One more project done

In the late afternoon, our back deck gets full sunshine from about May to October. It makes it uncomfortable to sit there, and plants that require some shade don't do well. So leave it to me -- another home handyman project! This will allow us to sit out on the deck in late afternoon and early evening, and will give the plants some needed shade.

Of course, with one project down, now I'm thinking of what comes next -- a duplicate screen on the other end of the deck, and a pergola over it? Railings and seating benches? Who knows!

Barry got some shots of several wildflowers -- we've sent the pictures to the University of Kentucky to see if we can identify them -- one we know, the white one is the "Field Bindweed", and we think all three are relatives of the morning glory.

Murder mystery, and watermelons, etc.

Murder mystery first. A gal from Indiana posted an inquiry on www.findagrave.com about a cousin of hers who was, as she noted, convicted and executed in 1946 for a murder he did not commit. Well, Barry and I took that as a challenge to find out what happened. We've been to Frankfort to the state archives, and researched the appeal of the case; we've been to Somerset and copied newspaper accounts of the crime, the trial, and the execution; we've been to Nancy (near Somerset) to photograph the grave stone. End result -- reads like a Perry Mason mystery. The guy and his accomplice both participated in the murder, but conflicting testimony in today's jurisprudence would not have gotten either of the parties executed. Unfortunately, we're working with 1946 standards and rules, and, yes, the man was executed, his partner receiving a life sentence. We're willing to do genealogy and historical research for anything or anyone! Gives us something MORE to do. Interesting case though.

On a brighter note, it seems that Barry's gardening skills and Kentucky's soils will grow about anything. Again this year, the front garden has gotten away, and is growing so fast, the squash vines will soon reach the Tennessee border. The compost we made last fall and winter didn't fully kill all the seeds, so wherever Barry used the compost, we have vegetables sprouting up. In the slash pile behind the carport, we have tomatoes and potatoes. In the herb garden, we have squash and melons. In the window boxes with the petunias we have more tomatoes. And this little gem... Yup, it's a watermelon, growing in the driveway -- crushed rock, and who knows what soil, if any, is underneath it. Right now it's about the size of a softball, but with another couple of weeks of growing time, it'll fully grow and ripen.

Barry has the second crop of broccoli started, and those will go in the ground in another couple of weeks so we'll get a fall crop too. We haven't bought vegetables in a grocery store since April 2008!

The cucumbers were grown as an experiment on 4 foot high fencing. They are free of bugs, and are growing so well we've already canned 6 quart jars each of dill and bread and butter pickles, with more to go. The peppers -- he picked a 5-gallon pail full just to get the weight off the plants -- and we made green pepper relish, another 7 jars.

The onions are doing quite well; we have about a dozen drying now, and will either try to keep them or will freeze them -- YES, we found directions on how to freeze onions and peppers! Slice them the way you want them, arrange them on a tray in the freezer, then when frozen, pop them in freezer bags.

We're gonna have to get a second freezer.

For Pushpa

When Pushpa asked me to send her some pictures of the garden, I thought, if I send her the ones I want, it'll take her days to read the email. So I remembered -- "Hey dummy, you have a blog website, why not post them there?"

Well, here they are, Pushpa.

Amaranth -- it'll produce an edible grain, but I think it's just a beautiful shrub in the meantime.














Back garden -- early crops are out, waiting for fall plantings of cool-weather vegetables. At least a peck of red potatoes out of just TWO hills! Enough strawberries to eat AND to freeze. Beets, chard, collards, broccoli, cilantro are among other occupants of this garden.









Crepe myrtle -- it looks BEAUTIFUL this year, and will bloom well into September or October. The previous owners trimmed it way back apparently quite frequently, but we want it to grow its own way -- it may eventually reach to 15 feet -- right now it's about 5.










