Feeling Squirrely?

I have designed, planned, & executed our garden to attract wildlife. I love to sit in our back room, where the TV is, & watch the feeders for alluring, appealing, adorable avian visitors. We live mere blocks to the mighty Columbia & Willamette Rivers & we have plenty of flying guests. We have spotted an Eagle (with his eye on a terrier dinner, I suppose) Red Tail Hawks, Goldfinches, Scrub Jays, a Woodpecker, & Hummingbirds. I have different feeders with a variety of seeds & suet, & apparently the squirrels love them all.

Fed up with the squirrels feeding frenzy, the Husband & I purchased a “squirrel proof feeder”. Is there such a thing? This item was expensive, but we were didn’t wish to have a winter with hungry avian & fat, satisfied squirrels. The Husband placed the new feeder close to the house for optimum viewing.

The new feeder is now deeper in the garden for the shy birds, but we had a day of gratifying diversion watching a squirrel try & negotiate the new device. This squirrel did not give up & I commend his wholehearted commitment to snatching those seeds. He apparently did not grasp the notion of “squirrel proof”.

The Squirrel lands on the window to prove that he is a HIM & to torment Junior.

 

Balls & Grass... A Chapter Of My Memoir, Or A Garden Problem's Solution?

 

Summer 2008... I add the bowling ball (far left side of photo)

Summer 2009... the Husband adds the pillar

The garden was designed & executed with intention of providing food, water, shelter & materials for birds & other critters & with aesthetic balance that reflects my tastes for excess & the husband's innate artistic sense of balance. Except for the fact that I always make note of the tasks & decisions that have yet to be actualized, I feel that at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia we have succeeded for the most part. The Garden is lush, & plants were chosen for leaf shape & size & not for colorful flowers & we make use of many grass varietals. Grasses are a current favorite plant group.

But, Gardening is not an avocation where you can say- "well, I am done...there it is, my garden." Changes are made daily & tastes change nearly as often. The house came with a backyard full of ivy & blackberries, a dog run & the posts from an old clothesline. Over time, we got rid of the unwanted elements, except for a large cement filled pipe. The husband tried sawing through it & digging it up. I suggested making it look "on purpose" & added a bowling ball to the top as a witty finial. Last summer the Husband put an old hollow pillar right over the top & voila... the pipe was gone & the Post Apocalyptic Bohemian aesthetic reached out even further into the world.

Summer 2009, except for the balls I add, the pillar stands alone

This year the pillar solution was just not good enough for the Husband. He used a damaged, cracked trough, last year's table in the Boys' Fort, & transformed it into a raised bed with variegated grasses. He cut a hole for the cemented pipe & lifted the empty trough right over the top, filled it with soil & compost. This is the solution for one of the garden's problem spots in Summer 2010:

The process

Summer 2010

Extra added photo view, my bog garden, planted in an old sitz bath that I found in a pile of garbage from a vacated house in our Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle.  I spied it on a dog walk &I carried the sitz bath home with 2 leashed dogs at 2am on a summer morning. It has had many uses, often as a water feature. This is the 2nd season of the sitz  bath bog garden:

Reflections On A Summer Sunday Afternoon

 My favorite song about summer, from the musical- The Golden Apple by Jerome Moross & John Treville Latouche.

What a difference a week makes, 168 little hours. I am taking a rare mini-staycation. I have 5 days in a row, in which I must work about 12 hours.The owner of the business that I work for (who I like) is on vacation in another state, a situation that always makes me feel a tiny bit more relaxed.

Some details of scenes around the garden.

My idea of perfect happiness is a summer day off from work, with no list of things to do & no agenda, with a couple of $20s in my jeans (just in case a little shopping calls to me). I am enjoying just such a day as I post this, mostly because I warned the forces that might make a mess of it- I am going to have my day, my way. A hot summer afternoon in late July is condusive to doing little & enjoying small things in a big way: never leaving the house or garden, listening to my choice of music, read favorite blogs, do a blog post, not getting in trouble for being on the computer too much, watering the garden, sweeping The Boys’ Fort, going for a dog walk, smoke a bowl, make the August Playlist, being-in- the-now, taking note the temperature, the plants, the sky, the Husband, the dogs, being ecstatic, being calm.


The August 2010 Playlist::


Between My Legs- Rufus Wainwright


Crossfire- Brandon Flowers


I Burn For You- Sting with London Philharmonic


Machines Can Do The Work- Fatboy Slim & Herve


DJ’s Got Us Fallin’ In Love- Usher featuring Pitbull


Misery- Maroon 5


Tweak Your Nipple- Faithless


Next To Me- Alan Cumming


Senegal Fast Food- Amadoum& Mariam


You Are Not Alone- Mavis Staples


Your Love- Nicki Minaj


Show & Tell- Al Wilson


Straight No Chaser- Chet Baker


When I Get Low I Get High- Jane Krakowski


If You A Viper- Erin McKeowan

Thank you to the readers who commented & sent best wished & sympathy to the Husband. He reads Post Apocalyptic Bohemian, even when recovering from surgery for Dupuytren’s Contracture. The Husband uses the fact that he in agonizing, difficult pain all the time, to be a bit of a shithead… but I am not allowing that to matter during my little summer respite. Below are photos of the Husband's hand 3 weeks after surgery. He wouldn’t let me see it before now. Yikes! Call James Whale, it is time to make Hand Of Frankenstein. I know life has been kicking him in the gut in 2010. I brought him a beautiful Blueberry/Peach pie, hoping it would keep him busy & happy for a while.

