A Wildlife Dilemma

All winter my family enjoys the visits of songbirds to our bird feeders.  Actually we keep the feeders filled well into spring with hopes of attracting an interesting migratory bird, and start up again in early October for the same reason.  Little black-capped chickadees and American goldfinches eat the thistle seed.  Juncos, sparrows and mourning doves hop around on the ground eating what the cardinals, finches and blue jays knock down from the big hanging feeder.  And wrens, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers and red-bellied woodpeckers hang upside down nibbling at the suet cakes.  We also enjoy the antics of the squirrels who hang from the feeders and the occasional visit of fun-loving raccoons.

About a week ago I was sitting on the patio by the fishpond when a small hawk landed in a maple tree about 20 feet away from me, and about 10 feet away from the bird feeding area.  It sat for maybe 5 minutes then flew off.  I thought that was neat, but at the time didn't think much of it.  Last week I was doing some yard work and enjoying the early spring weather when I heard what sounded like a pair of "jungle birds".  I looked up and saw the small hawk again.  I chased it around with my camera and it flew to a large tree in front of the neighbor's house where a second small hawk was sitting.  I took a photo of it and left my yard work to identify the birds.  Turns out they are Cooper's Hawks.  We saw one again yesterday.  It's kinda' neat to think they might be a breeding pair and we might have little hawk babies later this spring.

It has occurred to me that I haven't seen many songbirds at the feeders the past week or so, and I've let the big feeder go empty while I think about the following... If I continue feeding the songbirds, is that akin to setting up a smorgasbord for the hawks?  If I don't feed the songbirds (thus not attracting them to the feeder-of-death) will the Cooper's Hawks leave?  How is this different than spreading bird netting over my pond to protect my goldfish and bullfrogs from Great Blue Herons?

Fun weekend

On Friday I drove to my hometown in east-central Illinois for a reunion of sorts with my best friend from high school, Mary. Since I won't be attending my 30th class reunion later this summer, I told Mary that I'd come over and we'd do something fun. Mary got on the internet and discovered that the Woodstock Folk Music Festival was this weekend. I know this is the 40th anniversary year of THE Woodstock festival, but this was a much smaller festival in the town of Woodstock, Illinois. Then she discovered that one of my favorite artists, Natalia Zukerman, was going to be performing at this festival, so it was a definite Must-Go! Mary had seen Natalia in concert earlier this year on my recommendation and agreed that Natalia's not to be missed.

It was about a 4 hour drive to Woodstock and we got a little mixed up with a detour but finally found the town square. The venue was great, the weather was great and the music was great. Mary packed us a lovely picnic lunch--quiche, salad, fruit, linen napkins and tablecloth, fruity tea, biscuits--Mary calls herself the Martha Stewart of Birdland. Natalia took a photo of us with Mary's iPhone. If Mary can figure out how to send it I will post it.

After we got back to the prairie I got a tour of Birdland. I enjoyed seeing the aviary and meeting Ellis and the chickens. I liked the screened in vegetable garden and the Adirondack chairs that Mary made. The house at Birdland is very old, and Mary and her family have been working very hard to fix it up and enlarge it for the family. Every time I go, I see big changes!

I'm enjoying this cool summer...it's actually pleasant to be outside.

Raspberries

I am very lucky to have raspberries growing in my backyard. There were some black raspberries growing in the yard when we moved here 3 years ago, way in the back corner and almost swallowed up by large coniferous trees and a 50+ year old lilac bush. We moved the plants to over by the shed that first summer hoping they would be happy there, and I have to say that this year they've been very happy!

My dad has grown red raspberries for years and years, and gave me about a dozen plants 3 years ago. I planted them around a rotting stump and they've had 2 very good producing summers. I've been picking raspberries almost every day now for 2 weeks and have 2 gallons of berries in the freezer. We've eaten some fresh, of course, and friends have come over to pick berries, too.

I made my first batch of raspberry jam today--10 half-pints of black raspberry jam. My dad really likes black raspberries, so I will give him several of these jars, and when he comes over for the Fourth of July weekend I will make him a black raspberry cobbler. I'm sure it won't be as good as his stepmother made, but I can try!

I also harvested a cucumber, some side shoots of broccoli and half a head of cabbage. Yes, half a head! This is my first year trying to grow cabbage and the slugs got the better of me. I tried pouring beer in shallow dishes but wasn't consistent with it. So one side of the cabbage was slimy and the other side was nice. The rest of the garden is looking good. The cauliflower heads are just starting to appear. I'd almost given up on them; the plants are huge! Lots of squash, zucchini, celery on the way.

Coldplay for my birthday!