Cucumber trimmings -- we're growing cucumbers on 4 foot wire fencing this year -- this is just ONE of the tendrils Barry cut off because they're growing SO well he had to thin them out. We've already picked enough to make 8 quarts of pickles (see pic below). This is the side porch -- most of which is now freshly-painted.














Cukes on wire fencing -- they grow upright so they don't have those yellow spots from being on the ground; and they are CLEAN! We tried them on nylon netting, the kind you use to keep birds out, but they just grew over it and dragged it down. But the wire fencing is a GO for next year!











Front garden -- note the single lonely sunflower (there are actually several, but only this one shows in this picture) and the amaranth. This is where we plant the warm-weather crops. Tomatoes (3-4 types), corn (2-3 types), melons (3-4 types), cucumbers, green peppers, string beans. And this year, amaranth an the occasional sunflower. That's a white pine tree on the left -- we actually PAID MONEY for it down here. But then the trumpet vine which grows wild here, Barry paid money to get up in Maine. Go figure.




Front garden 2 -- looking back toward the shed. Pink shrub in the back is the crepe myrtle. Shot includes as well, the east end of the house, where the white porch is.















Grapes -- no, not for a winery, just a few for eating. It looks like we installed telephone poles, but these will give the grapes 7 or 8 wires on which to spread.




















Kiwi -- actually Chinese gooseberry, growing on the south side of the shed. The vines get up to 25 feet long -- these are growing along a 16 foot deep shed wall.












Sage in blossom -- an older pic, but haven't posted anything like it yet.















Barry making pickles -- 6 quarts of dill, 6 quarts of bread and butter. I insisted he use the larger cucumbers, and unfortunately, they didn't fill the jars up quite enough and left lots of space, so he ran out of brine. I'll wise up next time.










Finally, a photo Barry took of me and my grandson, Gannon, at the Maine Mall. He's always smiling, and even his eyes smile. He's SO cute!

Strange finds in unexpected places.

When we first moved here, we noticed lots of round-ish rocks, which we later found out were "geodes." They are generally hollow inside, and contain crystals of calcite, amethyst, or other minerals. In fact, there's a house not far from here where the entire central chimney and front porch structure are made from geodes. We're using them for landscaping all around the house.

Well, one of these has been on the back deck since we moved in. Just the other day, I noticed (and Barry photographed) something unusual on the surface of the geode.

A bit of research (isn't Wikipedia wonderful?) shows that it's a fossil trilobite, a little marine creature much like a modern horseshoe crab. There are over 20,000 species of trilobites and they range in age from 250 to 500 million years old.

A bit more research and I sort of figured that our little trilobite died and was laid down in the sediment at the bottom of the Ordovician ocean about 450 million years ago. At that time, most of the US and Canada were submerged under a shallow, warm ocean somewhere near where the equator was then.

You never know what's out there until you open your eyes, I guess.

Hummers are back!

Well, at least ONE is back. Barry and I were sitting out on the back deck looking at the garden and the bluebirds nesting in the cleveland pear tree when all of a sudden there was a "whizzzzz" just near where the hummingbird feeders were last year. Sure enough, it was a little (or is that redundant?) hummingbird who REMEMBERED where the feeders were.

So in a jiffy I came in and, following Barry's expert culinary guidance, made my first batch of hummingbird food. Four cups water, one cup sugar, boil and simmer, and put into the feeder when cool.

If you have a feeder DO NOT USE RED FOOD COLORING. It harms the bird's liver and can actually kill them. The feeder, being red, is what attracts them. Other red flowers will do the same.

The window boxes are done, with red and blue petunias and white alyssum, and Barry planted red salvia and red impatiens around the bird bath as well. The early garden is all in and we've already had a few servings of spinach, chard and lettuce.

Now, Spring can officially begin!

A freeze scare...

We've been spending a great deal of time watching the weather reports -- the other day it was 76 and sunny, and I got the front lawn mowed. Sunburn was a real possibility, but the lawn looks great.

