Almost time! Flowers forming on toms!

One of the most pleasurable things about gardening is walking through to check the plants and discovering the changes. Seeds sprout, plants grow, they start to vine, new leaves pop out, and flower buds form. Yea!

Several of the tomato plants, both the Beefsteak and the Giant Pink Belgium, have flower buds ready to open. I'm not at all sure where this fits in the 2022 schedule. I know that by mid-June last year there were green Roma tomatoes on the vines. This year the weather seems cooler, so it may take longer. 

But no matter. All happens in a garden in its own time. You can only hurry the season so much without a heated greenhouse. Oh, yes, I'd love to have one but as with all expenses, we'll have to wait and see.

It's enough for now to see the buds in the tomatoes. One lesson that is quickly taught to novice gardeners is that you must be patient. 

The Lady of The Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, tomatoes, gardening, flower buds, rural living, country lifestyle, container gardening, greenhouse, Beefsteak, Roma, Giant Pink Belgium

The wildflower garden is getting there

For many years, I wanted a knee wall built at our parking area. My first husband refused, my one serious "boyfriend" refused, and the Lord of the Manor refused. I didn't ask because I wanted to see them work hard. I asked because they were physically stronger than me. Even Himself could have done it the first time I asked him almost thirty years ago.  

Back in 2020, I did it myself. It was very difficult to do. Rocks are heavy. I'm still angry that none of them cared enough to do it for me. 

Fast forward three years and the wildflower garden behind the knee wall is showing promise. I can visualize what it will be in a few years. I have an old-fashioned iris from my great-grandmother's garden, a row of Stella d-Oro daylilies, Siberian iris, a red peony, and two seed packs of wildflowers that the seeds have sprouted and are growing. The row of blue wildflowers along the back are lovely. I just wish I knew what they were!

I'm hopeful that next year even more seeds will sprout on their own. I want it to be wild and free to grow in whatever direction it takes. This will certainly annoy the Lord of the Manor, but he had his chance to issue input and now he doesn't get a say. 

Is that petty of me? I don't care. Building that wall myself was an attitude adjustment I'm sure he's sorry he forced upon me. I have my wall. I have a jumble of wildflowers. 

Empowerment comes when we least expect it, and in ways we can't foresee. Be open to it.

The Lady of The Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, wildflowers, knee wall, empowerment, rural living, country lifestyle, a writer's life, gardening, stacked stone wall, 

Remembering on Memorial Day

Memorial Day is a day to remember those who entered military service on our behalf. Military service is a big deal in my family. My five-times great-grandfather whose last name I was born with took the Oath to the new United States back in 1781. My father served in Germany during the Korean Conflict. 

Dad never saw any "action." He was tasked with driving some General around. He made it sound like he and the General got along rather well during their time together. 

Some people may snicker that this was the task assigned to him, that he didn't do much. Driving a General around - how hard can it be? 

So driving around one of the command staff and protecting him, having to make the decision to step in front of a bullet if necessary isn't really serving your country? It is. 

I thank all our veterans for performing the tasks put to them and the families of those who never made it home for such a sacrifice. 

The Lady of the Hideaway

Memorial Day, veterans, Korean Conflict, Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, a writer's life, rural living, family

A very busy month, lots to do

I can't believe it's been weeks since I blogged here at The Hideaway. To say we've been busy would be a bit of an understatement. Spring is a time of preparation in the country.

My little garden is planted and thriving. The tomatoes are ready to bloom! The inner leaves of the cabbages are starting to curl. The sugar snap peas are vining and climbing their guide ropes. After a tentative start, the cucumbers are gaining traction. The butternut squash seeds have sprouted as have the cantaloupe and watermelon. The Contender green beans are looking good and I wish I'd planted more of them. Five of the six green pepper plants are thriving. 

If there is anything I can call a disappointment, it's the Greenstalk. Hopefully, it will improve as the summer progresses.  

Other activities include mowing, weeding, mulching, some tractor work, helping a neighbor with the removal of a downed tree, and the usual household chores. I even uploaded a short video. I wanted to have the pool set up by now, but that hasn't happened. 

It feels good to have the work done. For the next little stretch of time, I'll need to water the garden (possibly daily) and mow once a week or so. During this "break in the action," my one cousin and I may drop a large cherry tree that is leaning out over the yard. Cherry makes great firewood and we'll each take half the wood for the winter of 2024-25. 

One thing is for sure - there is never a day with nothing to do.

The Lady of the Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, country lifestyle, rural living, gardening, Greenstalk, cutting wood, mowing grass, John Deere 1023, helping neighbors, hard work, loving life

Lopsided roses

The roses began to bloom a couple of days ago. It's May, so it's time, so that's really not news. The news is they are only blooming on one side. 

What's up with that, you ask. Answer: the deer nibbled off the front side of all three rose bushes. 

