A Backyard Walk With Sophie

Finally we saw the sun for a few short hours this morning (first time since last Friday!) Here's where working part-time is great because Sophie and I got to take advantage of a nice morning and go for a little hike in the backyard. Come on along and I'll show you some of the things we saw.......

In spite of being almost 12 years old, a heart murmur and hind feet with no feeling in them, Sophie still loves to get out and run in the backyard. I don't take her for long walks anymore and she spent the rest of the afternoon napping after this adventure, but I think you can see how much she's enjoying being out here!

There's nothing wrong with Sophie's "sniffer" though. I bet she was smelling a bunneh under this tree.

When we were exploring at the farthest end of our yard, I noticed this fresh deposit of deer droppings.

Very close to where I found these droppings, we have an area of the yard that we've never mowed or done anything else with -- in fact, it's where we dump tree trimmings and other yard waste. It's grown up into a pretty dense thicket, but as you can see below, there's a little path going into this thicket......

and when I followed the path into there, I spotted this fresh deer hoofprint also.

Sophie was checking out all the good scents in there too, but I didn't let her snoop around too much because I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if a doe hasn't hidden a fawn or two in that area! Wouldn't that be a real treat to see someday? I'll definitely be keeping a closer watch on this part of the yard now.

I've got quite a few cavity-nesting birds occupying some space in the backyard also. There are three active Tree Swallow nests. This little female Tree Swallow was reluctant to vacate her house, but I wanted to see if her eggs had hatched yet.

Not yet! Just 6 pretty little white eggs in a lovely bed of feathers. I'm always amazed at the variety of feathers the Tree Swallows can find to line their nests. Does anyone know if that stripey feather right down in front is from a hawk? (click on the photo to enlarge it)

I also have Tree Swallows nesting in two of these plastic super gourds, but they place their nests against the back wall of the gourds, so it's impossible to see how many eggs there are and whether they've hatched or not. But I know the nests are still active because I see the swallows going in and out.

Mrs. Chickadee is still sitting on her 5 eggs in this front yard nest box. According to my incubation calculations, there should be baby chickadees hatching by this weekend and I'll keep you posted on any new developments.

I have bluebirds in a nestbox in the backyard too. There was an unsuccessful nesting attempt earlier in the season and I'm not sure what happened, but that nest had been abandoned. Now a new nest with 5 eggs is being tended by the bluebird pair. Another neat thing about this is that I've finally found a nest that incorporates some of the yarn scraps that I put out in the backyard every spring!

Here's a nice shot of Mrs. Bluebird waiting for me and Sophie to get the heck out of her territory!

A quick check on the vegetable garden revealed these broccoli sprouts from the seeds I planted a couple weeks ago.

The garbage can potatoes are doing pretty good too.

Remember the scenes of the wildflower garden that I burned on April 13th?

Here's what it's looking like today. No buds or blossoms yet, but everything has grown back very nicely. With all the rain that we've had recently, once it gets sunny and warms up again, these flowers are really going to take off.

The wild grape vine has really taken over the dead tree in my front yard. Right now it looks there's going to be a good crop of grapes later this summer and the dead tree isn't quite so unsightly now that it's covered with green leaves again.

The house sparrows finally took over the nesting cavity that I showed you in this tree earlier this spring. I wasn't real happy about that, but a windstorm a couple weeks ago blew the top part of the tree off right at that nesting cavity, so the sparrows lost their home anyway. (I'm so glad the bluebirds weren't nesting there when that happened!)

I've got a bumper crop of common milkweed growing next to my driveway this year. I have only seen 1 monarch butterfly in my yard so far this spring, but hopefully when they come back, they'll find this milkweed patch along with several others that are growing in different spots in the yard.

And finally, a couple weeks ago I cleaned out some dead plants and replanted some new perennials in my hummingbird and butterfly garden. One of my new plants is this Foxglove. It's the only one blooming so far, but isn't it pretty?

Thanks for coming along with Sophie and me on this walk.....we had a good time and hope you did too.

Garden Update

This afternoon I harvested the first produce from this year's vegetable garden -- a radish!
This is the first time I've planted radishes in the garden and I couldn't believe how beautiful the color on this little radish was. It tasted pretty good too.

Here's a look at my two raised bed gardens for this year. As you can see, I've gone back planting in rows again. The radish came from this bed -- down on the lower left side (radishes are sharing a row with leaf lettuce -- the bright green leaves at the lower right of the picture). There are also some volunteer strawberry plants that I discovered this spring while cleaning out this bed and I decided to leave them and see if they will produce any strawberries. In this bed, I've also planted cucumbers (pickling and eating), peas, green beans, carrots, beets, and onions. I got everything planted really early this year (late April) and have been fortunate that we've not had any late frosts this spring.

