Monday, April 30, 2012

A bird in the hand...

is worth an egg on the windowsill?

This weekend, while upstairs cleaning out more of the unfinished room, I happened to look out an unopened window and spotted the following:

Photobucket
It's obvious why they call that lovely shade "Robin's Egg Blue"

Last week, a robin flew into the kitchen window (which is on the same side of the house, but below this attic window). She didn't hit hard like she couldn't see the glass, more like she was trying to land on it. I was surprised, and she must have been more surprised at seeing me. It happened several times over the course of a few days, which was very odd. Now I realize she must have been scouting out a nest spot and settled on the second story ledge with a view.

Photobucket
On another avian note, the chicks are growing and learning. I have been taking them little treats and handling them a few minutes every day so they will associate us with good things. Except they haven't liked the treats I tried. Atomic Cluck loves fruit and tomatoes and bread crumbs and meat scraps and noodles and most anything we give her from the kitchen (except, inexplicably, strawberries). But the chicks weren't interested in any of it. But when Jeff saw their attention on an errant fly that was circling their heads, it gave us an idea. We began swatting insects and dropping them into the cage. Eureka! They devour them. So we were busy killing bugs and hand-feeding the babies yesterday. It only took one or two times before they eagerly awaited the sight of our fingers anywhere around or in the cage. I think Pavlov should have done his experiments with chickens instead of dogs!

Here is one of the chicks checking out Jeff's iPhone camera lens from the safety of my lap. This is our two and a half week old Silver Laced Wyandotte named Cluck Norris (she's very bold and brave and came jumping out of the stacked cages at the feedstore with a roundhouse kick):
Photobucket

Friday, April 27, 2012

Bluebird

IndigoBunting

I thought I had identified this gorgeous blue bird last year. We saw several flying around during the summer and believed we were seeing an Indigo Bunting. But I captured this photo outside the kitchen window yesterday and am not certain the markings are quite right. The male apparently does has more brown in the late winter and early spring before turning a brilliant blue all over just in time for mating season, so maybe this guy is still in his lounge-wear and hasn't gotten all spiffed up for the girls yet. Whatever he is, God certainly created a stunning color for this fine feathered friend!

Photobucket Pictures, Images and Photos
Indigo Bunting Passerina cyanea
Courtesy of National Geographic


IndigoBunting3

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Wonderful Windowboxes

Since I have quite the little nursery of extra plants built up in the back corner of yard (from gifts, propagation, plant sales, clearances, etc.), I thought perhaps a little color on the left side of the house would be in order. It's a very sunny spot, but the small Knock Out roses aren't doing much blooming yet, and the herb garden will be mostly green. I found bronze colored windowboxes for $2.50 each, and Jeff fell in love with some colorful celosia at the garden center. I used that as my (soon-to-be) tall "thriller" element, mixed in some 25¢-per-pack discount annuals as filler, and tossed in two colors of sweet potato vine for spillers.

Photobucket

These boxes fit nicely on the windowsills outside the two downstairs bedrooms. I think they will really cheer up the western face of the house, which also happens to be the most prominent side coming down the road. I love that I can just open the windows and water them, and I look forward to seeing them fill in!

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Chickens Little

Our new babies have come home to roost! I picked out two Buff Orpingtons, two Americaunas (which lay the colored eggs), and two Silver Laced Wyandottes. I had to go to two different places to get the breeds I wanted, but I've been calling all over town for over a month now trying to get the right combo of chicks at the right age. I wanted to raise them all together and I wanted pullets (females), so that led to some careful planning. Ordering from the hatchery required purchasing 25 or more, and we definitely don't have the time or space for that kind of operation!

PhotobucketPhotobucket
The smallest one, an Americauna that is only three days old, fell asleep in my hand!

We made them a cozy home and brought Atomic Cluck in for an introduction. She got extremely still and just stared at them. Then she hopped off my lap and ran out into the yard calling over and over. I have no idea what's going on in her little brain, but it was certainly unusual behavior. Once they are a little bigger and stronger, we'll start some supervised "play" time between them.

Photobucket

Monday, April 23, 2012

Hooray for Herbs

I love Lowes! I was in the store pricing some materials for my windowbox project and decided to check out the garden center on my exit. There, I found several pots of summer annuals on clearance that will work nicely in my newest planters for the porch steps. Even better, I noticed a sign after checking out that had herbs and vegetable starts in peat pots mark down to $1.50 through today! I had just been working on the herb bed Sunday, so for once I have the site prepared before the plants come home. I filled my cart again and went through the check-out line a second time, but it was well worth the extra trip.

