We'll call it "Cozy"...yeah that's it!

We are here

...or at least we will be after Dec 17th if everything goes according to plan. About an inch below the big white roof in the middle of the page.

Can't wait until summer !

Upcoming Ad for SLCT in The Scarborough Leader

Had some fun coming up with the copy and headline on this one.

TK

Boo!

Latest column - Apples

What do Apples, Forest Gump, Janis Joplin and Timex all have in common? Read my latest article to find out.

TK

Where will I find MY Walden ?

Henry - with accompanyment

"Life in an out of the way place carries universal import, and people everywhere seem to understand what David Mallett's songs are about. Although they are rooted in place, they speak to the essential things that move us all. If you grow up in a small rural town, as Mallett did, you can't help but learn its stories. He knows about the people who shouldn't have stayed, but did, and those who shouldn't have left, but did..."

Just ordered the CD after reading about this in the Bangor Daily News.

When you gotta go !

....ahh, life with little boys ! Betcha Michelle never thought about doing this before Garrett and Alan came along!

TK

Play (yawn) Ball !

Glad to see I'm not the only guy thinking this way !!

A DAD'S LAMENT
Game Time Vs. Bedtime

By Philip Lerman
Sunday, October 14, 2007; Page B02

The signs of fall are upon us: The days are shorter. The leaves are falling.

And dads are sitting in their basements, watching the baseball playoffs and getting ready for the World Series. Alone.

what i'm reading- The Prince of Thieves

i originally picked this up to read on our trip to the UK...just getting around to reading it now. really good so far, with some fairly accurate descriptions and dialog of Boston.

Take care of your Mum's - Latest Column

Sacrificial Mums
By Tim King

Do me a favor - after you’ve returned home from your local garden center, take a minute and put your mums (chrysanthemums) in the ground. You’ll notice I did not say on the porch, on the steps or on the ground next to the driveway. In the ground. The mums you just spent $30 on are not one hit wonders meant to dazzle for a few short weeks and then be discarded. They have more life to give.

In a few weeks, thousands of spruce and pine trees will be harvested, packaged and delivered for Christmas celebrations across the country. That is their fate. It’s what they were born and raised to be. They have had their time in the wild, living under the stars and watching the seasons change from their northern fields.

But the colorful mums we buy are different. They are whole plants, not simply ornamental figureheads. They have roots, stems, leaves and flowers that will last many years - if treated right.

It amazes me year after year, the shear volume of colorful chrysanthemums that are on display at nurseries, supermarkets, superstores and even hardware stores. It seems to me that the number of mums for sale always far outnumber the amount of shoppers looking to add some color to their dying landscapes.

Mums come in a wide variety of colors, shapes and sizes to offer something for everyone. Bright reds, deep maroon, orange, yellow or white, purple, even shades of blue are available to complement any house palette. At this time of year, there are very few choices when it comes to flowering plants. This is the mum’s time to shine.

For this reason, each year thousands are displayed in yards across New England for a few weeks, only to be left for dead and tossed in the trash after Thanksgiving. I just can’t see the point in spending money, year after year, to replace something that is made to come back on its own.

Imagine deciding to replace your new car after it ran out of its first tank of gas, or never taking the goldfish out of the plastic bag when you brought it home from the pet store. A week later, you look at the bag on your counter with its “sleeping” resident and simply flush it away and go get another one. Doesn’t make sense, right?

To me, buying a mum without intending to take care of it is equally negligent. What these plants want more than anything is to be in the ground. Sure, some plants don’t mind the ground-like environments that we create for them in pots and containers indoors. But I’m talking about wild, hardy perennials here.

The mum is plant designed to put on a colorful show, then hunker down to patiently wait out the cold until the warmth of Spring returns. I wonder how many of you have secretly questioned the “hardiness” of the mums’ moniker after witnessing them wilted and dying after the first hard frost. Not so hardy you might think.

I’d like to see how hardy you would be without basic warmth and protection from the elements. Although the surface air may dip below freezing, the underground roots stay relatively warm and toasty into November.

So, if you’ve got some mums just chilling in a pot on your front steps, dig a hole three feet to the left or right…and plant them! Next year, buy some more, then plant those too. Pretty soon, you’ll have a fantastic fall garden that will return and expand on its own each year.


