Sadly, But With Fingers Crossed

The extreme cold last month really hit my beloved rosemary plant hard.  It probably may have killed it.  I've lost track of how many years it's been living in the greenhouse, but at least seven per a "Facebook Memory" posted back in November of 2025.

 

I found one tiny green branch the other day.  It's in a random spot and there is really no other sign of regrowth anywhere else.  While I hope it may regrow from the base, I think it's definitely facing a challenge and I've been stewing on this green sprig for several days.

Part of me wonders if that's the branch it needs to feed itself to see if it can get back on it's feet.  Another part of me wonders if this is the plant's way of giving me a gift.  That it worked really hard to shelter this one tiny twig so I could try to save it.

I decided to cut it off and try to root it.  I also took three other tips that had a little hint of green, albeit dried out, but not gray like the rest of the plant, and added them to the pot.  

This window has started several injured plants over the years, so I have some hope.  The little rosemary is in good company with a favorite geranium and a tiny hoya that were both tiny broken branches not long ago.

I'll keep you posted.

Transplants

As I was picking some tomatoes for dinner last night I noticed several monarch caterpillars trying to make a living on some pretty marginal milkweed in the raised bed area.  Even with trying to keep everything watered, this summer has been hot and dry and the milkweed has paid a price.

I was headed off to our weekly Wool House Crafters zoom meeting so I couldn't do anything about them right then, but this morning I headed out to see if I could find and move them to a couple of greener plants in the nearby B Garden.

I stewed about whether or not it was okay to do that, but a couple of them were pretty small and sickly looking.  Moving them might be their only chance of making it to maturity.  I carefully snipped their current leaves from the dried plants and placed them on a greener neighbor.  Each caterpillar immediately started eating the fresh(er) leaves. 

I hope everyone has had a good monarch summer.  I've seen more butterflies this summer than I've seen the last ten years combined.  Same with caterpillars.  The one thing I'm not seeing...or finding...are their chrysalises.  Hopefully they are out there and I should just stick to finding four leaf clovers.

I'd love to find at least one to watch open though.

What are you seeing your way?

I Mean, What Else Would You Do When It's Nine Million Degrees?

I don't remember why I started flipping through my natural dye books looking for a green, but I did and came across comfrey.  I'd been given a start of comfrey this spring to add to the B Garden and was pleasantly surprised to see it is also a dye plant.

I messaged my flower giving friend (who's also into natural dyes) and she said she had a big patch ready to be cut back so we decided to put a dye pot together.  Another natural dye friend was coming into town so it was perfect timing...and then the August heat dome arrived.  We had fun and learned a lot, but it would have been more fun if it had been a more reasonable temperature.  

 

Did you know that the screen drying rack flips up to access a perfect work table underneath?  I love this set up.  

The freshly started comfrey in the B Garden.  See the bee?  Mine was still blooming because it was a bit behind Rebecca's due to the transplant.  

It's a beautiful addition to the garden!

After a brief soak.

And a little bit longer.

The gray on the left and the white on the right were where we started.  The gray became pretty army green and the white, with just an alum mordent, became the light yellow green.  I wasn't super excited, but was instructed to reserve judgment until we had added in the iron modifier.

And that's when we got the two greens on the left :-D.  So those two skeins were mordented with alum, simmered in the comfrey dye pot and then dipped in an iron modifier bath afterwards.  Much better!

Another plant that could give us a dark green was ivy and I thought I had a source for that, but when we prepped it, we didn't get any color so I must not have the right variety.  We'd already mordented a couple more skeins so we looked through the book for other plants we could find and set up quickly and chose goldenrod.  

It's too early for blooms, but the leaves work well too, so I headed down to the creek in the blazing sun and picked a pot full.  The leaves started green and cooked to a greenish yellow color and when I dipped out a cup of dye to see where we were, it was barely colored.  I thought it was another fail, but was cautioned once again to give it a try.  

 

See the bright yellow strand on the end?  That was our test strand. The book cautioned that cooking too long might dull the color...and that's what happened with the skein.  The dark yellow had been in the dye pot for about 5-8 minutes.  The skein, closer to 15 minutes.  Yep, it faded it right out.  A good lesson. 

The other good lesson learned was to mark your skeins better.  I no longer remember if the middle skein was with the copper modifier added in or the iron.  At one point we lined the skeins up in alphabetical order (alum, copper, iron), but I don't remember if we did that before or after I took this picture.  It was hot.  

Overall it was a fun experience.  I got a green that I think will work well with my walnut dyed yarn from last fall.  And now, looking back for the link to that post I see it was the fall of 2023.  At least the blog remembers to put the "tags" on.  

If I want to wear that sweater this fall I better get knitting!

