The Flower Gardens

I took some photos today but apparently they did not transfer correctly to the computer so will have to try that again later on.  Or somehow they ended up in another folder, which is more probable.  I'll try and dig them up tomorrow and figure out where they are.
Here in Kentucky, stuff GROWS.  I mean it really grows...Everything I have planted has thrived except for some nasturtiums that the sun baked in 90+ weather.  So I thought it was probably too late to plant again, this was maybe in mid June.  Oh, no!  I found out many farmers down here plant two plantings a year, say winter wheat through the wintertime and then cut that down and raise corn or tobacco through the summer.  Unfortunately, this also applies to weeds.
So here are some photos for you to enjoy!  These are from the backyard:

And this is a beautiful view over the hills:

These zinnias are huge, nearly the biggest flowers I have ever planted except for one year in that other place I used to live, :), I had some Amaranth and that got about 6 feet tall.  I can't imagine what it might do down here.
These are some hardy, native hibiscus that are overgrown in the veggie garden that the weeds took over.  We are going to move them to a better spot in a few days, I think:

We bought another pink one that is planted in the front yard now, along with two crape myrtles.  These end up being enormous bushes and loads of flowers through July and August.  We have Rose of Sharons, probably a dozen of them planted around, that are quite large and bloom nearly all summer.  The Tulip Tree grew blooms twice this year, in April and then again last month.
Here is the rose garden that we did out front in late May:

These roses have tripled in size and I'm not exaggerating.  They all looked so cute and tiny in this photo.  One of the photos that I lost somewhere on the computer will show how much it's grown in just two months.  Before I planted this garden, though, I planted basically the same thing by the kitchen entrance garden.  I used some monkey grass that has some long name that I can never remember.  It's monkey grass, everyone knows that.  :)  I did that instead of the hostas.  Both the hostas and the monkey grass came out of the backyard where I feared that the dogs would eventually kill it.
But it got hot, really hot.  And the weeds started to grow.  So I sprayed them once, then thought they would stay gone.  Wrong!  They are back and huge. But so are the roses.  Anyhow, this is what it started out to look like after the first big weed killing off, I had started to lay down some landscape cloth.  This was in early June:

It was just so hot when I got home every day that I didn't want to work in the garden.  So the weeds grew up fast again.  And here is Tom Cat, who belongs to the neighbors, and he has decided that he really likes this garden a lot!

I took some really nice photos of him and will print them up for the neighbors. But you can see how the weeds tried to take over!
So now I have to go find the new photos that the computer put "somewhere" else.  More tomorrow, I hope.

You just have to love Kentucky!

I know I have been remiss in posting lately, been a little bit busy but things are settling down for the moment.  I will try to do better!
We have a rather large amount of Amish folks here, see them all the time in town in the stores, etc.  This is a really neat culture and I've done some reading on it.  They want no connection with the "English" (meaning us) yet sell goods on the side of the road to us, buy items from us, etc.  I see a definite change going on with them. For example, you can have a phone in a box on a pole outside of your home and can talk on it BUT it can't be in the house because that allows a tie with the English into your home.  You can't own a car or drive it but you can hire the English to take you around (we are called Drivers) where you need to go.  There are differences in the different sects of the Amish, too.  Some women use straight pins to fasten their clothing.  I'd be real good at that, either sticking myself, jumping up and saying something very un-Amish and very English (particularly the Anglo-Saxon language) or being in a high wind and losing something important because it wasn't pinned right.  
Wayne the Hay Guy has some men who work for him, and they delight in grabbing his cell phone which he leaves in the truck and answering it for him.  "Hello?  Hello?  Who is this?"  It's a real toy and a delight to them that you can talk on this little device.  I had a couple of ladies come into the store one day and ask me where I got the paper bags from.  I had to restrain myself from saying "just google paper bags and you can find a source".  :)  And then there was the Amish man who whipped out a checkbook to pay for his purchases.  We take driver's license numbers.  Um...not....just take the check, thank you so much!  :)  I didn't even know they could have checking accounts but like I said, it appears that some things are being allowed, or at least not disallowed.
So this week I observed a young man trying on sunglasses and looking at himself in the little mirror above the rack.  These were not plain old black Foster Grants, either, these were yellow iridescent ones.  He tried on half a dozen pairs.  Jerry says he sees them all the time at the Sonic restaurant, with their giant cokes, or riding down the road, clutching them.  I had three ladies run me down in Lowe's to ask about the Knockout roses I had in my cart. They were thrilled with them and asked how much they were and where they were in the store.  Also, many are allowed to use chain saws and propane refrigerators (which I am actually glad about, I can't imagine trying to keep things cool and unspoiled without a fridge).
Welcome to the new century, Amish folks!  I must say the delight that they look at things with is so refreshing!
And then this week, Beth took a photo of a buggy at a recreational area next to a lake.  No Amish were harmed during this photographic session.  In case you don't know what that means, they are very shy about cameras, it has to do with becoming a graven image and that is not allowed.  But nothing in the rules says we can't take photos of their buggies.  And so, with the stories above and this photo, I give you the New Age Amish sect:

