Daffodils are coming up. Is spring far behind?

Daffodils are up and the buds are getting bigger day by day.  In case you don't remember what they look like, I am posting some pictures from last year.

Such a simple flower, easy to take care of, deer won't eat it, gophers won't eat it either (actually it is poison so they are wise not to eat them).  Here in Grants Pass Real Estate they start coming up in January and just keep coming. We have had rain, freezing weather, a little snow, lots of frost, some warm sunny weather and through it all they keep coming.  Each year there are more of them.  They are lovely.  What's not to like?  Nothing apparently.  

I posted some of my early blooming daffodils last year, but I did not get around to posting these that come on later.  We have blooming daffodils for almost two months.

                            

Nice to be with you again.  So long for now from Grants Pass Real Estate.  

God bless.

chuck

30 Years to Bloom

This plant is one that my Mother gave me 30 years ago (actually it is more like 31 years, but 30 year plant sounds better).  












So I have had this plant for 30 years and I like it.  It is a succulent  so it can dry out and not suffer.  I liked it because of its look.  It had never bloomed.  That is, until a few days ago when my wife said, "Chuck, look at this."  I was amazed.  It sure looked like a bloom forming, a big bloom forming.


So now we have a beautiful plant with a bloom to be and I am thinking, "who knew it would bloom?"  


When I talked to my wife yesterday she said, "It opened!" When I looked at it, I thought, "Wow! what a blossom!"



I didn't actually measure the blossom, but it is at least six inches across.  Wonderful gift from my mother 30 years ago. She passed away 16 years ago and part of why I like it and keep it is to remember her.  I wonder if she knew it would bloom?  However, God knew and it is a gift from Him.  Good things come to he who waits.  

God bless you from Grants Pass Real Estate.  Bye for now.  chuck
P.S. Mother and Dad's wedding anniversary was today, September 9th.  They were married in 1931.
P.P.S. I never knew the name of this plant, but a friend did a search and found it.  It is called Stapelia gigantic, also known as the carrion flower since it attracts flies for pollination by its foul-smelling flowers reminiscent of the odour of rotting meat (I need to tell my wife, she thought the smell was me).  It is native to South Africa. 

Composting.

Here is a picture of my Compost Tumbler. I mow my lawn with a riding mower with a grass catcher on it. I fill up the composter with 4 parts green and one part brown. For the green I use fresh grass from the lawn and kitchen scraps (fruit, vegetables, coffee grounds, egg shells). For the brown I use dried grass and dried leaves though you can use newspaper, sawdust, small wood chips. Fill up the composter. Turn five turns once a day. It will reach 160 degrees the next day--hot enough to kill most weed seeds. Two weeks to compost. Great. Compost is good for any soil. Soil too sandy and loose--use compost--it will bind it up and make it more like good topsoil. Soil has too much clay--use compost--it will loosen it up and make it more porous and topsoil like. Composting is great in Grants Pass Real Estate.
This is my traditional compost pile. During the winter the weather is too cold to make compost in the compost tumbler. So I pile stuff up the old way. Leave it for a year and you still get good compost. You also have a place to put the kitchen scraps in the winter. Pull back some of the grass, dump your scraps, pull the grass back over top. It will not smell bad and if you don't put in meat products, you won't have animals digging in your compost pile.

So long for now from Grants Pass Real Estate.

chuck

Royal Empress Tree

This is what will be the blossom for the Royal Empress Tree, also known as the Princess Tree or the Paukownia Tree. This tree is widespread in the South and the Midwest, and the East Coast where sometimes it is regarded as an aggressive invader. However, it is not widespread here on the West Coast probably because the conditions for its easy spread are not met.

The wood is prized in China and Japan and used for jewelry boxes and furniture. Sometimes it is planted in the USA with thoughts of selling the wood. There are reports of selling a tree for $20,000. However, I have not found any markets for it.

I bought it for it's beauty and fast growth. It was touted as growing up to 40 feet in eight years. I have had mine for about 12 years and it is about 20 feet tall. I got it by mail order from http://www.raintreenursery.com/ for $15.00, though now it is listed at $9.75. It came in a little pot and was about 6 inches tall. I thought, "What have I done!" But it grew 2 feet that summer. Then it died down to the ground in the winter. They did say it would do that, though.

