Laughing Ravens

 More than anything, this was just a chance to test out new gear and see how it felt to try to narrate and shoot at the same time. By and large, I am finding the videography part much harder than my usual photography. If I had to guess, I think my attention span is affecting a lot of the process.  Part of what I was testing last week was the new wireless lav mic I picked up after Christmas... which should allow me (and potentially another person in an interview setting) to talk, and have that audio recorded directly to the camera. I know the rest of the world has been doing this for ages... but for me, this is a whole new world. Tons to learn and tons to play with.  I'd love to hear your thoughts on how this video came through for you. I wish that Blogger had a way to store videos without having to go through YouTube, but from what I can tell, that's the only path for videos longer than a minute or two. If you know of other places I could host videos, please let me know....

  hydrangea paniculata (not sure which variety) Walking through the garden this year, there are no bulbs up. Everything is still asleep. Last year was a very early spring after a very warm winter. We had iris reticulata blooming around this week. Not this year.  This year, all the plants have been asleep under thick blankets of snow. But there have also been plants that want to be awake early, like children on Christmas morning who refuse to sleep in. There have been plants who pulled the covers over their heads, refusing to admit that the sun has risen for the first time in four months.   comfrey leaves, melted into a thick mulch over the winter There are some plants that have chronic bed-head... like this gaillardia. It was stunning in the summertime, and all through the autumn it kept blooming until snow put an end to the show. Now its long stems are tangled up like tumbleweed. At this rate it's hard to imagine it will ever wake up.   gaillardia stems from last su...

By and large, I look forward to winter. The cold and the snow are a welcome change from sweating continually in July and August. A week ago the thermometer struggled to climb into the single digits after nights below zero. Earlier this week felt downright balmy. The thermometer had climbed to nearly 30°F which meant we could walk outside in just a fleece and feel the sun's warmth.  Woke up yesterday morning to the wind howling. Bits of ice pelted the windows and bounced off the metal roof. Every now and then, a gust would push the house enough to feel it flex and bow. With the heat being drawn from the house with every blast of wind, I figured it was a perfect morning to pull the covers tighter and catch just a tiny bit more sleep.  After the winds relented and the snow settled, I took a quick walk outside. In some areas, there was snow only on one vertical face. The other side of trees and shrubs were completed blasted clean.   Iris bed, tucked in for the winter This aft...

  We're heading into the deep freeze next week. Life near zero is weird. I don't want to know the inside of my house this well. I can't really blame the cold though. I always get stir crazy after surgery. Something about surviving the surgical event makes me want to run off into the distance and just keep running. It might be escaping the hospital or being able to get up from the surgical table... I don't know. But once I am up and under my own power, I want OUT! This week I had a piece of skin cancer removed from below my eyelid. My face looks like I tried to hail a bus with my cheek. Not pretty. I thought going to a plastic surgeon would make me look cute. It said that in the brochure. And now it is wicked cold.  Years ago, we would relish time like this. Snow on the ground. No snowmobiles on the trail. Nights cold and black like ice. You can hear the trees creak. The snow is still fluffy, but after the weekend chill drops, I expect the snow to squeak. Warm sun over t...

When faced with the bleak dreary skies of January, it is easy to want to fast-forward into April when blooms start to appear in the garden again. Let me rephrase that. There are two faces of winter. One face is sun-shiny and snow blankets the countryside. The other gives you a side-eye, pelts you with ice pellets, and hides the sun behind thick, unmoving clouds for weeks. You'd never guess that I love winter.  The local expression for this kind of snow is "Ithacation." It consists primarily of sideways snow and ice that nearly always finds a way inside your collar and into your ears.  Every few years we are gifted with the Norman Rockwell "winters of year's past"... and the sky opens up, dumps feet of snow on us and then the sun comes out and everything is still for a brief moment.  So how is one to deal with the interminable time between the rich colors of fall and the ebullient outbursts of color in spring? Around here, that can extend from November well i...

Winter sowing in trays, stacked in layers This year, I wanted to try a couple new ideas with our winter sowing. For those who haven't tried winter sowing, at its simplest, it is just planting your seeds during the winter to give them a jump on spring. Perennial seeds do well, some hardy annual seeds do okay, and tender stuff doesn't survive.  One of the issues we have this winter is carryover from the spring/summer/fall. There are lots of pots of seeds that didn't germinate in the spring. A lot of the things I am reading about some of the more difficult seeds to start, indicate that it can take 2-3 years for seeds to germinate. And that also includes scarification/stratification of some form. Winter sowing usually makes that a simple solution, with the repeated freezing and thawing cycles.  We picked up these flat blue trays on Facebook Marketplace. I have seen similar things in use for bread delivery. They are lightweight, rigid and affordable. Best of all, they are perfor...