Howling at the Moon

The moon is full tonight.  The clouds are broken and thick enough to lose sight of it at times, yet thin enough to catch the moonlight so as to light up the night.

Winter doesn't officially start for well over a month, but I'm already itching for Spring.  My vegetables aren't really growing anymore and it won't be long before a good frost knocks them down for good.  The grass doesn't need to be mowed anymore... the wild onions still do.  It's so cold in the morning that skipping the 5 minute commitment to making coffee and putting on real clothes before escorting the dog outside for her morning jaunt is not an option.

But all is not lost, work is yet to be done inside.  The shop needs a workbench.  The landscape plan needs to be *refined* before any additional digging or pulling takes place.  My wife tells me that the furniture needs to moved... and probably moved again.

Tonight's moon taunts me with its powers of reflection.

The morning chill burns off of a cabbage leaf.

Our November rainfall total. Note the shady, poor location and the sad little beaten beet.

My Orchids

The Background: I'm new to the whole thing, but I'm very proud of my Orchid. It's some sort of Phalaenopsis, a NO-ID Phal as they call it. My wife bought it at the store a year ago and... suffice it to say that it was generally considered a goner after it quit blooming. I set it out where all of my other plants go to die... by the mulch pile. I tripped over it one day several months later to find that the leaves were still green and healthy. So I bought some basic orchid supplies (Spaghnum moss and Special Orchid Mix -- looks like bark with charcoal and some kind of spongy material) and soon it was shooting up a new flower spike with two off shoots, all three covered in buds......... long story short, I took something that was only an impulse from ending up in the trash can and inadvertently ended up with a beautiful treasure. It's a good feeling. This orchid opened its first bud in July and is still blooming now in October.

The Event: My orchid actually has a brand new spike starting to shoot up.  This being my first orchid, I really wasn't sure what it was so I posted a picture on the forums at www.orchidgeeks.com. It's a great site for orchids - a very active, knowledgeable community. On it, I read that you can get cheap orchids from Lowe's Home Improvement if you buy plants that were never bought while in bloom. They set these poor little guys a-way back in the corner where the hoses evidently don't reach. As coincidence would have it, I needed a new supply line for our toilet. (The old supply line is "Flood Safe" which means that if flow exceeds 2.5 gpm then it shuts itself off. The only way to reset it is to take it off and put it back on. Anyway, our new water pump [I use "new" with the most negative of connotations. As in, "my new luggage that I got to buy because the airline lost mine."] is 1/6 of a horsepower more powerful which means that it now triggers my super flood safe fail-safe every time you... well... don't let it mellow. I tried to only open the water valve a little, but it makes the pump turn on and off while the tank fills up which I hear is bad for the pump.)

The Pictures:

1. All the supplies you need to repot an orchid. The small plant is my new Dendrobium Orchid that I bought for $4.49 (the same plant in bloom, though slightly larger, was priced at $24.49).

2. I'm filling the pot 1/4 full with shells (instead of rocks) then filling the rest with 1/2 orchid mix and 1/2 spag moss.

3. After soaking the mix and cleaning & trimming the roots of the orchid, I'm ready to put it in its new pot.

4. My newly potted Orchid alongside my Blooming Phalaenopsis Orchid.

Ad Nauseam: If I recall correctly, there is some species of orchid native to every part of the world. I'm interested in adding a SE North Carolina native orchid to by burgeoning collection soon -- I have no idea where to get one.

Catalyst

When we moved to Wilmington, we thought we were moving to the beach.  It's a twenty minute trip from pulling out of our driveway to stepping of the pavement and onto the sand at Wrightsville Beach.  Heck, for the first two months I lived here I lived in a shack (a 500 square foot kitcha-livingro-closet-breakfast nook-bathroom) that was less than 100 yards from the sand at Carolina Beach.  I never even imagined that the beach would be one of the lesser natural attractions (for my money) in Southeast North Carolina. 

In this post, I'd like to introduce you to one of the two places that first really opened my eyes to the natural wonders that lay within a 30 minute drive from Downtown Wilmington. If fact, these are the two places that really got me out of the air conditioning and into the wild. First, the Northeast Cape Fear River. Yes, most everyone knows that the Cape Fear river flows right in front of Historic Downtown so it may not be a big surprise that a lot of people can't tell the two apart. In fact, the confluence of the Cape Fear River (from the NW) and the Northeast Cape Fear River (from the north) occurs just north of the Battleship North Carolina and pretty much right across the water from the Coast Guard Diligence (FYI: the Isabella Holmes Bridge spans the NE Cape Fear, NOT the Cape Fear as many assume).

The part of the river that made such an impression on me is about 15 miles north of Wilmington off I-40 exit 408, near Rocky Point. The area is largely undeveloped though many take this exit on their way from Raleigh to Topsail Island. I was so surprised to learn that in an area known for sun soaked beaches there was an actual swamp a mere minutes away. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised if I had ever thought about it, but I didn't. On that day, I remember seeing a huge long leaf pine infested with Turkey Vultures (or Buzzards in the vernacular) -- the largest, most grotesque, most beautiful creatures I only knew existed in some place I would probably never visit.

Bald Cypress trees also stick in my mind from that day. 1) the oldest tree east of the continental divide is a Bald Cypress on the nearby Black River that's some 2000 years old. 2) I'm told that black bears sometimes find a nook at the top of Bald Cypress which have had the tops blown out in storms... the bears will back down into the hollow part at the top of the tree to sleep the Winter away. 3) The tops of very old Bald Cypress are some of the most interesting parts of trees that I have ever seen. Plants, moss, and whole new Cypress trees grow in (and out of) the tops of blown out Cypress. I would love to one day make it up in the top of one of these trees as from the ground it looks like a world in itself.

Below: a creek off of the NE Cape Fear River near Rocky Point, NC. It doesn't look like any huge old Bald Cypress were captured in this photo so I'll have to make another trip just for you all.

Back to the Earth!

Welcome to my blog!  First, let me say that I know nothing about blogging, and even less about being an outdoors individual.  So please, feel free at any time to comment, ridicule, lambast, praise, advise... you get the idea.

My goals for this blog are these:

1)  Enrich my recent newfound love for the outdoors.  Be it through personal inspection (i.e. writing my experiences on the blog) or though public support (i.e. you, the reader... who will undoubtedly leave comments galore that clue me in to the miracles I'm staring at but somehow missing).

2)  Encourage someone else that may be on the same journey.  Until well, now, I was a lurker that just flat enjoyed looking at pictures of other people's yards, flowers, vegetables, animals, and overall homescapes.

So, please enjoy and check back regularly!

Pictures:

Disclaimer: I inherited the yard you'll see pictures of when we moved into our new house in Wilmington, NC.

Above: My favorite stand of Iris.  I feel like they came and went relatively quickly this past spring...  I'm glad I got this picture because our time together was so short.