Saturday, April 19, 2008, 23:00
Red Sails & Spring Flowers
It still doesn't seem much like spring around here. The temperature stayed in the 40s for most of Thursday afternoon and all of Friday, and it is cloudy and gray again on Saturday with a high temperature in the afternoon of 48 degrees with a light wind out of the north.
The other day, when I really wanted to do something that felt "spring-like" -- I retrieved a flower pot from the basement to plant some Red Sails lettuce. The large flower pot had, at one time, held a mum. Usually I have pretty good luck with mums, but this particular plant did not survive for very long. So, I pulled out the dead plant and put the pot in the basement.
Over the winter, the soil in the pot dried out completely. I took the pot outside and, for two days, periodically poured water over it so that the soil would become moistened enough to allow my Red Sails seeds to germinate.
Thursday morning, the soil in the pot felt just nicely moist. I brought the package of lettuce seed outside with me, sprinkled a few seeds in the pot and lightly covered the seeds with fresh potting soil.
I need not have worried about moistening the soil in the pot and taking such pains to carefully pour water over it to moisten the dirt.
It has been raining since shortly after I planted the lettuce seeds.
Not a hard rain. Not by any means. But fairly steady. A light drizzle that has produced enough moisture to turn the horse pastures into mud again. And just when Isabelle and Kajun were starting to be able to walk around with sinking up to their ankles, too.
I have been working on piling up some of the muck where I fed Kajun hay during the winter. He did not clean his hay up very well much of the time, and when the snow melted and the ground turned to mud, there was a layer of about four inches of wet, mucky hay. I know that if the hay is not picked up out of there, either the ground will never dry out completely, or else whenever it rains, that area will turn into a quagmire again in short order.
It's a good thing I bought new rubber boots a little while ago. I am sometimes sinking up to my ankles in mud when I'm slogging around in the horse pastures. Saturday morning I managed to finish digging out the mucky hay and putting in a pile. When the mud dries out, either I will haul it out to the field with the wheelbarrow, or else Randy can try to get in there with the tractor and scoop it up with the bucket.
One thing about it, though -- at least it is not below zero anymore. But it seems that we have traded the below zero weather for cloudy, damp weather. It never rains much at one time -- probably only a few tenths of an inch. But the sky stays cloudy, and just when we'd all like to see some sun after a long, cold winter.
The weather pattern this spring resembles the weather pattern during the winter. It would become cloudy and would snow a couple of inches -- just enough to make the roads slick. But then it would stay cloudy for days. While we received two inches of snow up here, the southern part of the state would get 20 inches. Now in the spring, the sky turns cloudy and stays cloudy for days. We get a few tenths of an inch of rain, but the southern part of the state is dealing with spring floods. . .
Spring Flowers
Last fall before the first hard freeze, I brought the cemetery pot home and set it in the basement near the window. I have been watering it throughout the winter, and lately I have noticed that the green-and-white vining ivy-type plant and the Dusty Miller have been starting grow and were leaning toward the window.
Friday morning I set the cemetery pot outside to help the plants become acclimated to being outside again. When I picked up the pot, I was startled to see blue flowers on the green-and-white vining ivy-type plant. I never knew that the vining plant ever got any kind of flowers at all! But there it is, with charming blue flowers.
I suppose at some point I will have to start trimming the Dusty Miller and the trailing vines in the pot so they will grow more lush and not be leggy and spindly. I am hoping that I can coax the plants into looking fairly decent by the time Memorial Day arrives when I will be putting the pot back on the cemetery by the graves of my mom and dad. If I can't get it to look good, I can always replant the pot. But I would rather have the existing plants, if I could. Whenever I replant the pot, it takes half the summer for the plants to grow enough to fill in the pot and look good again.
LeAnn R. Ralph
Thursday, April 17, 2008, 14:05
Calm Again
Wednesday the wind was still blowing at 30 mph out of the south/southeast under a hazy sky with watery sunshine. I took Charlie for a walk across two of the neighbor's properties and back out to the road. I hated to do it, but I left Pixie home. It would have been too much for her injured leg. Charlie has been laying around so much this winter that I figured it was high time we got out for a good walk. During the winter, it was either so cold none of us wanted to be outside or it was so snowy and icy that it was difficult to walk without suffering bodily injury.
Charlie and I walked north, so the wind was at our backs. By the time we got to the second neighbor's property and were behind the woods, we enjoyed a much-needed respite from the wind. There was still quite a bit of snow on the north side of the woods. We were out of the wind for maybe 15 or 20 minutes of our 45-minute walk.
The old road we followed along the woods is the road that used to lead to the house where my aunt lived at the time my dad met my mother. Dad came up to this area to stay with his sister. And that's when he met Mom. There is nothing left of the house now except a pile of old, gray weathered boards.
When I was a kid, the house was still standing although it was in pretty bad shape then already after not being lived in for a number of years. All that remains of the farmstead now is the pile of boards from the house, a silo pit and the barn foundation. During the summer, you can really tell where the barnyard was, though, because the grass is tall and thick and lush right in that spot.
When I was a kid and we were over on the place where I live now checking the crops or baling hay, Dad would sometimes want to take a break, and then we would go to the dirt road leading to the old house to look for dewberries or blackberries or wild raspberries. Even at that time, the farmland there was abandoned and going back to the woods.
Nowadays, it has become the property of a couple who built a house close to the township road. They have mowed trails all over the property and have cut trails through the woods. Most of the property is forest cropland, so there is public access to it. The area is rather wild and remote and quite beautiful with open meadows and hills and woods.
I love walking along the old road leading to the old house. It makes me feel very close to my dad and brings back so many memories of warm summer days and the sound of bees buzzing in the wildflowers and the lemony smell of lavender bergamot and the taste of blackberries and dew berries and raspberries. And the coolness of the shaded side of the old road on a hot summer day when we needed a break from baling hay. . .
When I went outside first thing Thursday morning with Pixie, I was very glad to see that the wind had died down. Maybe I will be able to hang some clothes outside to dry without the clothes ending up on the ground five minutes after I put them out on the railing!
Lilacs
Every day, I find myself checking the buds on the lilac bushes to see if I can detect any hints of purple. If I can find hints of purple, that will tell me whether the lilacs are going to have flowers this spring. So far, I have not seen one tiny bit of purple. Maybe the lilacs won't have any flowers this year seeing as it was so terribly dry last year.
LeAnn R. Ralph
