chicks and ticks

We are in the car, returning from a trip to Natalie's. Her farm is just about a half dozen miles south of us and we decided that yesterday's second chocolate zucchini cake should go to her. She needs a boost and if she's not looking to find it in sweet cakes, well then she can share it with those who help her out in the veggie fields.

Halfway home, I look down and see a dark speck on my leg. Definitely moving up. Keeping my eyes on the road, I pick it up and hand it to Ed. He's the resident tick analyst. 

So is it a tick? -- I ask.

It's not even a bug! It's a piece of debris.

If so, then it's debris with legs. It crawled. Look closely!

He does. But I'd already mangled it enough for identification to be a problem this time around.

This is not an unusual occurrence for us: we step outside the perimeters of the farmette lands and we bring in a tick. This spring has had its fair share of ticks. Or so we hear.

But the fact is, we have picked up none of these horrid bugs from working outside here at all. We'll spend the entire day in the farmette fields and bring in nothing. Not this year. Not last year, nor the year before. The only time we'll spot a tick is on a day when we hiked elsewhere.

We think it's because of our free ranging cheepers. 

 

 

I mean, this is all anecdotal stuff rather than a scientific sampling, but we did leap from with ticks to no ticks pretty quickly once the cheepers came to regard this place as home. Ed has a good working theory: his view is that ticks meander toward the smell of human movement. They tend to move in closer to the farmhouse and the courtyard and in so doing, they come into cheeper territory. Zap! Crunch! Gone.

Earlier in the day, I did my usual several hour weeding stint. Now's time to take a look at what's blooming at the end of June. Each day, a few more lilies pop open! I'll show you a handful, even though I know that single bloom photos may be a tad boring to look at. At Ocean, the story is, I think, in the whole garden (or at least a big chunk of it). But right now, as you'll see, the beds are just waking up from their month of rest after a big spring effort. It will be another week before a flower field lets go of its green face (no matter how varied the texture and tone, it still appears as "merely green" to most). So for now, I'm enjoying a bloom here, a bloom there and so this is what you get as well.

Here's my day lily roll! (These girls are scattered throughout the eleven farmette fields.)

 

(a big splash overnight in the main lily bed!)

 

(ruffled)

(bold colors)

(gentle colors)

(looks good in front of the hydrangeas)

(looks good behind the daisies)

(okay: one general view photo! the back of the Big Bed...)

Breakfast is on the porch of course. 

Shall I end the post with breakfast? Yes! Even though I worked hard on the weeds after, I also took time for reading in the farmhouse. Had I the time for it, I would have taken a very long nap, smack in the middle of the day. Maybe tomorrow!