That’s weird, I thought, glancing out the kitchen window. I’m sure the mulch pile was shorter than that. I took another step towards the window and realized that we’d had new mulch delivered. (Yes, I had an email saying it was coming. No, I hadn’t seen it yet, I was busy at work today.) Needless to say, I’m going to be busy!
I wasn’t quite finished with the previous load of mulch from ChipDrop, delivered near the end of April. I was getting close enough to finishing that I was concerned about not having enough mulch to cover the areas that I know need mulching in the next month or so. No more worries there! Just a bit of back ache and sore legs as I haul it over the yard.
Assorted plants in the keyhole bed: Brussels sprouts in the upper left, eggplant bottom left, tomato bottom right, broccoli upper left, and obscured by a rain gauge stake (without the rain gauge) there’s a large scallion.
A handful of okra seedlings peeking out.
A bed where the squash has decided to grow only along two edges instead of throughout.
Half a raised bed of peas with bamboo supports.
Cantaloupe spread across a raised bed.
A pair of kale in front of a caged catnip.
The tomatoes in this bed look sad, probably because the maple tree provides too much morning shade.
A cluster of acorn squash seedlings surrounding by catnip and garlic in a raised bed. Should I have spread out the seeds that I salvaged from an acorn squash we had just consumed? Probably….
We’re not sure what happened early Monday morning. I woke up around 12:30am to the resident mallard quacking her little head off in our yard. Cassandra was already in the kitchen and had removed an attentive cat from the cracked open window near the nest, also wondering about the noise. Cassandra thought she heard some noises from a smaller duck. Unclear on why the duck was quacking continuously, and Cassandra already having stepped outside to check on the situation, I simply closed both the kitchen window – to prevent a cat from making her uncomfortable – and my bathroom window – so I could get back to sleep.
Come morning, I noticed that she was more protective than usual of the nest. Instead of just watching me when I stepped outside, she’d half raise in the nest or stretch her neck out to watch me. (Not surprisingly, I used the zoom option to take this photo.) That was the situation for the morning and part of the afternoon. By the time I stepped out for the mail though, she was gone, and the nest was left uncovered.
Until this point, the only time the eggs had been left uncovered was that first day when I noticed – and startled – her. We haven’t been able to see the eggs since then, as they’ve been carefully covered by leaves and feathers any time she wandered off for a meal (a couple times a day).
And so we’re left wondering. Did a single egg or two hatch, and more than half a day later, she wandered off with that chick, abandoning the unhatched eggs as unlikely to hatch? That’s certainly a preferable scenario to something having attacked an egg, and her having returned to the nest afterwards. In several photos I took while she was still on the nest Monday morning, I can only spot about half of a broken shell, rather than the mostly intact one separate from the nest in the photo above. Since she abandoned the nest, more of the egg shells have been broken and spread out a bit, though the stash of eggs has been buried in the leaves again, presumably by someone who wants to hide their food source. Hopefully she made it safely to one of the nearby water sources with a hatchling or two.
It feels like just yesterday that Cassandra posted about touching grass; it was actually two weeks ago, and the seasons have definitely shifted more towards the snowy side here in Chicagoland. In fact, the only place grass is visible in our yard is where we cleared paths to necessary areas, such as the birdfeeder and composter.
That said, it’s awfully pretty in a different way. The square lumps of the six matching raised beds amuse me, the leaves that fell after the snow (about 10 inches of shoveling, only 8 currently remaining), and the cluster of birds around the birdfeeder, scattering seeds all around it. It is the ideal time of year to appreciate the beauty of our garden… from the comfort of a heated house.
I swear, from one day to the next, the trees suddenly changed color. I’m sure there was a progression, yet I somehow missed it. What I haven’t missed is the subsequent delivery of many of those beautiful leaves onto our lawn.
Three photos over the course of four days show the slow progression, most noticeably in the upper left branches, which are now creeping towards bare. It could be gradual from here, with more branches showing each day… or, as happens periodically when you live near the Windy City, a blusterous day could sweep in and shake the rest of those leaves lose. That already happened to a tree across the street.
*checks the weather forecast for the next week or so*
Done well before the first snow!
And, delightfully, done mulching for the season.
For those of you following along at home, we went through about 35 cubic yards of mulch this year, dispersing it to a mix of previously and newly mulched areas, such as around the raised beds in the vegetable garden (old) and creating a back perimeter path (new). Our most recent new spot, which finished out the mulch pile, is in the front yard, set up for a variety of fruit that will be growing in the area.
Normally, I’d say we’re done gardening for the season. It is, after all, November. But the growing season has been entirely weird, I picked some raspberries earlier this week and we have some white strawberries still, though I don’t expect those will have time to ripen. It’s warm enough that weeding can still happen, which is really just a head start for spring weeding.
Every year, John Kovalic designs a new plush for Gamehole Con, the parent convention that hosts Dorkstock. A couple years ago, it occurred to me that I could combine those plush into a Monster Island game, a game I’ve owned for a couple decades now. The hard part, beyond retroactively acquiring a second set of most of the plush (the owlbear, alas, is no longer available), was coming up with their stats and special abilities while keeping the variety of creatures somewhat balanced in game play.
Among other things, I needed to take into account that some abilities just wouldn’t be useful against other monsters. The cute orange beast pictured here, for example, is a Rust Monster. But the other monsters don’t wear armor! They do, however, have the ability to pick up and throw several crocheted food trucks and garbage cans, all of which are theoretically made of metal. While it would have been amusing to let the Rust Monster just destroy those items, it seemed better to let is recover health by consuming them, though playtesting went through a couple iterations of what that restored health value would be.
