Showing posts with label natural farming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label natural farming. Show all posts

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Garden Cats

Our farm lives in two pieces, the big piece, of 25 acres that we call Napoleon Ridge Farm, and the mini-farm of 3.3 acres, which we live on and call Horus Hill. Today we are visiting Horus Hill. We do grow many of our products here: garlic, strawberries, apples, herb gardens, rhubarb, elderberries, black raspberries, pecans, black walnuts - and flower gardens. All sustainable and natural like its big brother down the street. And all the cats live here, and enjoy gardening as much as we do. They certainly like to dig in my gardens and leave behind some compost! Jasmine and Clarence are my biggest gardening fans. Every time I reach down to grab a weed or plant a flower, they are right there. I must have tired out Jasmine, here she is just conked out in the bee balm and echinacea.



From his rocking chair on the porch, Ash likes to oversee what is going on. He's not really a paws on kinda guy, but he has to be there to give his meow of approval!

Clarence, like Jasmine, is a paws on cat. And he prefers to roll over directly what I am doing for a belly scratch. Hanging out near the herb garden under the (gosh I really wish I had not planted this here) mint with one of our inanimate cat friends.

And here is Lina checking out FiFi (the cat planter) and another one of our cat statues in the front gardens. So there you have some of our garden cats, those that live and breathe, and those that do not. We love them all.


Sunday, April 5, 2009

Cotton Candy

Every year I get treated to the beauty of my Japanese cherries. I have two, one regular and one weeping. Sometimes their blooming coincides, though not this year. The weeping cherry is just getting started, but the regular cherry looks like a big puff of cotton candy.



If it sets cherries, (though Mother Nature is about to pitch us a fast ball, with temps below freezing and snow for Monday and Tuesday) which are not edible by humans, I can depend on the Cedar Waxwings and Cardinals to come and gobble them all up when ripe. That's about the same time they are wiping out the mulberries.

Spring is popping up everywhere now, the perennial flowers are starting to show some green. My russian sage, echinacia, bee balm, hostas, tiger lilies, hollyhocks, betony, agastache and even my false prairie indigo are up. And one of my spring favorites, the peony is up a good 6 to 12 inches.