Tim King is a freelance writer who sees the forest and the trees from his home in Scarborough. He can be reached at - sylvan.sauntering@gmail.com

Red Sox clinch the Division - And we were there !!!

Garrett and me at the Red Sox game on Friday night. That's us in the top right hand corner....I'm the guy with his arm in the air next to the guy with the white shirt. Garrett is the small brown smudge next to me. It was pretty friggin' cool to be there watching the Orioles beat the Yankee's on the Fenway jumbotron. I pulled this picture off Boston.com the next day.

Column - Finding the right place

There’s no place, like the right place.

By Tim King

Sylvan – Adj. of, pertaining to, or inhabiting the woods.

This is the season when a lot of us will look around the garden and evaluate the year. Sure, there may still be a few weeks left of color - late bloomers, hardy annuals, newly purchased mums – but the writing is on the wall. What’s grown has grown, what’s bloomed has bloomed. Soon the color palette will shift from the ground to the sky with the brief flash of brilliance called autumn.

The only question that remains now is “Did my garden do what I wanted it to do?”

For me this question is usually followed by “well, then what can I do differently?” I am, after all, a guy…problem solving is what I’m hardwired to do.

Most often, if a plant or shrub didn’t end up living up to my expectations, it’s not the plants fault. It’s mine. Maybe I didn’t fertilize it when I should have…or at all. If I did, maybe I should have measured more carefully? Or maybe I really did plant those bulbs upside down after all?

There are a lot of things that I could have done wrong this summer. But, like most things in life, I found that simply finding the right location can be the single most important factor of insuring gardening success.

Unfortunately, plants must rely on the good sense (or otherwise) of their owners to determine their fate. Plant a marigold in the shade – you’ll watch it fade. Put a hosta in the sun – by July it’s all done.

To reach their full potential, plants must find a place that matches their specific need for sunlight. Of course water, the right type of soil and showing them a little attention once in a while is also important, but without the right location, their fate is sealed – a life of mediocrity, or worse.

This is why I can be seen digging up perfectly good plants around my yard at this time of year. If I can get them into a new spot now, maybe they’ll have a better shot of coming up stronger next year. I’ll either move them to an entirely new location or split them up and set the stage for a botanical a-b test next year. There’s nothing quite like seeing actual proof that you made the right decision. For me, affirmation yields contentment.

Whether its flowers, shrubs, trees or people, until something finds the right place to grow, it can never truly reach its full potential.

Unfortunately, you can only find this out by trying the other places first. Its trial and error and it can be scary. How long do you think it took the first person to figure out the best time, location and conditions for growing corn, or potatoes? Talk about a test of faith. Guess wrong and you go hungry.

Today, it’s easier. Many of the plants we buy come with clear planting and growing instructions right on the tag. The biggest challenge is trying to decipher the difference between partial sun, partial shade and dappled sun…or how to keep something moist and in well-drained soil at the same time.

It can take years or it can happen instantly. But when you find the right place, it’s something special.

With just the right amount of sunlight, your plants will have a much better chance of actually looking like the pictures in the catalog that you bought them from. What’s best is that most of this growth will occur on its own, with very little effort from you. A perfect example of being in the right place at the right time. Flowers will blossom with vigor and roots will grow strong and deep.

After finding this good place, future generations of plants will have an easier time reaching their full potential too. A particularly hard winter or wet spring can still wreak havoc on your garden, but at least the scales will now be tipped in your favor.

The process reminds me of one of my favorite quotes about hard work and success. Thomas Jefferson said, “I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

Finding the right place can be hard work, but the rewards are great and the choice is ours alone.

Tim King is a freelance writer who sees the forest and the trees from his home in Scarborough. He can be reached at - sylvan.sauntering@gmail.com

Latest column - Trees

Take my Trees…Please!
By Tim King

The headline came to me while writing this article and I had to do some research to make sure that I was using it in the correct context. Many of you may (and many more may not) remember the famous line from comedian and violinist Henny Youngman. “Take my wife…please.”

