Nature's Garden Fall 2009

Look for the fall issue of Nature's Garden on the newsstand. I interviewed a Chicago-area family who has a stunning backyard garden featuring gorgeous fall foliage and a wildlife-friendly landscape including a pond. My article appears on page 74. In the same issue, check out Sandra Soria's butterfly garden planted in front of her chicken-coop-turned-office. Sandy offers lots of tips for attracting both butterflies and their larvae. And there's also a fun article on growing your own mushrooms (I'm definitely going to try that). You can learn more about gardening for wildlife at BHGNaturesGarden.com.

Camping with Girlfriends

Camping is all about food. Getting ready for meals, cooking on the grill and in foil packets, cleaning up--it takes five times longer than it does in your kitchen but tastes one thousand times better. Why is that?

I went on a overnight camping trip with three girlfriends and we cooked awesome food, swam, sunned on the dock, kayaked and toasted summer evenings with some great wine. Of course, we bonfired as well. My friend Kathryn kept the fire stoked all evening. This is her photograph of the fire just after the sun slipped behind the trees.

New Sheep at Cat Crossing Farm

Meet our new flock! This month we bought five spring Katahdin lambs from a very dedicated breeder who raises a large flock about 10 miles from us. We’ve never raised Katahdins before (over the past 20 years we’ve raised English or Scottish sheep breeds including Cheviot, Jacob, Romney Marsh and Border Leicester). So this is our first American sheep breed. The breed originated in Maine, named after Mt. Katahdin, the highest peak in the state.

Another first is that Katahdins don’t have to be sheared. They are called hair sheep and they grow a thick coat that sheds off in the spring. Our lambs are undocked too, which means that they have long tails. They look more like a flock of little dogs right now.

A very vigilant llama guarded our sheep at their previous home, so our new lambs were totally comfortable with sharing a pasture with our three donkeys and three horses. It’s nice to have sheep again. Just seeing them grazing on the hill makes the farm look so pastoral, so peaceful.

In Praise of Summer

“Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” --Henry James

All the windows in the house are wide open and a warm breeze is whisking through the screens, making that shushing noise I love so well. I'm in total agreement with Henry James about a summer afternoon.

In midsummer, the roadway ditches are as blue as the sky--with wide sweeps of blooming chickory and clouds of flat-headed Queen Anne's lace bobbing in the wind. The sound of a crop-dusting plane whines in the distance. How do you capture this feeling and play it back on a January evening when you really need it?

Country Gardens Fall 2009

The Fall 2009 issue of Country Gardens is on the newsstands on August 4th. My "Slow Lane" column is all about taking note of the seasonal changes of the garden. The take away is that you should be out there ohhing and ahhing over your garden every day. Because, tick-tock, the season is slipping by. Which is why I've been so lax in posting to my blog. ;-)

If you want to become a fan of Country Gardens magazine on Facebook, here's the link:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Country-Gardens-Magazine/79434999038?ref=nf

Pecking Order in Action

It's spring. So it's chick time.

A teenaged barred rock hen is the newest addition to the Cat Crossing Farm menagerie. The owner of a local coffee shop called my husband Doug and said there was a chicken running around their parking lot. The coffee shop is in an urban area so it's not likely that the chick just hatched somewhere in the bushes and developed a taste for coffee...

So, of course, Doug went to get her. Now's she's living in our greenhouse until she's big enough to go into the hen house.

We also inherited 8 cute fluffy chicks that were used for a magazine photo shoot. They are in the greenhouse too.

And here's what we learn from chickens: That pecking order thing? It's real. Our big hens tried to peck Coffee Shop Chicken (and that's why she's living in the greenhouse). And although you'd think that this experience would soften Coffee Shop Chicken to the tiny chicks, she has nothing but evil-chicken-eyes for them.

I assume they will all get along someday...

Springtime in The Netherlands

I just got back home from a trip to The Netherlands where I saw millions of blooming bulbs: tulips, narcissus, muscari and hyacinths. The fields of flowers in and around Lisse are beautiful. And surreal. After living in Iowa much of my life, row crops are a familiar sight--long straight rows of green corn and soybeans. But sections of red, yellow and pink flowers aren't. Big blocks of color like a Mondrian painting.

Canals rim the bulb fields. In fact there's water nearly everywhere, but it stays well-behaved in canals because the Dutch are masters of water management.

The farm pastures were carpeted with grass and Texel sheep, Holstein cows and Friesian horses (all Dutch breeds) grazed happily. Long-legged European hares danced in the fields and white trumpeter swans nested along the canals. The landscape there is just startling beautiful.

And when I arrived home after 10 days abroad, Spring had arrived at our farm too. The narcissus were up and waving, the crab apples trees held tiny fists of petals that were ready to burst open and the grass was the same emerald green as in the Dutch farm fields.