Went fishing, found bear

Taking a break from house and garden, we went fishing the other afternoon along Skalkaho Creek. It was Mel Holloway's suggestion. He's the friend who drives all over the Bitterroot, shooting great photos of wildlife, both human and animal. He posts at lease one of these pictures a day on Facebook. He thought Skalkaho would be a relatively good, close trip for us.  We'll, Mel, we took in the spectacular pine-scented air, stopped around mile-marker 18 and saw beautiful sparkling water...

Clear water on gorgeous rocks, in Skalkaho Creek.

...and a few small trout (didn't catch any)...

 ... plus random birds and insects...

But the biggest treat was a bear. Driving in an easterly direction, Alex slammed on the breaks as a juvenile cinnamon-colored bear clambered up from a ditch and then started slowly crossing Skalkaho Road. Let me tell the rest in pictures.

Of Gardens and Mountains

They tell us that our valley is the "banana belt" of Montana.  Gardening in this 100-mile-stretch, from Missoula at the north to near Sula at the south (our town of Hamilton, roughly in the middle) is protected by mountains on all sides. They say it is warmer than most other open and Arctic-swept regions of the state.

Mountains are everywhere you look in the Bitterroot Valley. (BTW, so are restaurants, cafés, coffee shops and other merchants, many more than this older map suggests.)

Nevertheless, until the last couple of days, we've had a very cool month of June 2012.  We may be listed in USDA Cold-Hardiness Zone of 5a, same as Illinois and parts of Iowa (for plants surviving lowest winter temps of -15 to -20 degrees). But it just takes one unusual weather event to make a big difference.  Banana belt, shmanana belt. We decide to look for some protection. I've brought five tomato plants -- started from seed in St. Louis. They need help on these 38-degree nights.  I punt.  I did pack three Wall O Water "season extenders" (http://www.wall-o-water.com/). And so, on a sun-warmed south side of our old garage, I plant the five tomatoes and position their cages so that every other one takes one of the plastic tubes designed with walls of empty cylinders. When they are firmly in place, I fill each cylinder with water; sun warms it and keeps plants and soil snug overnight.  I hope that a little residual heat helps the two unprotected plants. So far so good! Two of the five plants are fruiting. The others have flowers. They've been babied for weeks, but they seem not to have missed a beat.

Wall O Water around a tomato plant, against the old garage's south side.  We just took the walls down a few days ago when daytime temps soared into the low 80s and nighttime ones were upper 40s, now 50s.

An article in the local Ravalli Republic (also Lee Enterprises-owned, my fellow Post-Dispatchers) talks about the struggles of local small farms, in this and other years. Says Bitterroot Organic's Mike Duda, "If you're serious about growing in western Montana, then you have to have infrastructure. Hoop-houses, greenhouses and cold frames are essential for even serious kitchen gardening if you want to be successful in this kind of a climate." (More at http://ravallirepublic.com/business/local/article_983d7c2a-bb44-11e1-8372-001a4bcf887a.html.) I think the water-walls count.

And we plan to further bolster our version of micro-climate. First, we pull knee-high weeds out of a little, slightly raised bed just south of the tomatoes and along the alley (believe me, I joined Alex in doing a lot of this work).  Then we buy bags of a local favorite, Boost, from the helpful cows at Huls Dairy (www.hulsdairy.com/products.htm) and spread the aged manure on top of weed-free(?!) soil.  An incredibly nice guy we meet named Wes volunteers to rotor-till it in for us (on Father's Day morning, no less).

Pulling knee-high weeds out of the plot.

And we extend an existing fence to screen the alley and, we hope, protect plants a bit more from cold, west winds. I stain the cedar boards. Alex designs and puts the fence together over a series of days.

Oh, and the fence may help keep deer out of this patch. When we saw them browsing our yard last summer, always they came in from the alley. We're so clever, we'll outwit those critters -- haha! (Did I mention that the north side of the yard is wide open?)

We begin to plant -- peppers, eggplant, zucchini, crook-neck squash and lettuce even though it may be getting daytime hot for tender greens. We also start a small compost bin from old wire fencing that we find in the garage (this view is looking south, at neighbors' Pat and John's sweet little cottage over the fence).

We visit several local garden centers and decide that K & S Greenhouse in nearby Corvallis is our favorite (http://www.ksgreenhouse.com/). It was recommended by our friend Mary Alice Holloway. We love the veggie starts and herbs there, but spectacular containers and hanging baskets of annual flowers steal the show.

Blooms-a-plenty at K & S Greenhouse, Corvallis, Mt.

