Tag: <span>Gardening</span>

A pair of chickens - hen and rooster
Another Fine Feathered Mess!

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

We’ve been doing small scale suburban gardening ever since we settled here in Northern Virginia. Winnie is a terrific gardener, and has been gradually building more expansive vegetable gardens each year. But this hasn’t qualified us to call ourselves “suburban homesteaders.”

Saturday, that changed when we expanded our suburban gardening into backyard chickens.

Family Stories

A Bride To Spring and New Life
A Bridge To New Life

Spring has sprung, and with it comes new life. Mother nature is dressing trees with new greens while early season flowers bloom. Birds are returning to their summer habitats, being nominally welcomed by their year-round feathered residents.

Here inside the on-going pandemic lifestyle, there are signs life is also returning after a year-long winter of frozen plans and lives put on hold. The spring weather seems to be building a bridge from the pandemic to post-pandemic life. People are slowly springing back to life.

Family Stories

This And That
This And That

So yesterday we entered the time of year colloquially known as “Daylight Savings Time.” For those readers who live in a place civilized enough to not do daylight savings; the concept is that if you cut off the top two inches of a sheet of paper and tape it to the bottom of the sheet, you make the sheet longer.

The people who came up with this idea run the world.

Family Stories

This And That
This And That

We’re in the dog days of August but time still seems to be flying by. So many chances of fun have passed without actually seizing the moment. Those few moments of fun that actually happened stand out like jewels in the cluttered mass of routine that hardly vary from one season to the next. It seems there’s just not enough time to do fun stuff, but always enough time to do the chores of daily life.

Family Stories

This And That
This And That

Winter seems to finally be at an end.  Daily temperatures are slowly climbing back up, trees are beginning to show blossoms.  We’re having rain instead of snow.  All-in-all, things are looking up.

Family Stories

Winnie loves to grow things. Calling her a “natural gardener” may be a fair statement even though she did grow up in a small farming village. Having seen the village she grew up in with it’s wonderful small vegetable plots surrounded by hundreds of acres of rice fields, I’m not too surprised she’s good with plants. But she really does love to grow plants and work in gardens.

She is also extremely resourceful.

Family Stories

This And That
This And That

It’s been a fast month.  Spring is officially here and not a day too soon.  It’s still not nearly warm enough for my liking but every day gets better. The boating season has begun, but my boat is not ready for the water.  Beyond all that, Winnie’s gone to China trusting in me to keep her plants alive until she returns.

She is a very trusting soul indeed.

Family Stories

This And That
This And That

If “April showers bring May flowers,” then we’re in for a bumper load of flowers next month.  Meanwhile, I just wish the tree over our driveway would hurry up and dump its seeds and be done with it.  It’s a wonderful feeling to be standing in the driveway pelted with hundred of tiny seeds every time the wind picks up.  Really.

Family Stories