The 1st of May is another one of those pagan festivals that has been repurposed to suit someone else. Whatever, now and for the last three years it's marked the last of the cold nights/mornings. This area traditional celebrates it by putting a branch of beach tree on you neighbours house, for good luck /harvest/ prosperity etc ....

A lot of people focus on inputs—JMS, compost teas, fertilizers—but timing is where most of the leverage is. If you apply biology when the system is inactive, you get minimal return. If you apply it when conditions are right, it multiplies. Think about it: - Warm soil + active roots → microbes establish and cycle nutrients - Cold soil or peak stress → low response, wasted effort - Before a rain or with moisture → better infiltration and survival - Bare soil vs covered soil → completely different outcomes Even something as simple as JMS: - applied into a living, active system = amplification - applied into a dormant or stressed system = minimal effect The goal isn’t more inputs—it’s better timing. Right input, wrong timing = wasted effortRight input, right timing = exponential return

Most of us think about planting in terms of calendar dates—but nature doesn’t run on a calendar. It runs on energy. If you zoom out, the seasons follow a pattern—a rise and fall of solar energy, almost like a sine wave: - Winter → low energy, rest - Spring → rising energy, growth begins - Summer → peak energy, stress + production - Fall → declining energy, root development The key isn’t just how much energy there is—it’s the direction it’s moving. That’s why timing matters so much. Planting in late fall works because you’re aligning with the downward curve. The plant isn’t fighting to grow above ground—it’s quietly establishing roots. Planting in mid-summer does the opposite. You’re trying to establish during peak stress, when plants are already working at their limit. Same plant. Same soil. Different timing → completely different results. When you start aligning your actions with the natural rise and fall of energy, things get easier, not harder.

We have an over population of deer here and we’re not allowed to have fences. Approximately 30 to 50 deer live in the immediate area around our home. We live in a residential area and they have no predators. There’s no hunting allowed here. The only thing that ends up thinning the population is car accidents sadly.. Anything and everything that I put in the ground is being eaten. There’s no way of stopping being a hungry and determined deer especially a pregnant doe. The Mom’s stash their newborn babies right next to our back door and in the shrubs around our house. The only thing that they don’t ever eat is boxwood. I’m going to be doing a little container garden on top of the flat roof where our sunroom is. One of the female deer was hit by a car last year and she miraculously survived although a part of her leg didn’t. We call her Hopalong. She is an incredible survivor and has become very tame.

I'm a home gardener and I like a variety of fruits and veggies. Plus I grow a ton of herbs. This year I really expanded my gardening space and keeping it watered would be quite dauting without my watering setup. Part of this was my husband's idea and part was mine. The first picture shows my manifold and my timer. The manifold is attached to the side of our back deck. It's all brass (including the on/off valves) and takes a single hose and splits it off to 4 outlets. From the left I have - timer, motion activated sprinkler, short hose with sprayer, long hose with sprayer. The longer hose reaches the back of the property line for times when I need to water my compost pile, the shorter one is what I use to water new seeds and my mint beds (in grow bags to contain the spread) and asparagus bed. The timer has 3 independent watering zones. One goes to my raised beds and the jasmine that I planted last year (it runs along two sides of our shed). The second one goes to a small sprinkler for my potato bags, and the third one goes to my in ground beds. The hoses for the raised beds and in ground beds are soaker hoses that have been buried just under the mulch about an inch below the soil surface. With the 3 zones on the timer I'm not trying to water everything at the same time. Plus I can control how often each area gets watered. Right now the potato bags get water every other night and the beds are every 4 days. I just set this up so I'll be adjusting it as I see how often it truly needs to be watered. The potato bags dry out faster, that's why they get watered frequently. I'm pretty sure I'll be adjusting the raised beds and in ground beds to not be watered as often, but it was a bit dry, so I started with a more frequent schedule. I'm thinking that the raised beds might need water more often than the in ground beds. We'll see.