Hiding in the Tall Grass

I would like for you to meet some turkies:

These are but a few of the turkies that I see on my way to work each day. They stand around on the side of the road and lurk at me from the tall grass. This time of the year, they move in packs. Large turkey gangs. These are young turkies, and they are particularly brazen. This pack spilled over into the road and slowly poked around on the pavement. I and a couple other cars actually had to come to a complete stop in front of them while they considered their options and began shuffling off the road.

Turkies are also excessively weak-willed in their intentions, or else stupid. Just as it begins to dawn on some of their comrades that the road is no good and really needs to be avoided, new turkies begin mindlessly sauntering back out onto the pavement to see what all the excitement was about.

This turkey got too close to the car.

A little gardening project

As anyone who's seen my house knows, I've got more than enough projects to keep me busy. When things like a new kitchen and roof repairs are on my list, landscaping has fallen lower on the list of priorities. But a few weeks ago I picked up a bunch of perennials on sale and decided to ignore the urgent projects for a few days and convert one of my landscaping beds to a perennial garden.



Here's a picture of the landscaping bed in front of my house. It's pretty overgrown with lily of the valley and a bunch of annoying weeds that grow through the bed of rocks.



Here's the same bed after I removed all the plants, weeds, landscaping blocks, and a whole mess of flagstones that were hiding in there.


Now with 100% more plants! There's a variety of things here, which should blossom over the course of the summer and fall—ideally there's some color blooming at all times (though I think it's going to be hard to expect that in the winter). In the midst of everything on the left (kind of hard to see here) is a red elderberry, which will grow big white blossoms of flowers in the summer, followed by clusters of tart, red berries in the fall. I'm really excited to see this grow into a bigger plant—it should get close to 6 feet tall and fill out quite a bit. With any luck it'll hide the house.


And, lastly, the garden with mulch and flagstones laid out so you can walk into it without crushing the plants or the dirt bed.

Welcome Andrew

Barnhart, Baby Boy (2) has entered the waking world. Rachel and the baby both did very well. Here are the important details:

Andrew Paul Barnhart
Born August 10, 2011 at 2:10pm
8 lbs, 9 oz.
20.5 inches

He's a keeper.

Be sure to check out the latest food post, too.