January is moving on pretty quickly. Christmas has come and gone, New Years celebrations are forgotten and the left over fireworks are soggy. I’ve had lots of time in the woods both sitting and watching Mother Nature in action and spending some enjoyable evenings with Max and our buddies circling up our campers. We take turns coming up with each nights dinner. We have had stews, chili’s, Shepards pie made from venison and home made biscuits, no matter what we have for dinner it is tradition to follow it up with Mrs. Edward’s chocolate pie.
We have been getting together like this for 20 something years, always with the chocolate pie. None of us eat or desire the pie in any other circumstance, just while camping. I don’t know what it is about camping, hiking, hunting, boating or beaching that makes that kind of food taste so good but I’m not fighting it. It’s nice to get out there and talk about what we saw while staring forward for 4 or 5 hours without making a sound or a smell. We talk about our work lives, our home lives and make plans for what more we can do to improve our chances for a big buck sighting. I can feel regular life peeling away from me the deeper into Yazoo county I get and the farther I get away from home. By the time I get to camp and get the gate open and settle into the camper my mind is on something different than my regular daily grind.
When you are about to spend a few nights and days in the woods you become acutely aware of the weather that is happening. I always hope I brought the appropriate clothes for the weather of the weekend. When sitting for that long in temperatures around the 30’s with minimal movement you sure better have your warmest clothing. I am having a harder time keeping my bones warm. I have down tops and bottoms which really help. When I just can’t get warm enough I pull out my trusty electric vest and my heated insoles. If it’s too cold for that to work with all my layers on then I’m probably going to sit that hunt out. Wildlife can catch the tiniest amount movement and sounds and one of their strongest senses is their sense of smell. We have to know which way the wind favors as we choose our stands for the next hunt coming up. The clothes that we hunt in are only used for hunting and put back in the airtight tote that they came from so we don’t pick up any odors that don’t seem natural. It sounds crazy but when I spend that much time away from home and work I want that time to count so I don’t take any chances. I will see all the Turkeys that I won’t get to see during Turkey season, somehow they just know.
I have seen up to 40 turkeys at a time with big gobblers strutting their stuff right in front of me. They go on vacation when the Turkey season starts. I will see coons, opossums, chipmunks, coyotes and tons of birds. The birds get close, even on the barrel of my gun since I am in camo and not moving they have no idea that I am there. I love to sit in the darkness for about 30 minutes before the sun rises. Other than the owls hooting the woods are silent. When there is just a little light coming through one little bird will break the silence with a peep then all will follow and raise a chatter until it gets dark again that evening. They go on all day then the same in reverse interests me in the evenings. I will try to get to a stand around 1:30 in the afternoon and stay there until dark. The later in the day it gets the quieter the woods will become until there are no more daytime sounds. That is about the same time that the nocturnal world comes alive with brand new sounds to behold. When I get in a stand in the early afternoon I have usually just woofed down a lunch, I am nice and cozy, it is just a perfect time to check on the backs of my eyelids for a little while. That is a good way to stay really quiet and really still, so I guess I’m doing my job in a way. I love the walk back to the truck or to camp in total darkness, it still amazes me how adapted your eyes can become to the darkness when you give them a chance. Someone will usually have started a fire so I get my standing-around-the-fire clothes on so we can tell our hunting stories. I have some great memories of these days and Max grew up out there experiencing these things, I think he still enjoys coming out there as much as I do but he’s a lot less footloose and fancy free now since real life is happening for him now.
Now that we have had our company New Year’s party at Top Golf Mimi and will be leaving this week to go to market in Atlanta. We are so happy to have gotten the full crew to Top Golf for some Sunday afternoon friendly competition games of golf. They catered the food and did a great job of taking care of all of us, plus we had some fierce competing going on which always makes it fun. We could not get that ball over the farthest net as much as we tried, I’m guessing it’s impossible. With all of that behind us we will drive to Atlanta and stay at a cool AirB&B that Mimi has found, she said she found an extra cool one this year so I can’t wait to see what we got. The market is downtown Atlanta, other than market the downtown area has nothing to offer that interests us so we stay in areas surrounded by the restaurants and music venues that we are interested in. We will usually catch some standup comedian wether it be an amateur comedian or a big name somebody we always have a blast starting the night with that. There seems to always be some music in town that we will try to see if we are feeling it.
Sometimes after slugging around market all day we just want a great meal out and some dessert in bed. We will buy for our garden center inside and out for a years supply of interesting things for our shoppers to enjoy. It takes 4 or 5 days to buy for a place the size of ours if you really know what you are doing. Every category has to be considered from outdoor wind spinners, pottery, furniture, trinkets, gifts and snozzberries. It takes time to find all the right things then to get them ordered and on their way as quickly as possible so we can get them ordered and products in and displayed so we can get our new year on it’s way. Mimi is magic at finding all the right things and I’m pretty good at finding good restaurants so it all works out.
This year we feel like there won’t be enough winter time to get all of our plans and projects done by showtime. We are coming down the homestretch with a complete renovation of Garden Works. We have replaced all the windows and exterior and interior siding with a charcoal metal, it looks great and has been a dream of Mimis for a number of years, it is so exciting to see that finally fruit ate for her. I will be building a new greenhouse near the retail bedding plant area just for those wavy gravey months when the nights dip below temperatures that don’t agree with those early spring plants. Until now we have put those plants on carts and drug them in for the night or nights while the weather makes up it’s mind. The new greenhouse will allow us to get our spring going a little earlier. Gardeners just can’t wait, I am right there with you, lets get the show on the road. My plans to create a seeding chamber are coming along nicely. I will have racks with heat pads to warm the roots of the seedlings. The racks will have shelves that I will hang artificial lighting for the seedlings.
From there I will have open tables in a warm greenhouse to allow the roots to get ready to be transplanted into the pots that will be available to our customers. I have over 300 new varieties of annuals, perennials, herbs and vegetables. I am growing these specifically for the reason that they just can’t be found on the market that we buy from. I want to have plants that are interesting and unusual, I think we have enough interested , experimenting gardeners who understand that gardening is about trial and error. I will win some and I will lose some with this air brained idea but I have to keep it interesting up there for myself and others who have come to expect some kind of non sense coming from my general direction. I have been leaning farther and farther back to the original reason for horticulture for me in the first place. Having the greenhouses where we grow all of our seasonal color at my disposal has made the plant part of the plant business a reality for me. It’s easy to get away from real gardening when it’s being run as a business. We tend to focus on the staff, the customers, trying to keep some of the money we make and other such Tomfoolery that we don’t make time for those things that really interest us at a deeper level. I am going to sneak the seeding part of our business into my day just to keep the smile on my face. We have so many great changes coming our way this year I can’t even imagine how all the extra stuff, the stuff we don’t plan on every day, will be able to creep into all this. I just know that it will, sometimes all I can do is laugh and shake my head at it.
Mimi and I are planning to have a maintain- plane- Jane year here at our house.(other than the greenhouse we are building down by the barn) We are going to just maintain what we have without any major projects like last year and the year before and the year before that. We bought each other a nice golf cart for christmas that is a better size for our paths and is quiet since it is electric, our old one was gas and too bulky for our paths. We will keep the mule for any heavy garden days since it has a big dump bed. We hope to get some steps closer to being able to produce our own compost here at the house. We have a great plan to have big bins of composting going on, I wish we would have started that a long time ago but here we are, no time like the present. I am hoping your year ahead looks like one that you can get excited about and that all your wildest dreams come true.
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