As told in previous articles here on Two Ice Floes, our recent barn raising, along with witnessing our youngest Cog-ling graduate from high school and fly the coop for a summer of fun prior to her next educational indoctrination (college) have kept us Cogs quite busy. But the garden waits for no one.

Dancing around the unpredictable weather, we have finally managed to hit the ground running. Starting with ridiculously warm temperatures early this Spring, we progressed to a parched dry spell that felt more like August than March and April. Then a surprise freeze in April, followed by near freezing temps in May, confused the plants, animals and pollinators alike.

Finally, the past two weeks have settled into wonderful breezy days in the high 70°s and a rain shower or cloud burst almost every afternoon. The garden is very happy for now.

We are picking about one to two quarts of strawberries every day. I am amazed by the production of a 10 by 10 foot strawberry patch. The kale and the lettuce are growing well and we are already harvesting both for salads and smoothies. We’ve even made baked kale chips several times recently.

The peach trees had their blossoms caught in the late freeze, but surprised me with four peaches growing nicely. This is important because it is the first fruit from these dwarf peach trees planted two years ago.

The blueberries and apples are showing off, as they have every year since moving here. No shortage of jams, jellies, juices or cobblers on the horizon.

I am planting more flowers in the garden this year to encourage pollinators to continue to visit. So far there has been a much smaller attendance of the bees. The kiwi vines have begun to flower. I have sunflowers of several heights in various places, some to produce seeds and others just to look pretty and call to the bees and butterflies.

My volunteer red potatoes from last year (aka the row I missed digging up) are rock stars. I hope they offer encouragement to the sweet potatoes I am growing for the first time. Fingers crossed.

All the usual suspects are present and accounted for. I have (barely) limited myself to about 60 tomato plants this year. Various peppers, broccoli, cabbage, onions, black beans, kidney beans, cucumbers and three types of squash should keep me hopping at harvest. I am planting new rows of radishes and early sweet corn every ten days or so.

Because growing corn takes up so much room, we are only growing enough corn to pick fresh and eat on the cob with dinner throughout the late summer. I will grab a bushel or two of organic sweet corn at the farmers market to can and freeze for use throughout the rest of the year.

There are failures too. I cannot grow a carrot to save my life. I have amended the soil, planted them in both pots and in the garden beds, changed every element of water, sun, fertilizer, pH, location and even promised to stop singing to them. But alas…sigh.

My HUGE find of wild overgrown chocolate peppermint was decimated. It was outside the garden and yes, once again, Cog mowed it mistaking it for unwanted weeds. It might have helped if he’d appeared a bit guilty over it, but nope. He was matter-of-factly defending his actions. I am tempted to buy a roll of police tape to mark my runaway crops, but since it isn’t exactly on our property, it’s hard to stake a claim lol.

We’ve had a parade of deer and wild turkey through the spring. There is evidence the bear has been about too, but we have yet to physically run into him this season. A large number of local sightings of a gigantic black bear, possibly over 600 pounds, dwarfs our regular bear 'Teddy'. The big one is shown in the picture below, taken just a few miles from our home, and was posted on Facebook. As a reminder, there are an estimated 18,000 black bears in the state of Virginia. So long as people stay away from their cubs and keep their trash secured, they generally do no harm.

While planning the construction of our small barn during an abnormally warm December, Cog declared the frigid winter weather would arrive as soon as we started building. And he was right on the money. In between the consistently wrong and ever changing weather forecasts, the barn is being raised in fits and starts. I assist where I can, but I am only the trusty assistant while Cog is the real magician.

We found a day when the temperatures stayed above freezing and the winds finally died down a bit and poured the concrete piers. This took a few days of prep prior to pouring in order to dig the holes for the concrete tubes and use a device called a transit to ensure the piers on the hill ended up at a relatively equal height so the base of the barn would be level. The transit, a surveyor’s tool set on a tripod you’ve probably seen used on the roadside, measures height on a stick. A two person operation, we re-measured several times because the winter winds on the edge of our mountain can be relentless.

Concrete day arrived, and eight hours and a busted concrete mixer later, the piers were poured. Because freezing temps were on their way, we mixed the concrete with warm water before pouring it into the tubes. We proceeded to wrap each tube with insulation, then covered them with a plastic bag. This set up a warm thermal environment so the concrete could set without the water in it freezing, resulting in crumbly concrete. Cog said they looked like rows of dwarves hunkering down in the cold.

And three working days later...

In between outdoor work sessions, while searching in the large freezer last week, I came across vegetables I had frozen fresh and then promptly forgot. As a compulsive canner, it was obvious what needed to be done. I must make soup!

