January 2024: Cold and Atmospheric

January was cold and then it turned frigid. We spent the middle of the month in a polar vortex which brought temperature highs down below freezing and lows into the single digits for more than a week. Add in some windy days, and we had wind chill warnings on top of it all.

Even with the new Feralvillas that I’d gotten for the outdoor cats, I didn’t have confidence that we could keep them sufficiently warm, so we evacuated them to an emergency shelter. We did the same during similar weather last year. They spent 11 days together in a small bathroom and were very much ready to go home by the end of it. They did stay safe and warm, however.

There were no particular happenings in my garden during January, but we were treated to a range of natural beauty. There were cold, crystal-clear sunsets with slivers of moon, enough snow to smooth and brighten the landscape, a stunning sunrise, and particularly dense and mysterious fog.

At the end of the month, I saw the first signs of spring as a few hellebore leaves and buds began to emerge from beneath the dried leaves. There are also some early crocuses, bluebells, and daffodils starting to poke up above the ground.

The sharp-shinned hawks that live in a huge oak across the street are more noticeable and active as the days start to get longer. The other day, I was walking Perry at lunch and noticed a pile of feathers in the backyard next door. When I looked more closely, the hawk was still eating its meal there in the yard. It flew off with its kill (probably a pigeon, judging by the feathers). I’ve noticed the hawk family for years and it’s been interesting to see their activity throughout the seasons.

A Cat a Day: February 4

Lady Ygraine in the Portrait Gallery of her Cat Palace

January 2022: Photogenic Amounts of Snow

As I write this, we’re preparing for a massive ice storm. There seems to be no doubt that we’re going to be hit with significant accumulations of ice. But while we wait to learn our fate, here are some pictures of some much gentler snowfall in January.

I didn’t take any pictures of all the shades of brown in my garden in between the couple snowfalls that we got. It was partly that I didn’t see anything terribly photogenic and partly that there have been several stretches of bitter cold weather so I didn’t get out and walk around in my garden very much.

On the couple non-snowy, non-frigid days, instead of gardening I went to work building Cat Pods to add some extra insulation to the outdoor cats’ heated cat houses. You’ll see more about that in some upcoming Cat of the Day posts.

My Christmas lights are still up. I like the festiveness that they give, especially in the snow. There are several photos of them here so you can appreciate them, too.

And one additional photo: a reminder to pay attention and look around you. I was walking Perry in January and I looked just to the right of an opening in the fence that we pass through almost every day. And finally, in January, I saw that I’d been visited by a monarch butterfly at some point but I didn’t know it until that moment. I finally saw that there were the burst remains of a chrysalis that have been there in front of me for months but I never noticed.

October 2021: From Tomatoes to Turning Leaves

October finally saw summer turn to autumn. I started the month by cleaning out the mass of plants in my vegetable garden. By that point, the tomatoes and melons were pretty rough looking. There were several melons to pick, but not many tomatoes anymore. There were also some pretty Klee’s orange marigolds mixed in. Covering it all was a mass of Mexican sour gherkin vines. They’re so cute and fun to grow, but, sadly, I didn’t get inspired to use them in anything this year, so they just grew and grew and never got picked. Next year my garden will be swarming with them because so many unpicked fruits fell on the ground everywhere.

Once the mass of plants was out of the way, I planted my garlic. I always think I have a great new plan for how I can plant garlic so that I’ll be able to plant something else around it in order to maximize the little space I have. But it never works that well. I always get the Small Garden Sampler from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. It’s four different kinds of garlic. This time around, I thought I could plant four rows lengthwise in the raised bed. Surely that would be enough space, right? Well, a couple of the kinds of garlic had lots of small cloves in each head, so there were a lot to plant and they took up more like three rows each. I couldn’t throw any out, so I planted them all and, like usual, hoped something will work out brilliantly next spring. I don’t know what that solution will be, but I’ve got several months before it’s a problem.

Mid month, the overnight temperatures started to regularly be below 50 degrees and that meant it was time to bring in my houseplants for the winter and to harvest my basil. I’d used leaves of the basil here and there all summer, but at the end of the season I always pick everything and turn it into pesto. I made three rounds of pesto and froze most of it. We did use some as the bottom layer on a few pizzas, covering it with fresh mozzarella, pizza cheese, and roasted red pepper. It was delicious!

