I first tried to grow melons while still in the moving truck on the way up here. Living as we do does not allow for many impractical hobbies, but the successful growing of melons (an impractical, inefficient addition to the garden) has blossomed into a full-on obsession, full of much …
I was setting up shop last Saturday to deal with the first real fruits of my ceaseless labor, and while sorting through the endless piles of cucumbers that have harvested, decided to pull out a jar of last year’s pickles to mitigate my guilt. The jar was labeled “10-10-10,” with …
In case you’re wondering why I’m not returning your phone calls these days, here’s a quick tally of what’s going on in the gardens this summer. I plan to post notes in the coming weeks on the status of some of these, if there’s time. For the most part, my …
I have so much I want to discuss with you. It has been a maddening week of excavatory literal muckraking, which has left us carrying our avoirdupois in mud every evening. There are stories of something bioluminescent appearing in newly exposed tree roots (Honey Fungus)? There was a mishap with …
This photo, such as it is, reveals a little of what I uncovered this weekend after many hours of bushwhacking. Our neighbor was once asked: Â How do you get the blackberries to grow so well where you are? Her answer: Â you hack at them mercilessly to keep them from growing …
So I rolled in to my Great Lower Garden on Sunday evening after a week out-of-town on a means-making mission, and pulled up to check on the state of things– the state of tomatoes and peas, I’d thought. Something to note about the Great Lower Garden; mine, while the most …
As you can see, we’ve decided on a small garden this year. This is the lower garden, not on Cooter Hollow Proper, on a neighbor’s land, accessible via hike through the woods. It’s the one we water with My Native’s Amazing Hose Technique. Right now, it’s a (modest) pile of …
It’s snowing, right now, flurrying in a way that will stick to the sour taste in my mouth if not to the ground. My seedlings are dying to see the light of day, and I’m wilting right behind them. Oh, but I could candle-dip melodrama on and on (being stuck …
We’d run out of wood for Operation Endless Sapsucking, but undeterred, he dug from beneath the snow a pile of logs we’d chopped but not split last year. We split them up and resumed work, or tried to. We had a problem: the soaked, unseasoned stuff wasn’t throwing enough heat …
My Native keeps telling me that I ought to give up on the iPhone’s photo filtering toys, but really, it’s a garbage can buried in the snow. What better subject on which to practice? So now, Cooter Hollow trivia of the day. Guess why we buried our 32-gallon garbage bin …
