eucalyptus fuss

The freakish cold snap we had recently was perfect for attacking the overgrown garden at the house.  I delayed painting for two days while I dug up most of the invasive vines (there's still a 2' x 2' patch that I haven't quite gotten to yet).  Then I dragged all of the sun-loving perennials around and stacked them around the edge of the bed while I contemplated placement.

True to my Type A roots, I'd made a spreadsheet detailing height, bloom time, color, light needs, and spread.  Armed with this formidable document, I placed the pots around the bed...

...and started digging.  A side note:  every time I do something scary like this, my mind goes back to a passage from one of the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Laura hated sewing, and fabric was expensive.  She splurged on several yards of lawn cotton, a very nice but thin fabric that's harder to work with because of its delicate nature.  She shrunk back from the pile, afraid to make a mistake and ruin the fabric.  But Ma "made the pattern for the waist and fearlessly cut the lawn."  I always think of Ma seizing her cutting shears whenever I have to do a scary project like this, where there's potential for major loss of time and money from my ineptitude (height/color proportions totally off, spacing too close/far, holes not deep/wide enough, plants wither and die after so much time and money spent). Funny how those books have been so influential.

Back to the plants.  At least they're in the ground!

 
The shade section too.  Columbines, transplanted bleeding hearts, solomon's seal, ferns, fall anemones...it could be beautiful in a couple of years.

Meanwhile, Todd has been ripping out carpet from upstairs and taking it to the barn, where it will be stored until I drag it out into the fields to kill down weeds for another garden. 

He has good company back there.  In one of the many fence post nesting boxes, a tree swallow couple has set up house!

And a family of woodchucks is living under the chicken coop!

They are fairly tame: if I stand quietly for a few minutes, they'll come out for food.  Now, woodchucks are fairly damaging.  They make big underground tunnels, which will undermine the foundation of buildings they've made dens beneath, and they eat vegetables and fruit, which is bad for the garden I'm planning in the area.  As I've mentioned, we're planning to tear down and rebuild this chicken coop.  Since these woodchucks are 'teenagers' and will 'fly the coop' soon, we'll time our rebuild so that we don't disturb any young nestlings, and give the oldsters plenty of time to make a new den before winter.  When we build, we'll sink wire into the ground around the foundation to keep out groundhogs and predators like foxes and raccoons.  Someone on a nature forum gave me a good tip:  "Put a radio in the coop and dial it to NPR.  Woodchucks don't like the sound of human voices and won't try to re-nest in the area."  That's our plan!

I love walking out there...

...but house demands have kept me inside.  I've been painting for 2 weeks.  Two rooms need a final coat, plus trim, so the end is in sight.  But I'm still obsessing over kitchen wallpaper.

The one that Todd and I like the best has also been a top-rated selection by a couple of visitors:  a watercolor rendition of eucalyptus sprigs.  It is a PERFECT match to the trim/cabinets and feels fresh and light.

I had no idea that wallpaper was so expensive, though!  It will cost SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS to wallpaper our tiny kitchen.  Worse, I've read terrible reviews about Spoonflower, the company selling this particular design:  that they basically print designs on cheap fabric and low-quality wallpaper, and customer service is a nightmare.  They do have an equal amount of rave reviews, though, and the sample I received seemed really nice, so I will continue to wrestle with this decision for a little while longer. 

At least we've purchased the bathroom wallpaper and will get started on hanging in the next couple of weeks.  Anthropologie has amazing wallpaper and it's actually less expensive than you'd think.  I got this roll on sale for around $60 and it's enough to cover 3 walls, which is just what I wanted. 

The cooler weather has been nice for doing my work this week:  clearing beds, planting perennials, and painting with all windows open. Borga likes the work, too - mainly because she makes nests in the carpet pad that we're dragging away.

The cats love it, because I've brought the quilts back out, and there's nothing they love more than a quilt snuggle.

Hopefully they'll be snuggling up at the new house pretty soon.

Have a nice week! 

A Quick Peek at Eagle Creek

Indiana is in the middle of a heat wave, and Todd has been working nonstop on his dissertation. We're both feeling a bit tired, and so together decided to take a break - one day to shirk our responsibilities and have free time to do whatever we wanted. As it turns out, what we wanted to do was get out of the house and go hiking. Followed, of course, by a big lunch out and a multi-hour board game marathon!

Eagle Creek, the fourth largest city park in the nation, is a mere twenty minutes from our house. It contains a 1,400 acre lake, and hiking along the shore, in the shade, is a really relaxing and peaceful experience.

Beautiful wildflowers are growing everywhere.