All month, my garden was brightened with a lot of blooms. Most of them were zinnias and marigolds, but there were also morning glories on the back fence (the kind that come up on their own and not the fancy kinds I planted, not that I noticed (I did)) and tassel flowers by the front bottle tree. I also had pretty blooms from a daisy-like chrysanthemum located by our front steps. You’ll see photos of the flowers here, but not of the plant. It got really leggy and not very attractive. I need to keep working on my mum-growing technique. The last half of the month was time for some of my favorite flowers to bloom–toad lilies. I love how bright, new, and fancy they look just when everything else is getting kind of tired and brown as it coasts into fall.

Toward the end of the month, I tried a project I’d always meant to do: using cement to make casts of big leaves and using those casts as stepping stones. The leaves on my elephant ears are always so beautiful and I’m sad every year when the frosts come. They’re the perfect leaves to turn into stepping stones, and now I can keep them year-round. I made five stones, plus a first one that turned out ok but not great. Next year I may try to add some color to them. For now I’m glad to have finished them before the frost destroyed the leaves (but not long before the frost so the plants didn’t look chopped up for long).

Another project at the end of the month was a round of garden-fresh ravioli. I hadn’t made any ravioli all summer and I decided that that needed to be remedied. Made from scratch, it’s absolutely delicious, but it’s also a lot of work. This time I made it even more work by attempting the fancy, multi-colored pastas that I’ve seen people making on the internet. I needed some natural coloring, so I used the one brightly colored thing I still had in my garden: sweet potato leaves. I cooked the leaves and pureed them and added them into some of the pasta dough to make striped dough. It was a lot tougher to do than they make it appear in internet videos. The pasta was stuffed with a cheesy, garlicy, roasted squash mixture. The squash and garlic were both from my garden. The pasta was served in a brown butter and sage sauce. It was sublime, but took most of the day to make.

Overall, the month was a little dry and quite warm. There were multiple weeks I decided to use my sprinklers to water because we didn’t get nearly enough rain. And our air conditioning was on for a lot of the time while the heat was only on for the last couple days (we tried to engage in the local sport of holding out till at least November before turning the heat on, but we quit when the temperature indoors didn’t get above 62 degrees for the day). There were no frosts and no temperatures near or below freezing, so most of my plants were still going strong at the end of the month.

John and I have been talking about how much we need to take more time off to help us cope with the stress of the pandemic and work. Then I saw a reason to take a long weekend away. There’s a place in Southern Illinois called Scratch Brewing. One of my Facebook friends wrote about visiting it a couple years ago, and I’ve wanted to go there ever since. They use all kinds of locally foraged plants in their brewing. I was intrigued but we never actually went there. Then Scratch’s announcement about their Octoberfest popped into my Facebook feed, and I decided it was time to visit.

We organized a couple days around our visit to Scratch. We found a cabin nearby where we could stay for a couple nights and drove out on a Friday so we could be at Scratch when they opened on Saturday. It was fantastic! The flavors were incredibly complex and layered. Some were surprising. All of them were fantastic. It was a cool, rainy day and was absolutely perfect for sitting in their outdoor dining area sampling all their drinks and eating good food. We spent several hours leisurely drinking and eating. All of it was created with an eye for what’s local. It was SO GOOD, and we can’t wait to go back.

A Cat a Day: May 1

Today’s Cat a Day is a little different. The story is that John and I commissioned a pet portraitist to create a portrait of Ladies Ygraine and Morgaine for us. I love the portrait I have of my previous cat Shamoo, and I wanted a portrait to celebrate (and eventually to remember) the Ladies.

John and I saw examples of other portraits by Ashley at Cloverkin and we loved her work. It was very cool, but also very humorous and fun. It’s styled after fantasy genres, and Ashley does a “Paw Reading” to determine how she should portray each individual pet she does a portrait of. Her Paw Reading for the Ladies was that they were royalty, so that’s how they’re portrayed. Ygraine also has elements of being a huntress as part of her portrayal, including a dead dragon (skink) on her belt.

It was a small extravagance for us to commission the portrait, but I’m happy to support artists doing their art. We’ve been waiting for a couple years for this portrait. Covid-19 got in the way of Ashely completing it last year, but we were really excited to finally have it done and already have it hanging next to the Ladies’ cat palace.

