Tag: Pruning
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For Fun: Top 5
List five things you do for fun. Almost a year and a half into Redacting Rosslyn, I’ve taken a semi respite from the rhythm of old house journaling, not by interrupting my daily updates — those have continued albeit with a different flavor and focus from previous posts — but by handing over the steering…
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Compost Bin v2.0
Probably about a decade and a half ago we repurposed a shipping crate (that happened to have been fabricated out of tropical hardwood) into a compost bin. We’ve used it for years, far surpassing the value I anticipated at the outset. When the top began to fail, it got pulled aside for eventual repair. Today’s…
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Thank You, Steve!
This evening I return to thanks giving with a tribute to Steve Cooley. Over the last few years Steve has undertaken winter snowplowing, spring-summer-autumn lawn care, and landscaping maintenance (from hedge pruning to leaf collection and composting) at Rosslyn, ADK Oasis Highlawn, ADK Oasis Lakeside, and the Westport Yacht Club. And last winter he helped…
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Fallen Giant
Timber felling continues. Bittersweet benchmark after bittersweet benchmark; five ash trees succumbing to the chainsaw. This afternoon we honor a fallen giant, the imposing 3-stem behemoth that stood just northeast of Rosslyn’s icehouse. It’s a poignant passing and sentimental benchmark when towering trees that helped define Rosslyn’s environs over the years must be culled. (Source:…
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High Tunnel Tomato Plants, Take Two
Sometimes, when I’m trying to explain the many merits of gardening, I describe the cultivation of plants as a quasi-religious force in my life. Sincerely. Hyperbole? Perhaps, but there’s much in the practice of planting and sowing, cultivating and composting, even weeding and pruning and grafting that underpins my worldview, informs my optimism, and provides…
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Searching for Poetry
Searching for poetry, questing for questions that need no answers to matter and guide and enrich. This might be my epitaph. Some day. But not yet. I hope. Today, the vernal equinox, I awoke at 4:00 AM, eager to start cooking a wild boar roast I had thawed. Actually it wasn’t the roast that caffeinated…
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Field Notes & Punch Lists
So many photos and field notes and punch lists, marked up plans, pruned and grafted scopes of work. This is the ephemera of construction and the detritus of rehabilitation. A midden of sketches and diagrams, souvenirs of collaborative problem solving, artifacts of alterations and adjustments,… this is the tangled and layered chorus we seek to…
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Paean for Pamuela
Sometimes we call her theair traffic controller —calibrating schedules,inventorying andcoordinating andunmuddling messes,managing myriadmicros and macros, andmultitasking Monday,Tuesday, heck, every day —also installing docks,feeding ducks and songbirds,soliciting bids andperhaps painting clapboardor pruning persimmons,brush hogging meadows, andwelcoming travel guests.In short she is all this —air traffic controller,conductor, ringleader,emcee and referee —but also cheerleader,advocate, confidant,colleague, and dear-dear friend.…
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The Art of Home
The art of home is a tidy title with an unpretentious posture. And yet it’s idealistic and evocative, ample and ambitious. Frankly, its restrained and self contained first impression is a little misleading. Maybe even a little ambiguous. What do I even mean? I’m not offering a catchy epithet for design and decor. Nor architecture. And…
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Broken & Unbroken
I’ve been reflecting a lot on vessels. Crockery, boats, homes, books, relationships, memories. And conditions. Conditions of vessels, the contents they’re asked to contain, and those of us who rely upon them, who contemplate them. The vessel above, a burly bowl, reminds me of another, gifted to us by Pam, crafted from a burl collected…
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Apple Season
It’s apple season in the Adirondacks, in my view, the quintessence of the North Country autumn harvest. Grab a crunchy treat and sink your teeth into its sweet-tart bliss. Aaahhh… Apple Concoctions An apple (or three) a day keeps the concocter away? Perhaps. Unless, of course, you enjoy experimenting with the nearly infinite concoctions born…
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Amish Assistance
We’re grateful to our Amish community for assistance nurturing Rosslyn’s organic vegetable, fruit, and flower gardens; our holistic orchard and vineyard; and sixty acres of landscape. While there’s much to admire about the dedicated women who have planted and weeded, pruned and suckered, nurtured and harvested for us, I’m especially grateful for their petroleum-free, exhaust…