Category Archives: In the neighborhood

Birds, In the neighborhood, Whatever

Deliverance

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… carrying,
in the clips of its feet,
a slim and limber

silver fish, a scrim
of red rubies
on its flashing sides.

from The Osprey, Mary Oliver

The ospreys in the neighborhood have been very conspicuous the last week or so; I think this year’s young have just fledged.

I watch their cell tower nest while I wait for the light to change or the train to pass. My view is better, closer, while waiting on the train, but it lacks the perspective the other side of the intersection offers. From there I can appreciate how massive the nest is and just how precariously it’s placed.

They drift by my car on their way to the river or over the backyard on their return, the fish face-first in golden talons. Last week, two dark bundles with checkerboard wings outstretched, awaited delivery. This morning the nest was unoccupied and the sky taken.

Garden, In the neighborhood, Whatever

Saturday’s Stash

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It’s hot like an oven here today and I was tempted to spend my $20.00 on a pitcher of lemonade and a beach pass, but instead went to the Asbury Park Farmer’s Market. It’s not much of a market really, just two farmer’s selling fruits and vegetables from the back of their trucks, plus a middle-aged couple with organic jams and relishes. Still, my $20.00 went quicker than it did far.

I bought a couple white potatoes (boring!) for $1.50, 6 ears of white corn for $2.00, a small mountain of string beans for $3.50, some corn relish for $7.00 and a little jar of sugar plum jam for $6.00. I’ve never had sugar plums or sugar plum jam, but the images of snow and cold were welcome today so I bought it just for the novelty.

So now I have this odd assortment of things that are just screaming to be served with a big juicy steak. Only I don’t much like meat.

Next weekend I plan to spend my $20 driving out to the middle of nowhere (for NJ at least) to a great U-Pick farm. I’ll make out good there, I’m sure.

Please stop by Vicki’s for a peak at her Market Day post.

In the neighborhood, Remembering, Snapshots

God’s square mile

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I spent a little time yesterday poking my camera into some of the living rooms and sleeping porches in the tent city at Ocean Grove. I’m there at least once a week with work, but usually avoid the maze of one way streets around the Great Auditorium and instead ogle the old Victorian homes on the other side of town. It’s a great little shore oddity and one that I remember visiting as a kid. My dad brought me for Sunday services in the huge open air Auditorium back when a blue law banned cars in town on Sundays.

The town was founded as a leisure-time retreat by Methodists and descendants of those founders still come to Ocean Grove to sleep in tents for the summer and to pray by the sea. There’s a hundred-some tents and they’re laid out within inches of one another in rows around the auditorium. A more permanent structure makes up the back of each – with electric and plumbing! – and the front of the tent is reserved as a sitting/sleeping space. They’re very cute and not nearly as rustic as one might imagine.

Other ramblings about Ocean Grove are available here.

Garden, In the neighborhood, Whatever

Saturday Shopping Challenge

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Vicki at A Mark on My Wall which, coincidentally, is one of my favorite blogs in the neighborhood, posted a challenge a couple weeks ago to see how far $20 would go at a local farmer’s market. Up for a challenge, but not so much the shopping or cooking part, I thought I’d play along and see how far that $20 would get me in local produce that didn’t require much fussing before tasting good.

Jersey tomatoes are just in and will be sublime in another couple weeks. The four I bought today for $6.13 (ouch!) don’t have much flavor, but mixed with garden-grown basil and my splurge for the day – locally-made mozarella – just under a pound for $8.81 and drizzled with olive oil and a dash of sea salt and black pepper made me very, very happy this evening. Once the supply increases the prices will go down and there is nothing finer than a Jersey tomato, let me tell you! Our growing conditions are perfect for them here, tho we have to wait until August for the really delicious and juicy ones that we make into kitchen sink sandwiches with lots of mayo and pepper. Heaven between two slices of bread!

I was hoping for corn, but there was only Georgia sweet corn for 49 cents an ear. Too steep for my budget today. Last week I bought nice Jersey bi-color corn that I made into corn salad with red peppers. Yummy. Sweet corn should be available by month’s end and is creamy, tender and scrumptious. I know quite a few people who can make a meal of it all by itself. Not me; it doesn’t agree with me and I have to limit myself to just one ear, preferably on the BBQ.

