Homestead Report 32: April 20, 2018

April 21, 2018April 21, 2018 / jablyth / 1 Comment

What a tough month! I’m overwhelmed at every level. When I watch the news, the deep dishonestly, corruption, and incompetence at the national level blows me away. At a local level, I find that my role on the selectboard is leaving me feeling drained. And then there is the fact that it keeps on snowing! I finally planted peas anyway (April 18, in the warm sunshine).

Lower garden with pea trellis yesterday morning.

I am normally anxious to start planting seeds in early March, but this year it just seemed too early. Finally I got some seeds in pots on April 7… the bulk of the tomatoes, peppers, and flowers. They just sat there in the cold for a week and half until I stuck the flats under the woodstove; now they are starting to sprout, since we’re still having regular fires. I had started a few tomatoes and broccoli to test seed about a month earlier, and they’re under grow lights now.

Lettuce

tomato seedings

tomato seedlings

broccoli

The flowering orchids have brought me joy, and about a week ago a begonia that my mom gave us started blooming too.

white orchid

pink orchid

begonia

Outside, crocus! Every year I am so grateful for these first cheery little guys. So brave.

And the spring beauties are up (I’ve seen a few blooms elsewhere, but the ones in our yard are feeling shy). Harbinger of Spring (Erigenia bulbosa) is blooming, as are the female flowers of our cultivated hazelnuts. The male catkins still haven’t released pollen, so we’re hoping the female flowers can hang on for a while longer in order to make nuts.

Harbinger of Spring

Hazelnut (female)

Winter wonderland? April 19.

Homestead Report 31: March 20, 2018

March 20, 2018 / jablyth / 2 Comments

Today might be the first day of spring, but we still have about a foot of snow on the ground with the possibility of more to come tomorrow.

icy stream

reflections on ice

Yesterday we took a walk down to the old quarry to visit the local porcupine neighborhood and see who else was ambling around in the past week.

porcupine trail near the quarry

Charley and I at the quarry

Turns out, in addition to porcupines steadily walking on well-beaten paths, a bobcat bounded around the quarry, daintily made its way across the snow crust, toes splayed wide like snowshoes, and meandered through the blackberry thickets in our woods.

bobcat bounding up

bobcat bounding down

bobcat tracks

bobcat walking on crust

And for a real treat, we found otter slide tracks around the edge of the beaver pond, complete with scat made of fish scales.

otter slide

otter slide on beaver pond

In garden news, not much is happening. We have lettuce and spinach growing under lights inside. In the hoop house, the voles happily ate all of the greens and even some of the tops of the leeks. Some chickweed is coming in… hopefully they don’t devour it all too!

lettuce

spinach and lettuce under lights

The houseplants are feeling the longer days though.

Klivia

Orchid

Klivia

Orchid

Homestead Report 20: April 17, 2017

April 17, 2017April 18, 2017 / jablyth / 1 Comment

Spring has sprung! The last bit of snow melted last Tuesday (April 11), some of our summer birds have arrived, flowers are blooming, and our hoop house is bursting with life. I’m excited to get my hands in the dirt and just to be outside.

Bulbs (scilla and crocus) are blooming– the crocuses have been out since April 1st, when we had a couple of inches of snow on the ground! Most are already fading. Daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths are all poking out of the ground, but no flowers are out yet.

Spring ephemeral wildflowers, including spring beauties, waterleaf, hepatica, and Dutchman’s britches, are poking out of the leaf litter on the east side of the house. The first hepatica flower opened today; the others are still just in bud.

The forsythia flowers opened yesterday at our house, though we’ve been seeing blooms in Northfield for at least a week.

One clump of Johnny jump-ups started blooming several days ago, and there are lots more with bursting buds.

Red maple flowers have painted the hills a subtle red-orange. Our recently-pruned fruit trees have swollen buds. We’re hoping that this year we won’t have a killing frost once they flower. Last year there wasn’t a peach to be found in all of western MA.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Our wildlife camera found a pair of nocturnal visitors last night.

P14_T_FG=3250,FT=93166,NIR=0,GM=2,CT=128,EV=52,TY=98,PY=103,DY=48,GB=0xa0,NY=0,AE(160,80,160,320,1),0

P14_T_FG=3250,FT=93166,NIR=0,GM=2,CT=128,EV=52,TY=98,PY=104,DY=48,GB=0xa0,NY=0,AE(160,80,160,320,1),0

Birds!! For several mornings, a pair of pileated woodpeckers has been hammering away at a rotten log that must be full of carpenter ants. We can see them from our breakfast table.

We’ve been listing dates of our first sighting of each spring migrant: red-winged blackbirds on March 26; song sparrow arrived on April 1 at our feeder (10 days after last year’s first arrival); phoebe on April 4th; yellow-bellied sapsuckers drumming on April 10; tree swallows and eastern bluebirds on April 11 (and both species already in and out of several nest boxes); chipping sparrow and northern flicker on April 12. There are other birds around of whom we haven’t taken such careful note. We are still seeing juncos today, but fewer and fewer. It’s hard to take note of someone’s “last day.”