The next year it grew to 4 feet. And died down to the ground. The next year it grew to about 8 feet and stayed up. From the first it had huge leaves. After 10 years it bloomed. Lovely blooms. Overall I find it to be a wonderful specimen tree here in Grants Pass Real Estate.

So long for now.

chuck

What is new in Real Estate in Grants Pass?

Three Local Real Estate Companies Join Forces.

Agents from ERA Prestige Homes, Coldwell Banker Doran Taylor, and RE/MAX Ideal Brokers, Inc. are merging to help agents survive and remain competitive in the still challenging real estate market. Bob Gervais, owner/broker of RE/MAX office said, “We will have, at the least, about 45 full-time, seasoned professional agents. We will not only survive, but thrive.”

Michael Masters, owner/broker of ERA Prestige Homes, said, “I have released my agents to work for one of my competitors, since there are just too many offices to survive in the challenging market.” He plans to stay with ERA until his commitment to ERA is up. Then Masters plans to join the REMAX management group.

Coldwell Banker Doran Taylor is closing. Bob Chalupa, owner/broker is retiring. Most of his agents are expected to move to RE/MAX.

RE/MAX will have the synergy of three good offices combined in one office and the excitement and positive energy that comes with that.

So long from Grants Pass Real Estate.

chuck

Fall Treasures

This is a reblooming iris. It blooms in the spring like all the other iris. Then in the fall, Surprise here it comes again--more blooms that last past the first frost.

This is cabbage coming on well with the cool fall weather. This is actually from a few cabbages that we planted last year and they kept growing throughout the winter and hung on through the summer and now are forming heads again. The climate here in Grants Pass Real Estate is mild enough that cabbage and kale will go through the winter. Also you can plant spinach in the fall and when it gets a little warm in February, sometimes in January, the spinach starts growing again and you get the earliest, tenderest, tastiest spinach ever. Please eat it raw so that it tastes great, don't cook it into a mush.

This is our asparagus patch. I pulled the weeds and the grass out and put a mulch of compost all around it. The compost will keep the weeds down and feed the asparagus so that it will come up early and strong in the spring. This asparagus is a purple variety that is sweet to eat raw and turns green when steamed or stir fried. Don't cook it to death and make it mush so that kids hate it. Leave it crunchy and tasty.

God bless your day. So long from Grants Pass Real Estate.

chuck

Late Garden Greats

One of the benefits of an organic garden here at Grants Pass Real Estate is healthy animals as well. This is a tree frog on a corn stalk. He earns his keep by eating bugs. Plus he is beautiful.

This is a surprise. I bought a four way pear tree to plant in the garden and the root stock sprouted and grew into a lovely quince! Who knew! I just now looked up recipes for quince and found some neat ones.

This is sweet meat squash and a pumkin. The sweet meat squash is supposed to be a very good keeper and have good sweet flavor. The pumpkin is---well it is a pumpkin.

Last of the cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes. It has been getting unseasonably cold at night and I think soon there will be a frost to end this particular part of the harvest.

So long from Grants Pass Real Estate for now. May God's blessings follow you throughout your day.

chuck

Mac vs PC

Now that Snow Leopard has been out for a while, I have a few comments. First, by way of full disclosure, I have been a Mac user since 1989. I became a real estate agent and had to use a computer. The first one I used was a windows machine using DOS. A real pain and more user unfriendly than anything windows now. But then I got a Mac, an SE, which worked and was fun to use.

In 2001 with the advent of OS X 10.0 the computing world changed radically. The original OS X was Cheetah in January 2001, followed in September 2001 by Puma, followed in August 2002 by Jaguar, followed by Panther in October 2003, followed by Tiger in April 2005, followed by Leopard in October 2007 and Snow Leopard in August 2009.

All the various iterations worked well with each succeeding iteration working better than the last one.

During this time Microsoft was plodding along with XP (which admittedly was better than Windows 98) and promising year after year that they would have a new wonderful version codenamed Longhorn. When Steve Jobs introduced Tiger he commented that you know what happens when a Tiger goes up against a Longhorn. Shortly thereafter, Microsoft announced the new name was Vista. After five years in production it came out in January 2007 with much fanfare and a thudding response. Many corporations refused to update to Vista because of its many problems. Eventually Microsoft stopped selling XP to force adoption of Vista. Now they are coming out with Windows 7 (basically lipstick on the Vista pig) which is meant to fix all the things wrong with Vista.

