Good News, Bad News.

6-16-11 VERMONT: We both came up yesterday, struggling in an unending odyssey of construction delays and lane closures, it must be summer. When we got here, we found the two trees blown over by a viscious T-storm last week. Now we haven’t had house damage, or a tornado, but this makes about a half dozen trees we have lost in the past few years.

One tree, an ash, fell from across the road into our driveway, taking out about a quarter of a big honeysuckle bush. Our neighbor, Steve, had cleared the ash tree in the driveway and told us about the maple. It was a red maple, usually with gorgeous fall color, growing on a rock ledge behind the pond. It glanced an even more important maple tree as it fell, as well as a big pine, took out a bench, and landed in the flower beds behind the pond. I got the chain saw started and trimmed the tops of all the branches reaching the pond and the flower beds, cleared the pine branch pinned down by the maple and freed a small maple and a blueberry bush. Back in the woods, I found a downed pine that took out a maple and another pine as it fell.

Mark from Chippers came by today to discuss cutting the maple up, chipping debris, leaving wood that I can split for the fireplace and removing the stump. Scheduled for next week.

Otherwise I pruned the honeysuckle, did a bit of weeding, repaired the culvert, and cleaned up the damaged flower beds.

The veggies are doing fine. We have a grape sized tomato that will be full sized in a few weeks. The corn shoots are up. I plant three seeds in each hill. Several have only two shoots, a few only one and one had none. Did they all fail, or did I forget to seed it? I put three seeds in it today for the second time, or first time. The plantings from May are all doing fine. There was 1.95 inches of rain in the gauge.

That included a heavy downpour with hail yesterday as I was finishing the work on the downed maple.

In bloom: Diablo ninebark, lilac, roses, viburnums, stephanandra, cotoneaster, spireas, weigela, lamium-pink, purple and white, columbine, buttercup, daisy, geranium, cranes bill, meadow rue, forget-me-not, iris-siberian, bearded and water, baptisia, rogersia, jacobs ladder, alkanet, thyme, veronica, bleeding heart, centaurea, ground sedum, coreopsis, hesperis, apricot day lily, trascantia, tomato, water lily, lupin, indian paint brush-red and yellow, ladys mantle, valerian, celandine, raspberry, blackberry, jack-in-the-pulpit, bishops weed, solomon seal, rhubarb.


Downed maple missed the important stuff.

Yesterday, on the way to dinner, we had a surprise.

Can you find Chloe 'midst the buttercups? She's black and white.