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She Got A Snake!
Yesterday evening we let the chickens forage in the garden, which has a 4′ picket fence. Chickens are definitely rough on the veggies beds and sling dirt all over the paths. However, they sure can find the bugs! There were particularly many bugs under the pole bean teepee, which had a large piece of decaying cardboard on the floor to stop the weeds. It stopped the weeds and created wildlife habitat. The chickens were in there tearing it up, when…
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Chicken Updates
It has been so hot and humid — yet with no rain — here in Raleigh that I’ve bottomed out on summer morale. I’m doing what I can to keep the plants from drying out and the chickens from overheating, but mostly I’m waiting on rain. This afternoon we finally had a short shower with more supposedly on the way. It’s expensive to keep watering the plants, but many of the perennials and shrubs are in their first year and…
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No More Peach Tree
No more peach tree. It was infested all up the trunks (there were multiple trunks due to poor pruning and management) with peach scale bugs that would have been difficult to treat, and after 8 years of losing crops to fungal diseases, we decided to call it quits. I shed some tears as this was a symbolic tree, the one we bought after a second miscarriage. In truth, we can’t just burry our grief in the ground and expect it…
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House Wren Family
After the bluebird failure this spring, a pair of house wrens moved into the bluebird box on the blackberry trellis. They actually filled both bluebird boxes with nests but only laid eggs in one, which I later learned is common practice. The unused nest is called a “dummy nest”. Once the eggs hatched, we diligently kept the cats indoors to make sure that once the babies fledged, they wouldn’t fall prey to our viscous cats’ claws. Two days ago, the…
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Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’
Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ is a plant that has been banished from our fenced vegetable garden because it multiplies and grows well on its own without any attention and is a total space hog because of it. Last fall I dug up the crocosmia corms and moved some down to the street beside the rosemary and moved some just at the bottom of the deck stairs just outside the garden fence. They all popped back up this spring. The leaves are similar…
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Hatteras Island
We spent our first week of summer break on Hatteras Island. We aren’t very good at sitting around in beach chairs and relaxing, as you can see from the pics of our adventures. We obsessed over catching blue crabs in the canal at our rental house and the Haulover, chased the sunsets, paddled the sound, hiked a few trails, rode the ferry, climbed walls and walked the more remote beaches. It’s good to be home. Lighthouse Rd, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse…
