The marina

Just realised I hadn't posted any pics of the marina, a couple of streets away. These are from this weekend. There are three marinas in the village, but this is the only one I know so far!

Snakes on a blog. Well... one snake on a blog. A flat one.

It was in the street all curled up and squashed and the wrong way up. I lifted it by its tail and laid it flat. Flatter than it already was that is. It's been steamrollered. Ironed.

I think it is just a garter snake, but bigger than any I saw in Sac.

Look at the kitchen!!!!

Sunday evening at the beach

Just as the sun was going down, we went to the beach. Few people, still warm. Water calm and turquoise.

Poison ivy... treeeeee

I was in the back just cutting a few vines so that they will go brown and dry and I can stomp them in a few weeks... saw a few poison ivy leaves, avoided them (Walter at the beach showed me the blisters on his hands this morning, now I know exactly what it can do)... and then noticed a couple of intertwined trees. One of the twining trees was the marsh elm. One of them was poison ivy, and it's trunk was as thick as the real tree. It just had little roots growing out of it. All the way up. Yuck. It doesn't give me blisters, it just gives me the creeps.

Radiators

Saturday, I went to Home Depot and bought what I thought were replacement covers for the living room baseboard radiators. These radiators are like bare pipes with a million metal fins sticking out from them. When they are installed, they have tidy clean covers on them, but all the houses I saw while house-hunting in New York had tatty, broken covers. So I would very much like to make ours nead-and-tidy. You can buy really nice--and really expensive--custom metal or wood covers, but for now I just want something clean.

So I bought four six-foot, one four-foot cover and two end pieces.

The end pieces were both right-end pieces so I messed up there (well of course there are different ends for left versus right).

Opened the box for the four-foot length and discovered that I would not only have to remove the old cover, but also the finned hot-water pipe. No way that is going to happen this week. Then had the brilliant idea of using the new front pieces of the cover to replace the old tatty one. They didn't fit... but I found out how to remove the old ones, and how to re-place them correctly. So that they work.

This morning, I returned the covers to Home Depot, (180$ cash), and bought heat-proof spray paint (four cans, total 20$) (I liked that). Then I went into the garden center and spent 80$ on new ceramic pots (which may well crack in the winter freeze), a Shasta daisy, and a load of purple, white and peach pansies. So much for saving money.

City

In the city

Was in New York for a few days. Good trip. I have to make the effort to hop on the train more often: I like the city, the energy, the buzz...

The building with the carvings and the dragons is the Petrossian restaurant on W. 58th Street. The stonework is amazing... one day I may have to go taste the caviar there.

The finished deck--almost

I just have to stain it now, when the wood has seasoned a little. Then add brackets for hanging baskets for planting next spring.

It's not finished yet

... but hopefully by this time next week... maybe...

The way they met up the kitchen tile and the hardwood floor looks good. The floor is mostly still covered in cardboard to protect it until everything has been installed. Countertops arrive next Monday, a few other things need to be finished before they are installed, and then once all that is done the appliances can be hooked up and we can eat properly again.

Egret

Now I remember why I bought the big zoom lens. I also remember why I bought the tripod. Now I just have to remember to use it... once I can find it.

Breeze and blue sky

The sun is shining brightly. The sky is pale blue, with a few small clouds. The breeze is cool and there is an almost-red tree in my garden. I'm told this is unusually early, and winter may be long this year.

We will see. I hope, before winter arrives, that I'll be able to move the stuff out of my bedroom and get into my closet for a few pullovers.

Osprey

I saw an osprey this morning. It has been raining all night, no-one was around when we went for our morning walk, just a dumped bag of rubbish in the road near the wetlands, and a nice lady sitting in her car near the little beach. We took the rubbish to the beach bin and the lady made a fuss of Fury.

On the way back past the wetlands, there was the osprey. He hung in the sky like a tern, then dived, then hovered again. He was bigger than a tern... I had never seen an osprey before, wondered if he was maybe a marsh harrier.... but then he dived, splash, right into the water, white tummy showing, splash, did he catch the fish? I don't think so, because he hovered again and dove back in.

Here's WhatBird information about ospreys: http://identify.whatbird.com/obj/39/overview/Osprey.aspx

Summer has ended

Jade said that a few days ago, and I thought, no... it's just hiding. But she was right: it feels different. The air has changed. The blackbirds are back.

One lone, bedraggled starling is sitting on the lamp post.

Floor is finished...

... and it is beautiful. Will post a picture when I've removed all the cardboard that's protecting it from contractors' feet, appliances etc. But it is really really nice. Light oak.

