In progress.

11 months and 3 weeks of the year the bucks are not in sight, or at least very rarely. But in the last week they have been everywhere.

He's eating my clover in the foreground. The real grass behind him is my neighbor's lovingly cared for and seeded and aerated and pampered year-round lawn. I wonder if my clover-planting bothers her? She would never say. I wonder if left alone my clover would take over her grass? (Sounds a bit competitive, doesn't it?)

Is an hour a day too much? It's spread over 16 hours, but still.

Facebook has these gardening "games" and I'm hooked on two of them. You grow crops and flowers, raise animals, harvest and plow and plant. It's fun. More mindless than Solitaire I think. Is 1/16th of an hour too much time to devote to this, I ask myself.

Bread advice sought. I mixed up a batch of bread dough, Thurs night? Fri night? and forgot it. Found it Sun night and baked it. Tastes fine, but...

....can bread dough go bad? With only flour, salt, yeast, and water as the ingredients in this famous Sullivan Street bakery recipe, it seems unlikely that the bread is tainted. Any opinions out there among bread makers?

I'm posting this picture (from last winter) for Michelle in Massachusetts.

Her birds of prey post is well worth a visit. This hawk, a red-shouldered I think, enjoyed the fresh suet on my deck last winter. Usually, when I put out the kind of suet you buy at the grocery store--processed slab-like hunks of fat--I attract lots of creatures: mostly woodpeckers and chickadees and nuthatches, and of course squirrels. But when I offer up fresh suet from the local Amish market, even the crows and hawks and vultures stop by. Those processed blocks don't pass the smell test is my guess. Hawks know when there's really fresh meat to be had.

Lessons learned about food. Rose sauce.

Agnolotti di Spinaci
Housemade stuffed agnolotti with spinach and ricotta in a spinach pasta served in a tomato or cream sauce

This is what I ordered last night at Da Marco's. I asked for the tomato sauce, not the cream sauce. It was great. But, when the owner stopped by and I quizzed him, as I so annoyingly do quite often, about the ingredients in the tomato sauce, I learned that he makes his tomato sauce with... cream: called rose sauce. First time I'd heard of it. I've been reading a lot of books about food lately, especially chain-store food--like you get at Chili's and TFIG for example--and I thought that food was bad because of all the hidden ingredients and multiple deep-fryings. And I learned years ago that lots of restaurants, good and average, often drizzle melted butter on top of their vegetables. But I didn't know that when I ask for "tomato sauce" instead of "cream sauce" I may still be getting a cream sauce. The owner also told me he uses skinned plum tomatoes for his sauce but he doesn't start with fresh ones and remove the skins and seeds on-site. I guess that would be asking too much, even of a small restaurant. But I DO wish he'd start calling his "tomato" sauce by its rightful name: rose sauce.

Is this also late blight? Looks buggy to me. Teeny fungi. Good band name.

Say what you want about her, her husband, her politics, his politics. She's one cool first lady.

credit TBA

You can get your next brain respiration treatment on 14th Street, just a few blocks from the Washington Monument.

I sauteed some of these green tomatoes last night along with some Mahi Mahi. I liked it. That's one of us.

I heard someone, on Stephen Colbert I think--one of my primary news sources, say that we should eat only catfish, tilapia, and carp. Not sure I'm going to follow that advice. Now if I was still feeding small children I'd be more attentive, but hell, what's the point at my age?

Nasturtiums never give up. These formed the basis for a good salad last night.

The deer love all the clover I've been planting to replace grass. (What's that on his back?)

You gotta love a first lady who says this about French fries...

"...my favorite food in the whole wide world are French fries. I love them. Dearly. ... Deeply.

"I have a good relationship with French fries, and I would eat them every single day if I could. I really would,'' she said.

Photo from wikipedia, where they have many words saying "it's OK for Pam to use this photo."

The pond next door. Two days ago, maybe three.

On the far. far left (you really can't see it) is the beaver lodge. The park people think the family left, and I tend to agree with them. For one thing, no new trees have been felled in months. There were at least three in the beaver family, maybe more. I'll miss them but am glad I got to watch them work and build and grow (and slap their tails at me at night) for the almost two years they lived here.

I don't know what these are but they bloomed all spring, summer, and fall in a shady spot.

I mixed them in with some polka dot plants (Hypoestes phyllostachya) in a color combo no one would ever recommend. But I kind of like it. I read today that the polka dot plant is evergreen. We'll see.

Such a pretty mystery bug on Queen Anne's lace, in the park next door.

Grasses are at their peak in my front yard right now.

Garden "art."

Here's one way to deal with my inability to throw out old stuff that has sentimental value. I inherited this pitchfork from my parents. I have no idea how old it is. I like to pretend that it belonged to my great-grandmother (or father) and he or she used it to pitch hay on their farm. It's possible. When the handle broke off earlier this year I was crushed. I used it only for my compost pile. It's been hanging around the garage and carport since then, getting in the way, reminding me daily that I should toss it out. Now it has a home in my herb garden. And it doesn't seem to have pissed anyone off...yet. (I'm married to a non-hoarder; it's a struggle. For both of us I mean.)

