25 July 2008

Vinny, our current “top cat”, loves to take mid-morning naps curled around a small tree trunk.

Sometimes, he turns over and “curls” the other way.

We have had as many as seven cats at the same time.

Now, we are down to three: Vinny; his sister, Vicky; and Bill, our oldest. Bill is a retired top cat, and he sleeps a lot. Vinny and Vickie came to us as tiny kittens a few years ago – we found them under a tomato plant in the garden.

We have learned that cats have varied, distinctive, and interesting personalities.

All tolled, we have shared our home with more than a dozen cats over the past twenty years, or so. All of our cats have been “strays”. They come, and they go. We found homes for some of them, some died from “natural” causes, one died during surgery, two were killed in the street by automobiles, a couple simply disappeared and we don’t know what happened to them.

24 July 2008























These peaches are ripening on a tree that sprouted at the edge of the compost pile about six years ago, and there it remains. I never got around to transplanting the tree. This little peach tree has been blossoming each spring for the past couple of years, and this year it finally set a few peaches.

The tree seems to be perfectly happy right where it is even though it gets little direct sunshine, so maybe I will simply leave it where it sits. With an occasional pruning, and a bit of water now and then, it seems to be doing just fine, thank you.

17 July 2008

Summertime distractions have kept me from updating this blog for the past few weeks. Here is an entry to get things rolling again.

Dixie and Louis, our pair of Cayuga ducks, are now (almost) fully grown. I have found photographing black ducks to be a bit of a challenge. The background must be carefully chosen, else they seem to appear as little more than dark blobs in the photo.

Here is a photo of Dixie flapping her wings.

Dixie has never really taken flight, but she loves to stand on tip-toes, furiously flapping her wings. She bounces up and down as if on a pogo stick. Louis, on the other hand, has actually flown short distances. Louis is larger than Dixie, and his wings are more fully developed, but I have yet to catch him in full flight with the camera.

Here is Louis, waddling about near one of their watering dishes.

Some of the green iridescence is clearly visible on Louis' head.

In addition to their watering dishes, the ducks have a wading pool in which they can splash about and go for short swims.

Here is a photo of them in a couple of their watering dishes.

Louis, in the blue dish, is “helping” Dixie wash a munchie of some kind. Yes, they spend quite a bit of time in their watering dishes (which are plastic dishpans). The ducks seem to prefer their drinking water to be “seasoned” a bit before drinking it.

Their duck house, duck pen, and water facilities are works in progress; they enjoy full access to the garden in rear of the house until such time as I have finished fencing “their” territory. We were concerned that the ducks might destroy the plants in the garden, but they seem to be mostly carnivores, and do virtually no damage to the plants while searching for munchies hidden by the foliage. Snails, slugs, and earthworms are their favorite food. They will eat store-bought food that is formulated especially for ducks, but only as a last resort when they can’t find enough “real” food to satisfy their appetite.

These guys are excellent foragers!

09 June 2008

Tomatoes, turnips, and onions dominate the portion of our modest veggie garden this year. In this photo, there are some peas and beets hidden from view behind the tomato plants.

This particular garden patch is planted in an area between the house and the street.

Additional veggies, including leek, radishes, and more onions, have been planted in the garden behind the house, but their tiny sproutlings are not yet ready for prime time display.

30 May 2008

Dixie and Louis in their “wading pond”.
We have been using a small wading pond to let the ducklings get some exercise swimming around and diving below the surface.

They LOVE it!

We plan to have a larger and drainable permanent pond for them by the time they are grown. The pond needs to be drainable for cleaning because they love to make Gawd-awful messes while playing in the water. Ideally, they should have a pond with circulating water that cleans itself, but that is a bit beyond our “duck budget” right now.

Speaking of grown ducks, Dixie and Louis are a rare breed called “Cayuga Ducks”. (Yes, they have been officially declared as “rare”)

When they reach full maturity, they will look like this:

Meanwhile, we are enjoying the ducklings and all their cute antics.

