Letting go

[EasyStreet]

Your garden and descriptions are wonderful! I see many of the same things in our yard, minus the vegetable garden. I walk my little (10 lb) dog around the yard and we discover other animals for him to count coup on. Cats, mice, groundhogs, even the horse next door. The confident robins annoy him! If I named this place it would be Cardinal Hill.

Wishing you enough sun and rain to see you through Fall.

[Fleur]

You are a valiant warrior honeybera, a victor indeed

[there]

honeybera,
Victory is sweet
I'm, picturing the different birds in your yard you describe. Thank you for that.

[honeybera]

You are a valiant warrior honeybera, a victor indeed

♥♥ I love you, Fleur!! ♥♥

Your garden and descriptions are wonderful!

Why, thanks!

I see many of the same things in our yard, minus the vegetable garden.

Speaking of which, I have pretty much decided to MOVE my veggie garden (except for the Raised Beds #1-3 and the permanent fruit trees already there and the strawberries in planters snuggled up against my house and already in a perfectly-shaded-in-the-afternoon spot) over to the dog's yard. That would include ALL squash, tomatoes, and possibly peppers. In their place I would put a flourish of tiny blossoms from salvia, penstemons, and skull caps (hideous name, but a hummer favorite) to attract and satisfy the needs of my hummers! Figure that blooming year round in some fashion at any given time of the year for my tiny hummers with a full view for me from my WOW. WOW indeed!!!!!!!!

If I plant my veggies in my SmartPots in the straw-covered dog's yard, it will make it easier for me to water daily (they often need it in this extreme heat time of the year), fertilize, stay organized, and stay on top of harvesting. I may keep one squash over near my WOW kind of like the canary in the coal mine ("do the others need watering today?") just to keep me honest. They wilt so easily.

So this Fall and Winter seasons will be spent both pruning things back ( a LOT!) and moving pots around to establish a new "veggie garden venue" and planting the new and INCREASED hummingbird garden right in front of my WOW. Most of these new "hummingbird plants" will be in pots, too, but can take (and even ENJOY) the FULL SUN aspect of my yard, and with minimum watering needed. Only the dog's yard will need the daily watering of the squash and tomatoes and peppers. Very nice for me!! My little birds (sparrows, mourning doves, and blue jays) only seem to need bird seed and a full bird bath. Easy peasy! And very entertaining! We even get little barely-flying babies out there where the mother birds are stuffing seeds in their little ones open beaks when the babies rapidly flap their wings...SO CUTE!! And I get this wonderful show for a handful of bird seed and a drink of water. Good deal from my standpoint!

I'm also going to have someone come in and plant my apple trees and Asian apple-pear trees permanently in the dog's yard. I have four circles of "berm" bricks already in there, just waiting for the trees, but I can't physically do it, so I'll hire it done. No worries. And DS LOATHES the job. That will happen later on (in the Springtime). Lots of eventual pruning involved having so many trees, but this time I believe that I can keep up with it, no problem. I am keeping up with the watering this year (GOOD ON ME!! ) and I figure that I'll just put that time in on pruning instead of watering.

All the "pruning" effort has been showing me that not only am I NOT "playing God" or being cruel when I'm doing that, but that what I am doing in that much needed process actually HELPS the plant/tree/whatever to grow and be better preforming! My salvia is teaching me that absolutely! I need to be wise with my pruning (of all my plants), being careful to not "go too far" and harming the living thing, but to just let them grow without pruning at all (which was my former way of doing things) doesn't let the plant flourish and bloom beautifully. I'm seeing that this is the same way with all of us, too. Unfortunately, most of our parents hadn't "read the manual" when it came to rearing children and they made horrific mistakes in our upbringing that was placed in their hands. What a shame that is. As I gently and thoughtfully prune my garden so it can revitalize and grow properly, I can more and more see the way it should have been with MD, but sadly wasn't.

I'm also seeing how important it is to fertilize these plants, but not too much! And each plant has different needs, too, just like children do. To overindulge (using too much fertilizer) my plants to make them GROW or BLOSSOM can be very counterproductive, but some should be given. It's been said that we can be well parented, but if we happen to miss the mark there with our randomly selected parents, we can BE the good parents to ourselves retroactively. This garden of mine is teaching me that and demonstrating to me just how to do it well, ideally as it should have been done in the first place, but how to overcome that abuse in the NOW. That is really soul-satisfying and deeply healing to me. Daily watering, especially in this heat, is a chore and tiring at times, but to not do it, to get all depressed and ignore the pressing needs of my garden, to ignore Mother Nature's strict timelines and watch it all dry up and die as I sulk inside the house, is not something that I'm comfortable with anymore. You should see my dwarf walnut tree (a Pedro walnut, so we named him Pedro ) over in the dog's yard, how green he now is and how much he's grown this year! Before I began watering him regularly, he merely survived, but now, with water and a dose of fertilizer on a regular basis, he is THRIVING! He even has a fairly substantial crop of walnuts on him...first year ever! I'd say he's about 15 yrs. old. He's living happily, weed free and somewhat indulged, over in the dog's yard, their only shade over there so far. That does my heart good.

