Friends Of The Family, Groovy Fauna Edition

June 12, 2015February 14, 2023 / Ally Bean / 22 Comments

At the risk of sounding hippy dippy I’ll share with you that morning & evening I like to go outside into the garden with a beverage and commune with nature.

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I enjoy the aloneness of it. Tossing my thoughts aside. Being in the moment. Enjoying the colors of the flora. Trippy.

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But this Spring I’ve come to realize that often when I’m outside doing my Earth Mother thing, I am not alone. There be more than flora, there be fauna, too.

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And this fauna doesn’t seem to give a flying fig through a donut hole that I’m out there too. You’d think that they would care, wouldn’t ‘ya?

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But they don’t seem to groove on the idea that this is my garden– and not theirs. They just keep on keeping on like they belong out there. Far out man. 😉

Break A Leaf: The Garden Show Must Go On

May 21, 2015May 21, 2015 / Ally Bean / 31 Comments

What is a garden, but one big stage production?

And as any well-grounded director knows, every big theater production is filled with characters.

Here’s the diva, a honey locust tree, bowing to the backyard audience, wowing them with her pale yellow scented spring flowers.

Below her, the stones and grasses, covered with her discarded snowflake-like flower petals, create an encouraging group of extras, allowing her to look her best. Always.

Meanwhile, out in the front yard along the driveway, catmint is stealing the show. He’s the star who has blossomed into his own this year, giving a most dazzling performance.

While on the other side of the front yard, under some birch trees, his understudy waits in the wings, hoping to grow-up and be as famous as his great-uncle over by the driveway.

Around back, the colorful ingénues are content, contained until it is time for their dramatic entrance onto the stage. So young. So pretty.

Near the ingénues, the comedy duo of tomato and pepper sit hopefully. Grown ostensibly for their vegetables, more often than not, these garden stars fall victim to the shenanigans of overly enthusiastic fans such as squirrels and raccoons.

And finally, no production would be complete without a character actor who supports the story. A true thespian, sure of where he is going, the stone path is always willing to allow the other plants to shine. Knowing that without him, there’d be no garden production at all.

THE END

Of Slow Cooker Wisdom And Simple Garden Plans

May 5, 2015May 5, 2015 / Ally Bean / 44 Comments

“Knowledge is the process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.”

~ Martin H. Fischer, Physician and Author

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WE SPENT MOST of this past warm and beautiful spring weekend working in the garden.

My goal, influenced by the Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook , is to have what I’ve come to call a slow cooker garden.

A space filled with variety, but put together in a way that is simple to understand. Pleasant to look at, but requiring less and less effort each year to maintain.

That is, we’re going to fix it now with perennials, paths and stones; then forget about changing anything out there for the next decade.

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SO WHAT HAVE we got going on? Well, we’ve got:

a plethora of roses + daisies + hostas in planting beds beside stone and/or concrete steps that circle the house;
a landscape island in the front yard near the street filled with grasses and mostly purple flowers;
a newly installed dry faux creek bed under the deck; AND
a lower terrace in the back yard down by the woods that features stone steps, grasses, roses plus the recent addition of difficult-to-find milkweed. *yeah*

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I’M NOT SURE how our garden ended up being so multi-faceted and unique, but over the years, little by little, it did.

My hope is that when it comes time to sell this property, like the HGTV show CURBAPPEAL suggests, the awe-inspiring exterior of the property will be so amazing that this house’s relatively small square footage won’t hinder a sale.

However, be that as it may, in the mean time, I’m not worrying about real estate business-y things like ROI. Instead, I’m going to groove on all that we have going on in our pretty, pretty garden.

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So tell me, gentle readers: how does your garden grow?

A Report From The Sidelines Re: Neighbor Vs. Birds

April 14, 2015November 19, 2015 / Ally Bean / 33 Comments

{ Image Source }

[Note to readers: we live in a neighborhood with homes built on wooded ravine lots. With many trees. In which birds build nests, as they are wont to do. These are facts.]

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The neighbor woman who lives behind us has upped her anti-bird campaign. She’s still out to chase all the birds away from her property, but she has a new tactic.

Now, in addition to her shouting and noise-making, she has begun to place bright shiny silver & red metallic streamers in her trees.

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She wanders around her backyard throwing these streamers up into the air near tree branches. Then when a streamer gets caught on a tree branch she loosely ties it to the branch, leaving yards of streamer fluttering in the wind.

This means that when the sun shines and hits the moving streamers, her backyard has bright lights randomly twinkling. It reminds me of an old-fashioned used car lot, which I guess she thinks is a turn-off for birds.

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I find this new behavior alternately entertaining or annoying.

What entertains me is that her neighbors on the property immediately beside her have put a large bird feeder on a shepherd’s hook. They’ve positioned the shepherd’s hook in such a way that she’ll see the bird feeder ever time she steps outside onto her deck, but they cannot see it from their deck.

Don’t you just love passive-aggressive behavior?

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However, what annoys me is that when the streamers are twinkling their brightest the light from them is strong enough to be noticed on our TV screen. Inside the house. Across the ravine.

Meaning that if we happen to be watching something on TV, our show has little sparkly red dots of color superimposed on it. It’s kind of like stroking out without going to the bother of having a stroke.

Now how strange is that?