My Battle Against the Weeds

 

For Nicole's Sunday in the Art Room I don't have "regular" art today, but I see my garden as an art room as well. It has dominantly native flowers, but also non-native poppies that I first sowed 14 years ago and they have come back reliably every year since then. What also comes back every spring is the weeds. Some of them I'm okay with, but others are really annoying and spread way too much. Like these ones:

Cleavers (Galium aparine), also known as "catchweed". It's a sticky, vining weed that clings to surfaces - like other plants. It was traditionally used as a medicinal plant, but medicinal or not, it has got out of control in my garden and I don't want it to climb into my natives and choke them. So I had to do something.

First I did the hard work of pulling the cleavers. Since we had some good spring rains in April, they were easy to pull, but gosh! there were so many. After I had cleared an area, I covered the ground with newspaper.

Then I covered the newspaper with a good layer of compost, hoping that this will suppress the weeds for a while.

Since this garden was created on top of an existing lawn after we had bought our home in 2012, by using cardboard and huge amounts of compost (if you're interested how to do that, you can read about it here), this now resembles a lasagna with all its layers of cardboard, compost, newspaper, compost. 

It's a rather healthy, fully organic garden. Even while concentrating on battling the weeds, I still noticed little critters like this orbweaver hanging out on the clary sage (Salvia sclarea).

It is a very big garden and I'm far from done. Unfortunately, I have to pause wielding newspaper and compost because with all the bending (there isn't enough space to kneel on a knee pad while weeding because of dense planting) I hurt my right leg. It crept up on me and I didn't pay much attention to it. But the pain became progressively worse until I wasn't able anymore to walk down stairs in a normal way without stabbing pain. So on Thursday morning I called my GP and got an appointment in the afternoon. He pressed on some parts along my knee and thigh up to my hips (ouch!) and diagnosed Iliotibial band syndrome. Great! Now I'm doing stretches, hoping this will help with the pain, and no more weeding for now (or only in places where there actually is enough space for a knee pad). Wish me luck, please.

Tasting Wine with Friends

 

Our good friends Bim and Patti suggested we accompany them to an open house of a winery up in Cloverdale, the most northern town in our county. Since we weren't familiar with this winery, we happily agreed to go with them. I always enjoy wine tasting with Bim - being a wine maker himself, he is very knowledgeable about wine and the wine making process. 

He was very clear about why he went to the open house.

But then we were here for the food as well - they had cheese and charcuterie boards and a food truck served the most delicious pizza I ever ate outside of Italy.

Everything was beautifully decorated.

Our guys...

... and las chicas.

There were two tasting tables, one with their white wines and the other with the red ones.

An interesting board with all the different clamps and connecting pieces for the fermenting steel tanks you can see behind Bim.

It was such a lovely day, warm and sunny. The wine wasn't too bad either...

I loved the deep color of this Syrah.

Sometimes the Geek is the only guy in a group (we call that "Hahn im Korb", rooster in the basket). He sure enjoys that.

Is there anything better than having a wonderful time with really good friends?

Of course I couldn't leave AI (Gemini) alone... all of these faces are for Nicole's Friday Face Off. Cheers!

Happy Faces

 

My brother and myself, 1960

Today is the day of Nicole's FFO Portrait Challenge and I admit that I first didn't want to participate. But then I read that photographs are accepted as well, so I'm in. Nicole suggested five categories - happy, sad, tired, surprised or anger. Sadly, there was no "goofy" category (I have a good amount of those), so I opted for the happy faces. The hardest part was to make a selection.

This picture was taken in 1962 or 1963. My paternal grandparents who lived in Heidelberg used to go to Timmendorfer Strand at the Baltic Sea for their summer vacation. (I guess being at the Baltic Sea still felt a little bit like home for them after they got out of Danzig [Gdansk] with the last refugee ship at the end of March 1945 - this was called "Operation Hannibal".) When we still lived in Lower Saxony, not too far away from Hamburg, my parents, brother and I would go and visit them since it wasn't a very long drive. It had a lot of magic for us children since we were allowed to ride on these carousel figures along the Strandpromenade (seafront or boardwalk) - it was my grandpa who generously fed pieces of 10 Pfennig in the slots. It felt like heaven for us. You can see my grandma behind me and the pink blouse on the right belongs to my mom.

When I first thought of a happy, laughing face, I was thinking of this picture of Kaefer, taken when she was almost 18 months old.