Photobucket

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Pinky and the Pain

The Bible speaks of "little members" and "uncomely parts", but I don't think it's usually speaking of the pinky finger. But my little member has certainly been uncomely these days.

Photobucket
Jeff's iPhone doesn't do the coloring justice, but it's just as well,
since the one on the right is hardly an attractive sight!


It started Friday evening after DaVinci helped himself to a new odor by rolling in some chicken droppings. He had just done it the day before as well and received a full bath for his efforts. There was no time for a tidy bathing this evening, so I unceremoniously hosed him down the best I could. He was wet, frantic, and hungry by the time I let him in. While drying him off with a towel, he threw his head back just as I came forward to wipe his neck. Crack! His skull jammed right into my pinky finger. Within a few minutes, the finger was swollen, tender, and stiff. Now, one day later, it has the lovely addition of purple splotches and tight skin. In profile, it resembles a sausage stuffed in a too-small casing.

Jeff has had plenty of jammed and sprained fingers (via basketball) and says the symptoms are fairly normal. I had no idea how many activities required the assistance of the pinky, but now that mine is not cooperating, I'm realizing the significance of small appendages. I'm also discovering the difficulty of sleeping with one's hand over one's head (to prevent the blood pooling and additional swelling), so I'm learning all kinds of news things with this latest experience.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Botanical Bonanza

Our Huntsville Botanical Gardens has a huge annual plant sale every spring. As members, we get to attend the very first day, which is not open to the general public. I finished my volunteer work with the Master Gardeners and picked up Jeff, who played a little hooky from work for a few hours so we could romp over to the gardens and peruse the perennials, annuals, herbs, shrubs, and other goodies together.

I already have more plants than I can get in the ground, but I have been needing some annuals for the walkway flowerbeds. I haven't amended the soil, built up the beds, or installed any edging yet, but hopefully we will get to that soon. I say hopefully, since we went ahead and purchased a few flats of verbena! The price was too good to resist, and it's exactly what I've been planning for. Their lantana was a bit more than I wanted to spend, but I think I'll be able to find it reasonably priced elsewhere. Those two bloomers, combined with the free variegated liriope we dug a few weeks ago and the purple heart I plan to propagate, will form the main players. I'd love to work in some golden shrimp plant and angelonia, but I don't want to go too crazy!

Photobucket Pictures, Images and Photos

Monday, April 16, 2012

Dog Days

Photobucket

We spent a good part of yesterday out working around the yard. DaVinci came up front with us and found a comfy patch of yellowing foliage to bed down in. Since the bulbs have already gotten their needed nutrients and I'm about to mow down the leaves anyhow, we didn't mind. And he did look quite cute surveying our activity from the cozy nest.

Photobucket
He must have been exhausted, watching us labor so hard!

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Tangled Web We Weave

I spent some time this week creating an invisible trellis for my purple hyacinth bean plants. It's a lovely ornamental climbing bean with small lavender flowers in the summer and long dark showy pods from late summer until first frost. A Master Gardener friend got me started on it when she showed me her gazebo covered in it last summer and gave me some seeds.

Photobucket Pictures, Images and Photos

I started them inside, and as they got growing, they wanted to twine around anything and everything. We're technically a few days shy of the last official frost date for zone 7 (April 15th), but since we just hit the 30's last night and the temps are climbing again, surely we won't have another cold snap! That's my 'hurry up, I want to plant it!' gardening logic, anyhow. So I prepared the beds and rigged up a tidy lattice of high strength fishing line just off the front porch. The vines will block the hot western sun in summer and form a visual screen from the busy road a quarter mile from us. It's just an annual, but it will serve as a nice place holder for the evergreen Clematis Armandii I would like to plant there this fall.

Photobucket

Incognito

I've been busy blending. All the new electrical and plumbing conduit on the sides of the house were bothering me (as well as a few old pieces), so I used our leftover house paint to disguise them. I still need to borrow an extension ladder to paint the top part where it overlays the clapboard siding, but I'm out of that paint at the moment. Sherwin Williams is having one of their huge 40% seasonal sales next week, so I'm going to pick up a gallon of exterior paint for that. It's never a bad idea to have extra on hand for touch-ups.

Photobucket

Photobucket
The utility company won't allow painting the meter face (for good reason!), but the rest of the box is open territory. I haven't decided whether to paint the cable box or just have Charter come remove their equipment, since we don't have cable, dish, etc.