The boat looks to be a kayak of some sort, and if you look carefully, you can see the reels of the fishing poles towards the back of the buggy. There is a very bright yellow, very un-Amish fishing lure hanging down in the front, too.   I'm guessing the horses were tied out somewhere to eat and relax.
So I hope we can learn things from the Amish and that they can learn things from us!

Gardening and Flowers and Stuff

We have been able to garden for months here but I just haven't gotten around to it. We had some rainy weather that turned the clay to gunk and no hope at all of getting a tiller through that!  So let's start with some photos of what IS here.  First, we have a Tulip Tree (magnolia type) that has decided to bloom AGAIN here at the beginning of July. Go figure.  Maybe it got so much rain it was happy and just had to bloom.

There are some hostas out front hat are doing just fine and so they are staying there.  Once the corgis start to hide behind them or lay on them, then I will move them. For now, though, they are fine and healthy looking:

Please ignore that ugly green stuff Jerry put up, we used the front porch as a temporary place for one of the boys to go until we had the front yard fenced.  It's coming down soon!
The previous owner had a lot of gravel around the house and some big stepping stones that she put big pots on.  The front side of the house gets a lot of sun and heat in the afternoon.  So although I previously planted nasturtium seeds, which did fine in "heat and sun" in Michigan, apparently "heat and sun" is... um...well, a little hotter and more intense down here.  Heat and sun here just kills off plants, except for weeds, though, I guess.  They always seem to thrive. So after two months of coddling the nasturtiums, I gave them all the death penalty and yanked them up and planted zinnias, which do like heat and sun.  I do have to water them every day, though, because the sun dries the pots out so bad.  There are about a dozen or so pots out front and all are  planted with Zinnias except I did find a few that had volunteer petunias and rose moss coming up.  They like heat and sun, too, so they lived and now the pots don't all match.  No matter, if it blooms and it isn't a weed, it is welcome to live here!

The ones I'm showing are the lilliput variety, the ones I planted at the back of the house are the giants and already setting buds on them.  I only planted them about a month ago.

Kathy planted a small garden with some peppers and tomatoes in them.  I have to tie them to the fence today, they are growing like gangbusters!

