Spring Has Sprung – 2018

March 12, 2018 / Matt Talley / 2 Comments

With the official start of Spring – as determined by the fact that my wife was reading a book, enjoying the sunshine, and drinking wine in the yard – we had a busy weekend at La Maison Du Talley:

Moved all the power tools in the shop against the wall for temp storage duty
Ordered material for attic finish
Set up new iPhone (old one a brick!)
Checkout at Pratt to be able to independently use their fabrication shop.
Moved everyone else’s crap out of my basement and temporarily into the garage
Said dirty words about all the other people’s crap being stored in our home
Cleaned the basement completely out
Pruned the apple trees in the backyard
Restacked the firewood wood pile
Cleaned and prepped attic for floor installation
Published two YouTube videos
Set up new condenser microphone in home office/studio
Breakfast with my mom and wife
Went to the Moonshiners 36th Annual Jeep Swap Meet
Did not buy a new-to-me 1946 CJ-2A project Jeep
Stayed Married
Did not buy a motorcycle or boat at the swap meet
Stayed married – there is a theme…
DID buy an ARB on-board air compressor and a duel battery mount – and got a sweet deal!
Signed up for three classes at Pratt for this spring: Block printing, wood carving, and letterpress
Padded and protected the wood floor and built-ins in prep for attic finish
Cleaned the hot tub
Edged and mowed the front and back yard
Spread Weed&Feed on the back yard and parking strip
Re-seeded the front yard

President’s Day 2018

February 20, 2018 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

President’s Day is here and it is time to prune the fruit trees, roses, and lavender. Or at least that was my plan for yesterday. Instead, I spent WAY TOO MUCH time on Twitter – ranting about sensible gun laws and the current US administration. I also spent a couple of hours cleaning the house, washing dishes, working on 2 videos, walking the puppies, and working in the shop. So the entire day was not wasted on-line.

In the shop, I am building a Screen Printers Workbench for a local artist, Amy M. Douglas. She does some pretty amazing prints and oil/acrylic work. We are trading my time for art, so it is a win/win for both of us. Below are a couple of shots taken during the build and I will have a whole YouTube video about the build in a week or so.

I will spend an afternoon this coming weekend pruning, re-stacking firewood, and cleaning the yard – I see a dump run in my future.

3/4/2018 Update:

The bench is done and delivered.

Fall Harvest and Market visits – long & picture heavy post

November 6, 2017 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

It has snowed over the last three days, so I guess that our fall harvest season is officially over.

Our Garden this year was planted a bit late – like a month and a half, due to me having hip surgery and the complete rework of the back yard. Consequently, our sweet corn never fully ripened, but the hot weather and sunshine this summer made for great tomatoes, peppers, and squash. To add to our bounty: our grass is Ireland-green and we are set up great for next year 🙂

The yard – old and new:

We got real figs for the first time ever from a small fig tree on our south fence line. It has been in the ground for 5 years and this was the first year that it really produced fruit, which we enjoyed with breakfast. Our two cherry trees were not as productive as last year, but some of that had to do with the weeks-long battle we had each evening with the snails and slugs climbing the trees and the ants that came later.

The apple trees produced fairly heavily as well, though no thanks to an “arborist” that screwed up the pruning and set our yard on fire with an errant cigarette butt – seriously.

The apple trees:

Squash and Veggies:

The Lapin and Stella Cherries:

Stamps-With-Foot really came into her own this year with the flowers she planted and cultivated! The houses next door and across the street were for sale at the same time and we had a couple of people comment on our “beautiful” yard and our “amazing flowers.” It made me proud of her, and of the front yard for the first time in years.

A few of the flowers:

Next year my bride has spectacular plans for more tulips, lots of lilies, dahlias everywhere, more lavender, and other bee-attracting flowers. We will also plant the garden earlier, with starts that have been hot-housed, have a 3’X4′ plot of garlic, lots of carrots, parsnips, and some more roma tomatoes. We are going to bag the apples to keep the apple-moth at bay and can/bake/press/ferment them next fall. A row of blueberries will go on the south-side fence where the firewood used to be. Raspberries will go in in a sunny spot and I am builting in 2 more garden boxes (pending Stamps-With-Foots approval) along the garage. Until then, we are blessed with a year-round farmer’s market in our neighborhood. It is full of local fruit, veggies, pasta, bread, honey, berries, cheese, fish, and meat. The offerings are seasonal and we have gotten to know some of the folks that grow our food, which is awesome.

