The canal boat ride at Coshocton

Hi, thanks for checking in with the blog. I have more great photos of the fox doing exciting things like hunting (and not chickens) plus updates on the lavender harvest, my experiment with taking cuttings, and general garden updates. However, first the day trip for Andrew's birthday:

If you are one of my high school classmates, you probably haven't thought of Ohio canals since Mr. Lincicome's Ohio History class and those weird filmstrips.

Filmstrips.

Anyway, nothing beats the real thing I suppose:

I'm sitting on a bench of the Monticello III canal boat watching the world go by wondering when I'm going to get eaten alive by mosquitoes. We are here for Andrew's birthday day trip. He loves history.

I'm not sure this scraggly lemongrass prevented mosquitoes throughout the whole boat but I didn't get bitten. The canal boat can only go up to 4 miles and hour so it's not like we were really outracing them.

Here are some other shots of the two mile round trip ride.

Here is Andrew listening to canal boat enthusiast Finney tell us all about canals and canal boats.
I do not have much to report. Not because I was bored but because lots of bored children were running around and it was hard to focus. I can tell you however, that the man leading the horses is referred to as a hoggie/hoagie. President Garfield was a hoagie as a teenager.

 

I was much more interested in the horses.

In this video they are turning the canal boat around to head back to where we started. For those on email you can find the link to all of the videos in this blog to their own playlist on YouTube because I am getting fancy.



These horses are Percheron, which  I thought always stayed black or dark brown, but can lighten up to various grays as they get older.

I'll admit I was most interested in these because of the family tree. My Grandma Perdue who I have mentioned recently on the blog, was the youngest of five children. So much younger than her siblings that her father, Mathias Brehm was often tasked with looking after her. Great grandfather Brehm was a hostler...well that's the closest term I can find for what he did. Rather than looking after horses at an inn, he worked large farms with teams of Percheron horses. To hear my Grandma tell it, this man no taller than me acted as a horse trainer and farrier.  Grandma says he built a box for her that fit on a Percheron's back, and she would ride and nap in the box lined with a horse blanket while Mathias worked the fields.

You can learn more about Percheron horses here

and here

Here are some other videos of the ride:

I have to admit I could have ridden on the boat longer than we did. A homemade lemonade to sip would have made it perfect. Here is Andrew listening to Finney tell us all about canals.

We depart and Andrew takes some pictures. Finney (I'm not sure if it is Mr. Finney or just Finney) is helping transition to the next group of ticket holders. He has ridden on every canal boat in the Eastern United States. Apparently there is a canal boat in Piqua and one in Toledo.

And me saying hello and good-bye to the Percherons.

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Of Foxes and Lavender

July 5, 2020:

Writing about the fox has been on my list since the first weekend of June, and lo and behold here he or she obligingly appears in the humid haze of a 90 degree day. I have Andrew to thank for this picture. As we were just starting Sunday breakfast, he saw the fox. He was moving at a quick clip and this was the only shot I got with the Canon camera. Andrew's summer project is in the foreground.

With the hay cut, we can see the fox easily and from a distance. I think the cut grass also helps him hunt mice but he also hunts mice in the lavender. The fox is more hurt than help in the lavender though as I have plenty of mice tunnels beneath some of my plants (and will have to put poison out soon, loathe as I am to do it.)

His main offense is this:

What you see is a lavender planted 6 days earlier, replanted after the fox dug up this and 8 others!

On the Sunday I planted I idly wondered if the fox would be by to investigate the smell of fresh dug dirt. I checked every morning the entire week and thought I was as they say, out of the woods. Then Saturday afternoon while doing other things, I swung by the lavender and found one, then another, and another and so on, dug up, the good soil scattered among the gravel and the plants exposed to on of the very first hot day of the season.