Last night, with the peach tree budded out and the strawberries beginning to bud, we were supposed to have a hard freeze. Luckily, temps only got down to 32 -- which is WAY cold for this time of year here. And we actually had SNOW on Monday -- a whole 1/4 inch!

Everything looks OK today, and it is warming up slowly.

Last week, we had a round of severe weather, with an EF1 tornado touching down in Casey County, about 30 miles south of here -- it was only a little one but it did over $1,000,000 in damage, destroyed 2 barns, killed 2 horses, and one woman's heart attack was directly related to the storm. Luckily again, all we got here was lightning (enough so that we didn't need any of the lights on in the house), and a wind-driven, pelting rain, for about 3 hours.

SO many people down here are "sick of winter" -- I wonder how they'd survive in Maine!

This weekend, it's a spring tradition here, the Spring Meet at Keeneland Race Course. We're going up to Lexington for Friday and Saturday's races. On Friday, Maker's Mark, our favorite Kentucky bourbon (Barry and I are both MM Ambassadors) is hosting the Maker's Mile, with a purse of $300,000 (divided among the top 5 finishing horses), and on Saturday, it's the Bluegrass Stakes -- one of the most important preparation races for the Kentucky Derby.

Hopefully, I'll win enough at the races to pay my income tax bill!

Outside Cleanup and Possible New Neighbors?

The ice storm here in early February tore the heart out of many people with all the damage it did to the trees. We were spared most of the damage -- only lost two trees completely, one mostly, and several partially. Barry's been itching to burn the debris ever since. The County is picking up the branches, but one has to live near the road and we don't so burning it is about the only option. Unfortunately, it's been too windy to do much -- until recently. This is the last of the brush to clear up around the house. There's more way out back and down in the Salt River, but that's another day. We've replaced the Bradford Pear with a Cleveland Pear -- sturdier and more able to withstand the wind. We also have an apple tree coming shortly, buying grapes probably this week, then that's it for perennials or trees. At least until next time...

We also had the first prospective tenants looking at both of our "Bluegrass Bluebird Apartments". He'd try the house out for size while she watched. Then she'd fly around looking at the neighborhood and the landscape. I didn't see her poke her head inside to check out the interior decorating, window treatments, or appliances though.

They went back and forth from one apartment to another, chasing off any other potential undesirable tenants like the starlings, but in the end, they apparently decided not to move in today. We'll see if they found better "digs" somewhere else. They certainly won't find NEWER birdhouses anywhere in this neighborhood!

Visiting Cairo, 11 March

Have you ever thought about what racism and bigotry can do -- not just to people, but to a city? Well, take a look around at Cairo, IL (pronounced KAY-row, like the corn syrup).

I had heard about Cairo years ago, and since we were in Paducah this past week, we took the day to go over. This is the river city which was the inspiration for Edna Furber's book, Showboat, on which the musical and movie were based. The Lewis and Clark expedition stopped here on its way west. Grant headquartered here in 1861. It was a major lumber port for 30 years handling lumber from southern Illinois, eastern Missouri, western Kentucky and the entire region. I imagined a nice little city like Paducah, only smaller. After all, it DID have two of the world's largest rivers to the east, south and west of it.

This river city, located at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi SHOULD have grown into a prosperous river town. And until the 1950s, it was that. A population of 15,000 in 1920 has now dwindled to just under 3,000. Why?

Economics are part of it. The river traffic has moved elsewhere and centralized, causing a downturn in Cairo's economy. Interstate-57 is several miles away from the city. But more to the point, in the late 1960s, racism and discrimination reared their ugly heads.

The business in town were basically all white. The city hall and police/fire departments were all white. The schools were segregated, white and black. Public housing was segregated.

