Girl Meets Green

Little Bit of Sunshine on a Crappy Day

It was absolutely gorgeous on Sunday.  I was supposed to attend a wine tasting at the venue where I will be getting married in September, but mother nature had other plans for me.  My mother and my best friend were driving to my house to pick me up and a tree snapped in half and totalled my mothers car...yes while she was driving in it.  Thankfully, both my mother and friend were fine!  However, it kind of ruined the fun mood, and my mother's Subaru. 

After I brought my mom and friend home, I picked up my sister and her boyfriend and we went hiking.  It was such a beautiful day that I couldn't let it go to waste.

We decided to go to Step Stone Falls which is located in Arcadia off of 165 and Escoheag Hill Rd.  With all the rain we've seen in the past couple of weeks the water was running pretty hard.

We didn't actually hike much of the trail, we just stopped by and walked around the spot and looked for a geocache.  My sister's boyfriend had never been geocaching before and this was a geocache that I had previously looked for but failed to find... so I figured I could use the extra set of eyes looking for it.

 
And we managed to find it.  The first time I tried to find it there was to much snow. 

We also went to look for a geocache off the Barber Trail and then stopped by Breakheart Pond to take some pictures.  Hopefully I'll be feeling up to actually hiking soon.  It was so beautiful this weekend!

 

Coop Construction - Day One

I have been a little under the weather for going on three weeks now, so I haven't felt like doing much, including typing.  Three antibiotics later, steroids, and lots of sleep and I'm finally starting to feel a little bit better.

Last weekend, (after the sinus infection, double ear infections and bronchitis, but before the pneumonia! Seriously.) My dad came over and designed a chicken coop for me.  My father has never built a chicken coop, or even kept chickens for that matter, but he knows how to use power tools so I figured we could figure out the rest.  We didn't get very far in the construction phase because we spent a really long time at the drawing board. Two considerations - it had to be big enough for my ladies, and the cost couldn't break the bank. 
We settled on an all in one type coop (with the run attached and also enclosed) because I live in a city and I can't have chickens just running around my nonfenced in yard.  And also, we have predators that would love to crawl in a chicken coop and eat eggs and chickens.

After deciding the best way to meet my financial needs, and my chickens lifestyle needs we hit Lowes for 2x4's and 4x4's.

At this point we just have the 4x4's secured in the ground, but hopefully on Saturday we will get most of the coop built.

Job foreman coming to check on my progress.

Betty Ann (dark colored Ameraucana), Elsa (light colored Ameraucana), Florence and Marjorie (RI Reds).  

 
The chicken coop will mostly be hidden by the blueberry bushes.  And have a lovely view of the pond.  Lucky chickens.

The Name Game

Dear Internet,

Here is the first glance at my pretty little girls.  They are so soft and cute, I just want to cuddle them.

The dark colored chick is Betty Ann, and the light colored chick is Elsa - both of those ladies are Ameraucanas. 

The other two are Florance and Marjorie, they are RI Reds.  Florance has the three dots on her head. 

So far they seem to be adjusting nicely to their new home and they are making all sorts of happy little chickie noises.  Herky and Lola are less than keen on their arrival but so far they haven't tried to make them part of their evening snack, so I consider that an accomplishment.

And Joe called yesterday... the chickens can stay :)

I was just going to look...I swear.

The weatherman called for blizzard like conditions today, so schools were canceled and I decided to work from home so as not to have to drive around with all the other crazy people.  But the snow didn't decide to start until around noon time.  So earlier this morning, I was checking out the farm & garden section on Craig's List like I normally do.  I saw a post for pullets so I opened it up.  Pullets are female chickens, and as it just so happens I was thinking of getting a couple.  So I emailed the person about her selection and she suggested that I come by and see her farm.  Around noon time, Jill picked me up and off we went to Foster to look at chickens.  We thought we had arrived at the wrong location because there was a cape house, a garage and a shed...didn't look like much room for chickens.  But I knocked on the door and the woman was very friendly.  She explained all about the few chickens she had left and took us on a tour of her farm.  Set back down the hill from the house she had all different size chicken coops, rabbit hutches and sheds.  She had nigerian dwarf goat babies (I AM TOTALLY IN LOVE!!!) and sheep, ducks, rabbits, turkeys, and many different breeds of chickens.  After the tour, we went in the house to discuss the logistics of picking up chickens and what I would need to do to care for the week old chicks.  (That I would be picking up on the 20th.)  But when she returned to the room we were in with several week old chicks I couldn't contain myself.  So, now I am the proud mama to four baby chicks.  Two are RI Red's and two are Amerecuana's.  I have picked out names for them but I haven't decided which name belongs to which chick.  Once I learn their personalities I will name them accordingly.  Amerecuana's are cool chickens because they lay green eggs.  She sent me on my way with chicks, feed, a light, and a food dish.  The only thing I need to stop on the way home and purchase was a watering dish and pine shavings.  The little ladies are currently all snuggled up in their new home.