Scenes from the West Seattle market:

My Week in Review

June 18, 2017 / Matt Talley / 3 Comments

This past week has been a week of mish-mash happenings:

90-day Post-surgery hip appointment: Could have gone better.
Fruit tree pruning
I built a lid for the compost boxes
A rat didn’t like my lid and chewed through the side to get at the worms in the compost bin
I said dirty words
Mounted 7 up-cycled cabinets in the garage
Finished painting 80 liner feet of 1/4 round trim.
Sweep and cleaned GROP
Organized some stuff into new shelves and cabinets.
Finished painting the corner shelf doors – 5 total coats of fresh paint
Installed the hinges and hung the doors on wrong cabinets
Said dirty words
Re-hung doors on the correct cabinet.
Scratched paint
More dirty words
Touched up paint
Finished corner cabinet install
Did some Physical Therapy for my Old Man hip
Mowed and edged the yard
Read a book
Made a few Instagram and Twitter posts
Amazon sent me a new tool!
Flew drone one afternoon after J-O-B
Planted the boxwood shrubs
Bought garden starts at Nursery: tomatoes, corn, squash, zucchini, peppers,herbs, lettuce, etc…
50+ hours at my J-O-B, hustlin’ to keep us fed and the lights on
Watched about 2 hours of NetFlix
Gave away a bed in our home office
Had to delver it to new owner
Drank some French wine
Worked on cedar log garden table
Bought couch/guest bed for the office/TV room
Braved the gauntlet at IKEA – three hours to pick up a pre-ordered couch 🙁
IKEA gave me a $50 discount for the trouble
Had to source clear glass Victorian-style pull knobs for the corner cabinet doors
Spoke to both of my children for Father’s Day
Heart Happy
Planted summer garden
There was some coffee drinking and puppy snuggling
Took top off of Jeep for the first time in 1.5 years
Started Raining the second I took it out of the Garage
Made grumpy noises
Had coffee and listened to a bluegrass jam session at favorite coffee shop
Watched a movie
Was prolific on Twitter and Instagram
Murdered some dandelions
Rode around neighborhood on errands in topless Jeep when it stopped raining
Made happy noises
Sent some J-O-B e-mails from home
Started reading American Gods out loud with my awesome wife
Went to bed to start it all over again on Monday morning

Spring has Sprung!!

May 4, 2017 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

Holy Crap, it has been sunny and over 70F for two solid days here in Seattle for the first time in 6 months! Flowers and trees are blooming. Mason, bumble, and honey bees are flying about. My grass is green. This all makes me sooo happy. In a couple of weeks, we are taking a little referral bonus from my J-O-B and doing a front and back yard makeover to include a little fruit tree planting, grass for the back yard, and veggie garden.

Footnote: I cursed us all. 12 hours after I posted this, there was a huge thunderstorm in Seattle. Lightning, buckets of rain, power outages… Probably all my fault.

Wood Carvings at the Cluny in Paris

August 9, 2014 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

We spent 3 hours at Musée de Cluny (Musée national du Moyen Âge) in Paris on a recent trip. I highly recommend the little museum and the adjacent garden. While I enjoyed the tapestry and armor and paintings, it was the wood carvings that really stood out. The detail… Braids, carved folds in the dresses, miniature figures and scenes in a triptych that were beyond belief, fingernails, pages of a book… All carved in 400+ year old oak. Astonishing.

Side note: the plums in The Unicorn Forest (forêt de la Licorne) section on the garden were ripe and falling. I tried one ant it was delicious – upper sweet and deep blood red. They will make terrific jam. I may have brought 10-15 plums home with me and extracted the seeds. I plan to plant a few in a local forest and I have a sneaking suspicion that a very similar tree will grow in our yard in Seattle and in a friend of ours yard in Portland…

Our French Jardin

June 27, 2014 / Matt Talley / 1 Comment

With my J-O-B and all that we have going on here in France (work, travel, guests, work, work…) there is NO WAY that I can have a proper garden. To scratch my farming itch, I have been medium obsessive over the grass (I have not found the desire to begin a campaign of slaughter for the dandelions as yet) and have made our outside living space as nice a possible. The prior occupants of our house planted rosemary, sage, lavender (we have 5 different bee types on it right now), a couple of fruit trees and some bulbs that we are nursing a little the the color and life help with my primal need to make stuff grow.