The roses are planted along the front porch so the deer can only reach one side. You would think they wouldn't bother roses because of the thorns, but they do. 

Nurturing roses and then having the deer destroy half the bushes is frustrating. We're about to take drastic measures. 

We don't hunt. We have no intention of shooting a deer. We will, however, put a slug in the ground near their feet to scare them away. We hope that if we do that often enough, they'll get the message and stay in the woods. 

Will it work? We'll see. 

The Lady of the Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, roses, whitetail deer, country lifestyle, rural living, a writer's life, deer damage, deer control, gardening, simple country pleasures

Press the pause button, albeit unwillingly

Happy May Day! The Celts called this day Beltane and it was, I believe, their most important day of the year. It might be a pagan holiday, but these days, we need to remember that regardless of the different places we come from and the different things we believe that we're on the journey together. 

So. That wasn't on topic for today. Today I'm commiserating about the weather. It's the first of May and it's cold and damp outside. I had to press the pause button on all my outside activities, which didn't please me or Deuce. He's one bored pup at the moment. No long walks or car rides. No playing in the cold creeks. No squirrels running about the backyard. No work in the garden beyond a visual check which resulted in dispatching one green worm today. eewwww.  

Is our rainy, cloudy weather the result of the eruption of Shiveluch, a Russian volcano, on April 11? I haven't heard The Weather Channel mention it. Is it just our normal May weather? May and June are my area's historically wettest months with rainfall. It may be wet, but the temperatures are holding up, staying in the fifty+ Fahrenheit range, so my tomatoes and begonias are fine. 

Around three o'clock this afternoon, a bit of sunshine broke through, and Deuce and I went out for a brief stroll around the yard. It's a mixed bag out there. The daffodils are over, the one really early daylily is trying to bloom, the purple lilac has a couple of blooms, and the old-fashioned brown/yellow iris from my great-grandmother's garden has popped up a few buds. Along the front deck runway, the peonies are showing some promise, too. 

This brief pause won't last long. The clouds, be they regular or volcanic, will soon blow away. The sunshine will return in full force and the outside work will resume. Whether we like it or not, that's the way of weather. We simply need to be patient. 

The Lady of The Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, peonies, gardening, weather, rural living, country lifestyle, Labrador Retrievers, a writer's life, iris, daffodils

It was a great idea: shade cloth

My office is in our sunroom. The Lord of the Manor built the addition for the sunroom back in 1995 or 1996 when he was still young(er) and mobile. It's my favorite room in the house and not just because he built it for me. It's got windows on three sides and is the next best thing to working in the woods. It's a front-row seat to observe the deer, squirrels, foxes, chipmunks, and the occasional raccoon, possum, skunk, groundhog, turkey, and even snake. One day it was even the neighbor's cows! 

The windows are wonderful and the space wouldn't be the same without them. The biggest drawback is that in the summer, even with central air, the room heats up between ten and four o'clock. In past summers, I had an umbrella on the porch that I opened and moved a little bit every hour to create shade. The problem with the umbrella was that even with a heavy base, it liked to fly away like it was looking for Mary Poppins! 

I put up a good set of black-out curtains last year and they helped, but I didn't like closing off one side of the room during the day. I like to look out over my domain. I decided to try shade cloth this summer, and I got it put up. I can already tell it's going to make a huge difference. And when it gets really hot, I will close the curtains to help with utility costs.

It's not a fancy setup. We got some 2x2 exterior grade lumber from Lowe's and made simple frames that we affixed to the porch railing with zip ties (cable straps to some). The 70% shade cloth was purchased from Amazon. I used simple hooks to attach one side of the shade cloth to the house (it has grommets), draped it over the frame, and used more zip ties to fasten it to the frame and the railing. 

The shade cloth creates enough shade to make sitting on the porch in the afternoons bearable. I can already tell it will help keep the sunroom a lot cooler. If it works for the entire season, I'll take some time over the winter and figure out if it needs improvements for next summer. The shade cloth will come down for the winter and be stored in the shed. 

Is it perfect? Not really, but it's functional. That's all that matters to me. 

The Lady of the Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, rural living, country lifestyle, shade cloth, keeping cool, cutting utility costs, home & garden, sunrooms, critical thinking solutions, home office, a writer's life, writing, romance novels, gardening

Cucumbers 2023

I will freely admit I am not a master gardener, but a novice at best. My grandfather was a Master. Oh, he never went to school or took classes for it, but he knew it. He lived it. His parents and grandparents' survival depended on the crops they raised and "put by" for the next year. He worked the garden right beside them. From my front porch, I can still see the area where they planted and it is about three acres in size. 

I wish I'd been able to learn more from him, but I needed to work a full-time job. After work, there was my first marriage to tend to, not that my efforts there were successful. Now I have time to garden and I'm learning almost from scratch. 

