I found these little guys high in the big azaleas by the garage. It’s been a challenge to get a good photo of them—when disturbed they tuck their heads into the nest and flatten their bodies. Here’s their nest ten days earlier, for those of you who are working on your nest/egg i.d. skills:

This is the first cardinal nest that I’ve found, and it’s right in my yard. As everyone’s sounding alarms about the decline of our native songbird populations, because of habitat loss and home and agricultural pesticide and herbicide use, I am very happy to be fighting back by maintaining a property that supports birds’ needs well enough to encourage them to breed here. To some people a bird’s nest is just a bird’s nest, but to me it’s a sign that I must be doing something right on this tiny scrap of land I’ve chosen to take care of.

The two little pullets that hatched in March are twelve weeks old today. I know it’s poor judgement on my part, especially given a day-time fox sighting at the back of the property last week, but I have grown rather fond of them. They are incredibly cute, and are more tame than any of the other chickens I have raised. They are still small enough that I can easily hold both in one hand. They think nothing of half-flying, half-running all the way across the unknown lawn toward me when they feel threatened. Adorable.

A couple of weeks ago, when I finally got their injured broody mother reintegrated into the main flock, I moved the chicks from their broody coop in the garage into a big dog crate in the main coop, where they have their own food and water. They are getting used to being with the main flock while still being protected from attacks. I have also started letting them free range a little, turning them loose in the front garden while I am outside. They’ve met the larger birds during their rambles, and of course were chased and pecked back (but not injured) into hiding places in the bushes.

They discovered dust bathing the other day. The hilarious thing was that despite having access to a whole garden of soft soil, they chose to bathe right on top of one another, kicking each other in the heads as they burrowed into this new experience.

It’s neat to watch the chicks explore their world. They are in many ways like kids and baby animals everywhere—a mixture of boldness and trepidation.

Against my better judgement of growing too attached to animals that could at any moment meet their ends in a number of horrible ways, I have named them Buttercup and Clover.

Last week I took the first hike of summer with a visiting friend and Tuck. We did about 9 miles straight up the Blue Ridge from Sugar Hollow to the Blue Ridge Parkway and back down.

Of all the mountains I’ve lived near and climbed, all across this country, there is something so comforting about the Blue Ridge. Probably that feeling comes from growing up here, from these being my “native” mountains. The hike we took last week began as one I used to take with high school friends, up past a swimming hole where we’d go to cool off in the summer. I think there is something very sweet and wonderful about walking, as a 34-year-old, the same trails I walked at 17—only this time with a friend made when I was 24 and the dog I never dreamed of having as a teenager.

Up near the ridgeline it was still spring, and the wild azaleas were fragrantly blooming.

The mountain laurel, with its buds that remind me of just-exploded fireworks, had yet to flower.

I was delighted to see several thriving clumps of pink lady slippers. These native orchids take many years to go from seed to blooming maturity, and can live to be twenty or more years old. These couldn’t have been more perfect specimens.

We traversed a lot of good creek and river crossings…

…which made me glad of my choice to hike in sandals, despite our dirty paws!

It’s finally time for one of my favorite gardening days of the year: redoing the front porch containers. Each spring, after the winter’s pansies poop out from rising temperatures, I get the instant gratification of putting together tiny minigardens to be appreciated up close each time I enter the house.

This year my mom and I discovered a fantastic greenhouse, Milmont, over the mountain in Stuarts Draft. Not only did they have varieties of plants that have been on my wish list for ages, and that I’d resigned myself to having to mail-order, they also had a thriving colony of purple martins living right near their greenhouses. Awesome, rare birds + spectacular, rare plants = pretty much my idea of heaven.

I came home with all the material for this summer’s container gardens and broke down the old arrangements, composting the spent pansies and then refreshing the pots with new soil and granular fertilizer. Then I got down to designing.

This year I wanted high-contrast color, dramatic leaf form, and to play around with some black foliage. To that end, the centerpiece of each container is a black Colocasia ‘Ilustris,’ and that tone is picked up again in black sweet potato vine, ‘Illusion Midnight Lace,’ which will spill over the edges. I always like to add rusty red-pink colors, because they are my favorite and tie into the color of my front door. For that I used Coleus ‘Colorblaze Keystone Kopper.’ I was really drawn to the icy, otherworldly green of Helichrysum petiolare ‘Lemon Licorice,’ to contrast with the black and brighten everything up. For color, I popped in a dwarf Gaura ‘Karalee Petite Pink,’ as well as Calibrachoa ‘Minifamous Double Magenta,’ which has bright pink flowers that look like tiny roses. And for a ringer, I added a shot of pure, bright blue with Evolvulus ‘Blue My Mind.’

