Spring Fever

I planted 1000 spring bulbs this fall and find myself wishing I had bought more. I should have bought snowdrops and more daffodils to naturalize in the woods we cleared out by the tree house. Next fall.

My husband shakes his head and looks worried whenever I talk about planting daffodils and other spring flowers. I think he is worried we are going to go broke over my flowers. I just laugh and tell him that by the time I am old and gray every square foot of our 13 acres is going to be covered with naturalized spring bulbs.

Then I remind him that bulbs are one of the best investments you can make because they multiply rapidly. In five or ten years I won't have to have to buy bulbs, I can just divide what I already have. He doesn't seen to get it, though.

Here are some photos from the gardens at our previous home:

Antique sink

We found a Craig's List treasure today. A cast iron double basin washboard sink for only $100! It is really dirty, but otherwise appears to be in excellent condition, with no chips or scratches. Here is an example of the same sink in the same condition that sold for over $1,000. We had one in our previous home and I knew I wanted one for my new kitchen when we get around to remodeling.

Here are photos of the one we had in our previous home. Gosh, looking at the photos of the kitchen we left behind makes me want to get to work remodeling. The kitchen I have right now does not lend itself well to more than one person working in it at time.  But I am planning on saving up some more money before we start so we can pay cash for everything.

A Sunday Morning in November

Flowers in November

Frost on chrysanthemum.

Last lavender spike.

Dew covered arugula blossoms.

Reseeded pansies.

November Moon

Full moon--November 20th.

Cleaning up the Woods

 Our woods are a tangle of thorny and invasive shrubs--wild roses, box elders, grey dogwood, blackberries, and autumn olives, with plenty of garlic mustard and poison ivy thrown in for good measure. Between the poison ivy, thorny plants, and the swarms of  mesquites this summer our woods were not a pleasant place to be. I didn't even make it out to pick the blackberries. The thought of being bitten, torn to shreds, and ending up with poison ivy was just too much.

The woods were logged a few years ago with no thought for the health or beauty of the woods. All the large healthy trees were cut down, leaving only weed trees and and a some twisted, unhealthy looking oaks and black cherries.  Because of the extra light that was let in when many trees where cut down, invasive plants are flourishing on the forest floor. The thick  carpet of garlic mustard chokes out native and beneficial plants and inhibits tree seeds from sprouting, making it difficult for the woods to regenerate on its own.

Before the Brush Hog went through the woods.  

We are slowly reclaiming our woods. This spring we took several days to through the woods and pull the garlic mustard. That will be a spring task for several more years, I am sure.  This weekend Terry and I spent many hours cleaning the brush and thorns out the woods by the tree house. We pulled out the big fallen logs and dead trees so we could brush hog and I scoured through the thorns and brush looking for young oak, hickory, and maple trees that will fill in the woods as they grow. These all got marked with yellow ribbon so that Terry could avoid running them over with the brush hog.

Terry ran the brush hog and I raked leaves, picked up limbs, and pulled hundreds of poison ivy vines. By the end of the day today, this woods was clean and brush free. After he brushed hogged, Terry went over the woods with the riding lawn mower to get the little shoots the brush hog had missed.

After the woods was brush hogged.

Last fall I planted about 100 daffodil bulbs around the tree house. Today I planted about 150 glory of the snow (chionodoxa) bulbs in the woods near it, as well as several dozen lily of the valley plants. I'm planning on adding more flowers to the woods each year. I am going to encourage native woodland flowers as well. This spring I found yellow, white, and purple violets, false lily of the valley, may apples, and sweet cicely in the this woods. I'd like to get spring beauties, hapaticas, trout lilies, blood root, and so many other native wild flowers growing here.

I went through the woods last winter and marked the few bushes and trees that are aren't invasive species. In the tree house woods we have a few wild high bush blueberries, a small Juneberry tree, two patches of wild hazelnuts, and two wild barberry bushes. I know the blueberries and Juneberry bloomed this spring, but I never made it back through the tangled mess to check to see if there were any berries. I did get a handful of hazelnuts from one of the hazelnut bushes, though.

Our goal is to make a beautiful healthy woods that is relaxing to walk through and can be managed as a firewood lot. I am hoping to encourage the blueberries, hazelnuts, and other edible and non invasive shrubs to help fill in the under story of the woods while we wait for the oak and hickory saplings to grow and fill out the empty spaces of the woods. We also need to figure out how to maintain a manageable blackberry patch--one that doesn't take over the entire woods.

The tree house got a a new set of stairs this fall and Terry and one of his friends have plans for enclosing the lower portion of the house and putting in a kitchen, large windows, and indoor plumbing. I guess we will no longer be be able to call it a tree house then, but it will be a more welcoming little guest house. (Click here for to see the interior of the tree house.)