Mid-July is only the start of farmer’s market season here in NJ, so there wasn’t a great variety. Greens are in season: kale, collards and swiss chard, but I think of those primarily as bunny food, so discounted them for today. Beets are local and cheap – just $1.89 for a nicely sized bunch. I love fresh beets, but don’t often go to the trouble to stain the kitchen or my hands purple with making them. Steaming-hot and drenched with butter is the way I like them best, but today I mixed them with some red onion and raspberry vinegar and fresh-squeezed orange juice for a cold salad. We’ll see how that turned out tomorrow once it’s had a chance to pickle a bit.

The real story locally is the berries. These are the most local of berries, grown in the farm fields just off my backyard, and they sit on the bushes until they are at the peak of ripeness and flavor. There are red, purple and black raspberries, as well as blackberries grown out there and were it not for the deer fence surrounding the fields, I think I would raid the bushes on my walks with Luka. I bought a pint of red raspberries for $4.99 and a pint of Jersey blueberries for $2.99 and cooked them gently with sugar and poured the sweet mixture over some vanilla ice-cream. The leftovers will be added to plain yogurt mixed with honey and some granola or eaten anytime I walk through the kitchen!

All that’s missing until the late summer is peaches. Jersey peaches should be available at farmer’s markets by next weekend. California peaches are sweet and juicy now, but I passed on them today in favor of NJ produce.

If you’re a stickler and do the math, you’ll see that I went over budget and spent $24.81. I could have left off the raspberries in favor of being under budget, but I just love them too much! I don’t think my money went very far today, but as I said, it isn’t quite the season of abundance here.

If you’re up for the challenge, I imagine Vicki may be doing this in the weeks to come. Maybe you’d like to join in the fun. Why not at least stop by her place for links to see how others spent their $20? Or read about her adventures as a docent at a zoo in Chicago? Or her home-away-from-home in Florida? Really, her blog is great… stop in and say hi.

In the neighborhood, Snapshots, Whatever

I’ve never been to Sea World…

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so dolphins in the neighborhood are pretty exciting… life mammal!

They’re not supposed to be here, certainly not in the river where they’ve been seen for the last week or so. Given the odd geography of Sandy Hook Bay and this summer’s early warm water temps, it’s thought that they took a detour into the Shrewsbury River by mistake. Fish and Wildlife is concerned with the upcoming 4th of July holiday (and the 20,000 plus boats it brings to my neighborhood) that the dolphins may need to be ushered back into the bay so they can safely find their way back to the open ocean.

Birds, Bunnies, In the neighborhood, Whatever

Drama in the driveway

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I’d thought there must be a cat prowling through the garden with all the fuss the robins and bluejays were making. I went outside, flip-flop in hand (they’re excellent flung at neighborhood strays) and found that the fuss was due to a red-tail on our roof. Strange, I thought. It flew to the black locust in the neighbor’s yard and I watched it for a while and cheered the robins for their bravery in dive-bombing it.

An hour or so later the DH whispered, “Come here, quick!” from beside the kitchen window. The red-tail was back, this time on the ground, high-stepping through the grass beside the driveway. Hawks look so out of their element on the ground, don’t they?

Then I noticed the tiny wriggling baby bunnies on the driveway. Three in all, spread out beneath my car, one in the shadow of a tire.

Hmmm. What to do?

Dutifully, bunny-lover that I am, I stepped out the door and the red-tail flew off to the neighbor’s roof.

The nest had been dug weeks ago and then abandoned. Too close, I’d thought, to Luka’s run of the yard. Looking inside it now, I found two newborn kits in the middle of a hastily covered scrape. Following the trail of newborn bunnies under the car, I saw the mother rabbit crouched beneath the transmission.

I returned the babies to their nest and wondered what had happened. Was the mother interrupted in her birthing by the hawk – does that explain two in the nest and three others spread out in the driveway? Had the hawk discovered the nest and the momma bunny caught in the middle of moving them somewhere safe? Was the hawk on the ground after the babies or the mother? Odd the mysteries that play themselves out if we’re paying attention, I think.

