This year’s fall foliage gets very high marks for intensity, variety and duration of color. No late tropical storms have blown away the leaves just at their prime. No persistent droughts or drowning floods have afflicted the southern mountains to disappoint…
I’m catching up with myself, from this time a few years back when I imagined keeping up all along through an entire year with a seasonal journal–part of my “Floyd County Almanac” that sits just exactly where it did when…
While the cat’s away…but it wasn’t mice in the garden while we were out of town. It was beetles, weeds, and from the outside, deer browsing on the beans along the fence. Oh well. All that hard work to make…
Finally in the middle of July, our garden is visible above the ground, even from the road some 30 feet away. For the longest time, it seemed like an iceberg–7/8ths below the surface, invisible. Now tomatoes near the tops of…
There lives this one tree to which I have bonded, this maple–outside the window over my desk, just beyond the green mailbox. It is deeply rooted in my life. It stands for all the trees in all the world, an object…
I have to admit that, so far–with the disturbing exception of our very local ongoing drought–it has been a benign summer. We can even cut grass and string trim and do other puttering in the middle of the day, off…
It is a terrible comparison, rainbows to snakes, but they both are silent in their appearance; and no matter how many times you see one above or below, it startles you when suddenly there they are right in front of you.…
Okay. Here we go. Â Summer is officially launched at *Five Maples. Markers of this truth include but are not limited to the following: â–¶ All double-sash windows, top and bottom panes, go open later and later during the long days…
If you drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway in late May and early June, you’ll be missing the forest for the trees if you don’t stop your car, get out, and walk along the forest edge. You’ll see, hear, smell…
This time of year, the day starts early and ends late. It starts and ends outdoors. These are the HHH days, where heat, haze and humidity spawn afternoon showers–if we’re lucky. If we’re not, the garden takes an extra hour…
It is now the time of year when I enter both temperamental and photographic aestivation: that state of hot-weather torpor typical of some terrestrial turtles. When conditions become too extreme for them to be in the presence of other turtles and remain…
I stepped quietly in the darkness, coffee in hand, with only the lightning showing the way to the front door this morning. Ann still asleep, I slipped out onto the porch and sat in the swing while my eyes learned…
I was feeling my oats during the cool early morning yesterday, so decided to tackle one of two of the more physically-demanding tasks on my Farm and Garden to-do list. The easier road (not taken) was to start digging up…
â–¶ Barely Bears: after seeing momma and her cub a dozen times this spring, Â they’ve gone missing now for more than a week. Last encounter, the baby bear that Gandy chased up a tree a month ago instead chased the…