I did not stop to take pictures for the blog, but replanted them and watered them as quickly as I could. Keep in mind they are supposed to look like this:

I lost 4 of the 8 casualties of a curious fox. That evening I checked on the ground sparrow nest to find the nest empty of shell and fledglings.  Dad says a fox certainly would have picked up the sent of freshly hatched young or at least the mother, and followed his nose to eggs or babies, That really burned me up. Yes a fox has to eat and he has a million mice in the hay field. But eggs in a nest is an easy meal. To add further insult to injury I found a fresh fox scat in the lavender too.

To read about further adventures with the foxes in our neighborhood with even better photography, you can go https://scordatos.blogspot.com/2012/05/and-foxes.html
and  https://scordatos.blogspot.com/2014/05/a-fox-eats-rabbit-and-then-tries-to.html

and https://scordatos.blogspot.com/2012/08/at-home-with-mr-fox-and-other-wildlife.html

In other lavender news, the babies given to me by my green thumb friend moved from here...

...to here. So far I've lost two to probably over watering, but the rest are going on three inches tall.

Weeding is on going.

And the harvest began around Father's Day. Here is a shot of a baby planted last year.

And what it looks like cut and trimmed to encourage new growth.

An older plant ready for harvest

And some of the English lavender cut. Someday I hope to have people over to see it as an open house and cut some of their own, but this year was not the year. I reached 50 bundles, but there are years where I've had 170 bundles so...

In a future blog post, I will share with you my adventures in trying to propagate lavender from cuttings which is a tricky business for a beginner. Below are some pictures of my beloved 9 year old Marge Clarks, who came back after two awful winters, and can come back no longer I think. I actually took cuttings from some younger Marge Clarks, that are not faring so well either.

About a week after the replanting of the fox's damage, I was walking Tutu in the morning to her usual morning business place. It was cool and sunny, and the hay had not yet been cut. The tall grass waved in the wind and you could even hear it. Not like an ocean wave I'm sure, but an Ohio wave if you will. Anyway, the tops of the grass were golden and green, and if you look above the fence post you will see two leafless limbs close together. When I was with Tutu, I saw, in between those two limbs the tawny red head and ears of the fox. I could see the edge of his red fur floating in the breeze,  I assumed he was watching us and I was torn between looking away as to not spook him, but also unable to look away. If I had had my Canon, it would have probably been one of the best pictures of my life. But it's impractical to tote a large Canon camera with a zoom lens out and about with an 18 lb terrier wanted to chase every winged creature in the yard. I was grateful Tutu didn't notice our destructive neighbor and I hustled her back into the house as quickly as I could.

When I came back out with the Canon, he was gone of course.

In the previous post I mentioned pruning lavender. The picture and video below is from a different night. I'm not letting the chickens out because one, the fox, and two the grapes are now starting to develop and the chickens are not above eating unripe grapes. So their bug filled vegetation is imported . I try to tell the girls they are getting room service, but they want OUT.

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I have so much content lined up for you, readers. We have Andrew's day trip to Coshocton, I have an update on the Killdeer family. There is the lavender cutting project and some other houseplant changes. Also another sprawling garden post. New blooms and the start of fruits and veggies seem to be appearing everyday. This week my attention will be focused on picking, washing and freezing black raspberries. I always dream of getting 20 lbs but often have to be content with 11 to 14 pounds. Maybe this will be the year...




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Big Lavender Plant 2020

Even though I have a separate blog devoted to Black Lab Lavender, the name of my lavender hobby and venture, it's been mostly defunct after a string of bad years of cold wet springs and/or awful winters. While I'm not ready to give up  on the lavender blog just yet, for purposes of making it easy for readers, I'll roll lavender content into this blog.

In the 4 days between the Killdeer hatching (May 27th) and buying the plants, (May 31st)  I concentrated on weeding the central area of my large patch for lavender. I prioritized weeding first around the newest plants, babies planted last year, as weeds had grown up around them.

You can see on the left hand side, where I've cleared more space for the new plants. Further to the left you can see how the northernmost third I've yet to turn my attention too.  A clearer visual below.

