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Birthday Musings
Hello, 36. My birthday was on Monday. I turned 36. I’m officially heading straight for 40 and that seems really strange. I took the day off because I learned years ago that working on your birthday just isn’t all that fun. If I’ve got the days available, why not take the day off? Last year’s birthday was a bit of a dud. We were driving back from vacation in Port Aransas so most of the day was spent in the car. Forest had been sick that week as had several of us adults, and while the vacation itself was great and we celebrated my birthday the day prior with my…
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Munching Monarchs
Back in May I mentioned finding monarch babies on our milkweed. For weeks after that I couldn’t find any more caterpillars or any sign of chrysalides so I thought maybe birds or wasps had predated them. Recently I began noticing that the swamp milkweed was being chomped on so I checked out those plants and found two caterpillars. Then another evening I trudged through the jungle of weeds in another bed to see about the tropical milkweed and found two more caterpillars! Happily they seemed to be gorging themselves quite satisfactorily and it was nice to sit and watch them for a few minutes. The bottom monarch decided it was…
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Carolina Satyr (Maybe) | (Not Quite) Wordless Wednesday
Over the weekend I was scoping out the figs, seeing if there were any to harvest. As I was doing so I was taking photos of the garden. I noticed several butterflies landing on the fruits and sipping the juices from the broken fruits pecked at by the birds. I managed to get a few photos but it was a butterfly I was not familiar with and would take some book identification and Googling to figure out. At first I thought it was one of the ‘Blues’, Family Lycaenidae, Subfamily Polyommatinae, but quickly realized it was a Family Nymphalidae, Subfamily Satyrinae (Satyrs and Wood-Nymphs). From there it became difficult because…
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The Formosa Lilies Take Center Stage
The Formosa lilies grew tall this year, taller than me. They started swelling with buds a few weeks ago and I knew they would be blooming soon. I was worried when we left for the July 4th weekend that the first ones would open without us. But they waited. I love being out in the vegetable garden in the evenings but I’m looking forward to spending some quality time with the flower garden soon. It needs the attention and some doting oohs and ahhs from me as I discover what plants are blooming, what has survived the neglect and weeds. A glance at the abutilon/flowering maple told me that it…
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Taking Time to Putter
These days I’m finding myself in a state of go-go-go in the gardens. Rarely am I stopping to just see what I see, to sample a bit of what is going on—there are so many weeds to pull, plants to trim back, and who-knows-what-else to do in this frenzy of summer. On Tuesday I got called to pick Forest up early because his low grade fever from the morning had morphed into something a little higher and he was crankier than usual. He’s finally cutting a few more teeth and paired with allergies that keep trying to turn into another cold, he wasn’t feeling very well. We settled in for…
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Soaking It In
Do I dare say that it’s hot? I mean, it is summer. That’s what summer is about. But it’s slowly turning into the phase of summer where anything after 11am until after 5pm you don’t want to venture out unless you are swimming in water. It’s almost like winter where we hibernate for awhile inside. For most of the garden plants this is their thriving point of the year, such as the daturas. They’ve grown by leaps and bounds and are flowering away, already producing seed pods to spring forth new progeny next year. In the compost bin an unknown cucurbit sprouted and has since climbed about 12′ up the…
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Life Lately: Late June 2016
+In My Head Not a lot, actually. Well, I take that back. A lot, actually, it just switches often. Let’s see if I can bullet point it… Privatized prisons: This is thanks to OITNB, more commentary below. Brexit: For once it was nice to see my social media feed filled with another country’s/dominion’s politics. I wish I’d known a little bit more about the implications before it happened—that’s my fault for trying to keep my head in the ground with the news these days. Eating/Conversing while a toddler is present: I remember watching my SIL (and this still happens, actually) as she got up and down, up and down, while…
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Blackberry Kombucha Shrub
I started making kombucha in August of 2013 (and side note to that post: A 10pm run to Walgreens for sugar? Oh man, I miss those days of randomly running out to the store at weird hours. That *does not* happen now with a toddler. Making kombucha at 10pm also does not happen!) and I’ve kept it up on and off in the years since. Brewing and drinking kombucha is definitely cyclical, with months of being very interested in having the drink around and other months where the batch sits in the closet just hanging out until I’m in the mood for a new batch. For those months that the…
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On Podcasting
When I started The Garden Path Podcast late last year I knew that it would be hard work but that I would enjoy it. Podcasting takes oogles more time than writing a blog, at least for me. I thought I’d break down some thoughts here about these first six months. Overall Goals It was originally the Cultivate Simple podcast that really got me into listening to podcasts. I’d dabbled in them before that but they really weren’t terribly popular yet. Podcasting has been around since the mid-2000s so it wasn’t even a new format at that point in time when I started listening to Cultivate Simple, but it wasn’t as…
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These Days in the Vegetable Garden
Today we’re wrapping up 11 days of Forest and I flying solo around here. Chris has been in northeast Texas doing field work. I’m trying to determine, I think it might be the longest stretch of time he’s been away since Forest has been here. When I found out a few months ago that Chris was going to be gone for this long amount of time I asked my parents if they would want to spend a long weekend with me, because, well, have you solo parented a toddler? It’s kind of hard, especially when there’s things to do around here! Thankfully they were up for coming down and helping…