Red Day Lilies and Clematis

Just a really quick post to show you the pictures that I took, today, of the Clematis and the Day Lilies.

We've got quite a few day lilies in the gardens but these are my favorite. Intense red. They're so red they almost look fake. But they're not.

And the clematis is just now starting to bloom. There are a million buds so it'll be amazing in about a week.

That's it. Nothing strange or startling to report. Just summer at Lake Mary.

I am a Rocket Mom!

What is a Rocket Mom? Well, according to Squidoo, "Rocket Moms are the smartest women on the web", that's who!

I'm quoting from the creator of Rocket Moms, here:

This is a 8 week exclusive "lensmaking" program for only about 140 women on Squidoo. The main point is to meet each other, get creative with new lenses, and have fun."

If a Squidoo lensmaster (women only) is a mom and wants to become a Rocket Mom, she can apply for the next session. But I was invited by a Rocket Mom so I consider that a little feather in my cap!

So far we're in the third week of this session and I've just got two lenses, so far. Got a little distracted by life. But it's loads of fun and I have every intention of completing my assignment each week.

Here are links to my first two:

My Camera and Me - A Travelogue
The assignment for this was to create a lens "About Me"

All About Salt
This assignment was to create a "Niche" lens. Why I chose salt is anybody's guess. It's probably not going to be my claim to fame but, hey, I completed the task!

The next assignment is to create a Top 10 list of something. I know what I'm going to do but I'm not telling until I've finished it.

Lots of fun and I'm learning a ton of stuff.

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band Connection

Last June (2008) we worked an event in St. Cloud, MN called the Liberty Block Party. It's kind of a Rib Fest and concert rolled into one. We were, of course, schlepping our smoothies.

Naturally, I uploaded the Dirt photos that I took into my Flickr photostream. A few days ago I was contacted by a the owner of a website called Dirtheads. He asked if he could use the pics on his website.

Are you kidding? It's a cool site with all kinds of great information about NTDB. An excerpt from the intro reads "In the summer of 1966, Jeff Hanna and Jimmie Fadden were hangng out at McCabes Guitar Shop in Long Beach, CA trying to "figure out how not to have to work for a living." Love it.

There are lyrics and videos and archived articles. There's a link there to the official NGDB website. And it's got concert photos.

So check it out. Click on the blue link; click on Concert Photos; click on Liberty Block Party, St. Cloud, Minnesota, June 27, 2008. And there you go! A slide show.

So there are my fifteen minutes of fame. Just so you know.

Fresh From The Garden Greens

Today was a fairly normal day compared to the past couple of weeks. One of our very good friends has been hospitalized in the intensive care unit with a staph infection in his blood following heart surgery. It's been pretty intense. Things are slowly but surely looking up and we have hope that he'll pull through. He's a tough guy so that's a positive. We're all thinking positive.

Our weather has been perfect. Lots of sun for the garden. The tomatoes are loving it. We've had very little rain which is not so good, though. Have to water every day but since it's coming from the lake, it's not so bad. And the nutrients are just the best a garden could get.


In any case, I gathered these beautiful greens from the garden. I've taken a leaf here and there this spring but this is the first time we've had a whole basket full of them. There's red leaf lettuce, butter lettuce, greenleaf lettuce and escarole. I also plucked some basil leaves, garlic chives and fresh parsley. The flavor? Yum.

I chopped up some fresh tomato and yellow pepper and the garlic chives and basil and tossed them with a little EVOO. Let it marinate a bit and then sprinkled the mixture on our freshly tossed salad greens. Scrumptious.

I can hardly wait until the rest of the stuff comes in. We didn't plant any spinach this year but no worries. There's a farmer (actually, the farmer's wife) who has fresh vegetables for sale every summer. You just go to the farm and even if she's not there you can go into her little farmstand, take what you need and make a note of what it is. The you leave the money in her old coffee can.

I'm headed over there tomorrow for some spinach and whatever else she has harvested.

Our Wood Ducks

This morning I was enjoying a cup of coffee and the newspaper in the porch and Jack walked in, looked out the window and sort of gasped. I said, "What???"

Well, he pointed out that there was the mother wood duck and her little babies scurrying along the beach. She must have nudged them out of the nest this morning and they were on their way for their first swim.

I don't have a good photo of wood ducks so I scanned this one from my Birds of Minnesota Field Guide. I love that book and have marked all of the pages with birds that I've spotted right in our own yard. Very cool. The male wood duck is gorgeous. He almost looks like a carved decoy with beautifully painted markings. They are just beautiful.