A Glimpse of Michigan's One and Only Whooping Crane

I learned about him on my first visit to the crane sanctuary.

On my first visit to the sanctuary back in early October, I was impressed by the group of half a dozen or so very serious looking birders, speaking in hushed voices and staring at an empty sky through high powered binoculars and telescopes. I felt awkward and out of place, kind of like I had accidentally stumbled into a church in the middle of a worship service.  I tiptoed around them and went off to explore the woods by Eagle lake.

It was still too early in the season for the major flying of the sandhill cranes as they gather together to migrate south. Other than a few small flocks of cranes and some Canadian geese, there weren't many birds around. I couldn't help but wonder what it was these people were so intently looking for. I had a hard time believeing they were that interested in sandhill cranes--if you want a good  view of sandhill cranes, all you have to do around here is drive down a road by a corn field.

As I was exploring off the trails, I came across someone else who was hiking off trails and we struck up a conversation. He told me that they were on the outlook for a whooping crane that was flying with the sandhill cranes. The large white whooping crane had been seen each night for the past week coming in to roost in the marsh in the sanctuary. I had never heard of a whooping crane before, but I was informed that it was a very rare bird, and it was a very exciting and amazing thing to have one in Michigan.

Turns out the this whooping crane is one of maybe three hundred wild whooping cranes in the world and appears to be the one and only whooping crane in Michigan. Whooping cranes are an endangered species that are being reintroduced to the wild by Operation Migration, a group of dedicated people who teach the young whooping cranes how to live in the wild and how to migrate south in the winter.  They use ultralight aircraft to guide the birds on their first migratory flight.

Today on my way home from work, I spotted a patch of white in the middle of flock of sandhill cranes in a corn field and got my first glimpse of the whooping crane. These photos where taken from at least two thousand feet away, so please pardon the blurriness.

I've spent most of this evening on the internet trying to track down the number of this crane. Operation Migration gives each crane a number and permanent bands on the legs to to make it easier to track them. They also have a bio and photo of each crane they have hatched, even the ones that died very young, on their website.

It turns out he is DAR 37-07. (DAR stands for direct autumn release--he was part of a group of young birds that were released with older birds in the hopes they would learn how to migrate by following the adults--as opposed to being taught to migrate by following the ultralight aircraft.) It looks like he might make Michigan his summer home. It is the males who pick a nesting territory and bring their mates home. Males begin looking for a mate when they are three to four years old. He was born in 2007 so it is possible he may bring a mate back to Michigan with him next spring. Whooping cranes can live 25 to 30 years and mate for life. They usually lay two eggs, but so far not many of the eggs in the wild have hatched. But even if they do hatch, the survival rate for the wild chicks so far has been very low. For an example, this year seven young cranes hatched in wild this spring, but only two survived summer for the migratory flight this fall.

Another very blurry photo, but if you look closely you can see the bands on his legs--right leg is Red/Green, left leg is Red/Green/White. The colors match up with DAR 37-07's colors.

The only other crane that I can find that was know to have spent a significant amount of time in  this part of Michigan was number 516--and he actually has an interesting story which you can read here.  But sadly he hasn't been seen in either Michigan or Florida since 2008, and is presumed dead. 516 is the crane that is pictured on the crane sanctuary's home page.

Frost on Lichens

The second photo is British Soldiers. I'm not sure of the the identification of the other two lichens.

Crane Trio

Why I have a hard time getting anything done around here...

One of the projects I badly wanted to complete while my brother was here, was to finish the little garden at the bottom of the driveway. We have a long driveway that is sandwiched between two other houses and unless you look closely, it  looks like it is just a trail headed off into a cornfield  I wanted to plant a garden at the bottom so that it looks a little more distinct. Last fall we hauled a bunch of rocks to the bottom of the driveway and I started digging and removing some of the sod. We managed to screw our address to one of the big rocks, but  that was about as far as we got. All spring and summer long the weedy rock patch was the eyesore of the neighborhood.
On Saturday we removed the weeds and dug out a bunch of rocks. Yesterday we made a concerted effort to finish the garden. Our plan was to use the front end loader to scoop loam out of the bog, and haul it down to the garden to raise the soil level and increase the moisture capacity of the soil. That plan ended in about 30 seconds once we got the loader on the edge of the bog.

The rest of the morning was spent unearthing the loader. My husband had the bright idea to use the loader to jack the front of the tractor out the loam. He says that is the standard way to get a front end loader unstuck.(Sometimes I wonder how he knows all this--he didn't spent much time around farm equipment before I dragged him out into the country last summer.)

Once it was clear that the loader wasn't going to work, we went on to plan B. We backed the trailer into the woods, just barely squeezing it between trees--and stopping well before the the bog started. Then Rene and I dug out 50 buckets full of loam and carried them over to the trailer. A little more work maybe, but at least we didn't get stuck.

