Last week, in the storied tradition of Saturday Morning Garden Blogging, I started posting a series of diaries about my little spot of alternating paradiso and purgatorio — The Sticks.
Those of you who have occupied your minds with the weighty matters of politics, treason, the oil supply, melting ice caps, and the outcome of the latest Big Brother are once again invited to come on down, find a shady spot, and camp out. I’ll make the lemonade.
It’s been a blazing hot, painfully dry summer around here, and neither the forest nor the garden have much appreciated it. We (by which I mean, my wife) have picked up a wheelbarrow load of fallen branches every day, and reliable old plants like peonies and columbine have wilted before the heat. Even the big peach tree — usually so loaded down that we have to use string and planks to keep it from committing peachicide by ripping itself to pieces under the weight of all the fruit — produced only a handful this year, and the deer nabbed those few before they could find their way onto my pancakes.
As usual, the one group of plants that seem to thrive in the worst conditions of the year are the coneflowers.
This year, the little volunteer tiger lillies have also spread quite well — though this seems to have come at the expense of the yellow coneflowers.
Last week, there were complaints that after showing the garden and the road, I failed to give a glimpse of the house. So, here’s that first look at The Sticks itself.
This is the northern third of the place, minus the part that holds the den and kitchen, the breezeway, and the new garage. Once I can convince my college age son and his friends not to leave a convoy worth of cars in front of the rest of it, I’ll try and get a shot of the whole sprawl. But this shot should give you a pretty good sense of the place. It’s logs. It’s a house. It’s a log house.
The Sticks would never make the cover of one of the log home magazines. It doesn’t have handcrafted custom logs made from thousand year old spruce (it’s plain old southern yellow pine, made popular as telephone poles). It doesn’t have a three story front window, or a ten person jacuzzi, or landscaping done by someone who won an Oscar. But it’s one big pile of sticks, it is.
Last week, someone also mentioned that they would like to sit down on the porch swing. Well, it’s ready any time.
This particular swing was made by some folks at an Amish community off to the west of us. That would be more special if I didn’t know they’d kicked out dozens of swings almost identical to it — even the Amish practice their own form of mass production.
Note the peachy-keeno turntable in the background, highly suitable for playing scratched up America albumns. The turner also works just fine for listening to This American Life or Car Talk.
If the front porch doesn’t charm you, you’re also welcome to find a seat on the breezeway.
We tacked a new garage onto the place, and the only spot where we could fit it without knocking down a half dozen trees was set off about 30′ to one side of the house. So we connected the two with a new screened in breezeway. This is the primo spot to sit on a cool morning. There’s a hummingbird feeder, big tray feeder, and a squirrel-proof (ha!) feeder just off to one side, so those binocs on the table gets used frequently in peeking at our avian visitors.
If someone has an idea what might be emptying the hummingbird feeder each night, without so much as removing the little yellow flowers over the openings, let me know.
Okay, that seems like enough for one week. Next time, I’ll either move inside, or maybe start talking up some of the endless list of projects underway. Or I could intro some of the critters. Hmmm.