Installing Snow Leopard was easy and quick. I put the DVD in, clicked a few times, and 45 minutes later I had a new computer. It made my computer (an iMac that I bought in 2006) faster in many areas and gave me back 11 gigabytes in disk space. Snow Leopard was meant to be a refinement of Leopard. So Apple charged only $30 for the upgrade. A great deal for a small price. I keep finding little enjoyable surprises about how things work--it is like being on an extended Easter egg hunt.

I don't have Windows 7 and won't go there ( I use XP that I run on Parallels for the few Windows applications that I need to run) but I have heard that it is very difficult to install. From Microsoft's website Windows 7 will cost $119.99,or $199.99, or $219.99 depending on the version you use. (Apple has one price for Snow Leopard--$30.00) If you would like to pay a lot and have a difficult time installing and an inferior OS once installed, then go for Windows 7.

However, that is not my choice.

So long from Grants Pass Real Estate.

chuck

Harvest Time!

Hello from Grants Pass Real Estate. This is a wonderful time of year in the garden. Just take a look at what God grew for us.

We have sweet corn, lots of juicy tomatoes, sweet red, yellow, and orange peppers, cucumbers, hot red cayenne peppers and still some honeydews getting ripe.

Everything is organic, bug free and full of taste that you cannot get from food in the store. Fertilizing with compost makes the plants strong and bug resistant. The one pest that we have problems with is ground squirrels. They take one or two bites out of a tomato or cucumber or melon and then move on. The only thing to do is to cut off the bite area and eat the rest. Not that big of a deal.

It is a joy to go to the garden to see what is new today. Beautiful colors, great smells, fresh air, sunshine, and God's bounty. What more could you want? A great use of real estate.

One of my daughters will not eat tomatoes from the store since they taste somewhere between a piece of cardboard and a piece of plastic. But a couple of years ago when she was six, we went to the garden and I gave her a yellow cherry tomato which she ate and then said, "Now that is a good tomato!"

So long for now from Grants Pass Real Estate.

chuck

Garden Growing

The garden is growing here at Grants Pass Real Estate. We have gotten lots of melons--watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew! Yum. Also lots of cucumbers, tomatoes, and now peppers.

It is a great time of year for a gardener. Great fresh tasty stuff free for the picking from your own real estate.

As you can see I also need to look at the sweet corn as it is looking like it will be ready soon if not now.

The picture here of a pepper also has a little bit of the orange cherry tomatoes in the bottom right hand corner. They are sweet and beautiful as well.

Gotta go check the garden. Later from Grants Pass Real Estate.

chuck

Watermelon!

Wow! Watermelon fresh from the garden. We have had some unseasonable hot weather this summer in Grants Pass Real Estate so melons have ripened early this year. I actually got our melons planted late and they still got ripe early. This is a picture of a sugar baby watermelon and two varieties of cantaloupe, namely fast break and ambrosia. Both are exceedingly sweet. Cantaloupe is easy to pick--simply watch and when it turns tan or brown check the stem and when it pulls off easily the melon is ripe.

Watermelons are a different matter. There are several things to check for with watermelons. One is a yellow patch on the bottom where it touches the ground. Next is a low pitched thump when you pat the melon. And the third is the curly tip that goes off to the side of the stem end. When it is still green so is the melon. When that curly cue is brown, the melon has a yellow patch on the bottom and the melon thumps when patted, then the melon is ripe and sweet. Nothing like a fresh melon right out of the garden. Cost effective too. So far we have gotten three watermelons off of one plant with at least one more to go. The plant cost me $1.50. Try to buy four watermelons in the grocery store for $1.50. No luck. Plant your own.

Put down black plastic, cut a hole for the plant, put in the plant, water regularly and wait for God to grow your melon. Very easy.

This is a picture of the watermelon pictured whole above, here cut with what was left of it. Within a half hour it was all gone as our family loves melon and this one was really good.

What a great way to use your Grants Pass Real Estate.