The picture above is the official “social media” version of the artwork that Ashley provided for me to share.

February 2021: Ice and Snow

In this month’s review of my garden: a surprising amount of snow and ice!

Near the beginning of February, we had our first round of snow. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to record the cats’ tracks, so it was official. I took some photos, just in case there wasn’t any additional snow for the winter. During the winter of 2019-2020, there was only one dusting that came in November, so it wouldn’t have been unheard of. Also, on the first day of February I sighted my first crocus, so there was the promise that spring was on its way.

But in retrospect, I didn’t even remember that it snowed that early in February until I went through my photos for the month, because less than a week later we got more wintery weather than we’ve had in years. First came an ice storm. Thankfully, in our area we didn’t get enough ice to do major damage, but we did get enough to provide me with some really nice things to photograph. The rain and sleet started in the morning and continued off and on all afternoon and into the evening, so it built up quite a bit.

Normally around here we would expect everything to melt right away, but the ice was followed by very cold temperatures. Then came a significant snowfall, then extremely cold temperatures, then more snow. In all, we may have gotten 8-10 inches of snow, which was actually less than the forecasters had thought was possible.

We woke up to snow on on the ground on a Monday, then it started to snow again around noon and kept snowing all of the rest of the day. That same week, we got more snow on Wednesday-Thursday. It’s very unusual for this area, but we had ice and/or snow on the ground for about a week and a half, and it stayed well below freezing for the entire time. That created fantastic conditions for cross country skiing! I got mine out. On the first couple days while road conditions were still bad, I only was able to ski down my street and down the alley behind my house. It was still fun!

The predictions at the beginning of all this snow and cold were really dire. In the end, we all made it through in good shape. I was particularly worried about the outdoor cats because temperatures and windchills were going to be so low. They all have spots where they hide from the bad weather, including the heated cat houses on my porch, but I don’t think those cat houses are built for this kind of cold. They’re insulated, waterproof, and heated, but don’t keep the wind out, so at the last minute I added some cardboard boxes as wind baffles. I also made a shelter for their food and I made sure their heated water dish was stocked. The cats managed to stay warm enough, though on the coldest nights there were three cats piled together for warmth in a single house.

Because it was so cold and windy, the first round of snow was beautiful but not particularly photogenic. It didn’t clump into nooks and crannies around my garden nor did it act as icing on top of everything. The second round of snow was a little better for photos.

I have a pair of cross country skis, but I rarely get to use them. Around Southern Indiana, even when there’s enough snow to get them out it’s usually just barely enough snow or there’s a thick layer of slush under the snow or the temperature hovers around 32 degrees so it’s pretty melty. It was really remarkable that we had lots of snow, it was frozen all the way to the ground, and it stuck around for almost a week.

Once the roads got a little better, I wanted to find someplace other than my street to  ski. We don’t have a car that’s built for snowy weather, so I didn’t want to venture too far away and get stuck in a parking area or something, so I stayed pretty close to home. John drove me to the levy near downtown Evansville, dropped me off, and came to get me when I was ready to go home. Years ago, I had friends who would go sledding there. Not many people go there now, so it was perfect for skiing. I had the place to myself and no one disturbed my trail once I’d created it. The water level in the nearby creek was also remarkably low, so there was a nice space between the creek and the levy where I could ski. Other years, I’ve gone along the top of the levy, but the wind had blown some of the snow off up there this year.

I went skiing for four days in a row. By the end, I was tired, but I knew an opportunity like this comes along so rarely that I had to enjoy it while I could. Each day I went a little farther, and the last day I went pretty much as far as I could. I skied from Waterworks Road to the Veterans Parkway/US 41 on ramp and back. Each day, there was a different mix of being overcast, overcast with some breaks in the clouds, and sunny with clouds. It was a pretty spot to ski, even though I was only skiing there because there weren’t many other options.

After the last day of skiing, I made myself some hot chocolate in my special bunny cup. When I was a kid, my mom would sometimes make us hot chocolate after we went skiing, and that was the main time I got to drink out of my bunny cup, so that’s what makes it special.

