We live on 14 acres in Tama County, in a hilly area referred to as the Bohemian Alps. It gets windy in spring and today combined with low temps it was hell out there. Things need to be planted, though. I put on these “ear muffs” I use to block out the sound of our wood chipper. I rubberbanded the bottoms of my jeans to keep the wind from blowing up my pant legs. This helped, somewhat. I planted only 20% of the daylilies I had hoped to get in the ground today. Ordered these from Oakes Daylilies and was thoroughly impressed with the huge divisions they sent. They generously threw in the more spendy “bonus” daylily I requested. I’ll be ordering from them again soon.

At the end of last gardening season I got a good deal on a bunch of hollyhocks and planted them on a couple sides of our shed, thinking it would make a great backdrop. I should have “planted” a fence at the same time to keep out dogs who love chasing each other around the shed. A few of these poor hollyhocks survived the trampling and skidding and I’m hoping to give them all the help I can and get a few blooms out of them. They are biennial and I have waited 2 seasons. So I’m testing out this bottle idea. Although dogs can still enter the bed, if they insist on running circles around the shed I’m hoping they’ll go around the bed to avoid the bottle obstacle course. I may need to tweak this a bit.

On Sunday after a long and arduous day of cutting and chipping branches, removing fence posts and painting, we made a campfire and roasted our first marshmallows of the year. I noticed our marshmallow roasting techniques are telling of our personalities. Al holds his marshmallow a safe distance away from the hot flames, aiming for a light brown evenly cooked surface. He cooks one in the time it takes me to do 2. I plunge mine directly into the fire, setting it aflame. I like the charred black result and it requires no patience to achieve it.

Al and I spent the last 4 days in warm and sunny St. Pete Beach, Florida. Here’s the view from our room. Poor Al was cooped up in conference rooms most of the time while I took long walks to neighboring beaches like Pass-a-grill and laid by the “adult” pool (no screaming splashing children). The hotel was a resort on the beach much like one I worked at while living in the area 15 years ago. I tipped well remembering the disgust I felt at all the well-to-do tourists in $200/night rooms who stiffed me. I am not nostalgic about those years spent in the hospitality business. I feel for all the people my age and older I saw working behind and counters and carrying room service trays.
With the extreme winter we’ve been experiencing this year in Iowa, Florida has never felt better. It was wonderful stepping out of the airport into warm, balmy air and seeing green, LIVING plants and trees, some of which were even in bloom! I did visit one garden center in St. Pete. Plants were marked something like: hardy, half hardy, and tender. No zone info. I considered purchasing a gallon pot of society garlic marked “hardy” but restrained myself. It’s a good thing I did because I googled it back in the hotel and found that it was hardy in zone 7. I enjoyed looking at the selection for whatever zone Florida is and smelling annuals in bloom like sweet allyssum.
This is a sand dune with what I believe are native Savannah grasses and flowers.

Dad and I came out to Golden to help Nick work on some projects. We decided the sun porch needed the most attention. I wish I had remembered to take a “before” photo, but a description will probably do. Picture an outdoor patio framed in by a low concrete wall. At some point in the past someone decided to turn it into an indoor sunroom using whatever they had lying around as materials and a shitload of nails. The result was “ticky tacky” as dad likes to say. This afternoon we ripped out all the ticky tacky stuff and installed a new window 2 feet wider than the old one. Tomorrow we will begin installing cedar tongue and groove paneling.

Alan tried sledding down a hill with Jake. We both knew Jake wouldn’t stay on the sled. Jake jumped off and bit Alan in the shin and then Alan scolded him. Couldn’t capture that shot.

Found this Surge milking equipment in the barn. Was very dirty. Don’t want to specify what I found inside and encrusted on the various pieces. Spent a fair amount of time cleaning it up. People are selling this stuff on ebay. I don’t yet have any idea what we could get out of it. It looks cool but takes up a lot of space. If we kept it I don’t know where we’d put it. But it is a relic from the old dairy farm. Alan found a slab of concrete in the barn with the date of 1912 scratched into it. That’s old for these parts.

Here’s a photo of the house with the old shutters repainted and reattached. Makes it look cute and cottagy. You would never know from this photo that there is a wild and crazy planting of roses, hollyhocks, cleomes, annuals and perennials in various shades of pink, red, purple and blue that obscure the bottom half of the house in summer.

Pictured are young cabbage plants that have sprouted in rather cold temps from stalks that previously produced substantially-sized cabbage heads. The green cabbages sprouted from a stalk thrown into our compost that rooted laterally. I stuck the purple cabbage in the front flower bed since it’s so ornamental and just let the heads rot because we had way too much cabbage in the veggie garden. One of the heads split and instead of rotting like the others produced a kale-like rosette (not pictured). The constant change and surprises are what I love so much about gardening.

We have about 10 old shag bark hickories on our property. Too bad I didn’t a photo of the yellow fall foliage. A couple are dead or dying, which has made me realize I’d hate to lose any more. I’m hoping seedlings will germinate on their own and without grazing animals grow tall enough to ensure survival of this lovely species. Gathered hickory nuts to plant in the spring just for fun. Not many were viable, as I found out by putting them in a bucket of water. Apparently the floaters are no good. You can’t buy native trees like this in a nursery. The IA DNR sells them in quanities of 500 for a song, but you have to agree to plant them all on your land and can’t sell them or give them away. After the 40 odd holes we dug (namely Al) last weekend to plant the cartload of Russian sage, Meadow sage and ornamental grasses I got for $5 at Lowes, I can’t imagine digging 500, even with the help of an auger.