I hope my poor, malingering blueberries will malinger no more!  The little things haven't had much going for them in the two years they've been in the yard.  I bought them for a few bucks at Wal-Mart when they'd barely grown a root apiece, then I stuck them in sweet soil and mulched them with nitrogen-leaching wood chips.

I'm hoping to remedy the damage with a little TLC.  Yesterday I treated them to some soil acidifier, as well as a nice mulch of mixed pine needles and decidous leaf mould from the hill above the house.  I also used a gift certificate to order a few larger plants from a more reputable nursery.  The pullets are busy scratching up and fertilizing the new ground in preparation for our second round of blueberries' arrival this spring.

I also decided to experiment a bit with the mudhole between the nectarine and grapes.  The soil there is pure clay and in our recent wet spell the chickens churned it up into a mass of mud.  I found some old grain seeds hidden behind my desk and sowed them in the muddiest spots.  If I remember right, the grain is rye, meant to be planted in early fall as a cover crop.  But maybe it'll do something to hold the soil together and outcompete the Japanese honeysuckle which is what naturally grows in that area.  Only time will tell...

I get so caught up in the flow of seasons, always joyously anticipating the next one along the chain.  Yesterday, I noticed that the darkness was already coming later --- 6 pm and Mark and I were still out preparing firewood for the night.  Walking Lucy, I found mole salamander tadpoles drifting under the ice in floodplain puddles, their feathery gills sucking oxygen out of the frigid water.  Signs of spring on the last day of the year!

Inside, we harvested the first tomato off the plant Daddy gave us at Thanksgiving.  I've had zero luck with growing tomatoes indoors in winter until this plant came along.  But this is a hybrid variety carefully bred for indoors life.  Daddy paid fifty cents per seed for his start, but quickly learned that he could keep the plants going indefinitely by taking cuttings (one of which he gave me.)  Our house is really too cold even for this little guy, and about 70% of the flowers don't manage to set fruit, but I'm curious to see how long I can keep it going.

Happy New Year, everybody!  I have a feeling that this year will be the best one yet!

Yesterday I received my last paycheck from my nonprofit.  From here on out, it's freelance or bust!

While musing over the above, and cooking our Christmas turkey bones into stock, I dug up this carrot in the garden.  Its split bottom, with the small side twining around and seeming to strangle the big side, reminded me of my life in the nonprofit world over the past year.  I'll leave the obvious symbolism to the reader to tease apart.

My resolution for 2009 is not to be that carrot.  Saving the world, keeping us fiscally afloat, visiting with friends and family, nurturing my own household with tasty treats, feeding my soul through art and long hot baths, feeding my body with wood chopping and digging in the garden --- I hope to keep all of the sides of my life in closer balance.  Meanwhile, that carrot went into our bellies.

It was warm enough to continue the ditch digging operation today which will be running from the hand dug well to the trailer through the garden.

The goal will be to prevent any future freezing of the line thanks to the warmer temperatures underground.

I don't think I'll miss carrying water in 5 gallon buckets, but it really isn't all that difficult once you get the hang of it.

In a 500 square foot trailer, you have to be pretty quiet not to wake up a guest sleeping on your futon.  As a result, I wandered outside into the morning drizzle to stay out of my cousin's hair.

Squishing through the mud, I found myself drawn to those big trash bags of leaves Mom and Maggie collected for me this fall.  Various sources on the web had admonished me to shred my leaves before using them as mulch, but when I began to shred them with the lawn mower a couple of months ago the mower exploded.  Nix that idea.  Instead, I decided to experiment with using whole leaves for mulch.  So I spread some newspaper around each grape vine then doused the root zone liberally with silver and sugar maple leaves.

I ripped into bag after bag, happy as a couch potato opening up potato chips, until I came upon the first bag of black walnut leaves.  Then the second, the third.  Yikes!  Time to scurry back inside and figure out what can safely be mulched with black walnut droppings.

About a year ago at a party, someone who seemed very knowledgeable told me that the juglone in black walnut parts is really only detrimental to germination, but an extensive search of the internet showed no sources which agreed with that assessment.  Instead, most websites agree that the juglone produced by walnuts messes with the metabolism of other plants, causing them to wilt and exhibit stunted growth. 

Some plants are tolerant to juglone in the soil, including onions (and garlic, I hope, since it's in the same genus and I used black walnut leaves on two of my garlic beds), beets, cucurbits, carrots, parsnips, beans, corn, and the Prunus genus (cherry, nectarine, plum, and peach.)  So I moved on to my nectarine, cherry, and peaches to use up the walnut leaves.  I hope my unshredded leaves work well as mulch --- I've had terrible luck in the past with wood chips (even well composted) and am in need of a free mulch that really does the job.

Another half inch of rain fell yesterday morning, but by lunch time the sky had cleared --- perfect weather to go out and look around.  On Christmas, Mom noticed that some of my garlic were poking green shoots up out of the ground, so I mulched them with leaves to put them back to sleep for a couple more months.

While I was mulching, Mark came out with the chainsaw.  He was going to cut up some more firewood, but I side-tracked him, begging him to take down the wild plum first.  Now if the soil ever dries we'll be able to put our new plum in the ground!