Next is the vegetable garden which is doing ok.  The radishes have not come up and neither have the carrots but the vining things like the watermelon, cantelope and gourds are coming up fast and big. Also I planted some beans, some blue lake green beans and some lima beans.  We started with a long garden that Jerry tilled up:

I like the fence in the middle that you can grow things up on.  I'm going to train the gourds and the cucumbers up that.  And I think I planted some squashes.  I should have made a list of what I did plant but figured that when things started to grow, I could figure it all out.  Here are the beans:

These have gotten a lot bigger, too, in the past ten days since I took this photo.  There are some gorgeous gardens around but I was just late getting things in.  We should still be able to harvest a few nice things, though, the growing season is so long down here.  No lettuce, though, until fall because it likes cooler weather.
The flower gardens were more of a challenge.  We had to get rid of the weeds, dig it all up and then plant.  The first project was the flower garden between us and the road.  It is 6 sided and about 16 or 18 feet across.   It is set in concete blocks to keep the grass out but the weeds moved in.  It took us over two hours to till, rake and get all the roots and stuff out of there.  Then I planted Knockout Roses, Stella D'Oro lillies and hostas.  Some of the hostas came from the back yard where they were being picked off one by one by the dogs, either they were lying on them, peeing on them or just destroying them.  These were nice big ones, hard to dig out of the gravel and it does look at little bit bare back there, now.  But they look great out front!
I put down landscape cloth which is so awkward to work with, then a couple of soaker hoses.  I found out you cannot hook these together, so if you ever decide to put one in, get a long one so you don't have to have two ends sticking out of the garden!  Then I put down some red mulch.  Except for the tilling, I did this by myself and am very proud of it.  And little to no maintenence except to put a stray weed or two, water it and maybe cut some back if necessary.

I forgot to tell you that I also found that scalloped concrete border out by one of the old buildings and there was exactly enough to go around the garden.  I'm guessing this is what Rose, the former owner, had in mind for the garden.
This garden should grow fast and well where it is located and in another year, will be lush and beautiful!  The plants are bigger than it looks, though.  It took over a week to do this and I was working on it a couple of hours a day.
The same thing is going on right now in the garden next to the kitchen door, but instead of hostas, I put in Monkey Grass.  I don't know the real name for it, it's an ornamental grass that gets about the size of a basketball.  It's what we used to call this in Florida when I was a kid. They also came out of the backyard and for the same reasons.  I had to search to find a couple of extra plants for the garden but they are all in now.  I've started the landscape cloth but will leave that for a half hour project each night when I get home as I'm working on another project right now.

And I can't forget the apple trees!  We planted three of them, a Fugi, and a Honey Crisp, and one that I have forgotten the name of but am thinking Ida Red.  I have to go look at the tags.

We got some nifty rubber tree rings for the bottoms of them so don't have to mulch.  The white rock you see is actually molten glass that the break apart into "rocks". These were in the front and the backyards but I thought some would look good around the trees.

Last of all, a treat!  I was able to film a bit of the Hummingbird Fever that goes on around here. We have several feeders and they know they can always come here for a drink!  Enjoy!

If you live in the South, you will totally understand this post...

This was sent to me by Helen:

Things I know from living in the South

 

 

A possum is a flat animal that sleeps in the middle of the road.

True. 

There are 5,000 types of snakes and 4,998 of them live in the South.

True. 

There are 10,000 types of spiders. All 10,000 of them live in the South, plus a couple no one's seen before.

True. 

If it grows, it'll stick ya. If it crawls, it'll bite cha.

Mostly True. 

Onced and Twiced are words.

True. 

It is not a shopping cart, it is a buggy!

And you carry people to town, you don't give them a ride to town. 

Jawl-P? means Did y'all go to the bathroom?

I did, thank you for asking. 

People actually grow and eat okra.

And it slid-d-d-e-e-s-s-s-s  down your throat because it's so slimy. Yum! 

Fixinto is one word. It means I'm fixing to do that.

Ah'm fixin ta post on mah blog. 

There is no such thing as lunch. There is only dinner and then there is supper.

True.  Don't get these mixed up or you could miss a meal you are invited to. 

Iced tea is appropriate for all meals and you start drinking it when you're two. We do like a little tea with our sugar. It is referred to as the Wine of the South.

That and Co Cola..... 

Backwards and forwards means I know everything about you.

If I don't know it then someone in the family will know it.  