Floored again

Today the new floor is being installed. It took about 15 minutes for them to install the under-floor, then they started laying the prefinished oak... and then they left for lunch.

English visitors

At least, their ancestors were English. Or Scots. Or Irish. Apparently, starlings are not native to the USA. But they sure have made it home.

I must remember

I must remember to write down the plants I put into the garden.

This weekend, I planted an Itea virginica "Merlot", or Virginia Sweetspire, in the front garden. I have also planted a small yew, and a Japenese privet, both in large pots in the front yard.

September 11th again

It is raining today. And I am enjoying the rain.

The (American) robins are becoming braver and have been standing on the deck railing. They can't get into the bird feeder as they are too big (not like English robins which can also be seen following gardeners around (hoping for worms) and on Christmas cards).

Somehow the rain makes things quieter. It is a gentle rain today.

Bits and pieces

Northern Mockingbird sitting on garden fence. And walking over the lawn flashing white feathers at American Robins who are crowding the lawn there are so many of them. Starlings too.

Guess who reseeded the lawn Saturday with top-price grass seed? Guess who's feeling stupid?

(I hung up a bird feeder full of nice songbird seeds too, but they are totally ignoring it. Grass seed must be the gourmet food.)

Alvin the turtle has gone walkabout. I took him out of the pond yesterday because I was worried he was a land turtle and was drowning. He is somewhere in the raised garden--I fixed the fence--but is hiding.

Hallucinations

I am starting to hallucinate about fresh vegetables and salads straight from the farm stand... newly-grilled steak/chicken/fish... my own cooking... a kitchen sink...

Don't even have a refridgerator since Saturday. A young hard-working couple took away the white fridge, stove and dishwasher. It took about three hours in all as everything had to be carried down from upstairs. The 'fridge was the most challenging. In the end we took the doors off and removed one of the sliding doors from the office, and they wheeled it out across the deck and down that way. I was very helpful and held the flashlight.

Now the challenge is to get the new fridge up from downstairs. No-one seems very keen on helping to move it. I have left a call with Irish Jack's moving service... hope to hear from him soon.

Sunday is good

Have been doing good work today--stuff that really needed doing. Have fixed the fence all around the raised garden. Too many children finding their way unattended into backyard pools. They would have to climb a four-foot wall before being able to find way through broken fence, but it needed fixing, and now it's done. Not the prettiest job ever, but one day the whole fence--and possibly the retaining wall--will need completely replacing, so this is one of the times when "OK for now" will do. Sometimes I demand perfect. This is not one of them.

Also been playing in mud. The so-called "dry well" for the grey-water-from-the=washing-machine type of mud. It's not a dry well at all, it's the end of a pipe that goes nowhere. Plan is either to have someone dig and install a real dry well (bit daft seeing as the water table is at best a foot below the surface), or build and plant a grey-water wetland. That idea appeals much more: you plant plants that naturally love wet conditions and which filter and clean the water. Have to do more research. Need a solution pretty rapidly, before the winter sets in. I wonder how often the previous owners did laundry?

Meet Alvin

My neighbours found him on the road and brought him to the pond--and named him Alvin. He seemed to enjoy swimming all the way round the pond, and I later saw him diving really deep and soaring with the fish.

But I think he may be an Eastern Box Turtle, and they are not purely aquatic, so I have put some more rocks into the shallow part of the pond so that he has somewhere to sit in the dry. (All the shallow part of the pond will be dry again by morning--it's still leaking from the waterfall--so he'll be fine. And he might be another species of turtle that is fully aquatic anyway.)

Can anyone help identify Alvin please?

(Alvin reminds me, Al's real name is Alvin, Al, where are you now?)

All hands on deck!!

The deck is almost finished!!! I can have tea out there in the morning!!! :-)

The railing is a little higher than it was before--to be safe--and the walkway a little bit wider--safer too and nicer. Now I have to find some nice wooden patio furniture.

A reminder

... just in case you'd forgotten, this is what the kitchen used to look like!

Noise

Noisiest day of remodel so far. The spackle guys (cheerful bunch) are here again and they have some sort of combined sander/vacuum cleaner for smoothing down the walls and ceiling. I appreciate what they are doing but I hope it is finished really, really quickly.

Will never be able to hear the Home Depot delivery guy when he knocks on the door.

Kitchen! Kitchen! (nearly)

The kitchen is really coming along. The cabinets are installed (do you like the handles?), the floor is tiled and grouted, all the wiring and plumbing is ready for the appliances to be installed. The dishwasher will be delivered tomorrow, then the only things missing are the countertops (still to be measured) and the built-in microwave (on special order from Lowes).