The Great Bumpkin

I haven't carved a pumpkin in several years.  I always have great intentions and then seem to run out of time or motivation or something.  This year, as I was picking out some decorative pumpkins at the local farm market, the bumpy one just called to me to become a Cotswold sheep.  So I did.

I wish I'd left some details in her ears.  That was the original sketch, but I got carried away carving and forgot.  I toyed with adding them in the next day, but she doesn't know I messed that up and I'm not going to tell her.  She's just fine,  just as she is :-).

A practice run in the dark feed room.  I love that there is just enough light to show her bumps well.

Her spot on the Wool House porch.

And lit up for the night.  The sprinkling of rain was annoying for most of the festivities, but made a nice addition to this picture.

This is a special shout out to The Great Pumpkin and his younger brother.  The orange and yellow pumpkin showed up around mid summer as a volunteer across the road from our mailbox.  The green speckled one was a late arrival just a month or so ago.  There had been a middle pumpkin as well, but he was lost in a road incident :'-(.

I carried water out to this hard working pumpkin plant through the entire drought.  And for some reason the squash bugs either never found it or maybe somehow she was more resistant than all my other plants have been the last couple of years.  I will save their seeds and see what we get next year.

I just love pumpkins :-).

The Woodworking Olympics

Here's the plan.  

Decide to get a rabbit.  

Do a bunch of research on how to house and care for said rabbit.  

Build a temporary house for the rabbit on top of the drying tables in the Wool House because you assume it will take a couple of weeks to get comfortable with each other and it might go quicker if you are on eye level.

Adopt a super sweet bunny from the Lexington Humane Society and realize it won't take much time at all for everyone to settle in, but that's okay, it's fun to have him up high every time you walk in the door.

For exercise and socialization, you install a fence around the lower half of the Wool House porch so the super sweet bunny can go out in the mornings while it's cool and run around while you do a little work and drink coffee.

The sides with the wide railing are fairly cat proof, but the front is completely calling "Hey, kitty kitty" and while Possum won't try to breach it while I'm sitting there, Archie is pretty much "Here, hold my beer."

The bigger issue is what happens if you need to pee and Pinot's not ready to go back inside yet.  Figuring it would be easier to screen the porch in than build a bathroom on it we decide to build the screens.  We maybe should have rethought the plumbing idea. 

Mixed in with all the porch work was a water leak in and then under the sink in the washroom which was an olympics all it's own, but no one really wants to think about plumbing problems, even if it's on someone else's blog.

Insert (only a small amount of) blood, (lots and lots of) sweat, (only thoughts of crying, surprisingly) tears and (a few) bruises...

Well, the chickens might have done some crying.  Added benefit of screening in the porch is the lack of chicken traffic up there.  We should have screened it in years ago.

That far end is higher up than you'd guess :-o.

This is a work in progress picture before the door frame was finished, but I love Pinot hopping around enjoying his safety porch :-).  The newly added roll down blinds made a huge difference in temperature on the porch and I have no idea why I never thought to add them before.  Slow learner...

Once the porch was finished we moved onto Pinot's permanent house.  I thought I could do most of this by myself and I probably could have, but it quickly became apparent it would be much easier if I had help.  Poor Saint Tim...

The move from the fun upper level to the almost as fun middle shelf is so Pinot can come out and run around the wash room if he wants. I also was using the middle shelf mostly for storage, but used the top shelf for almost everything including, but not limited to, drying wool.

I did build Pinot's ramp by myself.  Not a hard job, but I'm sharing it because I salvaged a scrap of carpet from the garage to give him traction.  Not just any carpet, but old wool carpet from our house.  It had been living in the garage under mowers and weedeaters and muddy feet and...chicken parties.

I scrubbed it with Dawn and some carpet cleaner and while it's not spotless, it did clean up better than a piece of synthetic carpet would have, especially as many years old as it is.  I loved having that wool carpet in the house years ago and I'm happy to see it still working hard in the Wool House now.

While the tools were still out I finally built a better sun filter for the night blooming cereus.  I have the best luck getting it to bloom by putting it in the bright sun, but it always sunburns so badly that I feel awful for it.  I decided to try a filtering the sun this year and some of the contraptions I'd set up were pretty hillbilly.  This is much better.  I hope it helps.

And thus extinguishes the flame for the Woodworking Olympics...I hope.

My New Pet Potato

I say that like there was an old pet potato.  There wasn't.  In fact, I didn't even know you could have a pet potato, but here we are.

A week or so ago I used up the last of a bag of organic Yukon Gold potatoes and found a teeny tiny potato left in the bottom.  It was the size of a small olive, a sort of flat-ish olive.  Somehow it had rolled through the sorter and landed in my bag of potatoes.

