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But no matter what, we fear not, you and I, Dear Reader, because God has us in the palm of His hand. That I do know and know well. I am beyond grateful that my fate does not lie in the hands of karma, ground hogs, money, or myself, but in the hands of a loving and just God.

How's the Weather?

So last month the weather was amazingly conducive to thinking the calendar was on the wrong page, or that new months had been invented, because even though there have been plenty of cloudy days and rainy ones too (otherwise there would not have been any mud to deal with)

there have been a fair share of incredibly beautiful days like this,

and this, where even though there is not a cloud in the sky, the temperatures have not plummeted like they usually do on cloudless days. Most likely because by evening the clouds return and give a nice blanket of warmth to the region.

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New months? Well lets just say that pretty much everyday last month I thought we were in Janpril and sometimes jumping to Januly. So I'm thinking that in spite of the predictions of the local hedgehoggy things that instead of more winter (would that be a bad thing considering what winter in the PNW has been so far) we are now in the month of Febray, well, we might get more rain than that so perhaps we'll have to call in Februne. What after that? Perhaps Margust. Hopefully Mr. Winter will not swing back up this way when he leaves the midwest and turn it into Maranuary.

PS. Sorry 'bout that weird post-not-post yesterday, I actually had a post that went with that title, it was going to be another one of my humorous rants but I was being sidetracked (imagine that Dear Reader) and really messed up big time on the whole, can you get your thumb off of the "publish" button, write your post and then remember to hit the "publish" button, brain wave. I'm sure I have a brain disease that causes this sort of thing, I just don't want to go to the doctor, 'cause I think he suffers from it too.

Farm Tours Restart

Welcome back for more tour of Vicktory Farm & Gardens! Didn't mean to let nearly a year go by. Today we will be strolling in the Barn Garden and talking water and weather, hope you wore your boots. Anna could run to the kitchen and get some bread sacks to go over your shoes but those stilettos your friend there has on definitely won't do.

In the scheme of things this garden sits west of the house, I can see parts of it from my new big bedroom window (the lilac hedge blocks a full view). In past posts you have seen the South Pastures that sit just west of the Barn Garden and share a pond, and in Hang Out Spots tour you saw the yard that is just the other side of the east boundary fence for this garden.

Let's get started, come off of the driveway here and come through the gate in Dirt's special fence.

You'll see a lot of plastic 5 gallon buckets around the Farm, they come in super handy. I use them to pick up my weed piles so I can throw the weeds to the chickens, easier than a wheelbarrow I gotta get up more often than a wheelbarrow load or I won't be able to unkink my legs.

There is a little strip of garden that separates the driveway from the main Barn Garden. We'll come back to that at the end.

For now we are going to go on through this second gate, gate way actually, because the gate is old and needs fixing. This walk way is rather muddy because the rain off of the big barn roof comes through here and out into Barn Pond. This issue is in the process of being solved, unfortunately it isn't at the top of the list.

I do a lot of ditching around here, no the "d" is correct, I dig a lot of water ways. I'm a hydrologist. The biggest issue about keeping someone out of the garden early in the year in the PNW (Pacific North West) is water and soggy soils.

This is what the soil looks like this time of the year when it gets walked on. Not a good look for garden soil.

That is the reason nearly every gardening area here at VF&Gs is a raised bed that has hidden electrodes around it so that you get blown to the next county if you step on the bed. Well, not really but a girl can fantasize about things, can't she?

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A raised bed is one of the basic season extenders here at VF&G, one I wouldn't do without. We make them simple. No treated boards, no plastic "lumber", no concrete blocks (the poison they all leach has a way of undoing that home grown goodness plus they harbor slugs, bugs and fungus) just a three to four foot wide bed not much longer than twenty feet (otherwise you find yourself cheating and jumping the bed to get to the other side). They are sometimes straight and other times they go with the contour of the landscape. We employ them not only in the "vegetable" gardens but also in the ornamental gardens as well.