Anyway, we've had trouble getting wood ducks to nest in our wood duck house. Haven't a clue why. But luckily this year they decided that they'd settle for it.

I grabbed my camera and we tried to get out on the deck without startling them but they slipped into the water as soon as they sensed us. This is the only photo I could get - not great but better than nothing. The photo below is of the wood duck house that Jack placed in the cottonwood tree by the beach. Must have been five or six years ago and as far as I can tell, this is the first year we actually had a family in to.

Just a couple of interesting facts about wood ducks from my Birds of Minnesota Field Guide:

• They're 17" - 20" in length.
• They lay 10 to 15 creamy white eggs and will lay them in old woodpecker cavities or nest boxes (like ours)
• The female enters the nest cavity from full flight! Whoa!
• Sometimes females will lay eggs in a neighboring female nest (called egg dumping) so one female may end up with more than 20 eggs to hatch.
• After the babies hatch they stay in the nest only 24 hours and then they jump out of the nest which can be as high as 30 feet. Ours isn't that high but it's still quite a jump. Then they follow the mother into the water never to return to the nest.
• They were almost extinct around 1900. Overhunted. But now they are thriving. I'm so glad about that.

Lone Fisherman

I took this photo about 6 A.M. a few days ago when the sun was just coming up (or the moon was just going down). It was as quiet as could be and I'd bet that the fisherman in the boat was thinking he was in heaven. This is a good walleye lake, as I understand it. Bass, too, I think. The grandkids like just fishing off the dock for sunfish. Sunnies, as we call them.

Then, just a couple of hours ago Jack came in to say that there was a big old loon just floating along out by the dock. Sure enough, there it was. It's the same loon that we've seen here in the past, I'm pretty sure. They typically do return to the same lake year after year. I just read about that. This one seems very comfortable and even though I was right down by the shore, he wasn't in the least bit nervous.

There's a theory that loons mate for life. I used to feel so sad when I'd see a loon all alone - I'd wonder whatever happened to it's mate. However, that's not exactly true. Some may but many loons find another mate after losing one. Good.

Here's a little loon trivia. Did you know that pilots have clocked loons flying at 80 miles per hour? And did you know that they need about a quarter mile of water for take off? They're so heavy that it takes them that long to get into the air!

Hey, It's Free!

I'm posting a link I think you'll like. It's for a website called Hey, It's Free!

It's run by a guy called Goob who spends his time searching for freebies. He and his crew have quite a writing style. Easy to read with lots of humor thrown in.

Some are in-store freebies (like free Krispy Kreme donuts on June 5th or free Orange Julius on June 19th.) and there's a tab on the website for downloadable coupons.

Can't tell you everything about HIF (as they like to be called). You'll have to check it out for yourselves but I'll bet you're gonna like what you see.

Here's the link:
Hey, It's Free!

Spring Garden Chores

Jack has really been busy in the gardens - mostly the lakescape. That's his baby. He's decided to plant some annuals in amongst the native grasses and flowers and I have to admit that he's got a good eye when it comes to that. I'll get down there and take some pictures one of these fine days.

I'm doing the garden watering in the mornings. The vegetable garden and the perennial gardens on the road side of the house or what I call the front yard. It takes me about an hour just to water those areas. We're using lake water instead of water from our well. That's a good thing. Not only does it save our well water but the lake has so many good nutrients in the water and the plants just love that.

In "lake country" the lake side of the house is called the "front" and the road side is called the "back". We've lived here eleven years and I still can't get my mind around that. In my mind the front door is the door that you use to enter your house on a regular basis. And that door is on the road side of the house. In any case, I water the gardens on that side of the house.

I planted my herbs right in the perennial garden, this year. I'm going to try to get them in pots before it turns cold in the fall so that I can use them all year. But we'll see. Haven't had good luck just planting them in pots. They seem to dry out so quickly.

I took this photo of the irises in the garden beside the driveway. It's at the top of a retaining wall and there is an evergeen garden of sorts just below where these irises are. The yard slopes down from there so you kind of get a panoramic view of the rest of the front (or back) yard. If you look closely you can see the vegetable garden in the far right corner...that's rhubarb growing next to the veggie garden.

And that's Jack on his lawn tractor. Probably getting ready to mow. This yard is just too big. One of these days we'll downsize. That'll suit me just fine. Until then, we'll just keep weeding, watering, mowing.