Garden on Corliss Homestead Journal

Well, that's one way to meet the neighbours!
Glad to know your chicken protection is working. Hopefully they can keep the dog safer in future. Lucky for you she was a good natured dog though!

Rescue Dog Update

Our new Dachshund Loy (Also known as Noodle) has been both a joy and challenging. We have given her a home at the age of three after being used as breeding stock for a local Amish family. She is all about people. Her biggest desire in the day is to lay near you and accept all the affection you can give. Her personality has been progressively coming out and it has been amusing to watch. She enjoys barking at the mailman as he walks by each day, but won't bark at other walkers in the street. Loy has some prey drive to her and has proudly brought me a chipmunk once in her mouth when I wasn't keeping an eye on her as best as I should of been. She also is a serial carpet pooper which has been a challenge! It has been accident after accident, mostly at night while we sleep, and my first few tricks have not worked.

Dachsund on the wife.

We made the decision that we will start a crate training protocol to try and help her control her bathroom urges last night. I have a crate that we used on her 'sister' who is a much bigger Plott Hound stored up in my crawlspace that I got out and brought downstairs. Luckily there is an insert so I can limit the floor space so she doesn't make a potty spot and a laying spot. Anyway, I did not get the crate setup last night as I need to clean it up. What I did do is close the dog into the bedroom with me last night. I fully expected to wake up to a mess but low and behold there wasn't any issues! She did her business outside when I got up and she got a little treat.

Dachsund and a Bully Stick

We will see if we can get a second successful night...

Finally got some time to go fishing this past weekend.

Fishing in New York

There is a turn off from a state route near me that hosts a large segment of water that is a remnant of an old lock system. Hawks, eagles and ospreys are commonly seen here so the presence of fish is likely. Walking up to the shoreline had a number of frogs spooked which was a good sight.

Originally I planned to fish with some worms as bait but I forgot to get my hands on some. Instead, we settled with corn on a #6 barbless hook.

We had plenty of nibbles, but no luck landing anything. I suppose that is why it is called fishing and not catching.

When my husband and I get to fish this is how it always goes, lots of fishing, no catching haha.

I am in my third growing season utilizing mulched paths between my raised beds. I have decided this fall that I would start harvesting the generated compost in these paths to top dress my growing spaces before the freeze sets in.

Raking back layers of mulch

I started by raking back several layers of mulch material (Woodchips, sawdust, leaves, other organic debris) until I reached a layer of fine textured compost and soil. I setup a wheelbarrow with some soil sieve so I could just shovel into the sieve and pick out large chunky pieces. I ended up needing to break up a lot of the material because it formed into clumps. I was surprised with the sheer amount of mycelium I found so I made sure to leave untouched areas around to reinoculated the dug areas next year.

Sifting pathway compost

I'm thinking of building a finer sieve insert in order to get rid of some of the more coarse material that still got through my half inch sieve.

Sifted pathway compost

This material works great for top dressing, I imagine it will provide some mulch benefits as well as being a compost. I'm rather pleased. Instead of paying to import compost like previous growing seasons, all I need to pay now with is time and effort.

Topdressed bed