Living the Good Life

I just finished reading Helen and Scott Nearing's book The Good Life, about their 60 years of self-sufficient living on farms in Vermont and then in Maine. The Nearing's embraced the back to the land movement during the Great Depression years. Their book described the good life they sought which divided their time into three segments: time to make their food ("bread labor"), time for personal pursuits, and time for service to others. Notice that no time was spent accumulating money or buying things. It's all about living simply and for them, that was the definition of a good life. The book documented how they built their house, budgeted their resources, and raised crops. I enjoyed the book for its documentation of a place and time in history as well as for its timeless gardening advice.

Sugar Snap Peas

I put a bit of that advice right to work in my garden. Over the weekend I weeded and mulched and staked. The garden's looking pretty good, if I do say so myself. It's already more fruitful than in year's past because the soil is better now, after three years of use and continual work on building it up with compost. The Nearings would be proud. Earlier in the spring, I dug out several long wood violet roots that probably sucked away a lot of water from the garden vegetables in years past. While wood violets are quite edible and I do throw them into my salads from time to time, I'm not ready to cultivate them just yet. Inspired by the Nearing's, I pulled up the spinach that was bolting and immediately replanted lettuce in that area. After the lettuce takes us through the heat of the summer, I'll plant more spinach. I'm looking forward to taking their advice on planting lots of root crops in the fall and seeing how long they take us into fall and winter.

Tomato Vine

Today I will pick the first of the sugar snap pea crop. We'll have some sort of stir fry for dinner. There are lots and lots of tomatoes on their way. About 25 small tomatoes are on the vine and double that number of flowers. About a dozen of the tomatoes are just beginning to turn pinkish red. Squash flowers are blooming and the cucumbers are coming up at last.

My Garden Path

It's turned hot now. We've had temperatures in the 90's for a week or so now. But it hasn't chased me indoors yet. I have to spend at least an hour every morning checking on my vegetable and flower gardens, feeding the fish, and refilling the bird feeders.

While not the Nearing's Good Life, it's good for me. I suppose my life is divided into quarters: time for "bread labor" (which is not all time in the garden!), time for personal pursuits, time for others, and time for earning money to pay for the other "necessities" of modern life (electricity, the Internet, transportation, etc.). This simple life, while not self-sufficient, is good.

Purple and Gold: The Flowers are Celebrating Too

Coreopis on Catnip

How appropriate that the flowers in my yard are blooming in shades of purple and gold this month! My son graduated from James Madison University on May 7. A few days earlier, I received my acceptance letter to the DLVE-SLP M.S. in Speech-Language Pathology offered by JMU.

Virginia Spiderwort

I'm enjoying the month off between finishing up my SLP pre-requisites (my previous credits in history, art history, and business didn't apply!) and the official start of the Masters program on June 9. Of course, that means I've been spending lots of time tending the yard. It's been so much fun to watch things grow and the vegetable and flower gardens are lovely. My son is in between too, working at the Cheese Shop and William and Mary sports camps until his Graduate Assistantship and Master's degree program begins at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga.

Near the end of the blooming
period for this Passion Flower 

The growing season started in March with first flower bloomers including daffodils and iris and buds growing on plants and trees like dogwoods. Things picked up in April when I enjoyed watching wild columbine and golden ragwort. Things have really taken off this month as the sun has gotten warmer. In the vegetable garden, I've been picking lettuce, spinach, dill, parsley, and basil for a couple of weeks now. Oh! And a strawberry or two. I have just two plants in my garden this year.

In the garden, the tomatoes and sugar snap peas are blooming and some of the spinach is blotting. The carrots are blooming underground. I picked one to see how they were doing the other day and came up with one about the length of a finger. I added it to a garden fresh salad for lunch.

I noticed the purple coneflowers (as seen in the Williamsburg Wordpecker banner) were starting to bloom yesterday!

The Marvelous Mind

In preparation for my next adventure, work toward a degree in speech-language pathology, I've taken a couple of prerequisite courses in neuroanatomy and neuroscience. It's been fascinating. I've also been reading lots of books and articles about the brain. My husband teases that neurology is king, changing everything. It is an area of understanding that makes psychology and religion seem outdated and naive. Isn't science wonderful?