26 May 2008



Ducklings . . .









. . . are an interesting addition to our collection of animals.

These guys, pictured here in their temporary home, at about four weeks old, are little fuzz-balls with stubby little wings. They are much too young to be turned loose in the garden.



Their temporary home is a portable kennel that was previously used by a 140-pound rottweiler named Hildagard (as in Hilda, guard dog). Sadly, Hilda is no longer with us – she lived to a ripe old age, and her ashes are now enriching the soil in a rose garden.



Be that as it may, we plan to enclose a small part of the garden behind the house so that the ducklings can “run wild” for short periods of time under close supervision. Once they are full-grown, they can have part of the garden as their very own with little or no supervision.

Their names? Dixie and Louis. It is rather difficult to tell which is which at this point in their development.

18 May 2008

Nothing accidental about this - - a functional, quick, and (relatively) easy retainer wall can be built using concrete blocks and flat steel bars (no concrete mixing, no rebar, no mortar).

This project started when I found myself with a pile of “extra” dirt following a few landscape changes. After thinking about the situation, it seemed that using the dirt to create a small “raised garden” was a good idea. Of course, a raised garden requires some sort of retainer wall to keep everything in place. Having recently suffered “sticker shock” after hiring a contractor to construct a similar retainer wall as a foundation for a fence, I decided to be kind to my bank account by doing it myself. Turns out this decision provided several hours of satisfying activity in the garden in addition to being financially sound.

The concrete blocks I’m talking about look something like this:

Concrete blocks come in a variety of sizes. I used two sizes:
[1] About sixteen inches long x eight inches wide x eight inches high
[2] About sixteen inches long x four inches wide x eight inches high

Where I need a two-block-high retainer, I use the 16 x 8 x 8 blocks as a “foundation”, then stacked 16 x 4 x 8 blocks on top, like so:

Notice that there is a small “lip” on the front of the wall, and a larger “lip” on the back side of the wall. The small lip in the front of the wall served to disguise any small misalignment of the blocks. The blocks can, of course, be mounted flush, without the lip, if you so desire.

The building of the two-block-high retainer goes something like this:

(1) The 16 x 8 x 8 blocks were laid on solid, level ground.

(2) After the foundation blocks are in place, lined up, and squared up, the holes in the blocks are filled with tamped dirt.

(3) Remove any “excess” dirt from the top of the blocks so the upper blocks can be added.
(4) Place the 16 x 8 x 4 blocks on top of the foundation blocks.

(5) Two steel bars are driven into the ground inside the rear wall of the 16 x 8 x 4 blocks.

These steel bars are ready made in various lengths, and can be found at lumber yards and hardware stores. The bars are used when building forms for pouring concrete, but here they are being used to “nail” the retainer wall to the ground so it will not move when dirt is placed behind the wall. These “ready-made” steel bars have become a bit pricey lately. Mine were “leftovers” from some concrete work that was done a couple years ago. Sometimes, you can find them reasonable priced at garage sales, but that could take months.

The steel bars I used are twenty-four inches long, an inch and a half wide, and about three-sixteenths of an inch thick. The dirt in my yard is pretty solid stuff, so the 24-inch bars are more than adequate to hold the blocks. If your dirt is sandy, or has a lot of organic material in it, longer bars should be used.

Does it meet building code. Darned if I know (didn’t ask, so nobody could tell me “no”).

Does it work? Definitely.

NOTE: Probably not a good idea to use this method for a retainer more than two concrete blocks high.

Here is a photo of the wall under construction:

As you can see, one of the steel bars is in place, ready to be driven into the earth to hold the blocks in place. Once all the bars are driven, the openings on the blocks are filled with tamped dirt. Concrete covers for the blocks are available to hide the openings, but I did not consider them to be necessary.

The retainer wall has been completed, dirt has been placed behind the wall, and a few plants have been put in place.

I will post an update when the plants are mature and ready for prime time showing.