• Gardening

    Zinnia Love

    When I decided to dedicate one of my edible garden beds to flowers I was originally planning to make it half native and half zinnias or other flowers. That is what it is this year but I am planning to change that next year to an entirely native bed and move the zinnias to one of the side beds once they are finally built. But, I’m liking my idea for the year because the zinnias are so delightful and I am in awe of their beauty every time I go out to water the garden. My original inspiration for doing zinnias was in the gorgeous flowers that Cassiopeia Farm in…

  • Outdoors,  Thoughts

    A Writing Habit: Step One – Get Out of Inertia

    I’m going to attempt a not-quite-daily writing habit here this summer. It may be a few paragraphs, maybe just a few sentences, but the goal is to write more here which will hopefully lead to more writing outside of this blog. I miss the days when I could sit down and jot down a few paragraphs no matter how messy they were, just to share whatever thoughts were coming my way or to share a few quick photos. Somehow I got bogged down into my trip reports and well, you see how well that has gone as I’ve just abandoned sharing them because it seems like such a task to…

  • Gardening

    Tomato Season Begins

    It was a bit of a rocky start to tomato season and unseasonably hot temperatures in May thwarted a lot of the production but we are finally starting to harvest some tomatoes. So far they are all primarily Chris’ tomatoes that he ended up buying not long in the planting season after the ones he started from seed weren’t thriving. My tomatoes are doing well, a mix of ones I started from seed and others I supplemented with nursery grown plants, but I’m still a few weeks away from any appreciable harvest. And with summer temperatures and a lack of rain in the forecast, I’m not sure how much I…

  • Thoughts

    A Forced Slow Down

    May was a very busy month for us and as I peered out into June and July, all I saw was busy, busy, busy. Don’t worry, it still looks like that, and with an ever growing pile of field work at work for a thin crew of field-bios-who-also-double-as-project-managers-and-other-indoorsy-type-biologist-job-descriptions, things are very chaotic. I was actually looking forward to last weekend with my parents and niece and nephew for the Labor Day weekend but if I had known that a late Thursday night headache would turn into a positive Covid test on Saturday morning, well, I would have done things differently. But here we are, a house full of Covid soup!…