I just finished An Alchemy of Mind by Diane Ackerman. Beautifully written with abundant metaphors that don't mess with the facts, it satisfies the writer and art historian and realist and budding SLP in me. Here's a passage just for fun:

"The brain's dynamo runs millions of jobs, by mixing chemicals, oscillations, synchronized rhythms, and who knows what else. It is like looking at a mosaic or a pointillist painting in motion. Study the whole and the parts disappear; study the parts and the whole disappears . . .  I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive. But I also sense the universe is magical, greater than the sum of its parts, which I don't attribute to a governing god, but simply to the surprising, ecstatic, frightening everyday reality we all know."

And another:

"Neurons grow like quaking aspens in the forests of the mind . . . they have two kinds of limbs, dendrites and axons; the former to listen, the latter to speak . . . dendrites hear what neighboring neurons signal through their axons. Like elegant ladies air-kissing so as not to muss their makeup, dendrites and axons don't quite touch . . . At land's end there's a terminal, where a neuron talks to its neighbor by releasing special molecules, more than a hundred different neurotransmitters, that can drift across the tiny gap and bind to receptors on the other side . . . Neurons speak an elite pidgin neither chemical not electrical but a lively buzz that blends the two, an electrochemical lingo all their own. To speak, a neuron wends an electrical shudder down the length of its axon in a wave created from the ebb and flow of alternating sodium and potassium ions . . . When the door opens, potassium ions rush out and sodium ions rush in, again creating an electrical charge . . . until the message zooms among whole environs of neurons. This one process (synaptic transmission) underlies everything the brain does, all of our knowledge, motives, whims, and desires . . . 'Ultimately all that we are -- all our memories, hopes, and feelings -- can be boiled down to the banal transfer of a few ions across the membrane wall of brain cells.'"

On the Morning After in the Rain Garden

Rain Gauge Report: .58 inches!

My rain gauge reported that we had a little over a half inch of rain yesterday. I've always been a weather watcher, but ever since I've been a Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network reporter I've been even more nutty about the power of rain.I know that anytime we get a half inch of rain it's just wonderful.

My easement rain garden

We could still use a lot more, though. I planted in my rain garden yesterday and the soil was dry and hard in many spots that you might think would be more moist from the recent rains. Apparently, it takes awhile to recover from a drought, and we haven't recovered from last year just yet.

Because it had rained and I planted in the rain garden yesterday, I walked down to the easement to check it out and take some photos first thing this morning. It hadn't rained hard enough to challenge the dam I'd reconstructed. It blew out after a particularly hard rain about a month ago, the one that brought deadly tornadoes to the area, passing within a mile of my daughter's home in Gloucester. This is the most rain we've had since then. Everything looked good. The first retention pond held all of the runoff that came to it from Oxford Road and Druid Court. It didn't look as though the second pond had held any water or that the dam had played any stormwater retention role.

Butterfly Weed

Can you see the Bald Cypress tree right in the center of the easement rain garden photo, above? I may not live long enough to see it develop those classic knees, but I couldn't resist trying to raise it. I also planted Lizard's Tail, Horsetail, Switch Grass, Blue Iris, and a Carolina Laurel Cherry in the rain garden and surrounding area.

I couldn't help but take lots of photos on this wet morning. Everything looks better in the garden when it's basking in raindrops.

Nature Sounds: Fowler's Toad

Ah, the sound of frogs on a rainy evening. Tonight it is the Fowler's Toad. It was about this time last year that the Cope's Gray Treefrog caught my attention on a rainy spring evening. What a primal sound that humbles and beckons us to feel our true nature. 

8:00 a.m. on Queen's Creek

There are many amphibians in my backyard at this time of year. An American Bullfrog is seen most often in the goldfish pond, but the Fowler's and Cope's are always the loudest on spring evenings, especially when they're wet and happy.

A beautiful way to end a Saturday. The day began with a Bird Walk at New Quarter, then planting in the rain garden, a salad of fresh greens from my garden and strawberries from the Williamsburg Farmer's Market for dinner, now reading and listening. 

Lots of Bluebird Hatchlings ... and a tiny Chickadee

Newborn Bluebird Smile

I suspect egg shells are cracking all over the place at New Quarter Park this morning as want-to-be hatchings tap away at them from the inside. Yesterday afternoon, Lois and I were at the park for hypertufa-making (be sure to see Kathy VanMullekom's story in the May 19 issue of the Daily Press!), so decided to take the Gator for a quick run around the 19-box trail to check the eggs that we calculated were laid beginning about April 19. By the way, Lois and I are Co-Trail Monitor Leaders for the New Quarter Park Trial and Co-County Coordinators for James City-Williamsburg-Upper York for the Virginia Bluebird Society. We feel like Bluebird midwives.

