My Project

Well, here are some pictures of the place I have spent many, many hours this summer. It really is hard to capture how it looks in a picture, but maybe this gives a glimpse In the picture on the top, I am standing right on the hillside looking towards the northwest and in the second one, I'm on top of the hillside. I am noticing things starting to die back the last few days and last night I spent the evening cutting off dead blooms and cutting plants back and continuing to pull out crown vetch. When I look around though, I am seeing fewer and fewer weeds so I believe I may be winning the battle. I have noticed a new problem, however. On several of the plants are little pest-like creatures. Being so new at this, I don't know if they are just a natural part of the whole prairie project or if they are destroyers. The plants they are on do not look like having those little pest guys on them is healthy. So despite my reading on not using pesticides in a garden attempting to attract butterflies, I did sprinkle some Sevin on one of the plants where I noted an abundance of little worm-like creatures on gray leaves. It just didn't look like they were doing the plant any sort of good at all. I think the answer to this problem is to get more birds in the garden as I believe they help control all that naturally. At the beginning of the summer, there were many birds in the yard, lately I have not seen as many. Whether that is because of the season or because I couldn't keep up with filling the bird feeders this summer and they found other food sources, I don't know. However, the next plan is to start working on some bird feeding stations, probably get that started already this fall and winter. It will be fun tromping out there through the snow and battling the winds that can make your face hurt. Perhaps we will even have a blizzard where I have to attach a rope to the house so as not to lose my way back. I think that would be very fun. Yet, even as I start thinking about the seasons changing and see some plants dying down for the winter, there are still many plants with new blooms still waiting to pop open so I would say we are about a month away from mowing it all down.

Mark is also building me a for-real clothesline with poles and cement in the ground and I'm pretty excited about that. I'm starting to feel like I'm living "Little House on the Prairie and couldn't feel more joy and contentment with that.

Planting and Weeding, Weeding and Planting,