Crazy Yard!

Our yard is going crazy right now! I took all these photos yesterday afternoon; by this afternoon everything changed (and I got home after the light changed - boo.) Hopefully things will be lovely tomorrow morning before work.

A small sampling (click on photo to embiggen, right click to open original photo at Flickr):

Bug or Flower?

Phlox and Peonies

Lupine (?) and Clematis

BUG!

And because no photo post would be complete without pictures of the poochies, I give you Miss Pooch and Still Life: Bliss with Ball.

What does your yard/porch/patio look like in the early summer?

Heat Wave Saturday

It just got really hot here today. Yuck. But despite that, Amy and I are hard at work shooting pucks for our hockey team challenge - 1000 shots in the month of June.

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We’ve got a pretty nifty setup this year. On the ground is a sheet of plywood, and clipped onto the top of it is a piece of plexiglass. We have 21 pucks. On the chain-link fence you’ll see part of my Christmas present from Amy - puck targets. We keep all that stuff in our front porch and simply drag it across the street when we want to shoot. I had to mow the grass between the “ice” and the “net” today, but it works!

Our garden is coming along nicely. I think we’ll be able to transplant the tomatoes and peppers by the middle of next week. Here are our Amish Snap Peas (all veggies other than our okra are from Seed Savers Exchange):

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Our purple clematis is taking over the front porch. I don’t mind because frankly, it’s gorgeous. I hope it keeps blooming for a long time.

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And Maggie guards the house while I sit and take photos of Amy shooting pucks (and myself…)

Hope you all are staying cool. We’re off to do a little more yardwork, and then I think we may try to go see a movie in a cool, cool theater.

Babies!

We have babies! Nine little tomato seedlings are poking their heads out of the dirt in our mini-greenhouse in the kitchen. I anticipate 3 more in the next day, and then we’ll repeat the process with the ones we planted later in about 10 days.

Not sure how long it takes for our peppers to germinate, but we’re waiting anxiously on those too.

I haven’t taken photos yet. I should probably do that this afternoon.

(Lack of recent updating due to being nailed with a nasty, N-A-S-T-Y bug almost all of last week. Thanks, god-daughters, for passing your stomach flu on to me and Amy.)

Soccer, Gardens, and Dogs

As I’m sure you can garner from reading this blog, I mostly play hockey in my non-work time. But in case you’re wondering, sometimes I do other things too.

Before I get to those other things, hockey. A bunch of us got a call last Monday saying, “Hey! There’s a tournament in town this weekend and we need another team. Want to play?” So of course we did. We ended up playing with different people in all 4 games. We won our first game, lost the two middle games, and in a hard battle, ended up losing the consolation game. That said, we achieved our three goals for the tournament: we had fun, we played hard, and no one got (seriously) hurt.

And now, the other things I sometimes do.

Two weeks ago I went to Amy’s soccer game and took about 400 photos (of which only 3 or 4 were really good, but about 40 were somewhat non-crappy.)

That’s Amy diving for the ball there. Lucky goalies get to touch the ball with their hands. If I could hang out in the net and touch the soccer ball with my hands I’d consider playing. As it is, all that running around and only using feet to control the ball? Not my thing.

We also garden and play in the yard a fair amount. Today after work, for example, we tore out half of the bamboo-like plant that we just realized was killing our incredibly gorgeous, super-old lilac. (Is it bad to admit that I didn’t know we had a lilac on our property? Probably, since we’ve lived here for 2 years now. I just assumed it was our neighbors’.)

We also got seeds for our garden from Seed Savers.

Top row: Bloody Butcher tomatoes, Moonglow tomatoes, Tarahumara White sunflowers
Middle row: Dragon carrots, tango lettuce, Wenk’s Yellow Hots peppers
Bottom row: Red Swan beans, Amish snap peas

The perennials are in full bloom!

And of course, I’m eternally amused and entertained by Maggie and Otter.

And lest I forget, I want to say hello to Chanda, who made Steph call me so I’d update this blog.  Thanks a ton - you inspired me to pull photos off my camera and get them onto Flickr, which is the main reason why I haven’t written lately.

What I did on Marathon Monday

1. Went to watch the Boston Marathon with Amy and the dogs. Liver treats work wonders in keeping the little dog calm when motorcycles and dogs go past her. Wonder of wonders! Watched the wheelchair racers and the men’s and women’s elite runners. Stuck around until we saw Lance Armstrong go past, then headed home.

2. Went to the Landscape Depot with Amy. Purchased 2 pallets of Pennsylvania fieldstone to be delivered later in the day. Five tons of rocks costs a lot more than you might imagine.

3. Went to Windy-Lo Nursery with Amy. She picked out a white birch tree and 2 red twig dogwood bushes for a corner of the yard. Loaded them into the Subaru and headed home.

4. Planted the dogwoods and tree.

5. Was amazed when fieldstone was delivered. CRASH BANG SMASH rocks in the yard. Surprisingly heavy.

6. Helped Amy figure out where to put grass strips that we took out of the area where we want to put in a vegetable garden. Spent a fair amount of time watering dirt and watering transplanted grass.

7. Built a small stone wall around new area of vegetable garden. In doing so, moved approx. 2.5 tons of stone in 30-pound increments. That’s the equivalent of picking up my little dog a few hundred times, and setting her down, trying to place her so that she doesn’t wobble. (okay, now I know I’m tired, because that image is making me giggle hysterically.)

8. Ordered a large pizza and watched the Bruins lose in game 7 to Montreal. Le sigh….

But here is the result of the day’s work:

Should be a nice-looking vegetable garden once we get a whole mess of manure delivered and put in there. The stones in the middle will come up when we get the compost and then will go back where they are, to be the walkway through this small garden. We need them there, though, since the electric fence which keeps the dogs from charging to the street runs right there. Ask me how I know this……..

Off to bed with me. Stones make my bones tired.