I'm ready! Drop that bug, Mama!

We calculated that yesterday was within the 12-15 day window of brooding at some of the boxes. So it would be about the first day that some hatchlings would see the light of day outside their shells. Low and behold, we found 14 Eastern Bluebird hatchings and 1 Carolina Chickadee hatchling. We counted 44 more eggs in the boxes on the trail and the majority of the eggs were laid at about the same time. They should be hatching out over the next few days. Exciting times on the New Quarter Park Bluebird Trail!

Carolina Chickadee Hatcling

I haven't actively watched Carolina Chickadees hatching and nestling behavior until this year. Last year I had a Chickadee nest in a box at New Quarter, but it was taken over by Bluebirds, which are higher in the pecking order than Chickadees. The Bluebirds simply pecked the Chickadee eggs and tossed 'em out. That's why Chickadees tend to head for the nest boxes ahead of Bluebirds, who wait a tad longer to select their nest. Chickadees try to get in and out of there before the Bluebirds. They brood for 12-13 days after the last to penultimate egg is laid. There is a sample page available on Cornell's Birds of North America site with lots more details on Chickadee breeding behavior, if you're interested in following this link.

Footnote here: I had a family of six Carolina Chickadees fledge from the Bluebird box in my front yard last week. (I hope they made it. I've seen my neighbor's cat, Lucy, starring up at it hungrily. Grrr.) In the last couple of days I've seen and heard a Bluebird checking out the recently vacated nest box and neighborhood. I hope Mr. and Mrs. Bluebird will be the text tenants there. And that my neighbors will please, please, please keep their house cat in the house where it belongs!

Black Rat Snake digesting

Back to New Quarter: We had a staff meeting at the park later on Tuesday afternoon and went out to see and talk about a trail that needed some work. We found this Black Rat Snake alongside the trail, sunning himself in a digestion stupor. Black Rats eat rodents and, sadly but in accordance with the great Circle of Life, baby birds and bird eggs. (P.S. on snakes! We found our first "official" copperhead at the park last week! Almost everyone calls every snake a copperhead, so we've skeptical. But this one was run over, so we have the "living" proof and have submitted it to the VDGIF database.)

One full & happy Black Rat Snake!

He posed for us and let me get this close-up shot of his face. The flash gave him a little nose shine and I tried to Photoshop powder it, but oh well. Anyway, very cool, don't you think?

More posts on our Bluebird babies are sure to follow!

It's a Beautiful Morning

Golden Ragwort

I love this time of year! Birds are singing and flowers are blooming. I'm identifying old birds and new birds by their songs, a personal goal of mine. Yesterday was Williamsburg's Spring Bird Count day, so I spent a good deal of time on the deck watching and listening. My husband popped out at one point and said it sounded like the Wild Kingdom our there.

Once the trees leaf in I hear more birds than I see, so want to know their songs. Right now a Pileated Woodpecker and a House Wren are the loudest characters out there. And I hear somebody new. That will drive me crazy for a few hours now. I think it's the Yellow Warbler. Oh! I hear a Red-eyed Vireo! Here-I-am. Look-up. In-the-tree. Here-I-am.

NQP Bird Walkers, April 26, 2011

I'm happy to be able to identify an old friend, the White-throated Sparrow, by his call. It was familiar to me, but I hadn't put the sound and the bird together until the April 26 Bird Walk at New Quarter Park. Oh my, Canada, Canada, Canada. Thanks, Jan.

I have three bird houses in the yard and all are productive. Six Carolina Chickadees recently fledged from the Bluebird house in the front yard. I have two houses in the back. A House Wren started building in Wren House by the garden and another is building in the Bluebird House that I see from my desk, just off the deck. An Eastern Bluebird has been coming by and looking in the box.

 

A quick Google on the topic of bluebird v. wren reveals that bluebirds are more timid and therefore lower in the pecking order than the twitchy and scoldy little House Wren. I've seen Eastern Bluebirds evict Chickadees, but not House Wrens. Oh well. I do know that Bluebirds are nesting in my neighbors yard, so I'll have to watch the blues there ... and, of course, on the Bluebird Trail at New Quarter Park, where we are expecting a dozen or so eggs to hatch this week!