We eat outside in the evenings a couple nights a week and I bought a sweet masonry grill from an English couple that were moving to Spain. The thing weighed a ton, but it works and looks great. In addition to grilling on weekend afternoons, I REALLY like to have my coffee in the shade of the porch out back if my schedule allows and the hammock has an assign spot in the shade. We see our back yard here as more of an outdoor room and have furnished it with a teak table set and the Adirondack lawn furniture that I made for Stamps-With-Foot a couple of years ago – she insisted we bring it from Seattle 🙂

Summer Garden 2013

August 23, 2013 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

Fall will be on us in a couple of weeks and this has been a fairly productive garden year, though not quite as bountiful as last year. I blame it on my travel schedule since the weather this year has been fantastic. We have less tomatoes, but a bunch of corn – 40+ stalks that are a week or so away from harvesting. A huge running squash plant, but only a few actual squash – it should have nipped it. Since rhubarb and Swiss chard are disgusting weeds that I feel has no place in my garden, the two plants that my lovely wife planted are going gang-busters…

The crows found the cherry trees up front and within two days ate EVERY single cherry – green or otherwise, and left pits scatted about the lawn to taunt me. Grumble, grumble, grumble… A particular squirrel found our raspberries & thorn-less blackberries and our harvest was cut by 50% or so. We grew TWO LEMONS!! Total cost for time, the tree, energy to keep it alive for two winters, water, etc.., means that my lemons are worth $500 each. The Apple trees are healthy and we have a few apples – we need more bees. The fig did well and we are going to plant it in a sunny spot in the front. No blueberries to speak of. We will plant our two Sunshine verities along the side of the south front fence and see how they do for the next couple of years.

On the flower front, we are awash in dahlias and lilies and poppies. The kitchen and bathroom have been filled almost all summer with various cuttings. Stamps-With-Foot is giddy about her progression from plant murderer (she once killed a jade plant… How do you kill jade?!) into a budding flower gardener. Giddy. Below are some pictures of some of the fruit, veggies, flowers, and berries from our garden at home so far this year:

Stamps-With-Foot’s Garden

January 30, 2013 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

Seattle has suffered through a weeks of freezing fog, stagnant air, flu season, and intermittent rain. The weather has me longing for long September evenings in our back yard….

2012 was a great year for us outside and in the yard. Stamps-With-Foot had her greening thumb put to work and our garden was crazy plentiful, in part because of her planting of mutant green squash and her nightly wine sipping/watering regimen. She moved dirt, turned the compost, picked berries, planted, harvested, pruned, cut bushes, dug in the dirt, and even removed a slug or two. I was very proud of her!

That hard work and spent energy was put to good use and we traded our bounty of veggies with the neighbors, she froze raspberries and blackberries that we both toiled over and my sweet wife made countless spinach and arugula salads from plants that we grew. To top it all off, she turned some of our tomatoes into chutney that was canned to make Christmas gifts. She is turning into quite the little homesteader.

Our yard is in bloom – Spring 2012

June 3, 2012 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

Magical Spring has finally come to Le Maison du Talley. Our rhododendrons are back and in full pooping bloom after they were hacked back last year. The tulips, daffodils, and poppies have all decided to bloom at the same time. The Spanash, English and Provence lavender has taken root and flourished along the front fence. After a two year struggle with blossom-rot, the two cherries up front are full of flowers and green cherries. We have Mandarin orange blossoms, apple blossoms, apricots, figs, raspberry buds, a fence line of blooming roses, and 3 Meyer’s lemons on the dwarf tree in our backyard mini-orchard.

Stamps-with-Foot and I planted garlic and onions in the fall that are close to being pulled and we spent an afternoon planting tomatoes, squash, corn, and zucchini in two of our raised beds. After in initial problem with early blight last year, our two full beds of tomatoes went NUTS! and we had more that we could use or give away. We were more selective this year and planted just a couple varieties and only 7 plants. I hot-housed a bed of spinach, Swiss Chard, and beats all winter that is now in full production mode.

I plan to be home more this summer and really spend some time tending and harvesting, although one wouldn’t know it from all the traveling so far. I can’t wait until mid-August when I can sit in my cotton hammock, gently swinging over my Ireland-green grass, drinking a Dunkel Weissbeir, snuggling my wife, and patting our puppy while gazing out onto our yard and garden.

A fruitful season

December 13, 2011 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

I am sitting in our breakfast nook, drinking coffee and getting mentally prepped for my J-O-B. As I sip my needed and delicious cup o’ joe, I can see the winter sunrise reflecting off the tips of the frost covered grass in the front yard. It has me ruminating on the intensity, goals, minor failures, and harvest from this years garden and yard work.

I spent our very cold spring getting our raised boxes ready for a bumper crop: perfect soil mix, irrigation lines, compost, etc… The tomatoes were planted a little early and they got an early blight that stunted them for a time, but they came back in force and we had more tomatoes than we new what to do with this year. I didn’t get the onions in the ground soon enough or plant garlic at all, so e ultimately gathered 2 medium white onions and I left the rest of the shoots in the ground this fall, planted winter garlic and covered them with straw so the we will have a summer crop next year.

