Number 88! Also, Fun at the River

Last night, while seated at the supper table, we spied the lovely fast swoops and dives of a flock of Barn Swallows in the area at the front of the house.  I'd seen them a few days ago while watering my vegetables, but wasn't quite comfortable in my identification.  I believe I speak for us both when I say that we hope they caught a very large number of those dang grasshoppers, which are a plague again this year.  Although these birds are not uncommon by any means, this was our first ID here.  Dryad Ranch species # 88: Barn Swallow!

We had house guests last weekend, and a fun time was had by all.  Nothing like being able to head down to the river to dangle one's feet in the coolth:

Hilarity Amongst the Tomatoes

Dryad Ranch was blessed last week with an overnight visit from my son, who was on the first leg of a cross country road trip to his new home in Washington DC.  His fiancee just started a new job with the Department of Energy and it's been just a tad stressful for them the last several weeks.  (Yours truly can hardly wait till August for the big matrimonial event.)  Of course, there had to be a photo op and what better place than the tomato patch? 

The raised beds that were built for this year's vegetable garden are proving to be ever so much more productive than our straw bale attempt last year.  We've been eating cucumber salad every day for a couple of weeks and have practically forced some of the overflow onto friends and neighbors.  (I still have a lovely freshly-picked selection right now as a matter of fact, if anyone's interested.)  We're about done with green beans, I think, maybe we'll get one more meal out of those.  I've also done the first picking of a couple of varieties of heirloom soup beans - they did well, but should really be considered more of a row crop I think, as we won't end up with a large quantity.  It's not the plants' fault, now we know how many need to be planted, meaning more than we have room for just now. 

Oh what the heck.  For the entertainment value, another insect photo.  (If not fungi, then bugs.)  I found a couple dozen of these tarantula hawks on some evidently delicious wildflowers down along Lion Creek.  I love how their antennae curl like that.

Sparkling Gem of a Driveway!

I could possibly go exclamation mark-mad but will somehow restrain myself to only one.  The other day, our neighbor Tom, who writes this excellent blog, came down the hill with his grader and did a superlative job on making our circle driveway Downright Spiffy.  Heaps of gratitude coming your way Tom for that assist.  The next day, a big truck arrived and now the driveway is all gravelly and really super duper.

Any Number of Complaints

Last Saturday afternoon, after a mini-cleaning and cooking frenzy, I blew off the rest of the chores and shouldered my camera bag and went for a walk. I decided to go down to the big ford on a neighbor's place and then walk downriver till I got to our place, then hop the fence and head home. This is where all those complaints I mentioned there in my title come in. It was hot, I had a 17+ pound sack of camera gear on my back, my right sock wasn't on quite right, I dropped my big water jug in a fetid backwater of the river and got some nasty scratches on my arm from a blackberry bush when I fished it out. From time to time, some salty sweat rolled down my face into my eye, which stung. The skeeters were fierce and the sun was bright.


And I realized that I had the biggest grin on my face. I love going for walks like that; that river is just the best. What a great few hours. I didn't get home till almost 6.


I was almost home, when I stopped for these wildflowers, which are on the slope just below the house near the spring. Dang, I just love pretty yellow flowers.

Arnica Cordifolia

Garden Update

The last couple of weekends have been pretty focused on doing stuff in the garden, mostly. 

Last weekend, I finished up Round Two of the weeding in the Upper Garden fence, and helped Dino with a few tasks in the Lower Garden. One of which included filling up that old claw foot tub we've got with good organic potting soil (almost five full bags). Also did some levelling to the left side of that tub, under the oak tree and put some of those faux brick 16" paving stones there. I rooted around the area near the big storage container where we put all the empty clay pots and came up with three more good sized ones, and hauled those down.  I haunted the nursery in town for a couple of lunch hours last week plotting and planning.

Friday after work, I finally bought what I'd decided on.   I should have gotten a sales commission while I was there because one of the other customers saw what I had in my wagon (I decided to get more of the salvia that the hummers like so much) and after I praised it heavily, he decided he wanted some too, so I showed him where they had it.  I also bought several pots of a trailing variety of thyme and some vinca.  

In the vegetable garden, lovely growth.  *Knocks wood and makes the sign against crop failure*  Some mornings, I've been cutting short my early a.m. workouts to go up to the vegetable beds and get the watering done ahead of the day's heat.  We've got big big tomato plants, and as of now a few small tomatoes and some cute little blossoms.  I am really hoping for a big 'mater harvest this year to make up for the pathetic yield of last year.  This weekend, we ate the first of the peas and the first pick of the Blue Lake green beans. 

If you must know,  I feel smug, as if I were the first human to discover that seeds will grow if you plant them in the right place and do good stuff to them.

Meanwhile, Dino has been kicking some major butt on getting the drip irrigation going in the Lower and Front Gardens, and I've probably forgotten something, so forgive me.  The shop building got its visit from the county inspector and received a thumbs up, so all of the trenches going down there got filled back up. The next big step is getting the electrical system going. 

These peas inspired not only hunger but the urge to close the shutter.

Ouch!

Last weekend, I was scrunched under the big rose bush in the far corner of the lower garden hand weeding, when Bad Things started to happen. I'm a little unclear as to the exact sequence of events, but I think it went something like: I disturbed a bee, maybe two bees. One of them stung me on the arm (I think - at the time I thought it could have just been the rose thorns raking me again.) I started yelping and the other bee, maybe the same bee, flew into my mouth and stung my tongue.


This is when Dino said I started making some really "funny" noises.  I got the bee out of my mouth and backed up out of the rose bush pronto to go find Dino. I was a little worried that if I started to have an allergic reaction it wouldn't be great. He could see a big welt in there and suggested I go get an ice cube and work on that for a while, which I did and it helped. Obviously, no bad reactions, just a sore tongue - and how wrong is that I ask you?

After sulking about that for some minutes and sucking on the ice cube, I decided that all was going to be well and went back to the scene of the crime and my weeding task. I'll be able to finish up that Lower Garden today, and I'm pretty excited about that area because Dino's just about finished with getting the automatic watering system to a place where he can get all of that operational. I rearranged the potted plants, moved around some of the neat rocks we've collected from here and there. There's one large pot whose inhabitant died over the winter - I'm going to find something as a replacement sometime this next week, and find two or three other smaller somethings to fill in a bit. All of those will then go on the auto drip.

Mariposa Lily, Calochortus venustum, of which there are a near-profusion this year.  My favorite wildflower.

Babe

Another inspiration from our uphill neighbors.  On the previously mentioned round up day, I split off from the group for a little while to spend some (photographic) quality time with Babe, a beautiful Steinway.