The word jeet is actually a phrase meaning Did you eat?

I didn't.  Can I have a biscuit, please? 

You don't have to wear a watch, because it doesn't matter what time it is, you work until you're done or it's too dark to see.

Did that just today. 

You don't PUSH buttons, you MASH em.

You will get you a finger ache from mashing buttons, too. 

Ya'll is singular, all ya'll is plural.

And everyone else is referred to as Susan and them. 

You measure distance in minutes.

And do not ask for directions in Kentucky.  No one can give them.  :) 

You switch from heat to A/C in the same day.

True in Michigan more than in Kentucky. 

All the festivals across the state are named after a fruit, vegetable, grain, insect, or animal.

We just had the Blueberry Festival this weekend. True. 

You know what a DAWG is.

Got a house full of them. 

You carry jumper cables in your car - for your OWN car.

Ture. 

You only own five spices: salt, pepper, Tonys, Tabasco and ketchup.

Well...I also have maple syrup but then where I lived for 30 years before living here, it was a staple and I got used to eating it. 

The local papers cover national and international news on one page, but require 6 pages for local high school sports and motor sports, and gossip.

Exceedingly true. 

You think that the first day of deer season is a national holiday.

 True nearly everywhere there is a deer season.

You find 100 degrees Fahrenheit a bit warm.

 Just a tad.

You know what a hissy fit is.

And I can pitch one with the best of them. 

Going to Wal-Mart is a favorite pastime known as goin Wal-Martin' or off to Wally World.

And you can go garage sailin', too. 

You describe the first cool snap (below 70 degrees) as good chicken stew weather.

Yeah, it was that way tonight. 

Fried catfish is the other white meat.

Good stuff! 

We don't need no dang Driver's Ed. If our mama says we can drive, we can drive, dag-nabbit.

Momma is always right. Always. 

The Art of the Biscuit

Back in 1938, Momma and Daddy eloped.  There were probably a lot of reasons, I think most of them had to do with Daddy being from a very wealthy family and Momma wasn't.  But at dinner one night, Grandpa Will was saying there was just nothing like a good biscuit.  Then he pointedly looked at Momma and asked her if she could make biscuits.  For some reason, Momma couldn't cook.  I don't know why, she lived in a home with several sisters but she was one of the middle ones and just never learned for some reason.  Then she lived with my Great Aunt Esther and apparently didn't learn there, either.  So she told Grandpa Will that she couldn't cook.  I never got to know Grandpa Will, he died way before I was born but if Daddy was anything like him, then I can just imagine his reaction, what had his son done?  Married a woman who could not cook a biscuit?
So I have been in pursuit of the perfect biscuit.  I'm not there yet, but getting closer.  I need to apply what I have learned to a recipe that Jerry brought home one day, if I can achieve that, I will have the perfect biscuit.
I go shopping on the weekends and get the food for the week as many do, but I also cook most of what we need for the week, either partially or completely.  Today I made the biscuits, cooked up some chicken breasts with pepper, onion and celery to be sliced up for chicken sandwiches for lunch, I have a pound or so of stew beef, also with pepper, onion and celery, in the small crockpot which will cook until 11 tonight.  I probably won't do anything with that but put it into a tupperware and freeze it for a beef pot pie some night.  If the beef is precooked and tender, it's not much to cook a few potatoes, throw together a pie and have it out of the oven in just over an hour.  I will be doing a stir fry in just a bit, veggies are chopped, but will make it just a bit closer to dinner time.  Basically onion, green pepper, zucchini, crookneck squash, broccoli, carrots.  I stir fry this and just add whatever rings my bell, so will probably be oregano, garlic, basil, and will serve these with some Parmesan cheese on top.  Lastly, the "casserole".  Take two cans of vegetable stock and bring to a boil. Throw in a package of whatever kind of macaroni you like ziti, penne, even just plain spaghetti.  Let it cook as long as it usually does, then turn off the heat and stir.  Put in one can of diced tomatoes, lots of oregano and basil, and half of a jar of whatever spaghetti sauce you like (freeze the rest for the next time).  Dump in half a package of the little Walmart Italian meatballs (thawed) and mix well and heat a few more minutes.  OH, YUM!  The vegetable broth gives it an unbelievable taste.  Don't drain it, leave it all in.  I put some mozzarella cheese on top, too.  The original recipe had teeny tomatoes cut in half (Jerry can't have the seeds), and then Jerry remarked that it would be wonderful with some black olives in it (I don't like them) so this is our compromise.  You can do what you like with it, even throwing in some of the veggies I chopped up for stir fry would be very good and very interesting.  Anyhow, I make a whole pound and it lasts us for 3 meals or so.
I am making some macaroni salad to have for lunches, too, as I pack our lunches each day.  I try to have something different each day so will have macaroni salad two days and apple cobbler and peach cobbler (I didn't make that) two days.  Hoagies, roll ups and regular sandwiches.  I got so tired of velveeta sandwiches when I was a kid.....
I have been trying to use up some stuff in the pantry, I get things and think "this looks good" and then don't do anything with it.  Or get six on sale and then for whatever reason, just forget about the last two packages.
It's really handy to have stuff ready to just heat up after a long day.  And, on that thought, I must go now and move some more hay.  We don't have very much left to do but my energy level is just sapped today.  It's not that hot, but maybe it's just that I've done so much my mind is saying "'Scuse me, do you realize it's Sunday, a DAY OF REST?"  Well, yeah, I do but someone's gotta do the cooking around here and I'm not doing it when I get home from work every day!