I wonder if they’ll survive, if the mother will come back to nurse them as she should. I wonder, too, that the red-tail won’t come back.

Garden, In the neighborhood, Snapshots

White sweet May again*

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A gentle breeze has been slowly dropping the petals of our neighbor’s black locust into our pond. I love the snow-shower effect of it in late May and their fragrance is so wonderful on a humid day like today. No wonder the bees and hummers are drawn to it – there must be some sweet nectar inside the flowers!

I’d hoped for a close-up pic, but it’s too tall. This gives you an idea, though, of why I like these weedy trees so much… the afternoon sun glimmers among the branches, full of late May light, and the flowers dance in the air. They’re somehow related to wisteria – can you see that in the pendulous flowers? Plus they have similar pinnate leaves, but locusts have thorns, too. Especially thorny are the young ones that like to come up everywhere in our lawn. They’re one of the very few trees that I can reliably ID at all seasons; their bark is dark and deeply furrowed and they tend to grow in waste places, in old fields, along the roadside. Like other members of the pea family, black locusts fix nitrogen in the soil which makes it possible for them to grow in the poor soil found in those places.

I learned something new from Wikipedia about members of the pea family: their leaves fold together at night or in wet weather. I wonder why that might be… anybody know?

*from “The Locust Tree in Flower” by William Carlos Williams

Birds, In the neighborhood, Pastimes

Nesting plovers

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“A problem cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness in which it was created.”
– Albert Einstein

With my back to their nest scrape and its symbolic fencing, I spent yesterday watching the beach crowd grow around this one plover nest that I was charged with *protecting* and was struck most by contrasts: the natural dune grass and pebble strewn high beach where the plovers make their nest amid bits of drift sticks and broken clam shells and in front of me the ocean with its equally vibrant and churning masses of bikini-clad sun-worshippers.

It’s a wonder to me these birds manage to survive at all here in NJ, but survive they do. For my first 7 or 8 hours spent watching them, most everyone was respectful of the fencing, so long as they noticed it. Wayward balls and children tended to wander beneath it freely, but most responded nicely to my calls beginning with, “Sweetie… you can’t be in there!” – though there was this one little boy – crossed arms and all – who refused to budge. That’s when the teacher voice came in handy.

😉

Those hours also gave me the chance to watch some bits of plover behavior that I’d not seen before. Mostly I felt badly for the bird left to set on those eggs in the blazing sun; I wonder what it does to occupy itself for all those hours. Every so often I’d notice there were two birds; switching duties, I guess, and I watched the other walk to the end of the fenced area and then fly off to feed in the intertidal zone among the kids playing.


Kite-flying was a problem, as it mimics predators like gulls, but I had a hard time convincing people to move far enough away to not frighten the plovers; plus that resitriction doesn’t seem to be posted anywhere on the beach that I could refer them to. Never mind that the plovers are invisible to anyone without binoculars… I could only find them because I had that stick near their nest to use as a point of reference!

It was a wonderful day at the beach… the osprey and oystercatchers kept my eyes to the sky… and the terns were the perfect background music as they fed just off shore. I’m spectacularly sunburned for my efforts and didn’t want to leave yesterday before the crowds of people did. Funny that I should feel so protective of these birds so quickly.

In the neighborhood, Pastimes, Seasons

Where’s the beach?

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Spotted along the drive on the interstate in Pa. to visit Delia a couple months ago…

The shore traffic has started already; yesterday I got caught in a traffic jam on the Parkway out to visit clients… time to revisit the backroads to the beach and avoid the carloads of city people that take over here come Memorial Day. The boardwalk shops are open, boats have been unwrapped from their plastic winter protection, storm shutters are up and awnings come down… the summer solstice isn’t until the 20th of June, but this weekend is the real start of summer at the Jersey Shore.

I’ll be out in the morning at Sandy Hook to watch over the few plover nests that remain after last week’s storm washed most of them away. Wish me luck at that and remind me to put on some sunblock.

😉