The soil in these beds is nice and fluffy and can actually pass the soil lump test just fine right now, if you took a similar sample of some other areas like the lawn or the market garden strip in the pasture rotation, it would not pass the test for a couple of months. It is also warmer than soil that is all soggy and wet because it can't drain.

Being able to get into the garden at this time of the year is a real bonus, and in spite of my being slightly jealous of those areas that get real snow and ice for winter, it is why I love living here in the PNW. With a few season extenders PNW gardeners can produce food for most of the year. So yes, our tomatoes are a challenge and fresh corn is barely a month long treat but if well attended to, a PNW garden can provide very well.

It also allows for gardeners to stay ahead of weeds. I suppose that ice and snow has a damper on weed growth but being able to weed during the slower growth months of winter really helps this procrastinator stay ahead, okay, a few steps behind the weeds.

Winter weeding is an art all to itself. I should tell you all about it soon. I hope you noticed a specific pattern to the little garlic plants coming up, it is called equidistance planting.

But for now lets look at another season extender, my cold frame. It sits just to the left and forward as we came through the last gate (the gate way). The area around it is trying to find itself, the beds just in front of the glazing side is becoming Bet's herb garden area but this funny spot back here is having some serious identity issues.

Here is the front glazing side of the cold frame, it is oriented exactly to the south. Not necessarily always the best choice, sometimes it is better to catch the sun a little earlier and orient it slightly to the east, but when you only have one and you can't make decisions well, you go with normal and average sometimes just to get the job done.

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There are some things inside, lets lift the lid and see.

A few flats of last year's left over onion seed, onion seed like just a couple other vegetable seeds is only really viable for a year, but I hate throwing things out so I went ahead and dumped the packets into flats just to see what I could come up with. And I think the showing was worth my trouble. This week I will be seeding flats with this year's main crop of onions and in a couple more days these guys in here will be ready to come out and head to a garden bed. Most likely in the North Garden.

So this is the view looking west from the cold frame area. We rather went crazy with the garlic this year. It will be interesting to see just how much we really need to be planting. Even though Dirt eats lots of garlic, with the varieties we end up growing he doesn't eat as much of it as when we get it from the market. So it will be interesting to see how sales of garlic go this year and how much we really need to plant. Yippee I am so excited about our new adventure. But we'll talk more about that later.

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For now let's go over and look at Bet's two new peach trees.

The names escape me at the moment, I'll get back to you on that in the morning here, They are semi dwarf and won't get much over fifteen feet or so. Bet says she is looking forward to coming out here with a good book and a saddle pad and taking her breaks from work under her peach tree, she has a few years yet before that vision actually fleshes out but I love her patience and I admire her faith. I now understand what it means to have the gift of faith, Bet has it. In spades. About absolutely everything.

Here is the other peach tree, the two trees line up with a spot she has picked out for some other trees. They are semi dwarf and of course deciduous, so the fact that they sit in the center of the garden isn't a real problem. The sun will climb up in the sky before they have their leaves and there will only be a lovely dappled shade underneath them, just perfect for somethings that can't take the heat of our dogs days of summer, five days in August.

This is our hoop house made from livestock panels. It has been a lot of things, a gourd arbor mostly, a cold greenhouse in the late winter/early spring and a great spot for the mums to get their early boost if it is a super cold winter.

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Most recently it served as a chicken coop so that Bet could separate out some of her breeds. It may be that again soon. There is supposed to be a chicken coop built along the west wall of the barn, it will serve to keep the water from the base of the logs of the barn and house Bet's breeding stock but the Hot House/Market Shed complex comes first and then we might collapse for a month before we tackle this project.

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If stock panels weren't so stinkin' expensive at the moment I'd have more of these, I'd anchor them a little differently, but this one was hard to do because there is a concrete slab we were spanning with the hoop.

