Saturday, 24 April 2021
A gorgeous day once I got out of bed! I slept in until 9 am, which is something I don’t normally do but I guess I needed the rest.
I spent a good part of my day in the sunshine digging holes for posts in my new – soon to be – vegetable garden. I started out with the shovel but couldn’t get as deep as I’d like, so I used our old post hole digger. This thing has seen better days but it sure does a good job. These posts set the boundary of the garden. Later on, I will add more posts and eventually wire to keep the racoons from stealing my corn.
Now what surprised me, while digging the holes, is how great the soil is. For the first foot, it’s rich, soft and easy to work with. Below that is the clay I’m familiar with. I remember this part of the land being a garden when I was a kid and how hard the clay would get, so I’m happy for this gorgeous soil to work with. I’m thinking, instead of using raised beds, I might just dig a few beds so I can take advantage of this soil. It all depends, I guess, on how energetic I am! 😉 I’m also thinking of trying Hugelkultur in one section of the garden. I have so many branches and wood, it seems like a no brainer to take advantage of this stuff and clean up the lot at the same time.
On a completely different topic, Mom and I were sitting on the veranda taking a break. It was quiet, the birds were coming to the feeders with us sitting there. It was quite serene. Mom pointed out a tree to the north, asking something about it. So our attention was in that direction when we noticed a bird flying directly towards us. Not a word was spoken as we watched it come closer. It flew by the veranda, at our eye level, about five feet away. I noticed it was brown and thought “a thrasher” but realized it was much larger than a thrasher. Then I thought “Merlin”. I don’t know where that came from because I’ve never seen a Merlin before. The bird passed us, I turned in my seat to continue watching it’s flight, then it turned towards us. I could see it’s eyes, it’s wings were outstretched so I could see the colours underneath (light with dark markings) and the visible markings on it’s tail (light with two solid red/brown stripes). It seemed like minutes it was there looking at me but was more like a fraction of a second, then it turned to the west and flew out of my sight.
It was an incredible moment!
So was the moon and sunset tonight.
Creativity is the calling of the soul 