Once the thaw came, it came quickly, which was nice. There weren’t lingering ice piles or partially melted snow on the roads. Temperatures shot way above freezing and stayed there. Quickly, more crocuses appeared. And, I have a wonderful array of four orchids that are now blooming in my window. There are bits of spring and hope everywhere!

But then on the last day of February it rained and rained and rained. Overnight we got about 2 inches of rain, breaking local rainfall records. There was a pause in the rain, then it started again. In the end, my rain gauge recorded over 3 inches of rain. In the middle of all of it, my front bottle tree reached its breaking point and tipped over into the yard. Luckily, the ground was super soft from all the rain and cushioned the landing. I managed to pull all the bottles and Christmas lights off of the trunk, and then John wrestled it out of the way. I’m still trying to decide what to do with it. I might try to prop it up with stakes. I don’t think I’ll leave it on its side on the ground, though. It’s just not speaking to me as an art piece while looking like that.

January 2021: Dormancy and Dustings

Not very much happened in my garden in January, and the proof of that is that I hardly have any photos of it! We got a few dustings of snow, which always make everything look a little more interesting because of the white accents, and that’s about it. It’s still too early for me to start the few seeds that I will start indoors, and this year the earliest crocuses hadn’t yet shown any signs of blooming, so there’s really nothing but dormancy going on.

I have, however, been cooking with garden produce. I started 2021 by making a bean and sweet potato stew. I took all the lima beans and cowpeas that my garden produced in 2020 and dumped them in the slow cooker with some of my sweet potatoes and garlic along with a few other things from the grocery store. The cowpeas are in the same family as the black-eyed peas that many people around here eat for good luck on New Year’s day, so I figure they’ll work. Hopefully dumping a whole year’s worth of my garden’s bounty into a New Year’s pot will guarantee plentiful harvests in 2021.

Later in January I made another round of ravioli from scratch. My recipe calls for squash, but since I have plenty of sweet potatoes sitting around, I decided to use them instead. I tried to find at least one of each of the three colors of sweet potato that I grew, and I was successful. It was amazing how much color just a single, purple sweet potato added to the final filling. To make the ravioli, I roasted the sweet potatoes, garlic, sage, and a shallot (the shallot was the only thing NOT from my garden), then added cheese and pureed it all. Meanwhile, I made pasta dough and ran it through my pasta maker to create thin sheets before piping the filling onto the dough. I boiled the pasta to finish cooking it, then made a browned butter sauce. It was a lot of work, but it was also really delicious!

The Temple of Tolerance

On the way home from visiting family in Ohio over Thanksgiving, John and I decided to stop at another art environment: The Temple of Tolerance in Wapakoneta, Ohio. I’d heard about it before but then I forgot. It came up again in Thanksgiving conversation when we were all discussing my post about the Birdhouse Guy in Loogootee, IN.

The Temple of Tolerance is a very interesting place. It’s a very impressive and well done backyard construction. It was built by a guy named Jim Bowsher, and you enter by walking up his driveway. There are a few metal arches and gateways and then you’re in a maze of pathways and stone constructions that look like altars. You wind your way to the back of the property and find yourself in front of a giant rock pile/temple. Along the way you pass several hand lettered signs and a display of bullet casings that represent all the Ohioans killed in wars from 1812 to today.

You can follow a rough staircase to get to the top of the temple area. John found the contemplative spirit of the place particularly strong at the top of the temple. There is a fire pit and a series of stone carvings and a high altar kind of thing at the top.

Unfortunately it was a horribly drab and dull day, so my photos aren’t great. My camera battery was also running low, so I didn’t get as much documentation as I’d have liked. As a result, I don’t feel like my photos truly capture the wonderment of the place. Hopefully they at least give you an idea of what it’s like.

I would like to go back again, hopefully when the plants are all green and growing. You can read more about The Temple of Tolerance and Jim Bowsher here and here. We did not happen to meet Jim ourselves. I also found an interesting video about the place and you’ll find it below, after my photos.

Artistic Inspiration

Occasionally I have heard about the guy with all the birdhouses who lives near Loogootee, IN. It kind of sounded interesting, and finally at the end of the summer I decided to make the trip to see it myself.

