Gardening

First I have new birdhouse perches. I know you aren't supposed to put perches on our birdhouses, but the Mr. discovered these really old nails in a couple of 2X4 pieces of lumber on our property. The wood was rotten and we were cutting up construction scraps for a friend who burns wood. We were just cleaning up and normally we would leave the nails, but these are OLD!

I went to a composting seminar a couple of weeks ago and I must say, it was interesting. We have so much material here as the previous owners NEVER cleaned up anything in the way of leaves, etc. I have a line of 40 plus lilacs from which I have been raking dead leaves. We have a pile of branches and pine needles which need to be put through a chipper. A gardener's delight!! Anyway, I now have a compost bin. We will see if I learned anything. One thing that we discovered is that composting here is different from other parts of the country, mostly because of the dry climate and the long cold winters. In fact, we got 12.7 inches of fluffy white today and it is supposed to continue through noon tomorrow. So much for gardening, but the moisture is marvelous!! I have 8 little cartons of seedlings popping through the soil and planted some chokecherry seeds....don't know if they will sprout, but what the heck!! We have birds galore in our yard. Doves, woodpeckers and robins by the score. I am not kidding! I have never seen so many robins. There at least 6 rose bushes that we had to literally chop to about 10 inches and these are BIG rose bushes. They came half-way up the side of the house and were sacrificed so that we could paint last fall. Guess what...they are all budded! We were going to move them, but they are so huge that we were afraid to try this spring, so they will stay where they are.

This is the compost bin and I have been saving table scraps for months in a bucket in the garage. When I was growing up we did the same thing, but it was "slop" for the pigs. I keep calling it my slop bucket and a lot of people I knew had one. We were "green" long before it became "the thing to do". We didn't have paper towels (used rags), Kleenex (hankies were washed), lawn fertilizer (used manure from the barnyard, and sold the extra), grew all of our veggies, made clothes from flour sacks, hung our clothes on the line to dry and so on. What I would give now to have a chance to "clean out the corral", a job I hated as a kid. But I will struggle to put in a few veggies and some flowers if the snow ever stops.

``"Gardens are the result of a collaboration between art and nature."~~Penelope Hobhouse