stubbed toes and mud pies

[flowerbug]

put an ad on the local cragslist group site for the gardening group meeting. also now have signs up at the library and local grocery store bulletin boards. not expecting much so if anyone shows up i can be surprised.

 

[flowerbug]

this bird was picking along the expansion joint in the cement driveway where seeds were blown during the winter. it went along the entire line and then also along the further edge - was fun to watch and brightened up an otherwise very dreary day.

not the best picture but at least it reminds me of those moments and makes me smile.

i tried to get a movie of it but i'd never taken a movie with the camera before and i couldn't figure it out quickly enough. oops...

 

[digitS']

For this neck of the woods,

the knotweed will bloom and the birds will find the seeds of the tiny plants in every crack in the concrete and asphalt.

It looks like the entire central part of the US will have some cold, snowy weather this weekend.

Steve

 

[flowerbug]

my 2nd (back up pair) round of glasses repair seems to be doing ok. these feel much better to wear for now. this means i can now go back and redo my repairs on my main pair of glasses and get them done. when i can i'll take pics. it's interesting how it went. what i am curious about now is if these back up pair of glasses will hold up or not. a few days of wearing them and no changes in the spots i was worried about so we'll see how they go for a few more days. i like seeing if i can repair something like this. i've always been interested in fixing things or trying to fix them even if i couldn't at least i would learn something by trying.

now i have to decide how much i need to clean up the pair i need to redo. there's a lot of stuff on them i should probably take off. and by stuff i mean layers of black nail polish and clear coating over which looked great and was all smooth and lasted a few weeks until it started showing some discolorations and a few small wrinkles started. i was hoping that coating with clear epoxy would stop the deterioration and also keep any more wrinkles from forming. i just did not get very thick layer on so it didn't work. now i have very wrinkled and looks bad. so yeah, gotta remove it and start over again.

the spare pair, me being the curious sort wondered if there was any residual smell from the epoxy as i would expect it to give off some slight fumes for a while as it finished curing and all that. these mix yourself fast cure epoxies don't give you much time to mix. there is a very faint hint of smell coming from them. it is not any worse than the smell of plastic can be to me (especially that which has been sitting around my ears for years (now there's a rhyme for ya ). no noticeable reaction on my skin. having worked with epoxies for coating floors i didn't have any reactions to them back then either so i wasn't too worried about that. i was reacting more to the degraded plastic that wasn't keeping very clean and the rough splits in the aging plastic so that is what started this whole project out. oh, and reacting to the metal frames. i needed to coat them anyways to stop that from happening. nail polish did work but it just wasn't durable enough.

 

[flowerbug]

ok, i've mentioned this before, but if you have a child that won't eat raw carrots you can often get them to try them by giving them a Jr. Mint along with the chunk of carrot and say that if they will eat the carrot then they can have the mint, but to start out with tell them to take a bite of the carrot and then have a nibble of the mint. i was just finishing up lunch of some chicken and wanted some carrots but i also wanted some Jr. Mints and to help brush the sugar off the teeth i just have them together. (and then drink some water and swish that around too). very refreshing...

 

[flowerbug]

first gardening group meeting went ok. i wasn't sure anyone was going to show up so i brought plenty of things with me if i was going to sit there alone. a few minutes after getting most of my things set up someone popped in and we started talking and were able to talk enough for a few hours (there were five of us there). i did give away some beans, garlic, onions, cosmos and peas.

most popular item is always garlic - every event i go to and no matter if it is in season or out of season for planting people will still take it to give it a try.

[edited to give total of people there ]

 

[flowerbug]

got a nice thank you e-mail from one of the people who attended.

 

[meadow]

Five people on your first day! It is SO awesome of you to be doing this!!! The potential results of such influence/interaction is mind boggling.

 

[flowerbug]

yesterday i took another stab at winnowing down the bean collection. it's about 5lbs lighter now. hard to get rid of them but i have no plans on growing most of them ever again and there is little demand for any of them when i go to seed swaps or talk with other bean friends. so they're going to be eaten (by me or by the worms in the worm farm).

almost all of them were unnamed mutt bean crosses or selections from varieties - almost all the heirlooms that i'll keep growing i didn't thin out too much from those. a few that don't appeal to me or didn't work out well in our soils/climate.

brown beans. i think i've now gotten rid of almost all of them. that would be about 100-150 selections i'd held onto for 5-7yrs. none of them appeal to me other than a few for their shape. i did hold onto the olive and greener colored ones and a few others from the solid colors, but i got rid of a lot of the variations in color because i just wasn't going to go that ways any more. i have a lot more interesting colors and patterns to work with now in more recent beans i've grown.

 

[flowerbug]

yesterday i got the worm farm fed with all the scraps i'd been drying along with anything else i had on hand. mostly dry beans, garlic husks, some burnt toast, chicken bones ( a small bone per bucket won't hurt anything), the dry bean stalks i picked off the fence, the last bucket of bean pods from shelling last fall, sweet potato skins, paper scraps, etc. i was even trying to get ahead of weeding a few weeks ago and while i was out there looking around for things to do there were some rabbit and deer pellets on the pathways that i picked up (otherwise they encourage weeds to grow in the pathways). if they are dry they don't smell... so now that bucket is out of my room.

i try to get this all done every two to four weeks depending upon how many food scraps, etc. we generate.

critter season has also started up, grackles, chipmunks, rabbits, and yesterday on the off-chance a groundhog was out there and at first i wasn't going to try to scare it away with the air rifle but i was right there so i did and i managed to shoot it (it made the mistake of running away and then stopping to look up). i always feel so sad in having to hunt them but if i don't i won't get much of a harvest from many garden plants even in the fenced gardens (they can get through the fence in spots either by climbing or by going through gaps). so i was out in the rain/snow/sleet and mud burying the poor creature. we have no shortage of them or any of the others.

deer too, they've been here all winter going through various areas, eating the cedar trees or anything else they can find, bedding down and making mud trails. they even went through part of my fence out front that i have to straighten back up next time i can get outside.

that won't be any time soon, it is windy and raining here, plenty of rain the past few days, we don't need any more.