Hurricane Irene

Hurricane Irene

With Hurricane Irene bearing down on NYC we assumed we would be better off on higher ground, tucked away in the foothills. We were safe, but definitely not better off. While our friends in the city were back at work…

The Butterfly Garden

The Butterfly Garden

We’ve been fortunate enough that the previous owners loved the house, and loved gardening. They surrounded the entire home in a moat of flora, many of the flowers planted to attract butterflys and hummingbirds. This spring we trimmed and mulched…

The Harvest

The Harvest

Our garden is the vegetable version of Noah’s ark, we basically have two of everything. This year instead of going for a big crop of anything we planted a wide variety of plants to see what would do well, so…

Another animal for the menagerie

Another animal for the menagerie

This spring we had a truckload of mulch/soil delivered to the house and dumped on our driveway. We’ve used most of it on the vegetable garden, but there was a good bit left over. This weekend we finally moved it…

The final product

Look what’s coming to dinner

The fourth of July weekend was a productive one. We managed to start, and finish, one of the many projects on our list – a dinner table. Amanda’s grandmother gave us a beautiful little table a few years back, a…

A new project

A new project

This one is gonna take a while. We haven’t even finished half the other projects (fixing up the shop, fixing up the club, putting up the screen door, making the dinner table, replacing the rotted wood on the small gazebo,…

And then there were none

And then there were none

Our last guinea hen is now gone. Painfully, for the last few weeks the numbers have declined steadily. At the end of the day we would check the coop and sometimes they were all there, but typically one was missing….

Free like a bird, and dumb like a brick

Free like a bird, and dumb like a brick

The guineas are free. We finally decided to let them roam and do what we raised them to do – eat bugs and ticks from the yard. We opened the gates on their coop and it took only a minute…

Ramps!

Ramps!

Wild daffodils are sprouting up in every open patch on the whole 9 acres. Along with the daffodils are patches of green sprouts, a little different than the daffodil leaves and unidentifiable to us novices. At first we thought these…

Let it rain

Let it rain

Our water comes from a well, tapped into the Housatonic watershed, and is wonderfully crisp and cool. However, it is hard, so we have to run it through a water softener to keep it from eventually clogging our pipes with…