Here's my second raised bed (you might remember what a disaster it was last year when my dirt was delivered from the garden center). Earlier this spring my neighbor Scott brought over a little pickup load of compost for me and that was just enough to cover this bed and it's doing really nicely now. In here I've planted zucchini, winter squash, tomatoes (Roma, cherry, and regular ones for BLTs and canning), a couple of red pepper plants, a jalapeno pepper and cilantro for making salsa, and broccoli (that I'm trying to grow from seed).

In case you're wondering, the little plastic containers are "wind protectors" for a couple of really small pepper and tomato plants that I grew from seed.

I've got some garbage-can potatoes going this year again too. After last year's successful harvest, I added a fourth garbage can. I think I planted these on Easter Sunday and after a slow start, they are now doing very well.

This has nothing to do with the gardens, but here's one of the cute little hummingbirds that's visiting me this year. After getting a drink from the oriole feeder, she loves to sit on this little branch perch and fluffle up her feathers (that's what she's going here--see how her tail's fanned out and moving really fast?)

Garbage Can Potatoes

I know it's probably too late anymore this year to think about the garbage can potato project, but here's all information from posts I did this year if you want to add this fun project to your gardening plans for next year.

Some history: I first learned about garbage can potatoes last summer on Robin's Bumblebee Blog (click on this link). Naturally I was intrigued because I love potatoes (no wonder I wasn't able to stick to the Atkins diet!) but I've never had the room to grow them in my small raised bed garden. I corresponded with Robin and she assured me it was easy and fun (she's much more of a gardening expert than I am, so I took her at her word).

As spring got closer, I decided it was time to get ready for this garbage can potato project. I googled "garbage can potatoes" and found a couple of sites that also explained this process (unfortunately, I didn't bookmark them and can't find the links again now), but you basically just get a garbage can (new preferably--or clean up an old one you're not using), drill some holes in the bottom (for drainage), fill it with compost and plant your potatoes.

I bought the collapsible "cans" that are made of a tarp-like fabric--that way I didn't have to drill any holes for drainage plus they were on sale (I didn't want to make a huge investment if this project was going to be a dud for me). My seed potatoes were Yukon Gold and I planted them on April 16th (here's the link). BTW, 5 lbs was the smallest bag of seed potatoes I could find, so I shared the garbage can potatoes story with my office mate and gave her the rest of the seed potatoes. She's had good success with this project too.

You fill the cans with compost about 1/3 of the way and then stick your seed potatoes down in the compost. Once the potatoes sprout, you just continue to cover the sprouts with compost (some of the instructions said to use straw, but I didn't have any and compost is a lot easier for me to obtain). Mine took a long time to sprout--check the picture from this May 10 post showing them just starting to come out of the compost

You will want to place your garbage can potatoes in a location where they will receive sun for much of the day. Then continue to fill the container till it's 1/2 to 2/3 full. The potatoes will continue to grow and grow--right out of the top of the garbage can. (Here are pictures of the potatoes from June 18 and July 12.) The potatoes are still looking pretty good here, but then the weather got warm and dry........once it gets warm, you will need to water them every day in order to keep the compost moist. I wasn't very faithful about this and several of the plants died. I think there are still some potatoes under the compost--even though the plants appear dead on top.

If you want the little "new potatoes" for boiling you can go out and dig around for those small ones. Or just wait a while and reach down into the dirt for the larger potatoes. The advantage of planting in compost is that it's generally nice and crumbly, so it's easy to grub around in the soil and find your potatoes. The other advantage of planting potatoes in garbage cans is that when it's time to harvest you can just dump the whole garbage can out onto a tarp or board and then pick up your potatoes--no back-breaking digging with a fork and ruining good potatoes by "stabbing" them. The other advantage I read is that sometimes potato plants are quite attractive to certain insects you may not want to have in your regular vegetable garden; garbage can potatoes can be placed just about anywhere you have adequate sunlight (although I will note that I never found any insects on mine--the backyard birds seem to be taking care of most insects in all of the gardens).

And just because I don't like having a post without any pictures, here's the one 'almost decent' photo I managed to capture of a Giant Swallowtail we saw last Saturday morning when we were out to the deer hunting woods putting out trail cameras.

Isn't this a fabulous butterfly? And it was just loving all those cockleburr flowers along the edge of the woods.......