The key to good containers, in addition to following the “thriller, spiller, filler” formula, is to stuff in way more plants than you think could fit. Yes, containers planted this fully require more attention with watering and feeding, but you get an instant, lush look. I already know that some of these plant will, if they’re happy, grow too large for these containers, so throughout the summer I will need to keep them trimmed and shaped up to continue looking nice. Not a hard task, and the added bonus is I can root the trimmings and make more plants!

The front porch, all dressed up for summer: the large evergreens below are some form of Chamaecyparis, which I’ve had for more than two years. They are very slow-growing and do okay in pots as long as they don’t dry out, but eventually they will need to be planted out in the yard. I refreshed their soil last year. The plant in the smallest pot is Sedum ‘October Daphne,’ which I cut back each winter for fresh regrowth.

And a purple martin parting shot:

Some families spend their leisure time together relaxing on the beach or meandering across the golf course. In my family, group recreation is most often in the form of a construction or clean-up project, soundtracked not by lapping waves or the shout of “Fore!,” but by the loud rumble of a diesel engine.

This past weekend my parents helped cross off one of my most anticipated Bonafide Farm tasks. And all it took was two long trailers, a small tractor, a big excavator, a dualie pick-up, half a dozen chains and winches, and a couple ropes. With all that equipment and three people, I finally got rid of this:

Hidden within that grassy mess is a 1950s David Bradley hay rake, which when I bought the farm was stashed along the woodline, covered in vines and honeysuckle. One of my closest encouters with it was during my first summer at the farm, when I was crawling around in the woods trying to retrieve errant guineas, and I looked up to see a massive snake stretched out along the warm metal, sunning itself. After that I stayed far away.

Two winters ago, when my friend Steve and my dad and I cleared the woodline of invasive trees and brambles and ripped out the old pasture fence, we dragged the hay rake out of the woods and dropped it in the field. Where it sat, all last spring, summer, fall, winter, and spring again. I posted it to CraigsList, but unfortunately it was in such poor shape—totally rusted through in spots—that I didn’t get any takers. I hated mowing around it, and hated how it looked like a big piece of rusted junk in the middle of my otherwise well-kept field. Which, it was, arty sunset shots notwithstanding.

Well finally last Saturday night my dad hooked the green tractor to the hay rake and took it for its final ride across these fields. Of course, the rubber tires were rotted off so it was more of a drag than a ride.

Then Dad staged up an empty trailer and returned the next morning with Mom and the excavator.

It took a few tries to get all the chains positioned so that the rake would balance when lifted in the air, but eventually Dad got the perfect pick. Then Mom and I got on ropes on either side of the rake to direct it as Dad lowered it on the bed of the trailer. We got it set down just perfectly within the confines of the eight-foot trailer bed.

Then Dad chained it down and drove the whole rig off the farm to the recycling center. I was ecstatic to see it go—I had wanted this off the property ever since I bought this place five years ago!

With every bit of clean-up we do, we’re reclaiming this piece of land which, though incredibly beautiful, was neglected and in some ways abused before I got here. Putting all this positive work, energy and intention into this property is nurturing it so that it can, in turn, take care of me. And I couldn’t do it without my awesome parents, so thank you both for all you do to help. There are no two people in the world who I’d rather stand around with and breathe diesel fumes.

Creeps up from the creek and across the field.

For weeks I’ve been watching a little house wren sit on a tidy nest in a front-garden shrub. I’d found the nest with my spade raised to prise the bush from the ground for relocation. Four blue, brown-speckled eggs popped into view, tucked just inside.

Obviously, landscaping was postponed, and each day I checked on the nest, always expecting the eggs to be gone. They were precariously sited in a bush not two feet off the ground, easy pickings for a snake or raccoon or possum. I considered surrounding the bush with some sort of barrier, but knew that the only thing that would keep a snake out was fine netting. I learned my lesson last summer when a large black snake got stuck and died in the netting I installed to protect the garden from the chickens. So I chose not to intervene with the nest.

Without any “help,” the eggs persisted, and two days ago the mother wren didn’t fly off the nest when I approached. She flattened her body in place, with only her brave eyes moving, and I knew her eggs had hatched.

Yesterday I went out to feed the chickens and saw Tucker bent over something in the grass. I knew that posture. Immediately I checked the nest, and it was empty.

I went back to where Tuck had been standing and searched the dewy clover. I found two little bodies, perfectly bloodless and still warm. I picked them both up, and they curled together in the palm of my hand as they must have in the nest. I almost felt their hearts beating against my skin, but knew it was only wishful thinking. Nearby the mother bird swooped and chattered, scolded and cried.