Fury is, I think, a little fed up with the floors... but the new wood floor will be here next week! And the deck should be finished within a couple of days!

And then... let the work begin. I have to paint, trim and do all the rest of the non-structural work. That will keep me out of trouble for a while.

Goldenrod

Today, the hedgerows are suddenly full of flowering golden rod. It's the plant with the yellow flower that can be used to dye fabric. Yellow or green or brown, depending on the mordant.

At least, that's the plant that I recognised as I walked past the tall grassy plants and small, yellow flowers. But Wikipedia's photo is a completely different plant. And encyclopedia Brittanica says that there are about 100 different goldenrods (genus Solidago of the family Asteraceae). I checked my old faithful, "Wayside and Woodland Blossoms", by Edward Step, F.L.S., 1909... but that's from England and this is New York State. Anyway it wasn't in Step's index either.

Am I imagining things? I swear we learned about this wild flower in the Girl Guides... no, not imagination, just one of a hundred different flowers for Wikipedia to choose from, and it they didn't choose the one that seems to be growing on both sides of the Atlantic.

Bulbs

I have ordered bulbs (to go with the Home Depot stash in the hall). This is what I am asking Breck's to send me:

Old-fashioned Bleeding Heart
Golden Queen Trollius
Two sorts of Allium, Azure and Roseum
Giant daffodils for naturalizing
English bluebells for under the trees! I hope they grow!!!
English wood hyacinths
Lily-of-the-valley

From Home Depot, I have white tulips, narcissus and some white/peach daffodils. I am going to spend a whole day planting them all in a few weeks.

... and the things you see

So when Fury and I take a walk, we see some interesting things. She has not forgotten Rodney the Musk Rat (I think she'll be looking for him every time we go past the house). She hasn't forgotten the deer (she sniffs after them at every spot we encountered them). And tonight, she saw something else, and--happily for all concerned--completely missed the other sight.

We went to the little beach near the house, walked past Rodney's home (tug of war, I won), walked past the house with the deer alley (roadside was more interesting to sniff, the deer had been there), and then onto the little beach. The wind has been blowing all day, and from the west, so it was coming towards us from the official town beach. The tide was half-in-half-out, so there was enough sand to walk on, so we headed along from the wetlands beach towards the marked-off-for-swimming beachlet. The wind was rustling the reeds and Fury had already been watching for ghosts.

Rounding the first corner, Fury saw something in the undergrowth before I did. He had his back to us and was huddled in his black/green feathers. It was a cormorant, just sitting in the mini-sand-dune among the reeds and undergrowth. He turned orange-beaked to look at us and extended his left wing. I wondered if he was hurt--surely it wasn't his usual resting place? Fury wanted to play but was persuaded to sit down. Then the bird stretched his right wing, refolded them both, and hustled, ungracefully, off to the water, half flying half running. And sat and bobbed with the wavelets and the wind.

Fury was so intent on dragging me backwards to the cormorant and into the water, that she wasn't looking ahead.

We rounded the next bend and I did a quick about-turn. There was Sex on the Beach, and it wasn't cocktail hour. A quick glimpse of bare knees and a blue-jean'd behind.

I'm glad Fury didn't see or hear them, because she would have kicked up a fuss and I wouldn't have been able to race-walk away without seeing people's faces. I don't think they heard me approach, because the wind and the reeds were louder than footsteps on wet sand. But it would have been hilarious had Fury gone to investigate... imagine being in the passion of love/lust when a big white panting dog gets in the way...

No wonder the cormorant had turned his back.

The things you find

So far, in the briar patch:

- a softball, a plastic baseball (broken), a multicoloured tennis ball, a kiddies basketball
- a sort of frisbee thing
- six or seven beer bottles
- several beer cans, an iced tea can
- a small whiskey bottle (empty)
- a large whiskey bottle (full of stagnant water)
- a broken glass vase
- three yogurt pots
- several plastic bags.

This morning, right under the poison ivy, I thought I found a nice big white moss-covered rock. I poked it with a stick to be sure. It was sickeningly soft. Looking closer, I saw it was made of a woven fabric.

Pushing away nightmares of body parts in sacks and abandoned animals, I ignored it for a few hours. Cleared some more dry reeds around it.

It was an old, rotten, sofa cushion. (The fabric was disintegrating, but the synthetic stuffing was like new. The condition of the plastics I'm digging up makes me want to scream at our pollution of the planet, but I still use plastic garbage bags and buy detergent in plastic bottles).