Yesterday was my 40-somethingth birthday. I had a leisurely morning, then Caroline and I drove over to meet my parents for lunch at the Beef House. My parents had been on a trip with a club they're involved with and were on their way back to Illinois. On our drive home, we heard on the radio that there were still tickets available for Coldplay at Verizon Wireless Music Center. We stopped at the box office to see if any lawn seats were available, and I purchased 3 tickets for us. There were already people in line for the 6:00 gate opening when we bought our tickets at 3:30, so we ran home, packed a picnic dinner and waited for Karl to get home. Fortunately it's a quick drive to Verizon.

We arrived back at Verizon at 5:15. Verizon Wireless was there doing a promo where the first 100 Verizon customers who showed a Verizon phone could get in the "Jump The Line" gate area. Caroline has Verizon service, so I took her phone and got in that line while Caroline and Karl stayed in the regular line. When it was time to open all the gates, the Verizon gate was opened first, and it wasn't until all the Verizon people has been admitted that they opened the regular gates. It paid off, as I was able to place our blanket in the very front of the lawn section in the center section.

We ate our dinner and waited for the show to start. The first band was called Howling Bells. Didn't much care for them. Then came Snow Patrol, which at least I'd heard some of their songs. At this point Karl and I were beginning to think maybe we were too old to enjoy concerts...until Coldplay took the stage.

AWESOME! That about sums it up. A real crowd-pleasing show. Chris Martin has so much energy and really seems to enjoy what he's doing. Fun and entertaining to watch. About half-way through the band left the stage and went to a mini-stage located in a side section of the pavillion where they played a couple of songs. Then back to the main stage for a couple of numbers, then the band went to another mini-stage in the lawn section to our left. Finished up on the main stage. They played all the songs I wanted to hear except Speed of Sound.

As we were leaving Verizon we were handed a CD, which we promptly placed in the CD player of the car. Here's a link to get a free download of the CD that was handed out after the concert. It's 9 songs performed live by Coldplay. Fantastic!

My vegetable garden

Today I finished planting the vegetable garden. Over the past month Karl and Caroline have helped me make my soil mix on a tarp and then dump it into the raised bed. I found I couldn't do it alone so always had to wait for someone to be available to help. Thanks to both of them for their help.

I can't harvest the lettuce fast enough. It's growing faster than we can eat it. I have some almost every day for lunch, and I use it to amend the store bought lettuce mix, but it's still way too much. It will become bitter soon with the hot, sunny weather.

The broccoli and cauliflower are looking good and strong. Can't wait for the yummy part to start growing. The inside leaves of the cabbage plants are starting to form the heads.

I planted some old green bean seeds about 2 weeks ago, but only one has germinated, so I may have to buy some new seeds and try again. The little celery plants are looking ok.

My zucchini, patty pans, and spaghetti squash plants have nice flowers on them. The cucumber plants are growing well but haven't yet reached for their pole-and-string trellis yet. I planted a couple of watermelon plants, too.

I have 5 Roma tomato plants and 1 Husky Red tomato. It's a dwarf plant and I'm curious about how big it will grow. It already has a golf-ball sized tomato.

I went a little pepper crazy this year. I have 2 cayenne pepper plants. Karl likes to dry these peppers and grind them up for cayenne powder, which he uses to spice up my not-so-spicy foods. There is 1 jalapeno plant, with a 1" long jalapeno growing on it already! I also planted 5 bell pepper plants-2 green, 1 each of red, yellow, orange. Most of the peppers have flowered and are starting to grow peppers.

The self-pollinating dwarf Braeburn apple tree was full of blossoms last week. I have no idea if it will produce fruit this year, but it was exciting to see all those blossoms. The yellow delicious finally came out of dormancy (I was beginning to worry about it) and is leafing out.

The red raspberries are starting to get a slight pinkish tinge to them and are still quite small. I enlarged the raspberry patch, but most of the transplants didn't survive, so I will have to do that again. Not a problem; there are plenty of suckers growing. We have a nice little strawberry crop that we are reluctantly sharing with a chipmunk.

The cherry trees are looking good; one had some blossoms. Karl planted the locust trees today while I was at work. Last summer we had a 120-or-so year old oak tree die, and the city came and cut it down. (Thank goodness it was on the city's right-of-way!) We plan to put a tulip poplar in its place. There's a volunteer in the front flower bed that we'll move over there.

I feel now like I have the yard the way I want it. I can't think of anything more that we need or want. Well, we did talk about planting a patch of whatever critters like to eat, with the hopes of keeping them away from the flowerbeds. One day last week I was in the bedroom and heard rustling and a chewing noise. I looked out the bedroom window and there was Walter the woodchuck happily chomping on some knee-high sunflower plants. I'd love to have some milkweed for the monarchs. And then there's the matter of moving the peony bushes...ok, so maybe I'm not done!