I buried the babies in a scrape of dirt, and went on with my chores, silent and avoiding eye contact with my dog. Of course I was sad but I had no right to be angry. I knew Tucker was only doing one of his jobs, hunting. A wild baby bird in an ill-positioned nest is to him no different than a rabbit flushed from the wellhouse or mole dug out of the pasture, and all are fair, encouraged game.

As I’d wrapped up the chicken chores I moved some flats of seedlings out of the shed into the rain. I glanced down and saw that my crepe myrtle, still in its gallon nursery pot, had leafed out by several inches from the base.

Seems reasonable until I tell you that I’d tortured this plant all last summer, letting it go bone dry and sunburned, as I prevaricated about where in the ground to stick it. And then summer became fall became our incredibly cold and snowy winter, all during which the pot of dead sticks sat unprotected outside of the wellhouse.  I was disappointed in myself that I’d killed a perfectly good future tree by not being able to make a simple, timely decision, and just a few days ago I had accepted my crepe myrtle was toast and mentally pitched it on the compost pile.

But in that short interval between intention and action this forsaken plant had quietly, and on its own schedule, conveyed to me its plan to live.

Doing or not doing. Both are choices, and the joke of this choose-your-own-adventure is that we’re all just bumbling along. In a span of five minutes I got a perfect lesson in acting and not acting, and how each movement’s consequences can be both predictable and surprisingly unexpected.

I am going outside now to plant a crepe myrtle.

This spring, the garden I’ve been most impressed with is the one I have spent the least amount of time thinking about and fussing over. Isn’t that the way it is with so many things—just set the ball rolling, get out of the way and wait to be unexpectedly amazed?

The strip of garden that runs along the east side of the house was an afterthought in many ways, even though it is the garden closest to the road and should be a showpiece. When the house was built I threw some shrubs in to hold the soil on the bank—a few doublefile viburnums and some dwarf oakleaf hydrangeas, two of my favorite shrubs. Then last year I extended the garden by building the rock wall, and added some gift irises and a few more little plants as I bought them. Because there are no evergreens it looks pretty bare in winter, but this spring the bank erupted in what turned out, this year, to be a quite nice combination of bloom, leaf shape, and color variation. It’s a very old-fashioned feeling garden, with classic plants that one might find around Grandma’s country cottage.

The first to bloom are the the daffodils in late winter, and I am happy to see that their decaying foliage will soon be hid by the new growth coming in on the shrubs, just as it should be. I particularly love the variegated Solomon’s Seal (Polygonatum odoratum var. pluriflorum ‘Variegatum’) at lower right, below, with its white bell-like blooms and sturdy foliage that remains attractive all season.

The front corner is anchored by these nice catmints (Nepeta ‘Walker’s Low’), new last year, that continue the lavender bloom color begun by the iris.

The viburnums have finished their bloom, and the irises are soon to say goodbye. I have a few peonies, planted last spring to test if they liked this location, that are budding now. I will see how they look when they bloom, and if I like the effect I will add more peonies to continue the colorful blooms a few more weeks. That should take me until hydrangea time…but after that I will have to figure out what to add to maintain interest here through the dog days of summer until the hydrangeas change into their red leafed costumes for a fall display.

Next fall I will divide the Solomon’s Seal to spread bits of it through the whole garden, and to move it more forward of the shrubs. If I can find something low and pretty all season (maybe some kind of Ajuga, which has purple blooms at the same time as the iris?) to go right along the top of the rock wall, this will really shape up nicely—almost as if I planned it!

And then just when it looks awesome there’s a good chance the shrubs will have grown too large and it will be time to pull them out and start over!

As a way of explaining some of my happiness with this garden’s progress, check out what it looked like just a bit more than a year ago:

Seeing this photo it’s clear to me that I did the right thing by extending the garden to lessen the slope away from the house, which was making it hard to keep enough water on the shrubs to make them happy, and all the plants responded really well to the back-fill addition of forest-dug compost and a thick blanket of mulch. The border is deep enough (10 feet) that I am able to enjoy the show from inside the house, looking out through the windows, which is an aspect that is so enjoyable but that few consider when creating foundation plantings.

Came across this scene in the middle of a gravel road during yesterday’s walk—a hawk kill? I think this bird’s claws, feet and legs are incredibly elegant.

I can’t figure out what kind of bird it is—its whole body was there, minus the head and innards, and it looked just like a tiny chicken complete with meaty thighs. It seemed much larger than our common songbirds, with a body of about seven or eight inches. It had some slightly barred feathers, which made me think maybe it’s some type of wood pecker? Or a yellow-bellied sapsucker? Any guesses?