Nothing quite as fulfilling as plucking yourself the world's tallest stalk of grass and marching around the yard with it. Love the big, fat grin on my middle boy's face from earlier today. Such great triumph over a "little thing."
We're into the real stuff now....hot nights when we lie on top of our beds listening to the fan whir away without even untucking the sheets, epic salads for dinner served in our big wooden salad bowl, days that stretch out longer than they have any right to be. Real summer.
Mango lemonade with mint
I have a window-box of fresh herbs on the back porch and its getting a lot of use. I drop snipped bits into our dinner salads, and snip them over all our meats and every glass of whatever we're drinking is better with a sprig of mint, right? I love fresh herb season. Next year I have to remember to make sure cilantro and thyme make it in. (Help me remember that, will you?)
Our corn went from this....
To this!
And here come the tassels...the male parts of the plant!
The corn/lawn experiment, in which I planted corn right in our turf grass and then mulched over the top once there were rows of green leaves..... is going well. I have never grown corn. My parents always did when I was growing up, but I've never done it myself. Fun to have the space and the sun. My dad always planted our corn when I was a kid, it was his special garden project, he pounded in stakes with taut string between to be sure of perfectly straight plantings, and then he put in the corn. I remember that we always planted from little paper bags full of seed that we got at the feed-store. Not a feed-store in sight here and I still seem to be managing to pull of my own tiny corn patch! Hooray!
The apples on our apple tree are swelling and starting to show just the barest hint of a blush...still wondering what color they'll end up, how big they'll be and if they'll taste good enough for eating. A few weeks ago I ate a jar of applesauce my aunt made, thinking wistfully that I hoped this fall we'd be eating our own. And apple pies, and dried apple rings and maybe a few apple turnovers for autumn picnics to boot! The boughs are starting to bend downwards with the weight of the fruit which makes me smile.
And the bees are happy about summer. They're buzzing around pollinating our cucumbers and tomatoes, and zooming over the hedge, to yards beyond our range of vision. I have been into the hive a couple of times since introducing the bees to their new digs. They're building beautiful comb and filling it with all kinds of good things, and I am hopeful that they'll find enough fodder in the neighborhood to make sure they are all lardered up for the winter. I have plans to build a small fence, with climbing, flowering vines planted on it, to enclose the area where the hive is, and create a little protected bee yard. We're working on teaching Dee to stay away from the hive but he did recently discover it and is now on closely monitored probation to ensure that he never get out of eye-sight. Time for a little landscaping to solve the problem. I'm thinking a short fence of some kind with honeysuckle on it, and maybe pots of jasmine in the summer to make it really highly scented. Mmmmm!!!! I'd like a barrier like that around my house, wouldn't you?
Closing with this song which is humming in my mind, on perpetual repeat, Sumer Is Icumen In, sometimes also called The Cuckoo Song. Can't remember where I first heard it but I know it was a long time ago and I know rings in my mind merrily and makes me smile. Its a very old song, one of the oldest written songs we have in English, written about 1260 or so....a little ode to "sumer." It says "Summer is a comin' in, loudly sing cuckoo, groweth seed and bloometh meadow and springs the wood anew..." Summer is a pretty timeless affair.
I love the discoveries that come with an old house. We're all cabin fevered up to our earlobes at this point so every single warmish/sunnyish day has us romping around on the lawn until the very last second. I've been out shifting plants around, playing with the edges of beds, dreaming up what will someday go where and generally enjoying having a yard to the very fullest. I decided that there needed to be a little something down the sides of the rather stark front walk....a little plant life to give a lusher look than just concrete and grass.
The boring front walk last fall, notice all those cringe-worthy buzz-cut yews along the front....all gone!
So, I found some hostas that could be divided up and moved from their current home and after plunking them in, I meandered down the walk to check the view from the street. At the curb I found myself looking down at a couple of funny cobblestone rocks we'd noticed in the grass between the sidewalk and the street. My landscape designer friend had suggested we lift them at some point and use them in our design because they looked pretty.
Here's a little further away view of the "Before" look. Can you see the cobblestones in the grass between sidewalk and curb? Yeah, me neither.
Pretty soon I was down on my hands and knees, fiddling around, pulling clumps of last year's crabgrass off of them and my fingers found the hidden edge of another stone, and then Ru was down on his knees helping and there was another and another! By the time I had finished Ru and I had unearthed a hidden cobblestone connector to the street. A beautiful little field-stone segue to our front walk, the perfect place for someone to arrive curbside and a beautiful little addition to the view. It is hard to believe that it was invisible under grass and dirt for all that time, years probably and that someone so long ago must have laid those stones, fitting all the notches and edges together.
Surprise! Beautiful laid stone walk!
Woohoo! Isn't that pretty? This is how it looks now. some plantings along the side of the walk, newly discovered cobble-walk bridging our house to the road....and plantings going in along the sides.
I sure wish I knew the story. After sweeping off the stones with our broom I went dashing to the backyard and came back with some clumps of daylilies I'd wrenched out of the long swathe next to the garage and planted them along the stone walk. I think the look is really beautiful, even if it is a bit unformed yet. I am having visions of creeping thyme or, Irish moss or Corsican mint creeping between the stones and beautiful gardens on both sides to frame the view. Gotta love little victories!
It is skunk cabbage season. And now that we don't live right next to a wetland I have to seek out my skunk cabbage experiences. It is the very first of the spring flowers...it beats out the crocus and the snowdrop and every daffodil in town, literally melting the snow and ice away with the sheer force of its will, making a hole in the chill and bringing blossoms to a snowbank. I will have to take a little expedition to find some soon.
I found some crocus the other day, without even trying! Look at that lawn! It is colder this spring than it was last year at this time (blogging helps you keep track of these things) so it hardly feels like time to look for blossoms. I am still immobilized half the morning by the chill and donning sweaters with impunity. But, there they were, a light frosting of lilac over the grass...all the same. Pardon the poor photograph, such faithful small friends were begging to have their photo included even if it wasn't as clear as one might have hoped.
I do hope that it warms up soon...I could go for a good 60 degree day with beams of sunshine. I am sort of sick of toasting my mitts on mugs of tea although it still seems like the way to survive. I hope we get some pools of sunshine on the sunroom floor sometime soon, the kind a sleek kitty would curl up in for the rest of the afternoon. You know....that is, if we had a sleep kitty.
And the sap is running! One virtue to the chill weather. I am sure the tree-tapping crowd is glad that it is staying cool enough to keep the run going. And I do like my supply of local syrup to be deep so I even benefit directly in a fringe sort of way. We saw sap buckets on the trees at the farms we visited yesterday when we went on a milk/egg run on our naptime drive. Small signs of progress. Nice to see those.
And then there are the plums. This isn't terribly local but it makes me happy. Every year, these pointed tipped plums come tumbling in from Chile. They come in fire colors, predominately yellow but hints of gold and crimson and hot orange, especially emanating from the tip. They ripen beautifully on the counter-top and unlike most any stone-fruit this time of year, they actually gush juice when bitten into. I discovered them a couple of years ago and look forward to late winter every year when I know they'll appear again in a small basket at my local Whole Foods. This year I found out that they are called lemon plums. So lovely to know the names of things you love. I'll take every little gift I can to tide me over. Drip on, sweet plums, drip on...you gotta get me through till April! (Note to self: Must go get some more this weekend...we're running low for some strange reason!)
