moving day

"little guy" or l g to the initiated is a rescue maple tree i pretty much stole from a cornfield at a good friend's behest to keep him from being done in by the combine...potted in my back yard he has prospered the past three years and this autumn it was clearly tine to move him to a larger home until a permanent residence can be procured...

knowing this was coming i obtained a larger container earlier this year and today i took it to the north side of the house and drilled sufficient drainage holes...

i added a mixture of cow manure compost and seed starting mix ( to act as a filler to help keep the compost from compacting ) and went to get little guy...

the extraction was more difficult than i had anticipated...

because he was reasonably pot bound...

which is why his new home is deeper and bigger in diameter...

i loosened the soil around his roots so they would know they could move around come spring...

put him in his new home and finished the fill with a straight shot of compost to feed the growing boy next season...

i had been gathering leaves to mulch the ramp bed and kept going while i was at it...

so that he and the ramps have a snug blanket of maple, mulberry, and catalpa leaves...

that done i took the bee house ( in its parasite proof mesh bag ) and all the hard work the girls did this past summer to my daughter and son's-in-law unheated garage to winter over and hatch out in the back yard next june...more season's end chores accomplished...i'm taking the rest of the day off.

another ending ( almost )

it has been cold...actually unseasonably cold for this early in november...

a bit over two weeks ago the bees were still busily mugging the marigolds out front...

things have changed...out back as well...

the cold has induced the northern tepehaun teocintli ears to open and begin to shatter even though the bulk of the seed is still green...

i have collected some however i am skeptical of its viability...

the zea mays mexicana began to shatter long before any cold settled in...

and there are still a multiplicity of green ears on those plants as well...

still, even this late they are producing mature seed...so i will be going over the ears for a bit yet (and hence the "almost" in the header ) to add as many as possible to the seven hundred or so seeds i have already brought in...things are slowing out there...i doubt they will stop completely...more as it comes up.

life goes on

my good friend kathy passed away nine years ago today...and looking though my past posts i find i did not mark the anniversary last year which strikes me as being fairly human and disturbing at once...i loved kathy very dearly...she could be exceptionally focused and profoundly serious when in academic mode...and she could be chatty and goofy and, at times, very vulnerable...especially to criticism from students...okay...she got to be human like everyone else...still miss the chats...still think of her...particularly when teocintli comes up...which, if you have paid attention, is a lot of the time around here...i don't feel badly about missing a year...life goes on and i am human too...stuff comes up...still miss the girl...hang tough kathy...maybe we will cross paths again sometime.

done

the garden looks like the scenery for a beckett play this morning and the barrenness isn't going to diminish...

i did find one intransigent sunflower out there...and its days are growing shorter...

and at the moment the sunflower has the garden to itself since my purpose in going was to put he asparagus to bed for the winter...there is a bit of green left in it...

however even that is wilting...

so i cut it all back with the lops...snipping the stems off close to the soil surface...not beneath it as i would if harvesting spears...

because i covered the stems with a layer of compost to give the crowns some insulation for winter...like last season i have dispensed with the layer of straw held in place with fabric...the root systems are old and deep enough that they simple plants...they are productive and eat a lot...

i closed my bed down two weeks ago...

the clover, winter wheat, and winter rye i planted in, i believe, late september, as a cover crop/ green manure have taken hold and should be fine...

unfortunately ( but not unexpectedly ) the ones i planted later have failed to prosper...so we will be adding a good deal of compost come spring...having been evicted from the most fertile bed in the garden ( which i had labored on for a number of seasons ) i will need to begin the process all over...which may find a bed of cow peas and vetch there next season to simply rejuvenate the soil...seems warranted...this will probably be my last trip out until next year...no good reason to go until march when the asparagus needs uncovering and the vetch can go in.

from sodden to frozen ( and likely back again )

temperatures are warming this afternoon...

however the precipitation that delivered two inches of rain over night from the thirtieth to the morning of the thirty-first shifted over to snow around ten yesterday morning and temperatures fell to the mid twenties ( fahrenheit ) overnight last night...

which probably did not do the chances of having viable northern tepehuan teocintli seed any good...

and would seem to have accelerated the shattering of zea mays mexicana ears to some degree...

the wild strawberries imported from new york scoff at the cold...

while, surprisingly to me, the native berry plants have had a few of their blooms survive the cold and snow...and, less surprisingly, many berries are still intact waiting for the birds...

the winter wheat will have more issues with the mulberry leaves...which, along with catalpa tree leaves, have carpeted the back yard overnight...than it will with the cold...

all this as the egyptian walking onions have remained blithely green, shrugging off the weather...what's a little ice and snow to an onion?