While I had the paintbrush wet, I decided to do a little faux finishing on the front, too. The lattice-work brick on the porch had collapsed some time in the past, and the repair job was less than professional. Gobs of cement were smeared on the face of the brick and the mortar lines were thick, clumsy, and unattractive. I used matching paint to clean up the facade as best I could. Not perfect, but better.

Before:
Photobucket
After:
Photobucket

Baby, it's cold outside

But it's warm and toasty inside! I'm so thankful God arranged for us to have the dual fuel heat system. We are slowly using up our propane tank (as we would have forfeited several hundred dollars by switching to natural gas immediately), so we haven't connected the gas furnace yet. But it got down to the mid 30's last night, and the house had a chill all day. I had completely forgotten that we had the heat pump feature until reminded. So I went to the fancy control interface and programmed us some warmth! It was so lovely and quiet and unscented and all-pervasive.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Awww...

Photobucket

That was my first thought on seeing the little rabbit. My second (spoken out loud) was, "He's going to eat my garden"! And he's actually not so little. But it certainly was cute seeing him pose outside our dining room window and look around, wash his face, and continue his exploration through our backyard. It's the first rabbit I've seen, although with all the tall grass, shrubs, and underbrush, I knew there had to be some around. DaVinci was soon hot on his trail, so perhaps that will dissuade him from too much interest in my much tended vegetation.

Photobucket

Thursday, April 5, 2012

All Our Ducts in a Row

All this thinking and planning and debating and praying about the HVAC situation, and I guess God already had our unit picked out for us. And it turns out He thought we should upgrade to the dual fuel system for downstairs, because that's what we got!

It's hard to explain how I didn't know what we were buying, but with all the confusing model number changes, rebate offers, different components you can mix and match, and other befuddling details, I was pretty sure I had communicated we had settled for the gas furnace. And the price on the final quote sheet definitely reflected that fact (gas-only is a good bit cheaper than the dual fuel heat pump plus furnace).

So imagine my surprise when the installer handed me the manual for the downstairs unit and it was for a dual fuel! And the unit was already sitting on the pad hooked up, so they said it was ours and not to worry about it when I asked. The owner admitted it was his mistake and to consider it a bonus! So we got a top of the line, highly efficient unit without meaning to and without paying any more than we were planning to for the gas-only one. One more blessing in the long line of fabulous happenings here on the farm!

Here's to being cool in the summer and warm in the winter. The process took twice as long as expected (but was still completed in only two weeks, which I find amazing). I had the opportunity to interact with a very reputable family business, a nice crew of guys, and learn more than I ever thought I would want to know about heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. It took a very big chunk of our renovation budget, but we think it's worth it.

Next step: Learning how to control our fancy-schmancy "environmental control" (nothing as simple as a thermostat, of course) with Jeff's iPhone!

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Clearly Calisto

Photobucket

Our new foundation plantings of Indian Hawthorne "Calisto" are in bloom, and we are thrilled. This was one of my clearance purchases last fall, and what a deal it was! Such pretty pink, long-lasting blooms, and fascinating blue-green curly leaves . I can't wait until the shrubs fill in and become a mass planting in future years. Now, if I could just do something about all the weeds in the lawn...

Photobucket

Monday, April 2, 2012

Delving into History

Another mystery solved here on the farm.

Photobucket
(Ignore the shiny duct in the background)

We have been asking anyone and everyone who ventures into the basement if they know what this contraption is or was used for. It appears to be a large, slightly trapezoidal concrete foundation for something that bolted to the top. We've asked electricians, plumbers, miscellaneous contractors, older men of "that" generation, etc. Many people have had suggestions, but no one could identify it.

Until this morning, when the elderly gentleman who was born and grew up here stopped by for a visit. I asked him, fearing he may not even know what I was talking about and certainly wouldn't be able to navigate the basement stairs to investigate. But he certainly did know. It's a remnant of the Delco-Light Plant!

Now, if that doesn't mean anything to you (as it didn't to me in that moment), let me "enlighten" you! (Ha ha, that pun is really funny, as you'll see in a minute.) Back in the '20's and '30's, less than 10% of rural Americans had electricity. So DELCO (Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company) created a gas powered engine and belt-driven generator that charged a set of batteries to power a house on 32 volts DC.

Photobucket

Photobucket
See the little concrete pad it's perched on? Just like ours!

As I sit here with my 200 amp electrical service and multiple breaker boxes and subpanels, it's amazing to remember how new electricity really is. Next time I complain about only having two or three outlets in the bedroom, I'll be thankful I'm at least not sleeping over a gas engine in the basement with a shelf full of batteries I have to charge and change!

Photobucket

Photobucket