I was relieved to learn that Henny and his wife were actually very close and were married for more than sixty years…the origin of the joke was an honest misunderstanding by a theater usher. Mr. Youngman only wanted his wife to be escorted to her seat first, but the usher found the line tremendously funny, when taken literally.

You see, I have a love/hate relationship with the trees in my yard. Let’s just say, I know why our section of town is called Pine Point! Between the hazy clouds of dusty pollen that coats everything in sight and has us scrambling for Benadryl in the spring, the sap that stains our vehicles all summer and the needles and cones that ruin the PH balance of my lawn, it’s safe to say that pines are not one of my favorite arbores.

Then again, oaks are not much better.

The oak trees in my yard are constantly shedding their deadwood branches all over my yard. In the fall, my vehicles are bombarded with thousands of golf ball size acorns and the clean white winter landscape is muddied by their late falling leaves, later to be revealed as a clumpy, soggy mess come spring.

Don’t even get me started about the riotous band of squirrels that may come for the acorns, but clearly stay for the much tastier seeds found in my birdfeeder.

All summer long the voracious roots of these overbearing neighbors suck up all the water from my lawn and block the rain and sun from reaching the ground, leaving patches of grass stunted and brown. They are forever tossing their buds, leaves, bugs and branches into my pool and prematurely darkening my deck of the already much too short summer sunshine.

In a few more weeks the work will really begin. Day after day, leaves and needles, cones and acorns will tumble from the trees and need to mulched or hauled away. It will start as a dainty flutter as the nights turn cooler, but will undoubtedly end in a deluge of tree debris covering every inch of my property.

You may be asking why I simply don’t move, where is the love…or even why I would have chosen to live where I do in the first place? Clearly my life would be simpler, maybe even happier, without all of these troublesome trees cluttering my landscape. On the surface, this is true, but I recently came to realize something that has helped me gain a better perspective.

Simply, they were here first.

This past spring, I had an arborist give me an estimate for thinning out the deadwood in the oaks and remove a few of the scrub pines whose growth will always be stunted by the much larger oaks. While we were walking, he mentioned that the age of oaks was probably around 30-40 years old. “At least the second growth, the original trees probably started here more than 100 years ago.”

I was amazed to learn that these monsters were actually second-generation oak trees. I had no idea. What tipped off the arborist were the three main shoots that came out of the ground and stretched to the sky. Each one more than a foot in diameter. “The original tree was as wide as all three of these shoots combined,” he said as I imagined a single trunk, more than five feet across! There is one such stump in my neighborhood. Counting its rings, I found more than 80.

Since that day last spring, I have found myself being more respectful of these proud sentries of my yard. Year after year, they have protected the house against the heat of the sun, the cold wind of countless nor’easters and more sleet, rain and snow than I have seen in my entire life. Actually, more than anyone I know…except maybe my wife’s 102 year old grandfather.

What has impressed me most was the shear determination they have shown over the years. They’ve survived harsh storms, drought and disease… even been completely cut down, only to grow strong and true once again.

Somehow, this makes it a little easier to deal with the mess, hard work and aggravation that comes with sharing my small piece of the world with a few trees. It also reminds me of the importance and limitless potential that can be found by developing a strong set of roots.

Tim King is a freelance writer who sees the forest and the trees from his home in Scarborough. He can be reached at - sylvan.sauntering@gmail.com

Edie Clark - writer

"For the past 17 years, she has written a popular monthly essay for Yankee. Known as Mary’s Farm, the column is rooted in the place where she lives, an old farm in the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire. The farm, which once grew corn and flax, sheep and horses, once belonged to a woman named Mary. Edie bought the farm 10 years ago, and now grows only hay. And stories."

"Time wounds all heel's" ~John Lennon

this was the answer John Lennon gave to the question about whether or not he held any ill will towards Richard Nixon for trying to quiet his voice through threats of deportation. An interesting documentary because it shows a little from both sides. how about the brutally honest G. Gordon Liddy "if he had just sung his songs and kept his mouth shut, the FBI would have left him alone."

How true Lennon's quote soon became in regards to Nixon.

