Why I Oughta...

Posting a couple of photos in the [ garden diary ] to start the new year to mark where I've spread out some of our hardwood ash in the beds in the backyard.  The two photos below in this post show the thin layer that I've scattered on top of the snow in the south bed in the backyard from the Oakleaf Hydrangeas to the newly planted Hicks Yews .  I've done this in the past (bringing out the wood ash from our fireplaces) and scattered it around the yard.  In 2019, I applied a thin layer to the base of our Frans Fontaine Columnar Hormbeam trees . This year, I had a bucket-and-a-half and chose the south beds to amend the soil over there.  Currently, it looks a little strange.  Grey patches on top of pure white snow.  But, once we get a melt/thaw then freeze cycle - or...another snowfall, I'm thinking this stuff will disappear from view. The word on the Web is mixed in regards to adding ash to the garden, yard and compost bins.  It seems that in a limited way, there's no

I've done these ' Christmas Haul ' posts over the years where I show off some of the gifts that I have received from family and friends at the holidays.  In 2011, I posted a couple of Beatles magnets that I received .  In 2018, I posted a photo of a bird seed bell .  For 2019, Nat's folks gave me a heated bird bath for the backyard .  Last year, I received a gift that sat RIGHT at the intersection of two of my loves:  Disney pins and jigsaw puzzles .  And, I also put a new pair of chainsaw protection gloves to work in the Spring.   This year, I received some fun gifts from Nat and the kids and as part of a family gift exchange, Nat's brother gifted me a few things for the yard.  I mean...what else would I want, right? The first thing they gave me is here, below.  A double pack of Rapiclip Soft Wire Tie (Light Duty) espalier training (padded) wire.  Each of the spools is 16 feet long.   I've posted about this padded training espalier wire before and have found i

Well, we didn't have Christmas flowers.  But, we sure do have New Year's flowers in two of our containers.  We came home from a long weekend to find out that both the trio of Red Lion Amaryllis bulbs and the red and white striped Sunshine Nymph have bloomed and opened up wide.  The last time that I shared photos of these was on December 28th , so in just a week they went from "beginning to open" to "full bloom" that you can see below.   The Lemon Star Amaryllis (our first green-colored bulb) is at the front of the table in the photo above and you can see that it has grown to be the tallest of the flower stems (Despite being watered with the alcohol/water mix), but the furthest behind in terms of blooming.  Thinking we'll see that one open up in the next week or so. Below are a few photos that I've taken over the last few days of the Sunshine Nymph flowers.  They're quite striking and have red petals with a white stripe down the middle.  The pet

We have a couple of - what we call - "nests" up in some of the larger, mature trees in our backyard.  I say that we 'call them' that because, frankly, we don't know what they are.  They're these large, clumps of leaves that exist up near the top of the trees (in a crotch) that sure look like a nest, but for all I know could just be a clump of leaves that didn't fall down. Or, that was...until I saw something recently up there.   On a recent afternoon, I saw good-sized hawk swoop across our yard and land right next to one of these nests.  Here, below is a photo showing that hawk perched right on top of said nest.  Can't quite make out what is going on?  Here, below, is a slightly zoomed in version of the photo: Still can't quite figure things out?  Here's an even-more zoom'd in version that I've annotated below: Well....that seems to settle things for me.  A little bit. This is, most certainly, a nest.   But, a nest for whom?   Was the h

Back in November, I posted a couple of photos and talked about the process of turning a collection of Black Walnuts into a homemade 1 scratchmade wood stain.  In that post , I laid out the steps from collecting the walnuts to bottling the stain - and about midway is where we pick things up in this post.  Six weeks of macerating in the five gallon bucket with a little bit of evaporation ended up yielding about 3 gallons or so of material.  A quick stir with a stick every once in a while and I had a thick, black syrup.  Along with a mass of walnut hulls and bits. I grabbed a piece of cheesecloth that Nat had on hand and a couple of rubber bands and donned a set of disposable gloves.  Knowing this is, indeed, stain, I opted to deal with the process out in the yard.  You can see the setup below.  The five-gallon bucket on the right, topped with cheesecloth strainer.  A smaller, one gallon finish bucket in the middle and a couple of pints of rubbing alcohol (91%) to thin the syrup out.  I

The boy had a proper Christmas train setup this year with the basement being done.  (or mostly done)  You can see his setup (a large oval) with a steam O-gauge locomotive running with some rolling stock behind it.  The tubs in the corner contain a few more pieces of track and cars that we didn't get to this year, but it still is a Christmas tradition.  My Dad set up a Christmas train with me.  And I'm setting up a Christmas train with the KotBTs.   Here's last year's post - 2020 Christmas train .   In our new house, this marks four years - 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021 (now).   There's a very short period of time these days for a boy to be interested in these model trains.  With our train being O Gauge (larger than the most popular - these days at least - HO), I think that also limits the potential in these trains.  HO (smaller) can pack A LOT more into a layout with the same footprint and the hobby is more well-formed for adults at that scale.  You can go to hobby shop

I was thumbing through a Disney World 50th Anniversary coffee table book at the Downers Grove Library last week and I was (of course) drawn to the early days pages.  From the land acquisition (Walt was involved then) to the opening of the Preview Center, the ephemera that they show is pretty interesting.  One of the standouts was this Florida Disney World balloon logo that features the Disney World glove as the center of the Mickey ear balloons. They've moved away from the Vacation Kingdom monicker, but with the 50th Anniversary merchandise that came out this fall, it seems that (at least part of) Disney is leaning into nostalgia.