Skip to main content

Random thoughts and pieces - Spring is getting near.

    Over the past few days the temperature has been on a roller coaster ride as we hit peak highs and small dips that remind us that this is Western Pennsylvania and winter may not be over till April.  However the days are getting warmer and spring - once a faraway dream - seems to be sneaking in.   

    I was even able to open the windows a few days ago and the last of the snow; dating back to mid December, has finally melted away.   

    The other night I watch as a family of deer grazed outside my front window nibbling on the first green sprigs of grass, our youngest cat looking on in fascination.  Spring is coming.  The days are getting longer and I think about planting some flowers and seedlings obtained through the Mercer Country Conservation website.

    I'm thinking that the native wild flowers and grasses will make a nice addition to the home.  

    I plan on letting part of the yard go wild again this year, letting it be overrun with native plants, I'm even considering taking up food foraging.  I've always been interested in taste, flavor and texture and as I learn more about food, the more curious I am about how nettles taste or how to cook a fiddlehead fern.  We have fiddleheads growing in our yard as it is, why not take advantage of them?

    Plus I like the idea of having a new skill, and one of my favorite memories from college was a field botany class where the professor would often cook up what she had found out in nature for our labs.  Plus there is an economic component to this as well.  I am not becoming a miser by any means but with rising costs and other environmental concerns, learning to forage only makes sense.  

    How many of us as kids enjoyed the wonderful taste of wild blueberries or strawberries?   How many of us have enjoyed the taste of dandelions in a salad  or a spring of wild onion?  The odd taste of a wild apple pulled from some old ancient tree?  Just thinking about it brings me back to my youth. 


    So I sit here, wondering where I can learn to forage like a pro.  Where I can find some proper containers for a garden and will I actually do these things?   I am lazy and sometimes - most times, if I am being honest - my plans come to naught because of my laziness.

    After 55 years I have become conditioned to certain ways of doing things...and life will simply not allow for those ways anymore.   I know deep down that we can't stop climate change, but I have to do my part...to quote the poet "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there."  That's one of the reasons my diet is changing and yea, that's one of the reasons I want to have a garden too.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

What all the cool kids are reading.

Maybe it's time I got serious about solar

  When my wife and I bought this house nearly 6 years ago, we made some upgrades.   We put on a metal roof, replacing the original shingles, replaced the floor in the kitchen, both bathrooms and the downstairs den.  We ended up upgrading the pellet stove (twice!) and added some insulation; one of the jobs I want to do in the coming year is to insulate the garage, mostly to keep the freezers we have in the garage from becoming damaged. It's only in various home improvement shows that the work to improve your home is done all at once and somehow in 1 hour.  For most of us its an ongoing never ending project. One of the important improvements that I've been wanting to make but have kept putting off for various reasons has been solar panels.  Now, I'm thinking that it may be time to least do something. The main reason we have been putting off this improvement was cost and how long it would actually take us to pay off the panels.   I'm 60 years old now...
Post a Comment
Read more

Honoring the past - Thinking more about "invasive" plant species.

 Recently I've been giving some thought to invasive species.  I had received both positive and negative feedback on the blog post concerning kudzu and recently I came across a very well hidden, and very small, wild cherry tree while doing some yard work.  Since it's against the house it would have to be removed since the root systems could damage my foundation.   A buddy of mine at work was asking if I was going to transfer it, his logic being that it was a fruiting tree that would not only attract a variety of pollinator's but that the deer would eat the bark and cherries, keeping them away from the garden (which Sue and I swore we were not going to do this year).  It occurred to me that I was going to have to do a slightly better job of identification, since black cherries are native to America , where as other types of cherries are not.  Being able to make a precise identification would be helpful.   I used to be able to identify all these tre...
1 comment
Read more

When it rains....

Bad things they say; happen in groups of three.  Lately we feel that this has been multiplied by at least three, then that by three.  Nor was this the article I was hoping to publish this week, but here it is warts and all! Thankfully there is nothing seriously wrong with my family health wise, and this is nothing that some more hard work and dedication can not get us though.  There is one big personal item that I can not go into details on to protect her privacy but what is affecting us right now is that we are again faced with decisions on what to do concerning some major purchases.   I've already written about having to buy a "newer" car but I'm not going to bore you with details about replacing the water heater or unexpected tax bills.  At the beginning of May our riding lawn mower died.   This in itself is that big of a deal because I got a good five to six years out of a used machine, and the fact that it has started to give up the ghost re...
Post a Comment
Read more