It absolutely exceeded exceeding my expectations. It was incredible. Below are a few photos. I hope they begin to do it justice. From the minute you drive up, it’s an explosion of color packed on top of color. There is a little geodesic dome house surrounded by row after row of birdhouses accompanied by painted rocks and wildly assorted yard art. Much of the yard art is arranged by theme: people, dwarves, cats, dogs, etc. The entire yard dips down to a creek with small foot bridges crossing it. It is an extraordinary art environment that envelops you. I walked around, taking photo after photo and trying to soak it all in.

I was about halfway through my walk when I heard someone. The owner of the place, Bill, had noticed me. Normally, I’d like to look and not visit, but Bill is a very friendly fellow. He invited me into the ground floor of his house where his studio space is located.

He said he was in the middle of painting a round of birdhouses, but he was ready to take a break. When he looked out his window, he’d seen some movement and realized he had a guest. He had at least 50 little birdhouses that he was working on painting. He also had a selection of larger birdhouses nearby. Part of his hospitality is to offer a birdhouse to every visitor, so I got one, too. I picked out a bigger house because I told Bill that it would fit well into my garden.

Then he took me on a tour of the rest of his house. I’m not normally someone who would go around taking home tours from strangers, but it was really worth it. The interior of BIll’s house is as extraordinary as the exterior. Every bit of the ceiling under the dome is covered in something. There are bird houses and butterflies and Christmas lights that he turns on for guests. It was a magical fairy tale bubble.

I took a million more photos inside Bill’s house while Bill talked to me about his home and garden and life. He asked where I am from because he keeps track of where everyone comes from. He talked about his garden and birdhouses and his knee issues that lately have been keeping him from working on his outdoor art. He actually began his art environment with plants, not rocks and birdhouses, but then there was a drought and he didn’t like how much he had to water everything. The next year he switched to things he didn’t need to water and everything grew (so to speak) from there.

I tried to express how much I genuinely loved his art and how incredible I thought it was. I hope he understood that.

This video captures a lot of what it was like talking to him. I highly recommend visiting the place yourself. Don’t miss out on the house tour if you go.

When I went to see all the birdhouses, I had recently finished painting my revamped blackberry trellis (I had also painted several cats in the process). I brought my birdhouse home from Bill’s and decided it looked good on top of the trellis. Then I, like Bill, decided that I needed more going on on top of the trellis. I bought a bunch of fence post toppers, painted them, and added them along the top of the trellis. I really liked how it looked.

I also built a second trellis for the raspberry plants and painted it to match. After that I re-strung my tree jewelry and hung it back in the magnolia tree. Somewhere in the middle of all that I got a burst of inspiration and ringed one of my apple tree stumps with upended wine bottles.

It wasn’t what I’d really been planning for the wine bottles I’d been collecting for a year, but I’d been looking at the weird circles that the EPA contractors had left around the two stumps and I thought of my friend Jane, who had done it around all of her trees, and I knew it would be a great thing to do. It looked great, so then I spent several weeks searching for enough wine bottles to do the same thing to the other apple tree.

With the help of some friends and a Posey County Solid Waste Management recycling center, I got the second ring done and added more bottles to the front bottle tree. There is still more to do, though. The project will be ongoing for a while.

You can get a tour of all this garden art below.

2019 Tour de Fleur Garden Walk

At the end of June, the Master Gardeners held their bi-annual Tour de Fleur Garden Walk. You could buy a ticket and tour “10 Spectacular Gardens in Evansville, Newburgh, and Mt. Vernon.” I went on the tour because it’s always fun to see how other people do their gardens. The Master Gardeners try to include a nice variety of gardens–small, large, formal, informal, wild, cultured, expensively landscaped, and grassroots.

All of the gardens were fun to see, but some were more my style than others. There wasn’t any super-quirky garden that stood out to me, but the one that came closest was full of funky garden art and all kinds of angels including a couple cat angels. It completed the experience for me to see that there was an actual cat in the garden, but he swatted at me when I attempted to make friends, so he was definitely no angel.

There was a lot to see and it was a fun weekend, but as I looked through my photos I didn’t feel particularly inspired to do a blog post about it. But then I looked through everything again and decided that I have some fun flower photos, and I could post them for anyone who would like to see flower photos.

So here you are. Some random flower and garden photos. There’s no real storyline or clear delineation between the gardens, just a random smattering of the beautiful things I saw.