I walk my little (10 lb) dog around the yard and we discover other animals for him to count coup on. Cats, mice, groundhogs, even the horse next door. The confident robins annoy him!

I had 4 Rat Terriers patrolling my yard, so we never EVER saw any of those things, including gophers, in our yard. To quell our neighbors constant noise complaints (dog's barking) several years back, I had a fence built in my yard to keep my dogs away from the neighbor's fence (creating "the dog's yard" on one side and my garden area on the other), however, my dogs thereby lost the ability to patrol the garden area. We suddenly had a rash of gopher holes (and gophers) over in the garden area! As my dogs aged and quit barking so much, I opened the gate, the dogs dug out those gophers in quick time, and we haven't had a gopher hole since! No mice, no rats, no nothing! And cats wouldn't DARE jump into our yard. They would be doggie fodder in a second! Ms. T even caught a slow-poke Mourning Dove taking off and she nailed it in mid-flight once. A fatal mistake for that dove! My remaining two aging dogs don't bother anyone anymore, but still patrol mightily. ♥ Love those good dogs! ♥ (They also weigh 10 lbs. )

If I named this place it would be Cardinal Hill.

Really? Why? Inquiring minds want to know.

Time for sleep! It's early, but I'm tired today. Maybe it's the heat out there. It's 107ºF today, but I can simply sleep through it. Plus today is about the last day over 100ºF for the next week and then we're back into it again.

Wishing you enough sun and rain to see you through Fall.

Well, we've always got the sun and it rarely, if ever, rains here until well after the end of Nov., so your wish has come true! But thanks for the good thoughts anyways, EasyStreet!

Good thoughts to you, too!

Honeybera

[Fleur]

Hello honeybera

Once you have the vegetables in same general area, maintenance tasks will be much easier. Your fruit trees have done well to survive to date - in less than a year, you'll have them in permanent residency. Remember to give them lots of TLC for a year or two to get them established. Great to know Pedro has been looked after and rewarded your efforts with an excellent crop

Snipping off any dead blooms might encourage further flowering; more nectar for hummingbird and other visiting wildlife


Wishing you and your son a lovely week

[EasyStreet]

Well, honeybera,

I bought a machete today. I'm going to take it with me on my walks with my dog and start whacking the weeds as we go. I'm trying to create a wildlife lane in the yard, so it's kind of landscaping rather than gardening.

You are in part the inspiration. Plants need to be cut back from time to time. It's part of the magic with the earth. Lots to learn from the earth, too.

Thanks for sharing your world and your visions for it!

[EasyStreet]

P.S.

I live on top and side of a small hill, and we are blessed by the many cardinals that ply the hedgerows separating our yards. We also have bluebirds (for real), bluejays, wrens, finches, woodpeckers (three variants),crows,hawks, and turkey vultures.

My bucket list has one item on it and that is to live as close to nature as I can before I leave the planet.

I see the infinite in each living thing.
PPS
I walk my dog on a leash, and only let him go so far in pursuing another animal. He is evolved to chase them, and I try to let him have a little thrill on a regular basis. The animals in our yard seem to be ok with this peaceful coexistence/low risk roulette.

Be well.

[honeybera]

Good Morning to all of you!! I'm sitting here watching the tiny dancers (hummingbirds) in my garden jetting about and enjoying the super sweet-sweet nectar of the Red Hot Mama salvia blossoms now available to them since I pruned back all the dried up flowers one by one. Now they have a refreshed plant to go to and this seems to be positively thrilling the hummers who are addictively drawn to this plant's bright red blooms! So busy, these fierce and brave little birds! I have decided that this is what I want to see every morning when I open my black out curtains and allow the sunlight into my room. It tends to make me feel happy to be alive! And isn't that what it's all about?