I divided the little garden into four beds with a path in the center for easy weeding. Once we got the loam worked into the beds, we took the trailer and headed up to the wood chip pile for wood chips to mulch the path. On the way there though, I stopped at the compost pile to drop off the sod and weeds that we had dug out of the garden earlier.  I don't drive this old horse trailer enough and completely forgot that the trailer is much wider than the SUV and as a result ran it over our well cap and ended up with the well cap tightly wedged between the two wheels on the trailer.

So my husband had to come to my rescue again. He hopped on the front end loader  (that he had previously rescued from the swamp) and was able to lift the trailer off the the well cap and set it down on the other side of it. No apparent harm done to either the well or the trailer.

I think we need to make a large marker for the well though. Earlier this fall my husband went at it full speed with the loader while we we ripping out the yew bushes in the backyard. (He claimed he forgot it was there.) Once we start snowplowing this winter we will most likely hit it again unless it is very clearly marked--the plastic "rock" that covers it apparently isn't good enough to keep us from inadvertently attempting to damage it.

The pile of wood chips is from the electric company. This summer we gave them permission to dump all their shredding on our property and ended up with a beautiful pile of mulch.

We filled in the path in the garden with 45 buckets of wood chips. I brought the path all the way up to the level of the beds since I know that as the mulch decays the level will go down. And also with our very sandy soil, we need all the moisture holding capacity that we can get, otherwise I will be watering every day.

The garden is ready to plant and is one of the best prepared gardens I have made, many thanks to my brother who didn't give up on helping me despite the disasters of the day.

(I hope I didn't scare him off from coming to visit me again. Today wasn't the only day we had problems. On Saturday we attempted to shred some brush---it was one problem after another and he got totally disgusted with our equipment. I tried to explain to him that in my life equipment malfunctioning is the norm...you spend two thirds of the time fixing or rescuing the equipment and one third actually doing something useful. Which explains why I have a hard time getting anything done around here.)

The Driveway Garden--ready to plant!

Empty Nest

Planting English basket willows

I'm taking a few vacation days this week and next to get some fall work done. One of my brothers is visiting until Monday and I plan on putting him to work. Already yesterday afternoon we finished a task that I have been working on all summer--getting my 45 English basket willows into the ground.

I planted them in a row along the edge of the vegetable garden. My plan in the spring is to take cuttings from these willows and double my planting. By the spring of 2012, I should have enough shoots to start working with. I'm looking forward to experimenting with fences and living willow structures, as well as finally have a source of willow in my backyard for baskets.

I bought seven different varieties--each variety has a different characteristic--some have thick strong shoots that are perfect for weaving  fences, some are ideal for living willow structures, and some have the thin long shoots that are idea for baskets. Plus we have a nice range of  the colors,  from bright yellow to orangy red, and dark green to smokey blue.

I bought foot long cuttings for $1.50 each this spring and potted them up in moist potting soil. This photo was taken April 11 the day I potted them up.

Varieties are:
Blue streak
Basfordiana Farndon
Green Dicks
Golden
Noir de Villaines
Polish Purple
Brittany Greens

Last spring Trina from All That is Good, sent me a some cuttings from her English basket willows.  I potted them up, then we decided to move before I got them in the ground at our old home. Amazingly they survived a summer of extreme neglect as we prepared for a move that happened far quicker than anyone even dreamed it would (the pots dried out multiple times and willows looked like they were dried to a crisp on more than one occasion.) But with an occasional good soaking most of them survived and they took off this spring when I finally got them in the ground.

Wild Aster Seedhead

Portrait of a Foot Bridge

My husband just bought me a camera that is something more than a little point and shoot. My new camera is still a point and shoot, but with its 15 megapixels, powerful zoom, and and large lens, it has a lot more possibilities than any camera I have had before. I've spent the little free time I've had in the last day or two learning how to use it. I love the super macro setting. The photos in yesterday's post were taken using that setting.
Today on my way home from seeing patients, I stopped a a lovely little nature area that I had never been in before to try taking pictures of scenery. (This time of year most of this part of Michigan looks grey and flat and lifeless with the leaves off the trees, and the crops harvested--not a lot of opportunity in my neighborhood for photos of beautiful scenery!)

Even though it is a sunny and relatively warm day, the light was typical of November--pale and thin and rather lifeless. I think I'm my own harshest critic, because I am rarely ever satisfied with my own photos...and I was a little disappointed in all the ones I took today. Hoping that with some practice and use of the some of the more advanced settings my photography will be improving....

Macros at Allen Lake

Swan down

 Swan feather

Spiral shell

Snail shell

Zebra mussel

Milkweed Snowburst

Today was a cold gray day with traces of snowflakes in the air.