Port Potager

At long last, two scary and dying spruce trees at the front corner of the house are gone. You can check out a recent "before" photo here . We tried to have this work done before the hurricane, but since it involved a massive coordination of utility companies – National Grid, Verizon, and Comcast –  to come take down and then reattach wires so the crane could get in and out, the work was postponed until Election Day. Seems the utilities were a little busy last week. Speaking of the crane, it just barely fit in the driveway, and the kids and I spent some time mesmerized by the swaying pendulum of the giant hook in the front yard: Getting Verizon and Comcast to do this was unbelievably frustrating. (National Grid, you guys were great.) Between the two of us, Kirk and I spent hours on the phone, and we lost several days' morale to sheer frustration in dealing and re-dealing with their scheduling errors and utter incompetence. I don't have the energy to go into a...

Yesterday was a beautiful day — sunny and warm. Perfect day to batten down the hatches, right? By afternoon the fog rolled in, but we picked up all of our tools, stakes, and brought in the outdoor furniture and other loose things. As you can see above, we also took down all the plastic sheeting covering our fall veggies. That stuff flaps around in far less windy conditions than we are expecting, so we just went ahead and took it down. We left the PVC stakes in place, but may have to gather them up from other places in the yard if the wind pulls them out.  By mid-morning today, it was already misting, and Kirk took advantage of our last chance before the real rain to clear out the gutters. Most of the leaves are off our big maple tree now, so this was good timing anyway. We skipped the raking, hoping to get lucky and have the wind corral all the leaves in a corner of the yard — preferably next to the compost bins! Fletch is one nervous cat today! He is lurking...

Happy Halloween! I know I'm early, but I wanted to get a picture of our chrysanthemums before they are potentially crushed by Frankenstorm Sandy , or whatever they're calling it now.  I know these don't look like those compact balls of flowers that we usually think of when we talk about fall mums. These are more like their giant, naturalized selves, obviously happy in their spot.  The bumble bees love them. They don't smell like much, but they're the only game in town right now if you're a bee, so every bee in Newburyport makes its way over here, I think. We've had a really nice week of sunny, warm weather, and they've been covered in bees. Good thing the kids mostly use the back door. As for Hurricane Sandy , the latest headlines are still full of hype, but this latest rain forecast from the Weather Channel doesn't seem so devastating: 1-3 inches I can totally live with. Still, I'm going to postpone planting my fall...