(Black) Gold Repository

I must confess to being a little lax with this post... but nobody warned me that May and June would disappear in a flurry of gardening and cursing the cold weather.

 May was when Daniel plotted and schemed (with a little help from the Australian organic gardening magazine Lynette got me a subscription to) and built me a fabulously fabulous compost bin for my black gold.

He started with some posts:

They're untreated cedar, rather than jarrah, but have the same kind of last forever properties. And they're untreated so we don't have arsenic and god knows what else in the way of toxic junk leaching into the compost.

Then there was some post hole digging, some corrugated tin, some nails, some hammering and sawing, a fair bit of swearing, and a rest or two:

 Here are some details:

And now for the unveiling...  I should probably confess that I also have a Tumbleweed (made in Australia!) compost tumbler that I will continue to use, but I need to leave it out of this story for dramatic reasons that I hope will soon be clear.

My composting abilities went from this:

To THIS:

Daniel even numbered each set of slats for the front (one hole, two holes, three holes) so they will fit properly when they get removed and replaced.  How cool is that?!

Not only do I think it's the most handsome compost bin in the entire Treasure Valley, but I think I can safely say that it's the only one made with corrugated tin.  It's not a popular building material here, which for some reason made it cheaper than some of the other options we had.

Needless to say, Daniel is very proud of himself and I am thrilled silly to have such a capable man in my life.

A Camas Dawn

I still can't believe I did it, but last Saturday I hauled my (immediately regretful) self out of bed at 3:45am (yeah, you read that right) so I could make the two-hour drive to Camas Prairie Centennial Marsh and be there by dawn to take some photos.

It's a beautiful, peaceful place, in spite of the raucous chorus of a million and one birds. Even better, I was the only human hopping around in the pre-dawn almost freezing temperatures, clicking the shutter and keeping my fingers crossed that I had at least something in focus and that my fingers weren't going to drop off from frostbite.

Here's a selection of the results, pretty much in the order I took them, which I hope speak for themselves.













This is the Camas Lily - traditional food source for Native Americans, and once owner of the whole valley. It's pretty much limited to several hundred acres now - at least in any great numbers.

I call this one The Cow of Camas Prairie. I do believe she was shaking her head at me.

The Glory of Dutch

Irises, that is. Just had to share with you some of Nature's bounty that I am delighted to say I planted. I have a couple of patches of these Dutch irises, but my other patch is really struggling. Guess I'll be moving them to this spot in the Fall!


The brief rain shower that happened when I wanted to take photos turned out to be a bit of a bonus when it comes to showing off the flower.


It was shortly after this that I got dive-bombed by a hummingbird, but that's another story...