Wildlife stalks the city

 

I took this photograph yesterday morning, as the deer proceeded quietly along the sidewalk across the street from our house. (That's our car in the lower right, proof that this is not out in the wild woods.) The deer did look round at me when I stepped outside with my camera, but they didn't run off.

We always see a few tracks and droppings in our yard come spring, and now and then in winter we see the deer themselves, but this year they are bolder and more numerous than ever before. I'm hoping they don't become resident pests here in Bozeman as they have in Helena, where they've caused such problems that they've had to be culled--i.e., shot. They leap out from between parked cars, causing accidents, heart attacks, and divorces (because of all the cursing), but that's nothing compared to the damage they do to gardens.

A New Low: cold snap in Montana

http://www.findlocalweather.com/weather_maps/temperature_north_america.html

When I got up Tuesday, the temperature in our back room, where we’ve been sleeping since my surgery, was 39ºF, or just under 4ºC. Upstairs in the bedroom we’re not using, I hit the “on” button of an electric heater to check the temperature there: 26ºF (-3ºC). I’m considering opening the refrigerator door downstairs to help heat that room, and using the bedroom as a freezer.

Please welcome--my new knee.

All right, I admit it: I have not been entirely straightforward with you. In the midst of this long hiatus, I had knee surgery. Total joint replacement, in fact, the fringe benefits for which included going to total joint replacement “camp,” a two hour meeting which was, thank goodness, far more useful than its chirpy literature, strewn with exclamation marks. Nothing makes me feel more curmudgeonly than being told that I will be prepared! and that everyone is going to work together to make sure that my experience is top notch! Grrr.

Fortunately, everyone did work together, though when they were all doing so in my room at the same time, most of the work involved pushing through the crowd: the nutritionist, the physical therapist, the occupational therapist, the case manager, the pulmonary expert, the phlebotimist, the anesthesiologist, the hospital nurse, the surgeon’s nurse, the surgeon herself--it’s extraordinary how many people were involved. On several occasions one of them sent others away because the oxygen levels in the room had dropped dangerously due to overcrowding.

All went well, and after four days I came home, where I am strictly forbidden to vacuum or cook. However, no one forbade my turning a compost pile, and the stool I use for showering works great in the greenhouse. So you can guess what I’ve been up to.

Product give-away standards--help!

To start at the end...

There's actually more to this story, but I'm saving some back until I get responses to this piece. So tell me what you think.

Background (Personal Position Statement)

Though I’m sure some of you will choke when you read this (either in laughter or astonishment), I feel I’ve acquired a relatively good feel for blogging etiquette over the year and a half since I started blogging seriously. But the whole world that blogging verges on remains closed to me. I don’t Twitter, and when someone recently invited me to join LinkedIn, I had to ask Alice Anistasia (Bay Area Tendrils) what that was (after I’d joined, no less.)

Holy smokes!

Actually, it's steam, and what's steaming is the compost pile I wrote about yesterday. Now, I've often seen steam when I've dug into a compost heap, but I've never seen an undisturbed pile steaming away like a small volcano.

Hot compost, anyone?

Should you drop by to visit, some bitterly cold night, and find my house locked, and should you be so lacking in good sense or hard cash that you don’t just head for a hotel on Main Street a mile away, I invite you to climb into my latest compost pile. Granted, it’s both damp and dirty, but it’s several cuts above Luke Skywalker’s accommodations, the night he spent in the belly of the beast. And it’s guaranteed to keep you warm. In fact, you might get burnt: the temperature is over 140°F.

Table scraps to the rescue! SF leads the way

 
source: Jepson Prairie Organics

Callooh callay, oh frabjous day! San Francisco has just become the first American municipality to institute city-wide compulsory collection of food scraps, which get composted. Nationwide, the EPA reports that food scraps make up an appalling 13% of the refuse currently sent to landfills. Once there, they decay anaerobically (without oxygen), a process that produces methane, a greenhouse gas which is twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide.*

Whatever happened to autumn?

Having more or less skipped spring this year, the weather decided to go for a double and skip autumn as well. This it accomplished by delivering the hottest September on record—on a par with a normal July—and then plunging straight into winter.

GBMD Lia Purpura, “First Leaf”

There are actually two poems from recent New Yorkers that I want to share, but for the moment I’ll stick to the more recent and most seasonally apt one. If a dozen other garden bloggers already  posted this, my apologies for being out of touch. (I’m still getting online only intermittently--more intermittently than I'd realized; I can't believe it's a month since I've posted! Well, the garden season here has ended so precipitously that I should have more time soon.)

I’m always curious, when I post a poem, whether readers like it or not, and why, so please feel free to post a comment.

First Leaf

by Lia Purpura
The New Yorker October 5, 2009

That yellow
was a falling off,
a fall
for once I saw
coming—
it could
in its stillness
still be turned from,
it was not
yet ferocious,
its hold drew me,
was a shiny switchplate
in the otherwise dark,
rash, ongoing green,
a green so hungry
for light and air that
part gave up,
went alone,
chose to leave,
and by choosing
embellishment
got seen.

____________________________

That first yellow leaf--usually a whole cluster--usually appears here sometime in mid-August, irrespective of the weather. So it was this year, even though we had a September as hot as most Julys. Someone told me that the trees react not to weather but to the length of days. That would explain why now, after two weeks of winter weather, the trees still hang onto their leaves, tenacious and suspicious.

A belated thanks, Fork 'n' Monkey (together with an extended digression on national anthems)

Something amazing happened last May. I know; that’s two seasons back, ancient history by gardening standards, an earlier era in the blogging world. But that’s when it happened: that’s when the Manic won the one of the awards in the second annual Fork ‘n’ Monkey Awards. Attention must be paid, however belatedly, and thanks rendered, both to the Garden Monkey and James A-S for sponsoring the second F ‘n’ M awards, and to everyone who voted for the Manic as best North American blog. Being nominated is an honor; winning still has me blinking in disbelief. Wow.

(And then I promptly shut down operations; y’all must have been rethinking those votes!)