Cammo and carrots

No frogs this summer! Normally as soon as the garden pond is up and running half a dozen show up to claim super-select bug guzzling spots and stay til fall. They soon ignore us completely and go about the serious business of slurping up mosquitoes and errant grasshoppers in contented oblivion. Some even accept handouts. In return for cheap entertainment we take the biggest garter snakes down below the bike path when we find them seeking frog leg lunches. (It is amazing how far we have to cart them before they stop coming back. They put homing pigeons to shame.) However, there have been no frogs this year....it has been too dry. Even up in the field potholes herpetiles have been rare as hen's teeth. Alan found one little green frog which he put in the garden pond a few weeks ago, but that is all.

The game of who can spot the hidden frogs (they have great cammo) loses some of its glamor when there is only one teeny-tiny frog (and an import at that). Then it rained most of our week at camp. It rained almost every day since too (putting a hellacious crimp in the hay baling I can tell you). Rainrainrain...thunderthundercrashinglightningstillmorerain. The driveway is a washout, barely passable by my SUV, (which I find I really NEED this year). It is too wet to pick zucchini. Or peas or beans. Too wet to weed. Too wet to mow the grass (which is growing again). It is no longer dry to say the least.


Yesterday Alan and I stopped by the pond for a game of find the frog. We hadn't seen even the little import in days. Simultaneously we spotted one....at least a foot a part! There were two! Then a third one plopped under a lily pad and frog-stroked for the bottom. Normally we get big, fat frogs; these were barely two inches long. (It makes spotting them even more of a challenge.) Wonder if the weather has anything to do with the small size or if it is just coincidence that we only have little ones this year. Doesn't matter. The pond, which is especially pretty this summer, is once again a fun place to visit.

We grew carrots in half a fifteen gallon barrel this summer. Our soil is so dense that normally you couldn't pull a halfway decent carrot without breaking it, (if you could even grow it in the first place), but a barrel makes it easy. (We grow lettuce, tomatoes and squash in them too.) Half a fifteen gallon barrel is the perfect depth. A mix of sand and compost equals perfect earth. The stuff we wash the pipeline with comes in such barrels and we only get three bucks if we redeem them so the price is right. They are easy to wash and just the right size for a wimpy old lady like me to drag around. Incidentally I have about six more out there in which the guys need to bore drainage holes pretty soon if I am going to have time to grow more carrots before winter.


I pulled this one for salad the other night and was astonished by the color though. Somehow I forgot all about planting Rainbow Carrot mix this year. Yellow is nice, now I can't wait for a purple one.