Triskele

Triskeles are one of the most common elements of Celtic art; they are found in a variety of styles in both ancient and modern Celtic art, especially in relation to depictions of the Mother Goddess. They also evoke the Celtic concept of the domains of material existence- earth, water, and sky, and their interrelations.

song lyrics

Twice as much
Ain't twice as good
And can't sustain
Like one half would.
It's wanting more
That's gonna bring me to
My knees.

John Mayer - Gravity

Into the Wild - Movie

great book...started me on the journey that landed us in Maine. I'll be very interested to see how they end it...since no one really knows.

latest column- thanks for the inspiration Maryellen

Learning to let it go - and grow

By Tim King

I got an interesting email from my aunt last week. It consisted of a conversation between God and St. Francis who were talking about a group called the “Suburbanites” and their odd landscaping habits. Here’s how it began:

GOD to St. Francis: “Frank, you know all about gardens and nature. What in the world is going on down there on the planet? What happened to the dandelions, violets, thistle and stuff I started eons ago? I had a perfect no-maintenance garden plan. Those plants grow in any type of soil, withstand drought and multiply with abandon. The nectar from the long-lasting blossoms attracts butterflies, honeybees and flocks of songbirds. I expected to see a vast garden of colors by now. But, all I see are these green rectangles.”

To which St. Francis replies: “It's the tribes that settled there, Lord. The Suburbanites. They started calling your flowers "weeds" and went to great lengths to kill them and replace them with grass.”

God and St. Francis went on to talk about how boring green grass is, how we fertilize and water our lawns to make it grow, even when it is supposed to be resting, just so we can work harder (or pay money) to cut it down. God listened in further disbelief as St. Francis told him about the Suburbanites quest to scoop up every last leave in the fall, even through he intended them to be used as protection during the winter, and fertilizer come spring.

Imagine his shock to later find out that Suburbanites then cut down trees to grind into mulch to do the same job as the leaves!

While I will admit that I am guilty of many of these same tactics, the email did get me to try and imagine what a more natural landscape would look like in my yard. I began to look for examples to try and mimic.

I didn’t have to look very far.

The next time you are driving down main thoroughfare like Payne Road, the connector between Rte 1 and Rte 295 or Rand Road in Westbrook, take a look at the natural diversity of plants that thrive in the stretch of land between the road and the trees. I did, and was amazed at what I saw.

Where I had once seen only weeds and overgrowth (if I noticed anything at all in my rush to get to wherever I was going) I now became aware of a wonderfully wild strip of various colors, sizes and shapes that has grow and evolved entirely on its own. The view, when you take away the distractions of asphalt and road noise, would rival any other found in a more serene, hidden tract of land.

As I pass the wavering kaleidoscope of purple, blue, white and yellow flowers of all types, I wonder for a minute about a single stand of black-eyed Susan daisies that are set a few feet away from the others plants.

How, in the middle of the Maine Turnpike, high on a rocky cliff, with the noise and smoke from thousands of traveling vehicles, did this dainty blossom of sunshine come to be?

I imagine a lone flower flying out of a car, maybe a convertible, from a bouquet being brought to sick friend, like that floating feather in the movie Forrest Gump. Perhaps it lay along the roadside, withering in the hot sun, as countless cars speed by. Eventually, the petals dry and fall off and its seed pack lightens. One day, a huge 18-wheeler truck blasts down the breakdown lane and its tremendous backdraft launches the seeds up to more fertile ground.

All winter the seeds wait under a blanket of snow (hopefully) and are pulled into the soil by the warm rains of spring, and grow. With a firm foothold now in place and a bright future of life in the wild, Susan begins her new life overlooking the roadway where she was unknowingly abandoned just months before…and begins a family of her own.

One of my favorite quotes from Henry Thoreau is “there is only as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate—not a grain more.” I try to keep this thought with me as I walk, ride, hike or bike in order to better absorb what is in front of me. Like a Boy Scout, I want to be prepared, to see.

I realize that there is much more beauty already occurring around me than I will ever be able to replicate in my own private landscape. The challenge is knowing when to stop trying so hard and just let nature do what it does best – grow.


Tim King is a freelance writer who sees the forest and the trees from his home in Scarborough. He can be reached at - sylvan.sauntering@gmail.com