But I didn’t make the food trucks just for the Rust Monster. Food trucks are part of the Gamehole Con tradition, adding food options beyond the convention center selection. And if there are food trucks, well, there have to be people (OK, meeple) gathered near them. This was one of the places where I tweaked the Monster Island game mechanics… each monster has two special abilities, and they’re activated by consuming meeple. That includes the Rust Monster’s ability to heal by consuming metal… they lost in the last playtest round because while they were in reach of a metal item, they were out of meeple. Oops. (The pictured kobold is a stand-in from 9th Level Games’ Kobolds Ate My Baby!, since the kobold is this year’s plush.)
While both scheduled Monster Island events for this weekend are sold out, the rules and plush will be available in Dorkstock’s games library for play in the room (Waubesa – up on the second floor of the convention center) for anyone who feels a need for a silly kaiju battle.
Most years, after the mulberries are done for the season, I do a quick trim of the branches I can reach that are extending too far over the lawn. A couple key phrases in that sentence were “most” and “I can reach”… I am not particularly tall, and I never quite got around to bringing the ladder out each year to trim the higher branches. That resulted in quite a sprawl, particularly at the higher levels, that I didn’t really want to deal with myself, and a fruit tree that was taller than we wanted, primarily because we had no way to reach so much of that fruit.
If you’ve never had mulberries – and I personally have never seen them available uncooked in stores – you might be wondering why we didn’t just collect them when they fell. Mulberries are quite juicy, while resembling a small blackberry. I assume this juiciness is the reason for the lack of commercial availability; they don’t keep well. It also means that when they hit the ground, they immediately collect dirt. To be fair, this doesn’t stop the birds, rabbits, and other critters from eating them… we’re just a bit pickier.
I decided earlier in the summer to hire someone to trim the tree, rather than having to find the time to trim it and get the branches down to the appropriate size for the township’s branch pick-up. As you can see in this photo taken during the trimming, there were some sizable branches removed. Conveniently, my neighbor had hired a company, Paulo & Sons Tree Services (who can be reached here), mid-summer, when his branch overhanging my driveway cracked near the trunk. I kept their contact information, promising to reach out once the mulberry harvest ended for the season.
To be clear, our mulberry season usually finishes in July, nicely timed with our next wave of raspberries and strawberries, affording us the opportunity for some triple berry dishes. This has been a strange growing season in our garden – I picked a ripe strawberry today, in October, and saw another recently formed flower – and our mulberry harvest didn’t actually wind down until mid-September. In fact, the timing worked out nicely for the tree trimming to happen in cooler weather; it was still in the 80s last week. I’m hoping the raspberries are about done, so I can trim them before the branch pick-up ends for the season. (Edit: the raspberries said “I’m not dead yet!” So I ate some.) I’m happy with the trimmed mulberry, and glad someone else did the work.
As I mentioned recently, we needed a bit more mulch before the winter weather hits. After a couple weeks, I cancelled my Chip Drop request – I can always enter a new one – and bought some mulch after my garden planner said these magic words: “If we don’t mulch it, we need to sod lift the whole area.”
Yeah, I’d rather mulch it. Here’s the work in progress, starting with a perimeter mulch path at the edge, then a combination of sod removal and mulching. The areas where grass was removed are destined for more immediate planting of somewhat tall plants. We briefly considered a metal edging for the perimeter plant, so the mulch doesn’t wash into the neighbor’s grass when it rains, but realized how expensive that would get given that the entire north edge has a bit of a slope into his yard. We’re looking at a plastic edging instead.
A new pile of dark brown mulch – about 10 cubic yards – on our driveway, the day it was delivered.
A 2-foot wide line of mulch along the edge of our property in the northwest corner of our yard.
A mulched area around the lilac, with a small portion where we did sod lifting instead for upcoming planting.
A view from the side patio to the mulch pile, showing the recently mulched area and the remaining grass for the northwest corner, which will all be mulched over or removed.
One our perpetual summer projects is acquiring and distributing mulch around the yard, to help with weed suppression and generally improve the appearance of the yard. Earlier in the spring, I had a request in with GetChipDrop.com for wood chips, hoping to get a free (or close to free, with optional donation) supply of wood chips to mulch the yard. ChipDrop partners with local arborists and gardeners to mutual benefit: the arborists get somewhere local to drop the wood chips, and the gardeners don’t have to call every tree company or outright purchase mulch. It’s a simple process, but it doesn’t mean the availability of wood chips is sporadic. Each request is good for a month, and when we returned from the Canary Islands without having received wood chips, I bit the bullet and ordered mulch from a local supplier. (To be clear, their mulch is fabulous… but mulch is not cheap.)
The initial distribution wave went quickly – from delivery on May 3rd to the second photo on May 10th, we probably distributed half of the mulch. This was the easy phase, re-mulching areas that were mulched in previous years. You can see how good the fresh mulch looked around the raised vegetable beds. We have a large yard and progressed fairly quickly through those initial 10 cubic yards. I was quickly becoming concerned with other areas of the garden I wanted to mulch as I ran through the pile.
So, before clearing the entire pile, I placed a new request through GetChipDrop.com on a Friday… and received a response Saturday morning asking if I wanted a 15-yard delivery. Woot! It wasn’t until partway through distributing the refreshed pile that I named it “Mount Mulchmore.”
The process inevitably slowed, between some intolerably warm weather, my wasted time at PT, and our discussions as to which areas needed weeding before mulching and which should have landscape paper set down first. I expanded the back border to put more distance between myself and the poison ivy lingering under the neighbor’s white mulberry tree. And then, in mid-August, after mulching around the strawberry bed, I cleared the rest of the pile.