The Fascinating Skies of Kentucky

If you are a regular reader of this blog, then you know the fascination I have with the sunrises, sunsets, clouds and other phenomenon that occurs in our skies.  I took these photos this week over a period of about 20 or 30 minutes, some in the east, some in the west.  There was a front or two or three that moved over and the lovely and unusual clouds that occurred were really something to see.  I was happy that I was home and able to take these photos.
So let's start with the first one.  We had a front that passed over and Jerry yelled at me to come outside and see this cloud to the east of us (was moving from west to east):

It looked like a big spaceship.  Here are some more:

Then, when this passed by, there was a rainbow.  Not only a rainbow, but a full rainbow and the hint of a second one next to it on the right side:

My camera just could not quite catch the full beauty of this rainbow.  It was spectacular.  This was also seen in the east.
Back to the west, we then saw this:

Which was a light pink that did not show up very well in the photo above.  Then it became this:

And then this:

In a couple of minutes, it then became this:

I have never seen a show like this in my life.
Out to the east, the rainbow had disappeared but it was still lovely:

It went on the next morning.  I got up to find this to the south:

 I love my new state and wish all my friends could be here with us!

The Boyfriend and I get really serious....

As we say down here, "Ain't he purdy?"  All grown up, five years old now and a few months of training under his cinch.  No, I am not on his mouth, just started to ask him to back when this photo was taken.  We were working on baby steps here.

And here we had worked on trotting.  My inner thigh muscles were sore from holding on the first time a couple of days ago but for this ride I was fine.  I used the new saddle I bought for him two years ago.  Very comfortable and my knees didn't hurt when I got off.  Oh, yeah, getting up was accomplished without too much drama.  He's so....big.....at least 16 hands, I will try to measure him next time I go.  The round pen was ankle deep in mud but I found a lower place to have him stand so I could get up on him...by myself.  This is a real accomplishment!  Shopping has commenced for a mounting block.  I think I would do ok if the ground was level and not deep in mud.
Jacques is doing very well and will be coming home this week for a little more getting the feel of him in our round pen, some rides around the property and then off to the trails!
I've waited a very long time for this.
Oh, by the way, that is him at about 6 months old in the little photo on the blog, if you want to see how adorable he was when I bought him.

Gone Ridin'. 

The End.