Pictures to follow....

Quick Confession & New Years Resolution

First of all, Happy New Year!  And all that associated jazz.  Clearly I have not stopped by my own blog in quite some time.  Bad Emily.  I get so wrapped up with the rest of my life that things get pushed to the wayside, or in this case, blogs get pushed to the wayside.  (Housework tends to fall to the wayside also...)

So, what has happened since I last updated in (whispers), um July.  Well quite a bit actually.  I harvested more veggies than I knew what to do with.  Which was fantastic, considering it was my first year with a garden.  My tomatos were pretty lame due to all of the rain that was dumped on lil Rhody during the summer, but I'm not giving up. 

In sad news, my bees didn't make it.  I'm not quite sure what happened.  My fiancee is convinced that they're living in our attic.  (Someone told him about a swarm that lived in their attic, and he was thoroughly upset by it.)  I wish they were living in our attic - because then I wouldn't feel like an utter failure.  But I'm not discouraged.  I will try again this year.  I have been the brunt of many a bee joke since the end of October, but I have thick skin.  And for Christmas, I received some very good bee keeping books, among them "Bee Keeping for Dummies."  I will get honey this year.  Please and thank you.

What else, what else?  Don't tell anyone, but I'm going to get chickens! Yay.  I have been working on Joe to let me have a couple of hens since we moved into our house in April, 2008.  I don't know if he was feeling guilty for leaving me for four and a half monthes, or what... but he agreed.  Woo hoo.  So, as soon as the weather warms up a little bit I'm going to build a chicken coop (Daddddd........ ) and get three chicks.

I just finished reading a really good book, "Farm City" by Novella Carpenter.  She also writes a blog http://novellacarpenter.com/  Check her out, she is my new inspiration. 

It's time to order my seeds.  Last year I started growing my veggies in the house in February, so I have a couple of weeks before I need to really get it in gear.  I forsee my dining room turning into a little greenhouse.  It worked out well last year, I bought very few plants, most I grew from seeds.  This year, I'm going to plan the garden a little differently.  Around August it started to look like a jungle because I had tomato vines climbing over herbs and pumpkins growing out into the the middle of Joe's newly planted lawn (oops.  I'm from Warwick, I never grew a pumpkin before!)  And all sorts of other chaos.  Chaos is fine for flowers, but not particularily helpful when trying to pick bush beans that are hidden in the yellow squash. 

And finally, my resolution for 2010 is to be better at keeping up with my garden, bees, chickens (when they move in with us), and to keep a better account of it!

Blueberry Madness

Well, my camera is still not working, so you're going to have to bear with me as I describe my blueberry baking experience.  I love to cook, that being said, I don't really love to bake.  Cooking is pretty much a free for all, I usually just open the fridge and try to combine whatever ingredients I happen to have on hand, baking requires much more forethought.  I was feeling kind of brave, and just so happened to come across a recipe for blueberry zucchini bread, and I just so happened to have an abundance of both bluberries and zucchini (es??).  Off to the store I went, I actually happened to have all of the ingredients on hand, just didn't have little loaf pans to bake them in, and I figured I should pick up some extra sugar while I was out to feed the bees again.  Once I had everything I needed, I threw it all in a bowl and wa la, enough zucchini bread batter to swim in.  Seriously, the bowl I used to mix up all the ingredients could be used to bathe a four year old. (Where did this bowl come from??)  It made my house smell sooooo good!  I could have eaten all six loaves by myself, and knowing that I started distributing them immediately.  I brought one to Joe and gave one to the lady next door, one will stay at our house, and the other three I'll give away to friends at work tonight.  All in all, it was nearly as scary as I had expected it to be.  It cooked just like the directions said it would.. I'm that person that makes terrible brownies - hard as a rock edges, not cooked middles... those directions lie. 

While the bread was cooking I decided to make blueberry jam.  That was all easy enough, however, without the proper canning equipment, you need to be an octopus to do everything correctly.  I got burned by hot jam, hot jars, hot water, hot jars filled with jam, etc. you get the point.  I will be investing in a jar remover thing - whatever that utensil is called.

It was fun, although I'm glad no one was here to witness me swearing like a sailor making jam.  Seems to me like that should be a much more wholesome event.

After kitchen demolition was complete (ie six loaves of blueberry zucchini bread and 6 jars of jam), I needed a nap.  But instead I headed out to the garden.  And to my delight, there were two ripe tomatos (early girl), 10 ripe cherry tomatos, ripe yellow tomatos, and another round of string beans.  And my favorite addition, a teeny tiny eggplant.  I wanted to kiss it, it was so cute. 