Bald cypress. A deciduous conifer. Didn't know there was such a thing.

What's with these tomatoes? Black rot? Mold?

It looks like blossom end rot but the black spots aren't on the blossom end. Am I being too literal?

Not the last one but close to it. The deer left me a few beans. I'll miss these in the winter (tomatoes, not the deer).

Nasturtium. Painfully beautiful.

Deer way, way in the distance. They're on their usual trail. This is the entrance to the park next door.

My two pumpkins. Came up on their own, from my compost I guess.

Today is BAD--Blog Action Day. An unfortunate acronym but here's my 2 cents.

I've been trying for a year or so to read enough about climate change to have a shot at a slightly well-informed opinion on this subject. It's taken me that long to figure out that the subject is way too complex for me to have a truly well-informed opinion so instead I have a list of thoughts-questions, interesting people who have unconventional opinions on climate change, and a couple of fascinating historical weather events.
Thoughts-questions:
1. The subject would be easier to talk about if we could forget about whether or not humans caused the situation. Of course, our actions (like when the first humans dug up some trees and planted a garden) are causes but there are other factors so why waste time blaming or denying?

2. I believe what I read (in the IPCC report, for example) about the trends and likely causes of our current global warming (deforestation, burning fossil fuels, too many cattle on the planet, etc), but I have no faith that humans have the ability to stop or reverse the trend. With a massive, massive effort we could maybe slow it down but that's it. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't change our ways.

3. Every country should be looking for fossil fuel alternatives b/c fossil fuels are running out, they're dirty, and we have to be international hypocrites (and total ass-kissers) to keep the Saudi oil flowing into our oversized cars. I still don't like nuclear power plants even though I know we have 80 or so plants in this country and France gets about 80% of its electricity from nuclear energy. Have we been lucky or is it really possible to keep them safe from angry evil-doers of all stripes and human error?

4. Our two biggest problems are overpopulation and dwindling supplies of water. If I wanted to be, you know, part of the solution, instead of buying a Prius I should lobby on behalf of reducing population growth or increasing research on how in the hell we're going to have enough water in the future.

Interesting people with unconventional opinions on climate change:

Freeman Dyson:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?_r=1

James Lovelock:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock

Interesting weather and geological events:

Mount Tamboro and the Poverty Summer of 1816
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tambora

The cooling of 535-536 AD (leading to widespread famine, drought, and plague): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535–536

Next book I'll read about all this stuff:

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (Paperback)
by Brian Fagan

High up in my magnolia tree. Wasp nest?

A garden lesson for me. Two crops of lettuce. Mine at top (no thinning of plants); Susan's at bottom (much thinning of plants). Thin your seedlings!

Gus just had a nice drink of water. See the drop on his chin? He's such a sweetheart.

I've often admired his rosy nosetip. It's a great color--dark rusty rose.

This may be just as depressing as the Snark book but I have to at least skim it. Great title!

But first a word from our sponsor. How can you not love these singing pepperonis?

I read this very short book & it's ruined blogging for me I think.

It's made me hyper-self-conscious .... who the hell do I think I am? As my friend GR said to me when I first started blogging "Why, exactly, do you blog?" I'll never forget him squinting and eyeballing me up close while he asked this question. I don't know what I said in reply. Probably "because it amuses me." I may keep up the worm and weed blogs and go dormant on this one for a while. Other bloggers I follow (or used to follow) have done the same thing. Maybe blogging has a natural lifespan and mine is near the end? What do I know? nothing.

Saw him the other night at the Birchmere in Alexandria, VA. James McMurtry.

P is for Pencils.

My father whittled. He also got obsessive from time to time about little projects. So does my sister, but that's another story. He made a few of these little pencils and I loved them so much I gave them to most if not all my cow-orkers (thanks again Kitt for that wonderful way to spell cow-orkers) who of course all loved them too. This made my dad so happy that he went on a mass-production spree. Here are some of the results.

Late harvest & one of the last salads of 09. But until the first frost I'll have lettuce, nasturtiums, fennel,chives, basil, beans, & sickly tomatoes.

Some of my sister's flowers.

Listen to the rain. First minute or so of this Slovenian group's performance. Speakers up, please.

"Toto's Africa," performed by Perpetuum Jazzile live at Vokal Xtravaganzza 2008 (October 2008). Thunderstorm simulation effects inspired by Kearnsey College choir (South Africa).

New category: New Yorker cartoons I don't get.

Beans and Autumn Joy sedum.

I did almost every single thing wrong in growing these beans. But I learned a lot and the deer are only nibbling at the edges. Next year's goal: make my vegetable garden neater. It looks fine for a 5-year-old, not so fine for an adult.

Growing in a mossy area under a pin oak.