I peeled the cushion away from the earth, and beneath it, pink and pointed and naked, were two huge reed baby shoots, looking for the sky. Like asparagus in spring. Like bamboo in Japan.

Plantings and poison ivy

Eventually reached the shiny, green leaves in the heart of the briar--and yes, they are poison ivy. I took a branch to Forge River Nursery to have it checked out. Yes, we are definitely sure, it's poison ivy. So, probably, are many of the dead vines I've been hauling out. If you don't hear from me again, the Poison Ivy has taken me.

So I treated it to a nice shower with RoundUp. Should toast it a gentle shade of brown within a couple of weeks. Then I have to cut it all down and wait for it to show up again, then repeat the treatment ad infinitum.

I did some planting today:

- three chrysanthemums, Chrysanthemum morifolium, in pots: two pink and one bi-colour, red in the center, yellow petals
- two more junipers, one Juniperus squamata "Blue Star", one low-lying greener dwarf whose pot was labelled Large Leaf Hydrangea, but I beg to disagree (Home Depot stock)
-two willows from Forge River nursery; a French Pussy Willow Salix discolor, which has been planted in the new ground to the left of the front door looking from the street and a Dappled Willow, Salix integra "Hakuro-nishiki', which is still in its pot but which will have a home in the very wet corner near the street.

I will probably need to keep both willows well pruned--coppiced, almost--so that they stay shrub-like rather than tree-like. the French Pussy Willow (someone had a sense of humour) will grow up to eighteen feet high if left to its own devices, and the Dappled Willow up to twenty feet with a spread of fifteen to twenty. Both should flourish in the damp to wet conditions of this low border. I hope the conifers will be OK. I may have to lift them and put them into raised beds, but for now we just have to see.

Everywhere that the brush was cut down a few weeks ago, the wild hibiscus is popping up.

Labor Day Weekend = plenty of labour

I have been busy. Very. It's now seven-thirty at night and I'm ready to sleep. For twenty-four hours or so...

Spent the past two days clearing, cutting, stomping, pulling and carrying and tearing and mulch-shovelling-and-barrowing. Cleared away a large patch of "brush" in front of the house. That brown garden in the pictures above? It was all a ten-foot-high briar patch on Friday.

When Jose cut down three feet on the side facing the house, he cut into the overgrowth of briar, wild roses and everything-else, and more had died off and was brown... so I jumped in with both wellies. (What's the most important tool when clearing brush? Your wellies, of course!)

Cleared the patch, pulled out a load of Virginia Creeper roots, cut down wild roses. Believe it or not, all of the rose growth came from about five sets of roots. I have given them a good hard pruning and hopefully they will regrow. Buried in the briar, I found about six baby privet bushes--at least I think they are privet--all around the perimeter of what is now the beginning of the front garden. So those have stayed too. I gave them a gentle pruning; they were all a little leggy. I wonder if they were planted and then overwhelmed by the weeds? Or if they magically seeded themselves on the edge of the briar?

Built a small flower bed from some of the spare deck wood/old deck. Filled it with several bags of topsoil and mulch. Planted a couple of plants from my neighbour's garden; her beautiful big plant had sprouted babies. I hope they survive, they went all floppy within half an hour of being dug up, carried across the street and immediately replanted. Also planted a small blue low-growing conifer. There's another, different conifer on the back of the truck but it's going to have to wait until tomorrow because right now, I've run out of gas... the tank is empty.

P.S. The front of the house doesn't need painting. The photos look as if the paint is peeling off the white siding. It's not. It's not painted. It's vinyl siding, and this is the north side of the house... and it needs a good power wash. Soon!

The deck is flat

The floor of the deck is in place! It looks so much better than the old deck. It will be just the same shape as the old one--I hadn't even thought about making it different until one of the indoor builders suggested it--but budget dictates it stays like this for now. The walkway to the lawn, however, will be twice as wide as the old one.

This week the walkway should be made and the railings put up and everything finished by Thursday. We'll see! Can't wait to have my early-morning tea on the deck again.

Rodney the Musk Rat

Fury met Rodney the Short-Sighted Elderly Musk Rat a few days ago--and again this evening. I know the rat's name only because the neighbour, on whose lawn Rodney likes to sit, told me. Rodney's body is about a foot long and he has a long fat tail. His little face looks battle-worn and he doesn't walk very fast. He waddles. This evening he was sitting on the lawn right next to the edge of the road, minding his own business, like an old man leaning on his walking stick and taking in the evening air.

Fury wanted to play... I had to drag her away.