Standing up here at the hoop house and peach trees looking south we can see Bet's duck house. It finally got its front doors on and so the ducks got kicked out of the big barn and now Bet comes out and locks them up out there at night and lets them out in the morning.

They were being pretty good at staying on their side of the fence until the last couple of days. Something will need to be done to keep them from coming in here and pulling up the garlic and onions. They seem to be attracted to the green, go to pull it out, taste it as they are pulling it out of the ground and decide they don't like it. Unfortunately Bet hasn't successfully trained them to replant it!

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They really like their pond and they can wander all over on the other shore and up around the turkey pens but they seem to like to dabble in my garden this time of the year. I think its the green shoots of the garlic, I haven't seen much signs of slugs and other treats, besides if they are in here the slug and bugs are also out there.

Bet and I have been doing a bit of research about dealing with grey water, specifically the water from processing poultry, for when we apply for our license to process. We have come across some interesting info about cleaning water by running it through bogs planted with cat tails and some other specific water plants.

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The heavy stalks in the water in the center left of the above picture is a little colony of cattails. I am really drawn to cattails and would love an excuse to have a larger planting of them up around the Barn Garden.

The boggish place just to the right of this fence line has been filtering and dealing with the grey water from the farm house every since there was inside plumbing here. It is a great system and rarely puts off an odor, some compost piles smell more than our little un-designed bog.

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The pond just beyond the bog supports bull frogs, cat fish, occasional escapee trout, and the ducks of course appear to thrive here. Not to mention the resident river otters and beaver clan along with clearly healthy pond side flora.

Here's a view from the far southwest corner of the Barn Garden. The fact that the majority of our grey water has its own system and doesn't go through the septic makes our septic all that much more healthy. Besides in a septic system the grey water would pretty much end up doing what it is doing right now. Go through a soil/plant root filter before eventually ending up in the pond.

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It is all so freakishly green I can hardly speak of it. Funny, things on farms were green long before now and old farmers knew how to protect the water and soil supply. They didn't really need the Birkenstock, or black nail polish crowds to tell them how to take care of the earth that they depended on.

Here is a big view of the south west side of the barn and the hoop house. In the foreground is one of the gazillion weed piles. Lots of my weed piles, stuff the chickens would rather not eat or just the stuff that is more than they can handle, are cold compost piles.

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They eventually rot down and no, the weed seeds aren't burned up, but man that takes a heck of a hot pile and I'm just not that into doing that at the moment. The hot compost will come when we have to start dealing with poultry offal from the processing. But as for the weeds, I'm beginning to think they aren't so stinking bad, I really feel strongly, come 'round July or August especially, that we actually ought not to weed any more. But that's a discussion for another day. Right now I love weeding.

And I love tossing the weeds to the chickens so that Bet doesn't have to put alfalfa in the hay rack that you see the hens sticking their little head in (the bluish green square on the right half of the coop. This is the winter housing and where the breeding stock hang out. In the summer the eggers and the meat birds head out to the pasture and will become an integral part of the pasture rotation that we will be incorporating this year. MiG. Managed intensive grazing. Making the most of less land. And something Dirt and I are very excited about. But... you guessed it, we'll talk about that another day.

If we turn around and look east we come across my aronia berry bush. I have some more up at the nursery beds that will be coming down here this month during transplanting days.

I have no idea yet if this moon signs planting business is really effecting the plants and bugs and weeds (there are days for dealing with everything!) But it sure is doing a good thing for making me get stuff done and not get sidetracked with a bazillion jobs all at once. I need a way to keep me focused or I end up not getting anything finished because I am doing too many things.

A better view of Bet's herb beds in front of the cold frame, the bright green little tufts off to the left of the picture are her chives, a lavender and a sage is just beyond that.

The bed between that one and the cold frame is filled with lavender starts from a plant that I rooted in place by heaping soil up around it and in the middle of it. Each branch then became a rooted plant. It is a great way to multiply several different types of shrubs and herbs especially when they have been neglected of seasonal pruning and get all out of shape. A "do over" of sorts.