I tend to underestimate how much space I'm going to need for new plants. I ended up weeding the green you see in the lower left hand corner and found myself squishing a few plants in closer than I had planned. more like 18 inches apart rather than the full two feet.

So the last Sunday of May I trekked out to Oakland Nursery in Dublin with the plan to get roughly 30 plants; a combination of the hardy English varieties Munstead and Hidcote.  They are hardy in zone 5 and even further North and being an English variety, can tolerate a good amount of moisture.

To Oakland!

Up until a few years ago places like Lowe's or Home Depot would carry a variety of specific lavender, but now they just carry the generic "lavender" label. My green thumb friend had told me that they were selling Dilly Dilly lavender this year, a lavandin (somewhat less hardy) that grows much larger and all the lavandins are showier plants with long stems.

All the plants on the stand were Dilly Dilly. They were out of Munstead and Hidcote. They did have another variety called Ellagance...but I don't like it. I don't think it's very fragrant and I don't like how stubby the blooms look. However it is hardy to zone 5...

Anyway, I checked several internet sites and they all said Dilly Dilly was hardy to zone 5. Recently I've learned that where I live is actually zone 6a...probably. Dilly Dilly, something I had planned on buying a few of had now turned into my only choice if I wanted a variety specific lavender this year. I bought 32 plants.

I have had beautiful lavandins in the past, but they can really only survive a mild winter and spring here, or a harsher one with a significant windbreak like straw bales, but using them is unsustainable in time, money and effort. Each one weighs about 100 pounds after soaking up water for months in the elements.

For more on beautiful lavandins, you can go here

and here


So after the trip to Oakland, it was a beautiful day to plant 32 lavender plants.

I use pea gravel for the bottoms of the holes, and some kelp fertilizer to get them started.

Because the entire area is graveled and covered in landscape fabric, when I plant, the first order of business is to clear the gravel away and cut the landscape fabric with an exacto knife or pair of garden scissors.

I did this 32 times. Well, about 27 times. I had some lavender that died, from the previous year's planting and popping those suckers out was easy. Below is a picture of a lavender that didn't make it, and I swapped out.

Then I called Dad, who comes over with a little auger that attaches to a drill. He even cut the bottom out of a plastic bucket so the clod heavy clay dirt doesn't fly everywhere.

 By the time he left it was about 6:30 and I had been at this for 2.5 hours. And still had to plant 27 lavender plants. The humidity was low that day and I don't think it climbed out of the 70s, probably the nicest conditions I've ever planted in.

First I take a garden spade and enlarge the augured hole that you see above. then I add pea gravel and mix the kelp in with a little soil at the bottom.

Then...then I plant.

It was good I got these all in the ground because in about 10 to 14 days I would be cutting lavender.

By the time this was done, it was close to 8:30. I can't remember if I did a little weeding after this, I suspected I did, then I took care of the chickens and called it a night. I did my usual yoga routine in the morning before I went to bed to stretch out. Grateful for the cool weather, I wondered idly if the neighborhood fox would come by and wreck havoc as a fox did in 2015. Foxes make dens in loose soil, favoring field banks, quiet ditches, and often will have more than one den in an area. Our fox family in the neighborhood uses a local barn, and has at least one den at the edge of a small wood.

They like to dig, and the smell of fresh dirt catches their attention as a possible meal opportunity since the eat so many mice, voles and rabbits, etc...all diggers.

I checked on the lavender everyday for about a week, watering and seeing no sign of the fox. I thought I was out of the woods...

I'm going to wrap this post up as it is so long. If you enjoy the blog, I encourage you to sign up for it to be delivered right into your in box. I can't see your email if you sign up, or can't figure it out at least and if you are catching this blog through facebook updates, if you sign up, you won't be dependent on the FB algorithm reminding you there is a new post. In the upper right hand corner by the birds is a box where you can sign up for the newsletter.

Please enjoy these videos of barn swallows swooping and diving for an easy meal of bugs as I mow.

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Thanks for reading and stay safe!