It was way too small to think about cooking, but it had a tiny sprout starting on it so I decided to stick it in a pot and give it a chance to grow and reach it's full potential and for the next couple of days I carried it outside during the day and back inside for the freezing nights.

And I named it Dug.

Since everyone is already making fun of me, would anyone else like to join in and follow Dug's summer of adventures?

Don't Quit Your Day Job

Last year I grew a completely accidental pumpkin patch and it was the most fun thing I've ever grown.  I had the best time watching the plants overtake a pretty big section of the side field and the pumpkins were all different sizes and colors and the sheep had two big pumpkin parties at the end of the season and I decided I was going to be a pumpkin farmer.  Pumpkins at Punkin's Patch!

This spring I picked out three different varieties of seeds (including one called Big Moose!), figured out my plant date for fall pumpkins and then found out the extension office was going to do a "Who can grow the biggest pumpkin in Harrison County" contest and I was All In.

I waited with great anticipation for the date I could go pick up my free pumpkin seeds and in the meantime strategized as only I can over-think things and gathered up special dirt and compost and researched and watched YouTube videos and created a baby pumpkin nursery and went ahead and planted my earlier chosen seeds out in a special safe zone in the yard, fenced off and everything.

Since all the volunteer pumpkins last year grew so well just laying out on top of the pasture, I thought if I made a little effort to amend the soil for each seed this year they'd really take off.  And I thought the Big Moose pumpkins could just live in the fenced area with the other pumpkins. I mean, how big could they get?

When I got the educational handouts from the extension office I found out that the Big Moose pumpkin getting labeled as a "giant" meant it was going to be...a giant.  Who knew.  I carefully dug as many of  those seeds as I could find back up and put them in starter pots along with the extension office seeds.  The rest of the seeds sprouted, but have not taken off in any sort of manner.  Pumpkin farming, not as easy as I'd hoped.

Four of the five extension office seeds sprouted and four of the five Big Moose seeds I found sprouted as well.  As the babies grew I made their fancy growing mounds, which involved lots of shoveling and moving of heavy materials on some really hot and humid days.  I was becoming less enamored with pumpkin farming by the day...but the baby pumpkins all grew well and looked good.

When the plants got big enough to transplant, I moved them into their respective mounds.  Four Big Moose plants and three of the extension office plants (I'll try to remember to come back in and update the variety) were planted in Del Boca Vista.  I put the biggest and strongest extension office plant out front, next to the driveway so I could really keep an eye on it, in preparation for the October 27th weigh in at the office.

I lost one of the Big Moose pumpkins in a wind accident fairly early on.  I moved a tiny volunteer from just outside the Wool House into it's open spot and babied it through some hot weather and it survived and is now doing a great job trying to catch up.

I'm concerned about these leaves turning yellow.  This is my biggest Big Moose plant...of course.  It's also the first one to produce any female flowers and now has two pumpkins growing along it's reaching vines.  I haven't decided if I'm going to limit it to only two in hopes of growing a true giant.  At this point I'm probably just going to be happy if I get any pumpkins.

This Big Moose plant did not look good yesterday and has not rebounded today so I'm afraid it's going to be a another casualty.  I've been carefully watching the plants for bugs and mildew and all sorts of other problems.  I've used diatomaceous earth and a couple of careful applications of organic Neem Oil in the evenings when the bees are long gone, but I don't have any control over the too wet conditions that may be causing some of my issues.  

Three of the extension office plants.

While my volunteers last year were big, hardy, heavy producers, the volunteers this year (probably a different variety) have been a bust except for a couple plants here and there.  This nice volunteer is growing out in the barn lot, so I have zero expectations for a pumpkin to reach maturity surrounded by sheep, but it's helping provide pollination for the female flowers in the main patch.

The bees, hard at work.

Oh, here's a funny story.  The first morning I knew I had a female flower ready to open it was drizzling rain.  The flowers are only open for a short time on one morning so there's just a small window where they can get pollinated.  I didn't think the bees would be out until the rain stopped, so I read up on how to manually pollinate it, grabbed my paint brush, picked up some pollen from a male flower and when I went to dust it into the female, two bees popped up and scolded me.  

"Do you mind?!?"

I shouldn't have doubted them :-).

I think this epistle basically catches everything up on the 2023 great pumpkin venture.  I have lost any expectation that it will be a Great Pumpkin venture, but I hope I'm wrong and will have some happy updates through the next couple of months.  

I'm glad I'm just trying to find something fun to do during my least favorite time of the year and not trying to feed my family.  Farming is not for the faint of heart and we all need to be cognizant of that fact and remember that food does not miraculously appear at the grocery store.

It would be nice to be able to feed at least a couple of pumpkins to my sheep family.

It is really hard to type pumpkin instead of Punkin.