I made my new bread recipe in my VERY OLD bread-making machine! It was relatively simple to do, but when the machine began to rock and roll on my sideboard and smelling "funny", I began to have my doubts. I have to admit I peeked to see what was going on, only to see a very small lump of incredibly questionable dough inside. It took a FULL three hours and thirty minutes to make (tick, tick, tick), but finally it was done...and when I went into the kitchen to see what I had, there was a BIG GORGEOUS golden loaf of tasty HOMEMADE Keto bread!! FULL SIZED, like regular bread! All I can say is WOW! The only problem was that I had a dickens of a time trying to get the loaf released from the pan because the little kneading paddle tool had baked right into the loaf!! After I wiggled the paddle (and loaf) loose from the bread pan, it slid right out. Toasted, this bread is amazing!! Perfect for sandwiches of all kinds, but especially as hot dog or hamburger buns! All well worth the small effort needed to assemble the ingredients initially!

Because this bread has a chewier texture than the extremely tender almond flour bread recipe, I'm going to still keep making the first bread (almond flour with yeast that terrified me at first), but only as a "sweet" bread, the one that DS said tasted like a cinnamon roll (which it did). I can even make a glaze topping for it with a tablespoon of heavy whipping cream + some powdered "sugar" (erythritol). I am also making (today?? - I'm SO busy!!) a Lemon Pound Cake (all Keto friendly) out of almond flour with a lemon glaze on top. Oh, and some macaroons for me (DS HATES coconut, but they're my favorite cookie, one half dipped into melted dark chocolate, and VERY Keto!) - I put all of these prepackaged treats into "one serving" containers and then into the freezer for desserts after my One Meal A Day (OMAD). I've been doing this with muffins for months and months. Time for a change!

I made BBQ chicken (baked) last night (thereby leftovers! ) and am making a Keto Copycat KFC Coleslaw tonight - and that's my OMAD for today (with a cuppa rich Bulletproof coffee and a muffin or other treat for dessert). I know that the doctor's scale says that I've not lost many lbs. on this yet, BUT I can SEE that my muu-muus are bagging on me, my once huge stomach is shrinking and going away, my fatty liver disease is GONE, and I'm MUCH healthier for all this. I just plain FEEL better!

I need to get out there and water soon. The heat is coming. By mid-week it'll be WAY over 100ºF out there AGAIN (104º-107º!!). Today "merely" 99º! I have several things coming in this week, most especially my GardenGlide to help me rearrange my yard (those SmartPots are HEAVY when filled with soil and watered!!!) and offloading the pickup (manure and potting soil). My special order of desert-oriented hummingbird plants should come in as well. PLUS my new bed (mattress only) comes in tomorrow, so I have to have DS set up my new bed frame and headboard (received a couple of months ago from Amazon) today. I have to move a bunch of stuff that has accumulated at the foot of my bed so we can set the new bed frame up - better for me to get that stuff out of the way anyway.

DS LOVES his new car (who wouldn't?), but we have to sell his old one and put that money on the new car's loan. In addition, I need to clean the garage up a bit more to we can sell the rolltop desk that's blocking EVERYTHING from being cleared out in the "Computer Room" (spare bedroom/storage room) and chop out the goat-head weeds in the backyard before we start tracking into the house the sharp, thorn-like seeds that pierce our bare feet (however, all for another day - BUT SOON). I'm also in the process of clearing out the kitchen pantry (and bleach-water cleaning it) as we convert it into a Keto Friendly pantry, and TODAY I have to "do my pills" (sort into their pillboxes) and clean off the top shelf of the kitchen fridge PLUS get my bed frame and headboard set up. So I'd better get to it!!!

Finally HAPPY and UNASHAMED in my OWN SKIN!!

Honeybera

PS - I pulled as many of those goat head's as I could! Between the increasing heat and my inability to bend down to pull them (the stubborn ones) without getting both winded and lightheaded, some are being allowed to stay...UNTIL TOMORROW @ 6AM!! There are many more out there, but at least these won't bother us anymore. Some were developing the big green buds that turn into the goat head seeds that stick in our feet and the dog's feet, too! I haven't seen Spot and Dot limping around in the yard at all (between my hoeing efforts and the straw mulch, perhaps I'm winning). YAY!! Progress, not perfection. I also mulched my peppers (what's left of them) and the tomatoes with chopped straw, and I drug my hoe through the soil a bit more so the birds could enjoy their dust bathes right in front of my WOW. Nice. FREE entertainment! And nothing is cuter! ♥♥♥

[EasyStreet]

Hi honeybera,

Thanks for your posts. I can feel the sunshine even in my darkened room! I remember well the goat heads of my youth! No longer live near them but one never forgets that barefoot reminder!

More sunshine for you and your garden!

[honeybera]

oops!