Green

This was going to be a post for St. Patrick's Day.  Well I did think about doing it, but just didn't seem to make the time, we all know how that goes, unfortunately.  I was going to get seed potatoes yesterday too, and plant some, I mean what is more Irish than potatoes.  That didn't happen either.  We went to get a truck load of chicken feed today though, and the seed potatoes were at the same place, and it didn't make sense to make a special trip, so I got them today.  I have yet to plant them.

Here's one thing that's coming up nice and green  in the garden though.  It was planted last October, and that would be garlic.

See that thin rope stuff on the ground.  That is actually sheep netting, a fence that is connected to a charger, so that all the horizontal wires are electrified.  We don't use it for fencing any more, but laid on the ground on the garlic bed (unconnected ) discourages any stray chickens from scratching there.  Even if we manage to keep all the hens where they are supposed to be, it's almost impossible to keep the little wild bantam rooster in.

Here's a couple of green things I sewed yesterday.  Calli got a new cover for her mat.  The one she had used to be waterproof.  I had made it for our black lab when she had bladder problems.  Now that's a story I should tell you sometime.  The cover had been washed so many times, it was no longer waterproof, but the foam inside had a nylon cover over it, and under the nylon the foam had two plastic garbage bags over it.  Still, I had been thinking for a long time that I should make a new cover. Yesterday it finally happened.  I didn't go out looking for camo, it just happened to be a waterproof piece I found at the thrift store:)  And I calculated in my head how many years ago I made the first cover, and it could be about 13 years ago.  That's scary.

This is a scrub hat, the kind that doctors and nurses wear.  My niece Kathleen, who is a nurse in the maternity ward of a large hospital, had asked me to make her some....TWO YEARS AGO!

 Some jobs I just have a hard time starting, and I just kept putting it off... and off.... and off.  Then Kathleen went on maternity leave herself.  I blogged about how she gave birth in their van on the way to the hospital.  She wasn't going to be at work for a year, I had a reprieve.  Do you think I got it done,  oh no.  Finally, at a family gathering at Christmas, I promised her that the scrub hats would be the first thing I sewed in the new year.  She did finally get three of them, and I've been picking away at the rest, hoping to deliver them to her next week.

And what could be more green than that blessed hedge I've been hacking away at.  I finished all the pruning on that row yesterday, except for the last tree.  I decided it was getting one final prune, right off at the base.  That tree was a mess, not held together in the middle, scrawny and sprawling and growing right under a Variegated Maple.   I had plans for the space it would open up.  Larry chainsawed it to pieces this afternoon, and we sawed quite a few branches off the maple tree as well.

There will be quite a few trailer loads of branches still to pick up.  This is the south side of the hedge, from the vegetable garden.  I really hacked it back, and there are a few branches that could be chainsawed off, but it doesn't really matter.  It will fill in and look better eventually.

More maple branches to be cut up.  Those were the ones that Larry was balanced on the ladder to get.  The photo just does not show the scale.  The maple tree you see has grown from nothing (I think we cut it off at the ground a couple of times before it finally got going) to twice the height you see here, in the 27 years we've lived  here.  The Western Red Cedar in the row on the west property line along the road were planted as babies.  We had a friend who worked at a government tree farm, so we were gifted with all sorts of rejects when we moved here.

The row of Douglas Fir along the south property line came here the same way.  Hard to imagine they started out small enough that Fancy, one of our horses, used to walk over the top of them to scratch her belly.  Now they shade the vegetable garden until March.  I'm thinking we should take out the two smallest ones in the middle to create a Winter  sunshine window.

There's a few other rows of trees we've planted too.  Some have been kept under control better than others, but the green is threatening to overtake us.