Recalling the old folk tale Stone Soup, where the hungry stranger tricked the townspeople into each contributing something to make a wonderful eclectic stew, I set about poking into all my food places to see what I could concoct. Each storage space offered something unexpected. After examining the food pantries, freezers and the fridge, it was clear to me I would need to make not one, but two soups.

The result was 25 jars of Chicken/Zucchini Soup with potatoes, corn, celery and onions, and 28 pints of Butternut Squash Soup with pumpkin, ham, yellow split peas, potatoes, onion and celery. Both morphed into wonderful stick-to-your-ribs creations, well worth the time to re-inventory what I’d frozen. Served with rice, noodles, quinoa or even mashed potatoes (invented by my kids) I love having home cooked 'fast food' ready to heat whenever we want it.

Finally I have wonderful news to report about propagating difficult plants. Over the past few years I have attempted to follow several methods for taking wood cuttings from an ornamental cherry tree, our enormous tree sized blueberry bushes, and the hardy kiwi vines in order to grow more. Using commercial rooting hormones, varying the time of year and types of cuttings has only yielded sporadic results.

Recently, while I was poking around for additional information about willow bark tea, I stumbled upon a tidbit; organic farmers use white willow bark as a natural rooting hormone for cuttings. Since Cog was about to topple a beautiful, but diseased, old Cherry Kwanza tree in our front yard, I took handfuls of cuttings from the shoots growing out of the shallow sprawling roots. I put one handful in a jar with regular water and the other in a jar with freshly brewed white willow bark tea after letting it cool.

At first nothing happened. I changed the tea water every few days because it looked a bit slimy and was developing a film on the jar and the bottom of the wood cuttings. Then, about ten days later, the small buds that were on the cuttings when I took them developed green tips. Now, a few days later, there are green leaves coming from the first green shoots and more threatening to come out on the others. The very beginnings of roots are forming on the bottoms as well.

I have since changed the control group, which has not a single green node, over to willow bark water. I am just plain excited to see how well this will work with the blueberries. I told Cog, “We could plant blueberries everywhere!” Can we ever really have too many?

Mrs. Cog

1-16-2016

Among the many regular wildlife visitors, none have challenged me more than the wild turkeys. I have spent several years trying to get near enough to take pictures and observe them more closely. There seems to have been a change in their group consensus as I now feel they are stalking me.

The change began when a group of up to fifteen of them sauntered through our yard almost weekly this summer. Occasionally, one would quietly sneak up behind me and scream. I’m sure I can subtract several years from my life as a result of the sheer terror instantly instilled by that noise in close proximity.

Last month, I was terrorized by a turkey in our walkout basement. There are windows on three sides of it, with the side windows sitting just above ground level putting anything outside at a higher altitude than someone standing inside the basement. As I closed the door to a cabinet where I store canned goods, there standing outside looming above me, less than three feet away was a turkey with his face almost against the window. It seemed clear I was the zoo exhibit and he was the spectator. It’s a good thing I no longer had glass jars in my hands because I’m sure they would have been dropped as the turkey shrieked and dashed away.

Last week, outside my kitchen window, I spotted a group of three male turkeys. You can tell the gobblers from the hens because the males have long stringy beards hanging down their chests and spurs extending off their skinny legs above the feet. They were pecking around the front yard long enough for me to take photos and even change lenses.

Not bothered by the light rain, the turkeys strutted back and forth putting on a great show. Like a wet dog, they each stopped to shake the water from their topcoats and proceeded about their business all freshly rumpled and fluffed. My family moaned when I jokingly posed the question: if a turkey distributes moisture over his entire body by himself, can we call him self-basting? Lol

Butterball in training?

On a final unrelated note, my summer pepper plants have declared themselves immortal. After the boomerang warm then cold then warm then cold temperatures triggered the demise and regeneration of all my pepper varieties more than once, I dug up and transplanted the biggest and most hearty into pots and placed them in our indoor sunroom. The shock of the relocating appeared to kill them permanently.

I procrastinated moving the dead pepper plants back outside as I became busy for several weeks with various tasks. Finally, I dragged the pots onto the back deck with the intention of hauling the large pots to the place I store dirt for indoor plants. The weather then warmed up for several days and I was diverted to other work again. When I finally made it back to the pepper plants, they had again done the impossible and sprouted fresh growth on all its limbs. Wow.

Relocated to an indoor sunny shelf between the basil and the lemon trees, I promised the green bell peppers and the jalapenos that would not give up on them again. It is not lost upon me that my homegrown produce has taught me yet another lesson in perseverance.