A North Country Walk to the River

I just spent a lovely weekend in Canton, New York with wonderful friends.  We generally make a trip up there right around the 4th of July every year for a birthday party celebration for a good friend, M.  While we've been known to make a round trip drive in one day, this year I decided I needed a little time away from home.  My poor husband took the previous weekend off to visit his brand new nephew, which was wonderful, but that meant he was stuck working this entire weekend.  Rather than miss out on the fun or have to do all the driving in one day, he generously allowed me to abandon him to his labors, and I threw a tent in M's truck and headed up to the country.

Canton is home to me in a lot of ways.  I only lived there for a few years, but miss it terribly.  If I could earn a decent living up there I'd move back in a heartbeat.  But I can't - not with my school loans.  Its country ways and small town personality suit me marvelously, so I just make do with visiting when I can.

The host for the annual birthday party is M's mother, who lives in a little house on a country road on property that was once farmed by her father.  Since it's a small house and I didn't want to take up space, I pitched a tent in the huge country yard for the weekend, where I could listen to the bullfrogs in the swamp as I fell asleep.  I do so love sleeping in a tent.

On one sweltering afternoon, M decided to show me the walk to the Grasse River so his dog Lexus and I could go for a swim.  The photos show the walk through the farm fields to the River.  The farm fields are now just hayed, and thankfully had recently been mowed.  But M loves that it's essentially the old family homestead, and was excited to show me a piece of his childhood.  I loved the picturesque old farm equipment along the way.

 

The walk was wonderful... except for the @$%&! deer flies.  My God!  North Country bugs I swear are more voracious than most other varieties.

I loved it though, despite the deer flies.  The whole experience somehow reminded me of the song Farmer's Daughter by Rodney Atkins... the farm hand cooling off in the creek before going "back to work in that dad gum heat".

Our swim convinced me that I am a water rat.  I hate crowded beaches or public pools, but give me a nice Adirondack lake or a deserted stretch of river, and I'll just become one with it, melding into the ripples and mud and coolness for as long as I am allowed.

This last shot shows the last of the party goers in the evening, after most of the wonderful friends we see too seldom had left to put tired, sun baked kids to bed.  It, too, reminds me of a country song, Barefoot Blue Jean Night by Jake Owen.  Romantic and lovely as it looks, this one is omitting the voracious blood-sucking mosquitoes that were plaguing us.  Oh well.  Even my beloved North Country has to have a flaw.

Read more...

Much Much Mulch

I do love my gardens, though at the moment I am wondering why.  My sister and I are both avid gardeners, slowly turning our respective yards into more garden than lawn.  We both also have dogs, too, though she doesn't have quite the zoo I have.  Given that we grew up in a family that didn't have dogs or cats and didn't do a whole lot of gardening, I find it interesting that she and I both have multiple dogs and share such a passion for gardens.  I'm not quite sure what that says about nurture versus nature.

My sister, however, pays people to mulch her mini arboretum.  I, sadly, do not.

This is what I came home to on Friday afternoon:

Yikes.  That is four cubic yards of mulch.  Or as my friend M put it, it's "much much mulch".  My father observed that I would likely need the National Parks Service to do an archaeological study on the pile before I'd be allowed to excavate it.

What else to do but buckle down and start working?  Pulling weeds, planting new plants, putting down organic fertilizers, pruning, and yes, mulching.  Approximately 3 hours on Friday, 5 on Saturday, and, after coffee and Advil for breakfast, another 5 on Sunday later, and I've made a slight dent in the pile.  I still have a loooong way to go.  Lots more mulching and edging.  I don't know that my arms have ever felt quite as heavy as they do at the moment.  I'm not sure I'll be able to walk tomorrow.

I didn't take too many before pictures - it didn't really occur to me.  Here's an idea of how things generally looked at the beginning of the weekend though.

Weedy.  Messy.  And needing work.

I find the big comprehensive shots of the gardens difficult to capture, but a few "after" shots, for the parts of the gardens that happen to be more done than not.

So, given that gardens are an obscene amount of work, why DO I have so danged many?  I really don't know.  I can't seem to help it.  After a weekend of bone-grinding labor my house is a wreck, I have no clean clothes, I have no food cooked for the week and I still have a lot more garden work to do. But I'll just keep planting more of them.  Because I'm me.

I find I'm a haphazard gardener.  I can be absolutely ruthless in some respects.  I ripped out all sorts of tulips that were in bloom because they look messy.  I murdered probably 1,000 baby maple saplings.  I wrenched grape hyacinths out of the ground by the fist full because they annoy me.  Yet I'll stop digging to relocate an earthworm, laboriously rescued the baby tulip tree I found in one garden, and left very messy sprigs of random myrtle and lily of the valley where I found them, because I have a soft spot for those particular plants.  Ah well.  My gardens will always have their own quirky charm with me as their master.

Finally, I shall leave you with a set of general garden pictures.  Because I can't resist once I have my camera in hand.

Read more...

A Little Dose of Adirondacks

These don't need a whole lot of explanation - I hope they speak for themselves.  A little break from the chaos for a quick, cold trip to Lake Placid and back, with camera in hand.  Lots of sunshine, lots of wind.  Fresh clean air, rocks, trees, lakes, ice, mountains.

Read more...