Next, I gathered up masses of old bark from around the wood chopping station to scatter in the mud outside our trailer door.  The last few weeks' endless rains have turned heavily travelled parts of the yard into mud pits, and I hope that some judicious application of bark will make it a bit safer as we slip and slide our way in and out the door.

I moved the predator eyes to new locations, helped Mark split some wood then stack it by the stove, and gathered some kale for supper.  Life doesn't get much better than when I can spend an afternoon completely outside!

(Oh, yeah, and public service announcement to the one other woman in a thousand who buys fresh underpants once every four years --- the sizes on the outside of those six packs are not the same as your pants size.  If you buy the size which is the same number as your pants size, when you open your package of new underpants the day after Christmas and hold one up to your waist, you'll find that you could fit two or three of you in each one.  Turn the package over and read the size chart before buying!  Doggone it --- no fresh underwear for me!)

In my natural habitat, I am a frugivore, so I have slowly been building an orchard around our trailer.  My trees have faced varying success --- to be totally truthful, I haven't done a very good job with them in the past. 

It all started three years ago when we planted an orchard before moving to the land.  Apples, pears, peaches, and plums were pretty much totally eaten up by deer that summer.  Since moving in, we've continued to battle deer, which nibble on our apples and pears whenever I turn my back.  We've had better luck with peaches and nectarines, though, which may just be because the deer don't like them.  Or it may be because I read somewhere that peaches need drainage and decided to plant them in raised beds to battle our clay soil.

This winter, we're only putting in one fruit tree, a plum which Daddy ordered extremely cheaply from his extension office.  The poor tree got caught up in the holiday mails, and even though Daddy sent it priority mail it arrived a week later with dry roots and a bent top.  I soaked it overnight, then heeled it in while I prepared its new home.  The plum will be replacing a wild plum by the barn which finally bore this past spring in time for me to discover that the large stone and skimpy, untasty flesh made for a fruit even I won't eat.

The ground beneath the wild plum is the most recently reclaimed portion of the yard.  Baby plum trees and wild blackberries formed a thicket threaded through by Japanese honeysuckle --- a mass even the chicken tractors wouldn't quite knock down.  I skipped the area each time I mowed, but Mark bushhogged it with the lawn mower one day last summer, knocking down all of the tall growth. 

So yesterday I lined the bottom of my plum's new raised bed with deep layers of newspaper to prevent the honeysuckle from twining back up around our new tree, then scoured the yard for logs to form the sides of the bed.  After filling the bed with half frozen compost, I called it a day --- Mark was visiting a friend and there's no way I'm cutting down the old plum by myself.  Stay tuned for part two, the planting of the plum.

If you find yourself bored with plain old egg shaped watermelons then maybe you might be ready to take the square melon challenge.

The first thing you need is a collapsible square box, which does not look easy to build, but if you can spare 90 bucks you can have one mailed to you from Michigan.

A square watermelon sells for over 80 dollars in Japan and most people buy them as a decoration. If a guy could get half that here at a farmers market it might just be a new potential cash crop for your backyard.

Mark is hibernating today as he refills his mind with quiet, but luckily I have about twenty things I want to post about.  Tonight, you get the photos I promised you this morning. 

My predator eyes hanging method is simple --- a wire strung through the hole in the unit which slips over a screw I drove in various posts and tree trunks.  When scaring away deer with the predator eyes, it's essential to move them every few days so the deer don't get used to them, so I'm hoping the easy hang approach will make moving them simple enough that I'll do it in a timely manner.  I appreciate those of you who commented this morning about your good experiences with the product.  I hope I have equally good luck!

On an unrelated note, for those of you who have chickens, I highly recommend that you check out Harvey Ussery's website.  I've noticed recently that whenever I read an article I really like in the Backyard Poultry Magazine or Mother Earth News, Harvey is the author.  Specifically, you must check out his article about a Vermont composting facility which breeds chickens on mounds of compost and manure with no added storebought feed --- this is something I may have to try out on a much smaller scale once our manure source has their next load ready for us!

Tomorrow evening, we'll return you to your regularly scheduled male perspective of the farm.

After 4.3 inches of rain in eight days, I have to admit that I'm considering asking the rain gods to hold off for a day or two.  I wore tevas for my farm chores this morning --- no reason to soak my boots when mud will end up squelching between my toes anyway.  The yard is full of standing water, the creek is still far too high to drive out and bring in our clean laundry and linux laptop.

Instead, I installed the Nite Guard Predator Eyes Daddy sent me for my birthday --- thank you, Daddy!  Despite the abysmal review on Amazon, Daddy swears by these solar-powered, blinking LEDs.  He tells me they keep away the deer, and at this point I'm ready to try anything.  Once I bring the laptop in from the car, I'll try to remember to post an image of my installation setup --- I decided to go a lot simpler than Daddy's tripod design, instead just putting screws at several locations around the yard and hanging the predator eyes from a wire.

In other news, today is my thirtieth birthday!  Joey gave me another stunning birthday present --- he fixed the comments system on our blog!  Check it out and leave me a comment --- I look forward to hearing a lot more from you all now that it's easier.