Vegetables and Fruits

I have a love/hate relationship with this time of year. Each spring I get overly enthusiastic about gardening and buy too much stuff for the time I have. Last year we dug out nearly 20 yew shrubs that were 30 years old (no small task but clever Karl created a great stump removal method!) and I went crazy buying perennials and small shrubs to replace the yews. Amended the heavy clay soil, and planted, planted, planted, then ended up shoving the rest of the plants in the ground until "next year" when I could properly plant them. (Seems to me I did this a couple of years ago, too, and still have salvia, ox-eye daisy and something else growing in the far end of the strawberry bed...not their permanent home, to be sure!) I get so frustrated with myself about doing this every year. I need to pace myself and take care of what I've got before buying/trading more plants. Maybe I should make a deal with myself, like, "I can not buy any more plants until I have moved the peony plants that are scattered about the yard." That would stop the spending for the rest of this growing season!

I've spent as much time as I can outside getting the garden ready. So far I've planted broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, onions, and lettuce. The garlic I planted last fall is coming up. The red raspberry patch is going crazy again this year, although I don't anticipate as good a crop this year as last. Last year the weather cooperated and killed all the Japanese beetle larvae so there were very few eating at my raspberry plants. The wild black raspberries are looking healthy, too, but need to be moved. We dug these out of our wooded area and moved them over by the strawberry patch (temporarily!) a couple of years ago, and they are still there and the plants in the wooded area are as big as ever, too. The strawberry plants are looking fantastic and I will have to cover them with bird netting in the next couple of weeks, as the berries are starting to form. And I have to plant the asparagus plants I bought, but don't have a plan of where to put them (maybe by the strawberries with everything else!)

All the rain we've had lately has really helped these plants grow! You can water with the city water, but the plants really thrive with the rain. One of my 'someday' goals is to have a rain barrel.

For Mother's Day & my birthday Karl bought me a nice compost bin. Since we moved here we've been carrying our kitchen scraps to the brush pile but it doesn't get hot enough to make good compost. Last year I dug deep and got some nice looking compost, spread it on my vegetable garden and ended up with a nice assortment of weeds. Oops. Here's my new composter:

http://www.compostbins.com/compost-bins/compost-tumblers/rotocomposter12cubicfeetcompostbin.cfm?source=gbase&gbid=Roto_Composter_12_Cubic_Feet_Compost_Tumbler

I still need to make my soil mix and get the rest of the expanded-this-year garden planted. I make my own soil--1/3 peat, 1/3 compost, 1/3 vermiculite. Makes a wonderful, light soil that the plants do great in. I do raised bed gardening so no tilling necessary. Karl made me a rabbit-proof fence to go around the garden bed. Worked great against the rabbits, but Walter the Whistlepig did a fine job of eating through the fence last fall. And of course, I've already purchased the tomato plants, cucumbers, squash, peppers to put in the garden---the garden that's not ready.

I spent much of Thursday planting apple trees. I bought bare-root trees via mail from a recommended nursery. I bought 3 trees-- Arkansas Black, Yellow Delicious, and Braeburn. They're 3 - 4 feet tall and seem excited to be back in the ground, as they're starting to leaf out already. They'll be small (8 - 10 ft) trees. I also bought a couple of self-pollinating cherry trees--one sweet cherry and one pie cherry tree. Haven't planted them yet but maybe this weekend.

Also, I have started receiving bi-weekly deliveries from farmfreshdelivery.com I received my second delivery on Wednesday. This week I received potatoes, carrots, a large onion, a large bunch of broccoli, 13 apples, a couple of grapefruit, a lemon, half-dozen oranges, wax beans, asparagus, snap peas and spring mix lettuce. Here's why I like this service:

1. It's nice quality, mostly organic produce. In the past I haven't always bought organic, but would like to eat more organic food.

2. The food will be locally grown later in the season. Right now most of the food is from far way, some even from Mexico (not too crazy about that) but I really want to support local farmers in-season. I like the idea that my apples (not the ones in this week's box, but those that will come later) traveled only 10 miles to get to me rather than 2000 miles. (With any luck, in a couple of years my apples will travel only 20 feet!) In this order I got a pound of locally grown asparagus! YAY!

3. It will encourage me to try new recipes as I get veggies I wouldn't normally buy. I have no objections to wax beans, but honestly have never bought them. So now I have a pound or so of them and have already researched recipes.

4. It's flexible. A few days before my delivery I get an email telling me what will be in my box. I then can customize the order, removing items my family doesn't like and substituting what they do.

5. They also offer local meats, baked goods, jams, jellies, dairy items, and pretty much anything you'd like. One of my goals is to eat less meat and make the meat I do eat come from local sources.

6. In this week's box I got some tulips (for Mother's Day, perhaps?)

Happy Mother's Day to all you mothers!