We got a bunch of IBC totes for the price of a single one … storing water during the extra-wet parts of the year should let us get through the extra-dry parts without drawing on the ground water for crops. But the totes also glow in a very cool way when there’s a light source behind or inside of them. These would make pretty cool decorations! (and then I discovered that illuminated IBC tote walls are absolutely a thing someone else discovered)
I saw a really pretty autumn planter box at a local restaurant and wanted to remember it for next year. Could even plant a pumpkin instead of the ivy so the gourd components would be live.
Well, the cluster of five nuts I’ve been tracking are some of the nuts from the ground.
The cluster of hazelnuts I am tracking is almost ready …
We are installing a new water filtration system, and 1″ PEX-A isn’t easy to get into a bend support. First attempt kinked pretty badly — luckily heating it up seems to restore its shape. It’s hot enough when the material becomes translucent.
We have wild phlox that is purple and we have wild phlox that is white. But every now and again we get one that is white with purple stripes, and I love those. Anya dug this one up from the field and planted it in my bee garden last year, and it is huge this year. And still has the striped flowers that I love!
One of our Pekin ducks has gone broody — but people have managed to sufficiently breed out brooding instinct to what I call “short attention span nesting”. She absolutely needs to sit on a nest. For about 20 minutes, then she’s ready for a swim in the pond or some chow. Which means we wouldn’t trust them to hatch eggs — we’ve got incubators for that. She has, however, figured out a reasonable solution: pinecones. No one takes them from her .She can even leave them out in the yard overnight and the marauding racoon will leave it alone. She built a very convincing nest in our pine trees (and was frantically trying to escape the fence to go sit on the nest) … so Anya relocated it into the duck yard and got the duck over to it. Now she’s got a nest inside the fence to sit on for half an hour and doesn’t seem so compelled to escape.
