What a Long, Strange Week It's Been

It started with a dinner party up in the Bitterroot foothills off of Lost Horse Creek Road.  Magically, Rob Lynn piped us into the woodsy cabin that he's renovating and that he and his banker-wife Shelley Phillips share with two cats.  They fed us grilled salmon and grilled lamb, Greek vegetables, orzo and homemade bread. Dee-lish!

Beautifully warm weather a day or so later made us want to get out and picnic, if not hike!  (Alex still is getting over a really bad cold.) We went in the opposite direction from the Phillip's -- east into the Sapphire Mountains -- and up Rye Creek Road.  I'd been there once.  Alex hadn't.  So we packed oranges, grilled flank-steak sandwiches and cold drinks and pointed the Subaru toward more dirt roads.

From a dry ledge above where the road got too icy for us, we ate.  The smells of pine, damp soil and fresh air were intoxicating. This is why we're here.

Spring is slowly finding its way into our mud room.  Pots of nasturtium are growing from seed, a Meyer lemon is heavy with fruit and baby tomatoes also sprout from their seeds.

I hope the nasturtium doesn't get too leggy, waiting for the last frost date that's still weeks away.

Before house guests come, I shop for food and drink and end up buying two bunches supermarket tulips.  Spring in a vase, if not quite outside!

A fellow garden writer, Doug Oster of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, salutes the season with a Facebook post about new stamps with vintage seed-packet designs.  I must get some.

And a Bitterroot Audubon Society friend, Fred Weisbecker,  invites us on a day-long trip to a beautiful place called the Big Hole -- a vast meadow surrounded by mountains and scene of the massacre of the Nez Perce tribe in 1877.  The North Fork of the Big Hole River runs through it.  A National Battlefield monument is there, as well  (http://www.nps.gov/biho/index.htm).

The size and beauty of this valley is hard to believe.  Are my eyes fooling me?  Is it really this vast, and empty (of people)?

In places, the river is packed with ice floes.  The 6,000-7,000-foot altitude here is a reason why.  This site also is packed with migrating birds -- our reason for coming. We see rough-leg and red-tail hawks in abundance, mountain bluebirds, an eagle,  a peregrine falcon, a pair of Sand Hill cranes, mallards, merganzers and some 20 other species.  But nothing close up.  All got identified through binoculars or a scope.

Our varied week ends today, when we get down to earth. Our vegetable garden needs some prep, and some nutritional help. Only this morning, we attend Rod Daniel's lecture on red wigglers, the worms so popular with gardeners who compost with the worms' castings.

We buy a recycled milk carton full, at Sam's Spade garden center (http://www.samsspade.com/).  Their castings boost the nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K) in soil by measurable amounts.  We want to put ours outside to work down our compost bin, and that's Rod Daniel's preferred method.  His wigglers have withstood more than 20 "severe Montana winters," he says, out in a straw-covered bin.

Our wigglers go straight into our grass-and-leaf compost, also studded with asparagus ends, banana peels, orange rinds, coffee grounds and tea leaves.  Can't wait to see how fast it works down into something we'll soon use!!