I should be cleaning my kitchen right now... blah.  I'm going to click my heels a couple of times and see what happens.

Bad, Bad Blogger

I could list a bunch of excuses as to why I haven't blogged lately, but really I'm just lazy.  Well, I'm not really lazy, I'm just busy doing all things other than blogging.

Hm, since I last blogged, I turned 25 and had a birthday party, went Kayaking on the fourth of July, went to Maine for a long weekend, picked a ton of vegetables (rough estimate only), went kayaking over the weekend, worked a lot, babysat overnight, and did other things to boring to mention.

Oh, and my camera is broken, so no new photos to share, much to my dismay.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

All of the rain that we've gotten in the past couple of weeks has really made my garden shoot up like weeds, but enough is enough already.  I want to go play outside!  The last decent day we had a planted a whole bunch of new perennials along my rock wall in my yard - I've been trying to make the yard less tempting to the deer by way of plants rather than fences and gimmicks...we'll see how that works.  I planted Red Fox Speedwell, Sensation Sky Blue Salvia, Sensation White Salvia, Sentimental Blue Balloon Flower, Chattahoochee Phox, Scarlet Pineapple Sage, and Butterfly Weed.  I bought them all off the clearance rack at Lowes (I'm going to have to start attending anonymous meetings for shopping off the clearance rack so regularly.)

In vegetable news, my brocolli has started to form and it looks so cool!! I've never grown broccolli before, so I was waiting ever so patiently to see what would happen.  My zucchini has tons of flowers on it and the summer squash already has little squashes!  I go out every morning and take a little peak at their progress.

Around the Yard

This weekend was a bust for the most part as far as yard work went.  Saturday, I rounded up my bridesmaids and dragged them to Fall River, MA to look for bridesmaid dresses.  That was fun...to watch...I am not looking forward to having to wear a dress at all - not that I'm opposed to dresses, I just prefer to wear them in a color that matches dirt... I've never been particularly girly.  We'll see.

Anyway, Saturday evening I had a little run in with my bees, I'll spare you the gory details but lets just say it involved a curious dog, less then patient bees and me getting stung...a lot.  I went to the doctors today for an unrelated issue and the doctor made me an appointment with an allergist because apparently I had a delayed onset reaction... which you can read as my foot is roughly twice it's normal size and my forearm is as big as my leg.  No big deal.  Oh well.  Note to self, do not attempt to stop a curious dog.

Sunday, a little sore from my bee incident the day before, I decided to take it easy.  So, I went with Aunt Jill to The Farmer's Daughter.  This place was absolutely amazing!!!  They had just about everything under the sun.  I had to really hold myself back, but I only ending up with a butterfly weed and Red Salvia.  You could spend hours at this nursery if you wanted to really take a look at everything.  While we were there they were having an event that included guest speakers and members of the Master Gardeners Program.  After that we went to Simple Pleasures which is a cute gift shop that has tons of glazed terra cotta pots and lawn ornaments outside, and lots of fun houseware stuff inside.  They just so happened to have bee garden tiles... so of course I purchased one.  I don't harbor any ill feelings towards my bees for stinging me.

The butterfly weed...

And my new bee garden tile.

In other exciting garden news, when I was poking around my beds this afternoon I noticed that my tomatos are flowering!  Yay!  I feel like a proud mama, my tomato plants that I grew from seed are growing up!  Yes, I know I'm a dork....

Our baby birds have flown the nest... but now we have snakes...don't tell Zeke.

One final photo...Can you guess what this is?  I'll give you a hint, it makes me very sad.

Deer print..in my herb garden.  Luckily she didn't eat anything, but I think it's time to put a plan in action.  I just have to figure out what the plan is first.

The Last Few Days

This week has been a little bit crazy... really busy with work stuff and playing outside in my free time, so not much time to post.

I have been heading over to Lowe's regularly to see what they have on the clearance rack... Wednesday morning I bought two forever blooming Hydrangeas.  I haven't decided where to plant them yet, I guess I'll figure that out tomorrow.  I also bought 3 flats of dwarf marigolds for $1.50 a piece.  I planted them as a border along my squash beds.  I'll post some pictures, if the weather gets nice enough to take some later.

This morning I woke up really early, and my morning ritual is to open the bathroom shade up first thing, there is a weather station right outside my bathroom window, so I read the temperature and gauge what I should wear for the day.  So, this morning when I opened the shade, what do I see standing in my backyard by the pond?  A doe.  First thought - oh cool, second thought, oh no!  My garden!  So, I ran and grabbed my camera, (and a pair of pants!), and rand outside to take her picture.  She let me take one picture and then ran away.  Time to figure out how to keep the deer out of my garden.  I didn't even know we had deer!!

 

Sorry for the poor quality of the photo - it was early and I didn't get a chance to adjust the camera settings before the deer ran away.