A spotted cucumber beetle (Diabrotica undecimpunctata) finds plenty to do on this dog rose. Spotted cucumber beetles only live for 8 weeks, so several generations might plague a region in a single summer. They're quite destructive. Not only do they eat tender seedlings and later attack full-grown plants (mainly vegetables), some harbor a bacteria called Pseudomonas lachrymans. Lachrymans is similar to the word lachrymose, which means tearful or given to weeping. Farmers must feel this way when confronted with plants affected with Pseudomonas lachrymans, because it infects and then rots leaves and fruits.

Many berry bushes are growing along the water...

...which does not interest this tree swallow in the least. Especially in the summertime, tree swallows eat insects. They prefer to nest around water and are quite social, sometimes forming flocks of thousands. This tree swallow wasn't a bit afraid of me and let me get quite close.

Small fish and minnows hug the banks of Eagle Creek Reservoir. We've seen many herons on visits here, who make regular meals of them.

After circling the lake, we crossed a small stream to enter the forest.

A great many birds nest at Eagle Creek and we saw some beautiful feathers.

A line of fungus crawled up this tree trunk. This particular fungus, which looks like smoky bracket fungus, probably got a toehold here through an open spot on the trunk - maybe a slash caused by an animal, or an open area left from a falling limb. The fungus absorbs sap, water, and nutrients from the tree, causing rapid decomposition.

It must be high season for assassin bugs, because we saw several on low-hanging branches. I think they're such beautiful insects, but they do have a nasty bite, so we steered clear.

Above all, I was impressed by the spiderwebs. Orb weavers create perfect circles.

How do they do it?

But even more interesting were the webs created by grass spiders, a member of the funnel web spider family. Look at this one...a conical web within a web. Amazing!

And this one...a sort of twisted, inverted web that must have been two feet long. Absolutely incredible!

Grass spider webs aren't sticky, so insects blundering across them aren't caught in that way. Grass spiders are fast. They have a complicated system of 'alarm threads' that let them know the second their web is disturbed. They are upon the insect before it knows what happened!

At the edge of the forest we found a small, moss-covered pond. To me, that means one thing: frogs and dragonflies! I scoured the perimeter and heard the tell-tale plops of frogs slipping beneath the surface of the pond, but I couldn't seem to catch sight of any. Not in the water, anyway...

A large shock of vegetation grew at the water's edge, and I was astounded to see the leaves covered completely...with tree frogs!

Some no more than an inch long and completely unfazed by our presence, the frogs remained motionless on the leaves.

They looked like some kind of prehistoric creature!

These tree frogs don't really live on trees. They are easy targets in water, too, so they tend to live near water, on vegetation like this.

I didn't see any dragonflies, but when I got home, I found one in the back yard! Odd, since we don't live around water. This is a blue dasher dragonfly. Dragonflies are great to have around because they eat mosquitoes. They're quite quick...they can reach speeds of 35 miles per hour! It's good that they're such champion fliers, because despite having legs, they are unable to walk. Their eyes, too, are amazing. They have a nearly 360 degree field of vision!

Dragonflies were once known as "the Devil's darning needle." Parents would tell their children that the Devil would come in the night to bad children and use the dragonfly to stitch their mouths closed while they slept. That's quite an incentive to behave!

All in all, we had a wonderful day off and felt ready to get back to the daily grind.

Since it's been so hot lately, I've been focusing on small knitting projects, like this pair of ringwood gloves. I'm using Misti Alpaca yarn in a deep red color, which I've been saving for something special. These gloves are so soft. Their construction is unique - a seed stitch cuff, with a switchover to ringwood stitch for the body of the glove. Ringwood stitch is easy. You simply knit two rows, followed by a row of knit one, purl one, all the way across. Repeat these three rows and you'll have ringwood stitch, a really interesting texture.

I like the cuff, too. One down, one to go!

Last week I posted about pie crust. Now, you're almost certainly going to have leftover dough after you make your pie. Trust me, you want leftover dough. I came up with a really basic recipe for a miniature apple pie. I make mine in a shallow 5 x 4 inch dish, but you could use tart pans, or ramekins, or whatever you've got!

The recipe is really simple.

Two-Apple Pie

2 apples, peeled, diced
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix all ingredients together and cook on stovetop for about 15 minutes, until soft. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease your containers, lay your dough within, and spoon your apples on top of it. Cover them with another thin sheet of dough and crimp the edges. Pierce with a fork a few times and bake for about 20 minutes.

It is so good. Forty minutes to homemade apple pie? Oh, yes!

Now that I think of it, I've got a few apples in the refrigerator...I think I know what I'm making for dessert tomorrow! :)

I hope you give it a try...have a great week!