Pop grew cucumbers from time to time, but they weren't a staple in his garden. I recall that my grandmother would tell him she needed to make a batch of pickles (bread and butter) every few years, and he'd plant some cukes. Once the pickles were in the jars, the family got salad cucumbers because my grandparents didn't eat very many of them raw. 

This is the first year I started cucumber seeds inside. Nine seeds sprouted that have been transplanted into buckets in the garden patch. Cucumber is a fruit and is about ninety-five percent water. The seedlings are very tender and can't tolerate colder temperatures the way a tomato plant can. 

I knew I took a big chance getting the cukes outside this early. We're still ahead of our last frost date but my instinct tells me that while the temps are dipping into the mid to high thirties, we won't have frost. Nonetheless, I decided to hedge my gamble and move the cukes and tomatoes into the greenhouse for the next two nights. We had a good rain yesterday and the air is damp. I expect the greenhouse will add a layer of protection from the dampness settling on the leaves overnight. 

Planting early wasn't something my grandfather did, but we have new and improved varieties these days. If my cucumbers wilt due to the cold night, I still have time to direct sow more seed. If that happens, I'll consider it a lesson learned and stick to direct sowing from here on out. 

Live and learn.

The Lady of The Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, gardening, rural living, country lifestyle, cucumbers, tomatoes, greenhouse, freeze warning, a writer's life, simple country pleasures

Did I stick to the plan?

 

original plan

So I made a plan. I even made a nifty little diagram using MS PUB, a program I happen to like a lot. The question is, am I sticking to the plan? 

What a silly question. 

No, I'm not sticking to the plan, at least not closely. And the bottom line is, it doesn't much matter. 

The cucumbers and green beans switch places. The Brussels sprouts are going around the edge of the garden and sharing a grow bag with a marigold. Frankly, I don't have much hope for the Brussels starts. They didn't do well for me last year but I decided to try again. If they fail this year, I have seeds for one more try - the make-or-break try. 

April 20, 2023 plan

And I tried to overwater the poor little cukes. They snapped back as soon as they got to spend time in the sun yesterday. Today they seem rather happy in their respective buckets. 

All-in-all, it's going very well. We've reached the more traditional date for starting seeds outside, so I'll be planting in the Greenstalk over the next few days. 

Now I just have to keep a close watch on the weather forecast. If necessary, I can move all the buckets and bags into the greenhouse, but I hope that does not become necessary. It would be a lot of lifting but I could do it. 

I've drawn out the task of planting so I could really enjoy being in my little garden patch, but I'm ready to be finished. Then the tasks will be keeping everything watered and fertilized, and keeping an eye on pests. I'm looking forward to sitting in the middle of growing things and relaxing. I already have a chair in place! 

The Lady of The Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, gardening, green peppers, rural living, country lifestyle, a writer's life, cucumbers, bunching onions, garden plans, growing things

We need this rainy day

A rainy day view

It's a wonderfully rainy day here at Holly Tree Manor. It's been very dry, so dry in fact that the county government issued a burning ban. Twenty or so miles west of us, several wildfires have occurred in the last few days so this rain is a blessing to the firefighters. I'm always worried about wildfires living as we do. All it takes is one fucking idiot discarding a lit cigarette on the mountain trails to change the mountain forever. 

We've been busy with several projects. The Lord of the Manor is working on modifying an aluminum ramp to more easily load his power chair into the van, and changing out the engine on the log splitter to one that has an electric starter. We've reached the point where a pull-string starter no longer works for us. 

I've been busy with my little garden setup, getting seedlings to the greenhouse, and planting brassicas. Having an abundance of tomato seedlings, I even planted a few tomatoes into their buckets. My instincts say we're unlikely to see a hard frost this year, but if it looks like one will happen, those buckets can be moved inside the greenhouse. It's not a problem. 

Everything here has turned green. I "threw the mower" at the yard to chop the tops off the high spots, but after this rain, I'll need to actually mow. I took a morning and cleaned up around the edges of the yard, picking up and raking downed sticks and general tree debris. Anything large enough to damage the mower blades went on the brush pile. 

We built a rough frame for the sunroom porch and I draped 40% shade cloth over it to see if that would help keep my office cooler. It appears to work so I've ordered a denser shade cloth to make a more permanent installation. The shade umbrella I've used for several years has an unfortunate propensity to fly away in the wind. I'm not buying another one. 

This rainy day gives me the chance to catch up on a few things I've let slide. I want to get my planting diagram into the computer, all neat and tidy, so I have it for next year. I may even get some laundry done! The weather may have convinced me to take it slower today, but that's fine. A little break never hurt anyone.

The Lady of The Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, gardening, greenhouse, rural living, country lifestyle, rainy days, a writer's life, shade cloth, wildfires, woodlands, log splitter