The News from Kenabeek

Spring is the best time to begin things, and so I’ve begun this journal, documenting some at least of the next stage of my adventure. The first entry is a composite of the first couple of weeks of May 2006.

MAY 11: I’ve had exquisite weather following my big day, when I finally reached that light at the end of the tunnel and became free to be home full-time. Not that my working life has been totally dark, but our goal in moving here was to achieve personal freedom! It’s been hot, 75 to 80 but dry, not humid at all, and the new leaves positively exploded out of the poplar branches. The sugar plum trees are in full bloom and the cherry trees are close. In the garden, the crocuses have come & gone, the daffodils are at the height of their glory, and the scylla and tulips are just beginning.
The spring birds are back, of course … robins, juncoes, sparrows (white-throated, song, tree, chipping), siskins, purple finch and goldfinch. And my personal favourite, hermit thrush. The thrush is nesting a bit further from the house this year, so its song is more distant than I’d like, but it’s still the forest’s most beautiful music. So far, we don’t have a veery this year — another thrush with a lovely song — so I hope it’s just a little late. The sandhill cranes are back, and we often see them at twilight flying back to their nests, near the stream in back of the house, after feeding in the farm fields all day. There are 10 in the flock this year!

The spring peepers sound like a million tiny jingle bells in the trees.
MAY 13: The birch trees are blossoming, golden green catkins turning golden brown as they shed their pollen. The puddles in the driveway are rimmed with the golden pollen, and as they dry out they leave a chalky yellow line where the edges of the puddles were.

MAY 16: Still some birds at the feeder – junco, white-throated sparrow, and goldfinch. Warm and sunny again. I found a bunch of perennials, roots not plants, in North Bay yesterday, dirt cheap, and will very shortly be installing several bleeding hearts and a bunch of hostas in the daffodil bed in the front of the house.

The daffodils are past their prime but still glorious – there must be hundreds. They were here when we first moved in, in two clumps of over a hundred bulbs each. I rolled back the sod between the two little beds to make a long one, all along the low stone wall between the grass and the bush, and planted the bulbs all along it.

It is unbelievable when they all blossom … but the sheer numbers lead to problems after the blooms are gone, when the bed is covered by all those leaves. It does keep the weeds down, but makes it difficult for other flowers to make it through such a thick layer of leaves.

A few of the columbines I planted our first year here do make it through, as do the day lilies I divided off the “mother plant” (or maybe “mother clan” would be more appropriate for a big fat bunch of corn lilies). The pre-existing Solomon’s seal has no problems, and I am confident that hostas will also be tough enough to make it through too.

“We” (marital we) finished the new deck extension on the weekend and I’ll be applying some stain later today. We now have three full sides of the house decked! Time to get out there …

[LATER] A few showers drifted through so the staining has been postponed. Instead, I prepared the garden for seeding. Next year, if all goes well, the vegetables will go into the big plot near the road and this smaller one, next to the house, can be all flowers.

The cherry trees are in full bloom now. They’re fuller than the sugar plums, so from a distance the trees look like they’re full of small white pom-poms.