The Husband did, at long last, receive some scraps of good news: he won a judgment for back wages from a past employer, & he has a freelance job doing French style bistro signs for a café. They are quite stylish & smart, & not all that easy to produce with one hand. Even with his extreme pain & current state of mine, the Husband manages to relax also, it is after all, a very Lazy Afternoon. Even in repose, the Husband puts his best side forward.

3 dudes who are old enough to know not to be out in the sun without sunscreen. Bad Dogs!

Happy Summer Solstice!

Summer came to us in that certain Portland, Oregon style: drizzly, damp, cool- with a high of 60 degrees, & with hope of better weather to come. The longest day of the year had the very shortest bursts of sunlight interrupting the grey & gloom. Post Apocalyptic Bohemia had began to resemble Cold Comfort Farm.

Post Apocalyptic Bohemia, living up to its name in Spring 2010.

There are some gratifying corners of the garden. Cornus Kousa is native to Japan, Korea & China. This small white flowering dogwood was given to us a sapling, as gift from our dear friends & best men at our wedding- Ken & Eiric, in memory of our recently deceased 1st dog- Baby. Baby was a terrier mix, & as a puppy she was almost shamefully cute. She grew to be a real broad though. The Husband described her as the Joan Blondell of the canine world. She was a blond, possessed of full hips that she swung from side to side as she walked, & Baby had a snappy way with a one liner. Her death at 13 from Cushing's Disease, seemed to early to us & we were inconsolable. The boys gave us the tree as her memorial, & it was one of the few plants that we dug up in the pouring rain on our last day in Seattle & transferred to our new garden in Portland. In late spring/early summer the tree is heavy with breathtakingly beautiful blizzard of white  flowers. It produces showy, stunning scarlet leaves in the early autumn, with  blood red berries appearing in the fall & winter attracting songbirds. That is a lot of show from one small tree, but then Baby had come to resemble an aging Vegas showgirl in her later years, complete with a deep raspy voice & a fur coat.

Blossoms from Baby's dogwood. Gone for 12 years, I still grieve. I love this reminder of the old broad.

What a show off the Clemitis Montana is when it gives us a cloud of heavenly white flowers. I had always believed that the hummingbirds are attracted to red flowers exclusively, but I have seen our hummer enjoying the nectar from this Clemitis.

Clemitis Montana... what a show off.

The husband recently re-worked the fountain in the garden pass-through room, & surrounded it with part of my Hosta collection. The fountain head is Bacchus, found by me in the garbage of the display department of the grand old, & now gone department store- Fredericks & Nelson's in downtown Seattle, where I worked for most of the 1980s. He is artifice, plaster & chicken wire made to look like stone.

The water from Bacchus' mouth flows into a tall pot from China. The Husband rigged a pot of hosta over the bowl of the pot, that is held up by bamboo sticks running through the pot. Ingenious, yes?

I am so ready for summer after the endless damp, depressing, depressive, dingy, dismal, dispiriting, doleful, downcast, & drab spring. I look forward to the husband sunning naked on the hot tub deck with Junior by his side (I have great photos of this frequent occurrence. I know the Husband would be furious if I posted one, but I am so very tempted. You readers would like to view that, wouldn't you?).

The Trouble With 'Coons

One of my great joys of our garden is viewing the wildlife... I am not making reference to some of those late night, all male parties in the Boys' Fort. I have done it on purpose, planning & planting the garden to attract birds, bees & other critters. We live within blocks of the mighty Columbia & the Willamette Rivers, & we have had a Bald Eagle & a Red Tailed Hawk visit the back garden. I think the eagle had his eye on a Jack Russell Terrier for an appetizer.

They are not that unusual at all, we had them in our garden in Seattle, but our current family of raccoons is especially brazen. We had company for dinner enjoy the thrill of a raccoon fall from an overhead tree right into our meals. It was raining 'coons! This morning, in the very early hour of daybreak, a nursery (this really is the term) of raccoons traipsed across the roof of our bedroom, waking me & alarming the terriers. Their steps were not a gentle patter, but big clops. I let the fearless Junior into the garden & to my horror, the raccoon that he had treed was 3 times his size (these are not cute little Disney animals) & looked none to pleased to be in that position. The poor mammal was forced into our large White Pine, the home to a murder (again, really) of crows with chicks. The bodacious, bold, brassy birds made a terrible racket & were not happy about the raccoon in their space.

By now, the plucky & determined Junior is barking & putting up a valiant front & the Husband is standing in his boxers on the hot tub deck, spraying the raccoons with the garden hose. What a comedy of errors & all before 6am.

Junior is exhausted after his morning of 'coon hunting.

Junior looking for the culprits... after the fact.

I discovered later, from their wet paw prints, the raccoons had been into the front fountain.

Larry opts to sit out all the action, letting Junior & Daddy do all the work. He doesn't care that much about the critters in the garden, but he cares very much about having breakfast.

A Quick Trip Around The Grounds At Post Apocalyptic Bohemia?

Well... it is lovely to have you stop by. Do you have time for a cocktail? There is always time for a cocktail.

A small water feature near the front door has goldfish to take care of moquitoes.

Standing on the front porch looking towards the street.

It is true... everything at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia is made from used/reclaimed/salvaged materials...

A few corner views of the front garden.

 Let's stop in the kitchen for that cocktail, then head for the back garden for a little chat. There is seating for company in the back garden.

Larry the canine waiting for the guests.

The Husband reminds Larry about the importance of using sunscreen.

 One of my favorite pieces by the Husband- Terrace Queen.

                                                         
No, not autumn, but it is springtime in blossom for a huge Cornus Florida in the back garden. Photo by Little Jake's swell boyfriend- Kent.

We have come full circle & we are back at the front of the house. I am so pleased that you stopped by to have a cocktail & a quick tour. You are welcome back anytime.