Today's Bouquet and Other News

Japanese iris, coral bells, Jacob's ladder, poppy. There really isn't any news except that the weather has turned from brutally hot and humid to clear and windy with no rain in sight. Time to haul what water is left in Dry Belly Gulch. There's pachysandra needs planting and more gooseneck loosestrife to be dug up. I am a Flower Farmer. Full- time.

More to the Story

This is the skeleton of the old barn that was built around 1860. This is actually only about 1/3 of the original barn. Depending on how you counted. Back then, some clever farmers built their outbuildings strung together like beads on a wire. The big house was for the family, the little house was for cooking, especially in summer. The back house was for wagons and garden concerns. And the barn was the heart of the whole operation.

The barn represented life and warmth in winter. In the spring it was an object lesson in rebirth. Throughout summer, the barn filled up with hay that would sustain livestock in the season to come, and in the fall the barn was a place of celebration, to recognize the harvest and all the ways the barn sustained the family. A barn was as much a living part of any farm as the cows and the people who milked them.

Our barn was physically separated from the main house by a stream. It has a name. We call it Dry Belly Gulch. The real name is much more frightening. But there was a bridge, and some kind of aquaducted chilling system, most likely for milk. So the stream played a part in the farm as well. Perhaps this physical distance somehow contributed to the ultimate fate of our barn. As the other outbuildings slowly disappeared, the psychological distance increased as well.

The diagonals you see here were added by the deconstruction company to provide support after they had removed the original horizontal beams. The side pictured on the left was 40 feet, the side on the right was 50. The bowing across the remaining fifty foot ridge beam is evident.

There appear to be four 20 foot vertical posts across the front of the barn, but the two central posts have been reinforced by the deconstruction workers. A closer examination would reveal that both of these were cut in half with a mechanical saw, the lower portion being removed. This happened sometime in the nineteen sixties. I like to think they needed to get an airplane out of there. The barn stood this way for nearly fifty more years. This is a testament to the simplicity, safety, strength, and especially the fault tolerance of the old construction methods.

And this is what happened to the Broken Barn.  We got here too late to save it, but not too late to return the property to its farming roots.  Thus, the Broken Barn Flower Farm was born!

This Morning

I got my first cuppa Joe and sat on the front steps to smoke and watch the hummingbird wars. The sun was just coming up, burning off a bit of fog. Everything was wet from last night and the stream, aka Dry Belly Gulch, is running.

There are pines blocking my view of the horse field across the street when I sit there. So I am looking at them, kinda zoning, trying to wake up, when I realize I am seeing that distinctive summer red coat that deer get. That got my attention. I looked and could just see a doe's face through the pine branches, maybe 50 feet away. She was looking right at me, ears sticking way up all cute-like. Slowly, I got up and moved to the right where I could see her better. More of the looking right at me, and then she HUFFED, like she was annoyed with me for disturbing her, and bounded off, huffing the whole way.

She is probably in the woods now, blogging about the human she saw this morning. Deer must need really big keyboards. Hoof-sized.

I didn't have the camera with me, so you will have to make your own picture. In your head. Make it pretty. Or you can draw one. If you decide to do that, I'd like to see it.

PS: We got 1,817 hits yesterday. Thanks you guys! You're awesome!

Another Garden Tour. Wanna Come With?

Daylilies on east side.

In the morning, I walk and I look and I think. Here I think, "This spot's taking shape."

Ignore the buckets and cable wire- I do.

Left side, same area.

Nothing is planted here because we've been fighting wild grape and invasive buckthorn. I think we won and so now I am planting more daylilies so the entire east side of the house will have them.

Virginia bluebells setting seed.

All that leaf mulch will stop the seed from getting through,
so I kick it away and move on.

Oh! Rose Campion is showing her first blooms!

And here come the Missouri/ evening primrose. They're ready,
but too rainy today to really open up.

Aww, lupine holding water droplets. Pretty sure there's no such thing as a bad looking lupine. Now I'm done with my coffee so it's time to go in. But I don't wanna go in!

Lemme just look at Dry Belly Gulch to see what it's doing after all this rain. It'll only take a minute. Follow me, now dodge the dog shit and poison ivy. Just a little farther, between here and the barn field....

Now that was worth walkin' over to.