As blacks in Cairo joined the civil rights movement, racism surfaced. Most whites pulled their kids from public schools when they integrated, leaving mostly blacks there. Blacks boycotted businesses which refused to hire blacks -- and that was ALL the businesses. So whites organized a KKK-like organization, marched down the main street with swastika-decorated posters, and the deterioration, which had begun in the 1950s accelerated. Burning crosses, arson, looting, shootings, all were part of Cairo's landscape for several years. White-owned businesses packed up and left, or simply closed. The city isn't even trying to board up the abandoned buildings any more.

Along the riverfront, there's a 6-story apartment or condo building that's fairly new, in good condition, and outside are parked many fairly new cars. But a block north, a dog lay dead in the street, in front of several derelict buildings.

Today, Cairo has probably the lowest per-capita income in Illinois; the highest unemployment; the most poverty per capita; the lowest educational attainment level; in short, Cairo leads Illinois in all those measures that signify failure.

There isn't even a Wal-Mart within 20 miles.

Yet the architecture and history of the city show through the broken windows and burned shells of downtown. There are mansions along Magnolia Street which would beautify any town in the US. And right across the street, there are rotting, decaying Victorian hulks which are probably beyond repair. Many of the properties in the city are selling for under $40,000, some WAY under, like $5,000 or less.

Racism and discrimination can do a number on people. They can also destroy a once beautiful, bustling city.

Cairo, IL. -- R.I.P.

Charitable donations and exploring the countryside

We went down to Liberty, Casey County, today. Seems there are lots of attractions in our former county because we've been there several times in the past month or so.

To start off, the weather was beautiful. Upper 60s and low 70s, sunny after last night's torrential rain, grass greening, trees budding, daffodils out -- they grow wild along the road here. Anyway, I had gone through my books and clothes once more, seeing what books I didn't need any more, or what clothes didn't fit any more (it's all the fault of Barry's cooking).

We dropped the clothes off at the Liberty Trading Post, which is run by the Galilean Children's Home, an iconic charity around here. Gerry and his late wife Sandy Tucker began taking in "unwanted" children many years ago -- you can read about it by clicking the link above -- anyway, it's such a worthwhile charity and does so much good, I'd much rather my too-small clothes go to them. I was amazed and surprised at the quality of the clothing there -- no Goodwill or Salvation Army here -- anyone could put together a very nice look for under $20! I mean, first quality, look like new, button-down oxford shirts (my favorite) for $1.99! I almost came out with more than I brought in!

Then it was off to the Casey County Public Library. Casey is one of the poorest counties in Kentucky, being part of "Appalachia" (pronounced down here as "apple-LATCH-uh". Fewer than half the county's residents have graduated high school, yet the readership statistics at the beautiful and modern county library are among the highest in the Commonwealth. So whenever I have books, that's where they go -- where they will be the most appreciated and will do the most good. This time it was books, videos and cassette tapes I no longer need. The gal at the desk was thrilled. I felt good.

Then of to the settlement of "Phil", the beginning of the Casey County Amish region. We've been down there three times this spring to buy food at Sunny Valley bulk foods, Amish-run, and have stopped at Hillside Nursery twice, also Amish-run. We bought the broccoli, lettuce, and horseradish plants, which Barry may put in the ground tomorrow morning (before we head to Paducah to do more exploring in the western part of the state).

Finally, we drove around some back roads through the knobs, the community of "Teddy", and back home. All in all, it was a beautiful day, saw some good looking country (without leaves to obscure the view), and came home.

Is it Spring, yet?

Girl Scout cookies have arrived. I was good. Only ate half a box in 2 days. Usually I go for the whole thing at one sitting. Two boxes are in the freezer where I will probably forget about them for awhile.

Barry planted the peas and spinach on the 5th. We're not supposed to have any temps below 32 for the next ten days, so they should germinate just fine.

Over the past 10 days, temps have been from 5 to 72 (right now) -- and it seems the wind has never been under 20 mph. So even when it was 64 yesterday, it just felt cold.

The lilac leaves are about 1/2 inch long, and we're seeing different birds from mid-winter, so things are changing.