We also visit other gardens. Our friend Eric Milner is following the tradition of his parents -- mostly his mother Doris  -- with a huge vegetable garden in a clearing on the family hill overlooking the valley.

Eric's ambitious, deer-proofed vegetable garden, watered from snow melt in an adjacent ditch, with tomatoes secured in great old wooden cages.

And on a Saturday in town, we see a garden of a totally different kind. Volunteers with the Ravalli County Museum at the Old Courthouse have installed a Lewis and Clark native-plant garden in shady spots on either side of the museum entrance.

Native shade plants, the likes of which Lewis and Clark saw, even collected.

Shade-living natives on the other side of the museum entrance.

 I sat in on a meeting last year when changes for this and two other sites were being discussed and, having just seen the amazing Lewis and Clark collection inside the museum, I asked if anyone had thought of a native-plant garden outside. Bingo! Museum director Tamar Stanley took that little idea and ran with it, getting natives donated by the local Great Bear Restoration (http://www.great-bear.biz/natives.html).  Western snowberry, golden current, blue elderberry, chokecherry, serviceberry and thimbleberry are the shrubby, berry-producing, back-of-the-border plants; Rocky Mountain maple is there, to grow and hide a utility shed; and among a dozen or so other hardy flowers are the little pale-blue blossoms of wild blue flax (Linum lewisii).

All was unveiled to the public on a recent Saturday as the nearby farmers' market got underway.

Beet greens peek out of Alex's bag, at the Hamilton Farmers' Market (http://hamiltonfarmersmarket.webs.com/) -- now in its 20th year and our new place to shop for freshest vegetables, that is, until our own Montana garden starts producing!

Here, baby, here

We arrived at our little house in Hamilton, Mt., on Sunday night, tired, happy, sad, and a mix of other emotions. We've slept, off and on, for a couple of days. Today, we rise and shine. The morning is a cool, overcast one. We scope out the garden that came with our new place. We are pleasantly surprised.

My car backs up to a tall stand of Oriental poppies. I knew they were there, I just didn't know how big.

Our little, old carport is surrounded by blooming things. We sweep all of winter's last crumbly leaves from a weathered concrete floor and unpack our fold-up camp chairs. With a glass of wine each and a a section of tree trunk to serve as coffee table, we sit and survey the many blooming irises, as well as coral bells, rhubarb, raspberries and the poppies, of course. Someone here gardened, the old-fashioned way. It's lovely.

A humble carport becomes our getaway. The hazy blue color to the rear, left, actually is a mountain. It's called Downing.

To add to the Montana plants, we packed just a few of our own in my 2003 Subaru. Crazy, eh?

But they survived -- all of the hostas, Japanese painted ferns and variegated Solomon's seal packed tightly around a resin planter containing the roots of a six-foot-tall Meyer lemon tree. Had to bring it, swaddled in burlap. It's our favorite. It will live outside this summer and probably in the south-facing window of our bedroom this winter.

Below is part of the small St. Louis yard from which native Solomon's seal, in the foreground, was dug and brought to Montana.

Canna and Solomon's seal in the foreground, herbs in the sunniest spot against the house.

I also started three types of tomatoes from seed indoors in St. Louis -- heirloom Black Cherry and heirloom Green Zebra plus several of the prolific hybrid called Sungold. I had great luck with lettuce, but harvested most, and so-so germination with eggplant. I brought the eggplant and tomatoes, already hardened off by going in and out of the St. Louis back door. We'll see how well they do (and I do) in a garden in Montana. There's a huge raised bed here in need of major weeding, composting and roto-tilling before any Midwest transplants go in the ground.

Tomatoes made the trip pretty well. At least they're upright and have a few tiny flowers. They've gone outside and been brought back in here, as well. With tonight's low of a frosty 33 and upper 30s or low 40s predicted for the rest of this week's evenings, they'll live on a windowsill in the mud room.

But first, the real reason we're here -- the mountains. These are some that we saw along the way.

A first siting of mountains as we head west toward Bozeman.

Near the Big Hole River in a huge valley also called the Big Hole, southeast of where we live.

Mountain men, or man. We dine next to one -- a wary cowboy -- at Bitterroot Brewery.

And now I have to go!! The truck has just arrived!!! Lots of hauling off to be done -- of bicycles (old), harpsichords (2, built by Alex!), clothes, chairs, tables and the like. The one piece I'm worried about is the old Kentucky hutch -- also called a dry sink -- given to me by my mother. Here's what it looked like, blanketed and shrink-wrapped in St. Louis. I am hoping that it made the trip unscathed and unscratched...

The hutch before the big move. After?? For these and other domestic details, stay tuned.