Bye for now from Grants Pass Real Estate.

chuck

Summer is coming

Summer is on the way here in Grants Pass Real Estate. The longest day of the year is June 21st and that is officially summer. The garden is starting to take off. As are the weeds. But then, if weeds won't grow nothing else will either. By the way, do you know how to tell the difference between a flower or vegetable you want and a weed? Pull it out by the roots and if it grows back then you know it is a weed.

Over the years, our garden soil has gotten better. We started with decomposed granite and a few inches of topsoil. I added a few yards of topsoil. Then I added leaves in the fall and grass clippings, and compost during the summer. Now when I till the soil in the spring it breaks up easily and is lovely loose topsoil that gets deeper every year. I rarely use any other fertilizer and the soil stays loose, the plants grow well, and the bugs stay at a minimum. Occasionally I get a tomato hornworm, but those big ugly things are easy to see and pick off the tomatoes and squash. Splat!

Great days at Grants Pass Real Estate.

Bye for now.

chuck

Lettuce begin again.

Hello again. Sorry for the pun. I couldn't resist. Grants Pass real estate has been favored this year with relatively cool weather in a spring that has allowed cool weather crops like lettuce to last longer. I actually put these plants in late and they have done well without bolting. Spring has been delightful here. Makes me glad all over again that I live in Grants Pass and in Southern Oregon. The sign in Grants Pass says "It's the Climate" and this it true most of the time. Lovely spring and fall. Sunny summer. And an easy winter. I grew up in Iowa which had awful, cold winters that went on too long. Spring and fall were nice, but spring was on a Tuesday and then sultry summer came on with a vengence. Fall was on a Thursday and then the long winter began.

As a kid I didn't know any different. I thought all places had the same weather. When I grew up and went to a different climate I was amazed. Grants Pass real estate has the best climate I have lived in (I have lived in the Midwest, East Coast, South and now the West Coast).

Even roses grow easier here in Grants Pass real estate. The dry climate for the summer makes it hard for mildew and black spot to start or take hold on my roses. They just grow and bloom and look beautiful. Though I do have to put them behind a fence or the deer will eat them (thorns and all, ouch!).

So long for now from Grants Pass Real Estate.

chuck

Garden Time

Plant a garden. work in the dirt. Good for the soul. Put hot weather plants (melons, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers) on black plastic because Grants Pass Real Estate is in an area where the climate is warm during the day and cools off during the night. Those cool nights are not good for the hot weather plants. They will grow better and ripen sooner with the black plastic to hold the heat overnight. When I first came to Grants Pass, I planted a garden and planted melons. My first mistake was to think, 'Well, it's not raining today, maybe it will tomorrow.' I got up the next day and the sun was shining, a nice day. That happened the whole summer. Eventually I gave the plants some water. Now I have a sprinkler system on a timer. Much easier.

There are benefits of using the black plastic: you till the soil and put the plastic down, cut a hole in the plastic and plant your plant, turn on the sprinkler system and wait. The plastic not only keeps the plants warm it smoothers the weeds. No weeding. Lazy gardeners unite! Enjoy your Grants Pass Real Estate while you watch it grow and wait for God to finish His work for you to have garden produce.

Another treat this time of year for Grants Pass Real Estate is Foxglove (which is the source of digitalis used for heart medicine). The original old fashioned flower color is purple, but now there are white and red and yellow and pink colors as well. The leaves are very poisonous to humans, cattle and horses. The leaves contain a heart stimulant. Plant away from livestock.

Enjoy your Grants Pass Real Estate.

So long for now.

chuck

Evergreen Park is Grants Pass Newest Park

Evergreen Park is great!

Evergreen Bank bought the property from the Riverside Inn and shaped it into a lovely series of walkways, waterfalls, ponds, paintings and sculptures. The park is on private land, but is open to the public.

Brady Adams of Evergreen invites everyone in. Brady Adams calls the park a community asset.

Quality workmanship abounds. The quality of workmanship and attention to detail astound the eye with the attractiveness of the waterfalls, the many plantings, the paintings, and the view of nearby Caveman Bridge. The waterfalls are a delight to the ear and a refreshing coolness on a hot day.

Thank you Brady Adams & Evergreen Bank.

Providing this treasure for our community makes us all feel happy to live in our beautiful city where people step out to benefit us all.

So long from Grants Pass Real Estate.

chuck