Garden Part 2 and driving the backhoe…
Garden demolition continues with heavy equipment!
Mike gives me a quick lesson in Backhoe – the front half…
Archive for ‘October, 2007’
Recycling the garden
The garden which I originally looked at with excitement – envisioning fresh fruit, vegetables and herbs – turned out to be a bit of an albatross [to me] as it required a tremendous amount of work!!! to get fresh fruit, veg and herbs. I made the decision mid-summer that I wanted it gone. I will be a container gardener next summer… a few pots of herbs, tomatoes, peppers, onions – things easily taken care of.
It should be easy to rig a drip watering system and some chicken wire protection from deer so I can leave them for rv trips. Even with the garden turned into “grass” – still not much to mow and trim – probably less time as I won’t have to trim around planters and the fence.
The recycling part… my neighbors had said they would like some of the strawberry plants and as we got to talking about time to get them, they decided that they wanted the planters and the fencing – the whole kit and kaboodle! And – happy, happy, joy, joy – they have a backhoe!! – so have the ability to pop the posts out and grade everything out after and before you know it, we worked out a trade so that everyone gets what they want… they get a complete garden kit and I get a vanished garden. A friend of theirs wanted some strawberries also so we spread the love a bit and there were even a few leftover plants that I put in containers. Hopefully, I’ll get enough berries for a shortcake or 2 to share next summer.
Karl has been supervising the dismantling which is going very well. Readers will have to bear with me – I LOVE big equipment and watching it work and seeing how to do things so this is probably the first in a series of the garden recycling project.
Karl – Karelian Bear Dog
I had never heard of the Karelian Bear Dog before coming to Montana. My first dog in Montana was a pound puppy – labeled a Lab cross. I grew up with Labs and knew this dog was not Lab – labeled that way only because of his mostly black coat I assume. My vet told me he, Zack, was part Karelian Bear Dog. I looked up the breed information and was a bit daunted but as it turned out, Zack was an excellent companion, easily trained and very sociable. He was with me nearly 24/7 for 6 years. I put him to sleep after a 6 week ordeal with lymphoma. By now I had read about Karelians and met several others – short story, I found Karl in a litter in Choteau (Sho-toe) Montana and he became part of my family in May of 2001, joining me and my 5 year old tuxedo cat, Gus.
The baby pictures…
Grown up Karl
Karl – Karelian Bear Dog
Karelian Bear Dog History
Summers in Somers
Somers, MT is located on the northwest corner of Flathead Lake in Flathead County, Montana. Flathead Lake is the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. I had not even heard of it before coming to Northwest Montana.
Flathead Lake is beautiful – surrounded by mountains, longer north to south than it is wide east to west. It is not really developed on its shores which is nice. There is, however, plenty of public access and much of that via state parks that are wooded and very natural. I grew up on Lake Erie which is not the most beautiful of the Great Lakes – but I did learn to sail on that lake and on the Maumee River in Ohio. But I’ve sailed on Flathead Lake and it is incredible – the vistas, the water, the wind and the waves – big lake sailing at its best.
Late this summer on a not too smoky day, I took Karl to Lakeside, MT which is across Somers Bay from Somers, MT and took these photos. Somers is home to a nice little marina – I’ve sailed from there and also from Dayton, MT which is further south along the west shore of the lake. But Somers is a bit unique – itty-bitty town mostly on a hill overlooking the lake. It reminds me of parts of San Francisco in that the houses are small footprint houses that step up the hill with beautiful vistas of the water.
Calendar
I had some downtime today as I was waiting for software downloads to download…and found the new calendar thing that is on the right. Technically, the calendar in blog-speak is a “widget” – that’s just fun!! But, I think it’s pretty cool – the dates that have posts are bold and if you put your cursor on the bold date, the title of the post should appear. The other blog-speak thing is that the calendar is in the “sidebar”.
Boy, half the battle with computers – hardware – software is learning the lingo – cookies, widgets, sidebars, headers – and acronyms… Widgets, though – that’s my current favorite!
On Blogging and Beauty
I’ve hit a bit of a dry spell lately – not so much because I have nothing to say as much as I have a lot of things going on at the moment. I feel a bit bad because I know that I have some faithful readers who “tune in” every morning and it’s been several days since there was something fresh. And also, I miss writing!
In June when I was getting ready to go to Colorado and wanting to put together a more polished trip log than I had for my previous travels, I started looking at the blog format. I read a LOT of blogs and some were truly scary in content – corny, too “all about me” – generally just not appealing to me. And the whole blog thing seemed a bit too much one of those things that everyone was doing and I hate the whole “following the crowd” thing. But the more I looked, the more the blog format seemed to fit what I wanted to do as far as documenting travel and general writing about things going on with me. So, read some more, picked WordPress for my blog “vehicle” and it didn’t go so well. I struggled to get WordPress installed on my existing host and with all of the things that needed to be done to leave – I was ready to bail and put up a simple web page.
In the past, friends that I email have said I should write a book – that they enjoyed my writing. But at the time I was thinking of not pursuing the blog I was given some special encouragement and in addtion to the source, it was the words: “You have a gift, use it.” We rarely see our own gifts, talents or beauty. Thank God that others see with both eyes and heart – the beauty that we cannot. And the second part of that is that we must trust in the people that care for us and believe in what they see in us.
Those words – “you have a gift, use it” carried enormous power. They were more command than suggestion. It was strong motivation and things suddenly came together for “From the Front Porch”. And not only has it been a joy to write, it is a joy to hear from everyone who reads. Something special has happened to me through writing these entries. I often start with an idea of where I’m going and find that I end up someplace I did not anticipate – what fun! It is a grand adventure for me as I learn things about myself that I didn’t know. I think the real gift is being open to new thoughts and ideas and allowing the writing to happen. Ultimately it has been an incredible ride so far.