Living the dream

Living the dream
Visiting grandmas farm.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Planting time and fat horses


It’s planting time and no matter how I try I always have more things to do than time to do them. Today after some office work I got outside just in time to get half my corn planted before it started storming. Steve made and filled a nice new 5 x 10 raised bed for corn. It doesn’t seem like much but we had plenty of corn last year from a bed that size.

I have got onions, potatoes and lettuce up and growing. I made a trip to a packed greenhouse last Saturday and picked up some new plants, one of them is quite intriguing its got large, wine red trumpet shaped flowers on a trailing vine and is called LoFos, which is short for some long Latin name. I guess it has been popular in Europe for a few years and is called Trailing Gloxina there. I got my mom and daughter in law each one too.

I got some petunias because I can’t resist some of the gorgeous colors they have even though it’s hard to find a place for them here. And I bought more lavender because some of my plants didn’t make it through the winter and a single pepper and some cinnamon basil. My sage is finally getting some new green so it did make it through the winter and the pineapple mint is also coming back- although it’s hard to kill mint. I also bought a couple new perennials. I spend way too much on plants.

A Master Gardener friend brought me some of his “trilliums” which he said his woods were full of. They turned out to be mayapples instead, but that’s ok - they look great in one of my shaded gardens and the silky white flowers scanned well for my scan art pictures. It was great weather for transplanting stuff too.

My horses Charlie and Lily took a little trip last Saturday morning. They pushed the gate out at the bottom and walked up the road in time for breakfast at the big horse farm. The neighbors were kind enough to lead them home and put them back in the pasture without waking us. I was quite puzzled in the morning though, because the gate was all bent up but the horses were inside with both latches on. I spotted a mini manure pile next to my hosta which I knew wasn’t there the night before and then I did some sleuthing and found the tiny hoof prints going up the road. I guessed they had been out - Lily wasn’t that hungry, another clue, but couldn’t figure out who had put them back without us hearing, dogs didn’t even wake up. The neighbor rode over on Monday and told me about it.

I am trying to decide if Lily is PG or just fat. If she is pregnant she would have at least a month before she foaled. If she’s just fat I got to try and get her to lose weight. In a day or so I’ll post some pictures of fat Lily so you can be the judge. I didn’t want to say anything to my husband because this happened before when we got our Shetland pony Tinker, I thought she was pregnant and made him put up more fence so she could be alone and it turned out she wasn’t pregnant. He thinks I’m nuts. But Lily was with two males, a mini jack donkey and a mini stallion or at least close to them and the man who sold her to me said something about separating her from the rest of the horses because she was always trying to protect Charlie. I got her when Charlie was two months old, which would have given her at least two heat periods before I got her. Charlie was born July 19 and mares come into heat about ten days after foaling, gestation is 11 months more or less, so that leaves about a month before its possible for her to foal.

The tree frogs are really noisy tonight. It’s amazing how big a sound their little bodies can make. They like this warmer wet weather. I guess I’ll take a walk outside as the rain has let up, and get carried away by mosquitoes.

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