We feel our biggest success was with our greens. Planted spinach, butter lettuce, and chard that fed us all summer. There was an unfortunate incident with the broccoli (bugs, microwave, crunchy dinner…), but on the whole our bed of greens was were most of the bang for our buck came from.

Fall hurt a little. I was away a good bit traveling for work and the garden was neglected. My very first apple was stolen by a squirrel, the slugs went NUTS on the last of the tomato crop. Fvcking slugs… There will be a battle next year and I am planning on a plan of full slug eradication. There was some definite success though: we gathered almost 2 gallons of raspberries, made mint mojitos and mint juleps from the 6 types of mint I have growing in containers. There were probably 3 bushels of tomatoes that came out of one 3×7 raised bed – really. We had our first lemon, first fig, cherries, huckleberries, strawberries (also hurt by the squirrels though), a full cup of blue berries, beets, greens, and lot of knowledge gained through screwing up.

Thoughts for this winter and next year:

Death to all slugs!!
Need more bees early in the season for fruit trees – hang some mason bees in a warm area.
Grow starts in basement and do not plant too early.
Mulch raspberries and roses.
Cut all blackberries out.
Need more drip irrigation hose.
Raise kitchen herb planters up another foot off the ground.
Raise strawberry pots up as well.
Prune tomato flowers so that crop is smaller and fruit larger.
Use apple bags to keep apple pests at bay.
Spray fruit trees early!
Spray roses with anti-rust/fungal early and monthly.
Spend more time in garden.

Fresh cut grass makes me tingle in the lower abdominal region…

May 13, 2011 / Matt Talley / Leave a comment

After 100+ days of rain, spring is finally here. I only really know that because my lapin cherry tree and the ornamentals on the block are in full blossom. Hopefully, all the hard work done in the rain and mud till now is about to start paying off.

Prep has been the theme for the past few months. I spent some quality time killing yard moss, reseeding in the front and back yards, adding weed and feed, conducting property-wide dandelion genocide, planting 70+ bulbs, and getting the soil in the garden bed ready for the tomatoes, carrots, onions and garlic. In addition to finishing the raised beds and converting the cat litter-filled pond into a flower planter for my wife, I have cut all the trash trees, vines, and blackberries from my south fence. My neighbor on that side keeps his home and yard in the Miss Havisham fashion. I have taken three loads of branches/leaves/vines to the dump and I can now see from one end of our property to the other. So far this year his pine tree has delivered three 5-gallon buckets worth of pinecones in my front yard and I have had to clean my gutters three times. I have a sneaking suspicion that the particular pine tree in question is not long for this world… There is a holly tree of some relation that is not looking all that well either...

I finally got a great espalier apple tree in the ground, two columnar apples to flank it, and an additional cherry (a glacier) up front. There is now a fig for Laurel, a dwarf Helena apricot from Dave&Sarah, a Satsuma, and an Improved Meyer lemon – all in containers so we can hot-house them this winter. For the side yard, there are two huckleberries in bloom – ready to plant. The last rose bush (a J&P Radiant Perfume) has been planted on the back fence and irrigation lines have been run to the roses, garden boxes, raspberries, and fruit trees.

The Apricot and citrus trees will stay in containers so that I can

move them into a hot-house when the temperature drop in the fall.

The multiple weird cold snaps this year have been decidedly unhealthy for my strawberry pots, but the kitchen herbs planted last spring are doing well. The orange-mint has taken over a rectangular container and the rosemary is starting to bloom tiny baby-blue flowers. The two sunshine blueberries in pots are covered in small white blossoms and the grass in front and back is thick, healthy, and Ireland green – I can’t wait to string up the hammock and snooze gently swinging above my lawn. Although I still have dandelion farms on either side there have been very few that have dared to peak up in the grand lawn of Le Maison Du Talley this year. Their appearance has been followed with swift and forceful retribution. Speaking of the weed farms adjacent to me: It seems that someone sprayed them in the middle of the night with Scott’s liquid death. Now all the yellow-orange flowers that they were cultivating seem to be shriveling up. I think it was the gnomes. -I have a couple of English garden gnomes that are leftist lawn militants. The local dogs give our place a wide berth – narry a singe poop on the parking strip this year and there is a racoon living over at Miss Havisham’s and they are preparing to hunt safari-style…

The second of three loads of branches taken to the dump in the last month. My neighbor loves me so much that he shares his trees and yard waste with me…

Driven Outside

Tag: Fruit Trees