Kayaking Cowan Lake

I spent the morning on the waters of Cowan Lake with No Child Left Indoors. We took the kids out in canoes to see the lake’s blooming lotus groves.

Beats the hell out of a day job.

And I’ve gotta say, after a year of shooting almost exclusively Canon, the colors coming out of my old Nikon D3000 — which I bagged up in Ziploc and stowed on board — seem to pop like crazy. One of the few things I miss about jumping ship.

Say hello to Gatsby

The newest member of the Cropper household.

Today’s pickins

All hail the first peppers of the year! Some little jalapenos to add to tonight’s dinner. And the first of the beans don’t look too shabby either.

Summer sweat

Trees

Life at the fair, day 4

Four-year-old Mythias Stuckey of Washington Court House gets a better view of the Turkey Obstacle Course at the Clinton County Fair on Tuesday, July 12. (News Journal photo/John Cropper)

Ross Lennon, 11 of Clarksville, helps his turkey up and down a bridge during the Turkey Obstacle Course at the Clinton County Fair on Tuesday night. (News Journal photo/John Cropper)

At the fair

This week is fair week in Clinton County. Or, as it is affectionately known in the newsroom, Hell Week. Spend five hours a day in the sweltering heat in concrete buildings and then get yelled at the next day for not covering Little Timmy’s triumphant cupcake decorating championship, then you’ll understand the name. All things considered, it’s a pretty good time and a great excuse to wear shorts everyday to work.

July 4 fireworks

Obligatory fireworks shots from the Wilmington Independence Day celebrations at J.W. Denver Williams Jr. Memorial Park.

 

Fences, lettuce and the leafy greens

I first noticed the gnarled twigs showing up behind my lettuce about two weeks after the seedlings started to sprout. I’d find them in the same spot every other day during my morning weeding routine, and every time I’d shovel them out and toss them in the trees adjacent to our garden plot. On the third time, I started to get suspicious. Where were these things coming from? I picked one up and surveyed it in my hand — dried out, light and the color of khaki pants. Then, instinctively, I sniffed it. Immediately I remembered how I had seen stray cats hanging out in my backyard for the past month. Awesome.

I’m not sure how I had mistaken cat poop for twigs three successive times, but in my defense, that stuff did not look like cat poop. But it did smell like it. So after some momentary disgust and a trip to the bathroom to wash my hands, I hatched a plan to build a small fence around the garden, lest my night time visitor(s) try to soil my lettuce again. Sure enough, before I could make it to Lowes to buy the needed fencing and posts, the little bundles of joy showed up again in the same spot.

This weekend we (hopefully) solved the problem, because the garden has been noticeably poop free.

Let’s hope this works.

Instead of weeding this morning I harvested the first of the lettuce, as well as some spinach and two types of basil (Thai and lemon).

Thankfully, our little friends never popped a squat on our lettuce. It will be washed an extra time regardless.

The first harvest of the season!

Adventures in backyard gardening

If only I could get paid to keep a garden.

The summer I moved back to Wilmington to work with Grow Food, Grow Hope, I dutifully and enthusiastically planted a garden in my mom’s backyard. She hadn’t kept a garden in years and was excited by the prospect of having fresh tomatoes that she could pluck from her own plants. For me, it was an experiment. I figured I should at least become well acquainted with growing food if I wanted to successfully represent an organization that championed it. So I borrowed Mel Bartholomew’s “Square Foot Gardening” from a friend and went to work. That was a summer of planning, flipping, tilling, building, amending, planting, weeding, harvesting, cooking, eating and, in the end, marveling at the amount of food you could eke out of a tract of soil no bigger than your closet. I was hooked.

Living with mom lasted only so long, and pretty soon I had lulled Frankie into moving here. We packed our things in to a small, downtown apartment where we spent most of that summer wishing we had a piece of grass to plant something, anything. Our apartment came with lots of perks — a great location, reasonable rent and an upstairs perch overlooking one of the busier streets in town. But what it offered in convenience it did not make up for in green space. We tried our best to create some semblance of plant life there. The pathetic peet-pots of basil and oregano we placed on our bedroom window sill were quickly gnawed to stubs by our cats, or knocked over completely. Mom offered to let us use the second raised-bed plot that I had built for her earlier that summer, but having to drive across town to pick a few peppers sort of defeats the purpose.

Now, at our new house, we finally have a yard. Most of it is shrouded in shade all day, but I was able to pick out a patch behind our garage that sees at least 6 hours of a sun each day. That’s all you need.

It’s certainly nothing to brag about and it doesn’t feed us entirely, but it’s ours.

I’ll chart the progress of the backyard plot as the summer wanes. So far, it’s off to a great start.