She is sitting in her stroller and had just succeeded "stealing" her dad's hat. She was playing around with it - I did take an entire series of photos (this was all still on film, done with my SLR camera), and my favorite one is this one:

Still very happy, but there is also a hint of mischievous - she was a little rascal.

No explanatory words needed for the next one.

She truly was a happy child.

And she still is - happy, not a child anymore -, especially when animals are involved.

But I also found a non-human happy face. I had almost forgotten that I have this. I took it back in 1999 when we visited our relatives in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (in the Northeast of Germany) where they had a horse farm. Every morning Kaefer would walk around the open stables and greet the horses, completely fearless. That's when I captured this horse - it's definitely laughing!

Yeehaw!

Earth Colors Challenge

 

Recently I was going through a box with some of my pieces and found a few that I had never shown here, for whatever reasons. But since we have Nicole's Sunday in the Art Room, I feel comfortable showing them here. If I remember correctly, this was inspired by Laly Mille's "Color Challenge" which is part of her "Mini Abstracts" Workshop. I had done a couple of those mini series (green, abstract, and imaginary landscapes) and for this series I had chosen earthy colors. I thought since I love earthy colors this would be relatively easy and quick, but as is so often the case, I was kidding myself. These four little pieces I created in September 2023.

The substrat is four 6x6 inches watercolor papers that I collaged with different papers that I then covered with a thin layer of watercolor. On each piece I used the same papers. But since I'm not really into abstract painting, I only created one abstract piece using a few buttons I had.

For the others I chose some pictures that I had cut from magazines and added them to the pieces.

The following one is my favorite.

The Kestrel in the picture reminded me of the sweet Kestrel we had seen in Kaysersberg in Alsace in 2022. Even the bricks are similar.

Isn't he (she?) super cute?

At the Lake Again

 

This week I walked around the lake again, in the company of good friends. The weather has been sunny, but breezy and not very warm, but perfect for walking. The lake was very still which made for beautiful reflections in the water.

These two Canada Geese were busy with their morning hygiene routine.

Suddenly there was rapid movement on the lake. Thankfully my friend Kris was fast enough to capture a picture of a Red-winged Blackbird and what I think is a Green Heron.

A little bit further down the lake another Canada Goose was swaggering along the dock.

My favorite tree... crooked, of course, and with lots of Poison Oak growing up its trunk.

We thought this tree has a face and looks like a rhino.

Along Fisherman's Trail we saw this beauty, a Black-Crowned Night Heron.

There are so many beautiful places at the lake. We are so very fortunate to have this here.

When we left, the Canada Geese were still busy with preening.

This post's tree and bird faces are for Nicole's Friday Face Off.

Sauntering at a Seasonal Lake

Last week I joined Senior Saunters again (I wrote about them here); this time we went to Tolay Lake Regional Park. This is a park that has been open to the public for about ten years now; before that it was only open for the fall festival on two weekends in October of every year, but otherwise the public didn't have access. I have to admit that I hadn't been there since the opening to the public because it is a bit of a trek there. But this time, two friends of mine, who hadn't been there either, and I carpooled down there.

First of all, there was no lake, despite its name. Well, let me rephrase that, there was no lake now. It's a seasonal lake, the season being winter of course, but since we had such a dry March without a single day of rain, the lake was mostly gone. It was still pretty "marshy" and there were a few "canals", but that was pretty much it. However, I think if you're there early in the morning you will see a lot of birds. We saw mainly Red-winged Blackbirds and Violet-green Swallows.

And guess what? There were also dead trees - hurray!

We sauntered along this trail. It's a lovely park, but it almost completely lacks any shade. Last week was perfect weather for our walk, on the cooler side with a rather chilly wind.

There was a lot of teasel by the side of the trail. I love teasel and I couldn't help it, I took tons of pictures of it.

The trees in the background I found rather attractive. I love solitary trees.

We had just passed them and were walking a little bit farther when we saw at the foot of the hill two coyotes. They were too far away for taking pictures, and we simply enjoyed standing there and watching them until they slowly moved away. They certainly weren't in any rush. This was the second time this year that we saw coyotes during our sauntering.

Eventually, we turned around and walked back to the parking lot. I noticed the cows looking for shade under the tree to the left. I hadn't seen them when we came up that way. There are some parks in our county where cows are grazing - another way of wildfire mitigation. They're not quite as ferocious eaters as goats who, beside sheep, are also kept in the parks and other wooded areas for the same purpose.