These are a examples of raised beds that are not straight. I would like to do more large gardens with not-straight beds but that will come later in my life I think. Right now I just like to get it done and get them planted. Soon I will have more time to shape and have fun with different geometrics in the garden.

These big lumps here on the far left are not more weed piles, they are my enormous comfrey plants that if I have time will be busted up this year and dispersed through out more areas of the farm. Comfrey is an amazing plant in the apothecary and out in the garden. Its huge leaves are great in the compost and add some really good extra nutrition, because of deep roots it can pull up lots of minerals from the sub soils.

I can't think of a plant that doesn't like to be near comfrey or have its big leaves as a mulch during those five hot days in August. It is another great bog and pond edge plant and has tremendous water filtering abilities. It is just simply a must have plant.


This for me is a dreamy view. I like to look far across the pond to the other bank and the white barked aspen. To me they are like the paper birch in the painting by Carl Larsson of his family picnicking or the one where they are fishing. Sometimes I like to think I live in Carl's world.

This is the little gate way and walk that Bet takes to let her ducks out. This spot is also in need of an identity and restructuring, something I hope Bet and I can get to and get into process later this spring or at least by early summer.

We turn around and head back for the gate by the barn. Our raspberries here on the right on the fence line await their annual trimming and tying up session, hopefully this year I will get to it before the leaves are out, that makes a tough job tougher. I'm utilizing a bit more of my wonderful black weed mat, Water goes down through but weeds are really discouraged from growing and it is even impervious to armor piercing quack grass.

On the right side of the weed mat walk way you can see a couple of step in black plastic posts. Those mark where I think I want some climbing roses to go up over some hoops toward the raspberries, forming a arbor-ed walkway here. I like secret little walk ways and such so we'll see. The fence post in the fence line are old creosote and I keep the raspberries back from them for the most part but I would like to move the raspberry operation some place slightly less toxic entirely.

As we head back out the gate you can see the walkway, between the barn wall and the chickens, becomes a holding place for my mums in pots and the fruit trees awaiting their new home spots.

Sometimes I get a little crazy with the old and makeshift things we've got going on here but then most of the time I just embrace the character of it all. And then, I am thankful that God has placed me here and not in a modern home on an uninteresting, history-less plot of land.

Like the stories this little garden by the driveway holds for us.

Some where in that center bed lies the first casualty here on VF&Gs. A murdered sheep was buried by yours truly about our second or third year here. Back in '88. Dale's flock of sheep had come out here to live but not before the pet lamb of the wife of one of his worker fellas had been mistaken for a locker lamb. So after the flock had been here a while Dale dropped off a sweet little Cheviot to hang with the group, replacing the mistaken identity lamb.

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Well, sheep are flockish, and they did not accept her, She spent most of her time many yards from the flock, she ate separately from them or after they were done and had moved on she would come and clean up the leftover. She was excluded from coming in the barn to get out of the rain or the heat.

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Then one day it was particularly rainy I was glad to see that she had obviously gotten to go in out of the rain because she wasn't in the barnyard. But when I looked over the door I didn't see her. Well this is turning into a long story and has nothing really to do with gardening so I finish it up later.

Along with buried sheep and my second oldest's pet goose being buried in here, down by the lilacs there, was where the out house stood for the former resident and now neighbor and old work buddy of Dirt's. All another long story about just how small the world is and confirmation on God wanting us here.

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But as for the outhouse part, Dave says that when he left home for the Korean war the out house stood right about where the lilacs are or maybe a little over to the right where the path goes out onto the lawn. But when he came back there was a new addition on the house and indoor plumbing.

Well that's the end of the tour, long one for such a small space, you can come in and take advantage of the indoor plumin' if ya need to and you can stay for a cup a tea ifn' you'd like. I gotta get on with the hallway project but you can pull up a chair and keep me company while I paint.