Happy Monday!

sorta felt like this waking up today :) this guy has a better soundtrack…

 

Bloom Day August 2008

I’m pretty excited to have this much blooming considering we didn’t get back until June 1. It’s a small but happy garden. There are also cranesbills blooming, the crazy campanula ‘Kent Belle’ sprawling everywhere, nicotiana, zinnias, thyme, mint, a little bee balm, a few I can’t remember names of. Click pics for bigger.

yellow coneflowers

Small is going to get bigger–I went to the Rock Garden Society plant sale today and then to Plantsmen for “just look” for big natives for dry shade. THEN Andrea gave me some things she has to leave behind. It was haul! Now to plan…

rattlesnake master!

cosmos mmmmmm

everybody has echinacea

Helianthus

Cleome

first of the Batchelors

tiny chamomile flowers

Sedum

 

next year i’m planting dark sunflowers

stunning. almost black.

 

life at the grassroots

My second summer in central NY.

Music at the Grassroots Festival in Trumansburg a few weeks back, a magical night of a community diving into music, from the starry-eyed Swedes singing old-timey four-part harmonies out to a loving crowd dancing into a fever pitch, then over to the big stage to sway and rock to the weedy cackle of Lucinda Williams, telling her stories in songs and a style that have traveled with me for 20 years or more.

Stopping at unattended roadside stands to pick out fresh peaches and sweet corn.

Scratching mosquito bites.

Waking in the dead of night to the unearthly sound of the screech owl and crying coyotes.

Waiting for tomato plants as tall as me to render their first red fruit. Bumming that the cilantro always bolts.

Walking early mornings with Lucky Bud and in the process discovering Slaterville, meeting its children and old men. People recognize us now; they wave and smile. They stop and want to talk Beagle.

Watching a blaze of fireflies for nights on end in the field, never taking a photograph, then driving through a universe of them one warm July evening when there were so many streaking past it was like launching into slow-motion hyper-drive.

Helping spin honey once again at Boulder Brook, tasting the golden toil of the bees.

Saying goodbye to friends finishing school and leaving for bright new futures, teary-eyed and toasting to the bittersweetness of a new beginning.

Feeling surprised, walking outside one day, that the back yard still looks luminously strangely green but that, maybe for the first time, it wasn’t strange. In my time spent down low, hands in the soil pulling weeds, puzzling about what will grow or invade, inspecting odd new blossoms and bugs, scrubbing sap off my feet, ripping ugly weeds out of the ditch and planting some pretty ones, or lying looking up through the leaves, the place has seeped into me.

I’m only just getting to know it, but I’m getting to know it from the ground up.

 

and while I’m ranting, enough with the rain!

The heliopsis sunflowers, which have yet to bloom but finally set buds when it reached 6 feet, are knocked almost to the ground, crushing all the little guys around them. Some Batchelor’s Button seedlings have rotted, and the cleomes just can’t deal. They’re laying down waiting for someone to pick them up and take them back to the civilized garden they knew they were born to. The ferns we planted under the trees are loving it though, and the very cool Lizard Tail I planted in the “ditch garden” is very happy and blooming for me for the first time.

I fear Mr. Ellis Hollow told me the truth when he said last summer and fall were unusually warm and dry. Right now it’s sogging, chilly, and grey. This is July?!

My honey is outside mowing nonetheless, in the rain, before we lose the house in the grass.

 

What the #@^*! is eating our greens?

First the arugula fell, then the collards, but the romaine is so far holding fast against the onslaught of something evil that leaves pin-sized holes all over the lovely, fragrant, iron-rich greens that I REALLY wanted to eat, but now have the texture of sandpaper. bleh. The ONE baby chard that is starting to grow (because I accidentally trampled the rest) is sure to fall prey…grrrRR!

Anybody know what it is and how we fight back?

I have a great book on organic gardening my wonderful mother gave me from the year I was born, called Bugs, Slugs, and Other Thugs, and it can probably tell me too when I get home tonight, but I was just seized with the urge to know…you know how it is.

Edit: Turns out Mom gave me Best Ideas for Organic Vegetable Gardening, a Rodale pub :) Looks like I need to get reunited with my garden library!

Judging from the description of damage in Thugs, I think we have flea beetles…great.

 

a dead Queen

So I’m riding in to work on the bus this morning, half sleepy, thankful for the coffee my honey made me to go, generally happy and enjoying the green flowery summeriness, when we started down Maple Ave. Then, to my horror, I had to watch as an entire swath of Queen Anne’s Lace, which might just be the loveliest non-poisonous summer wildflower around, was being weed-whacked to the ground by two thugs in safety glasses! The whole floaty patch that had waved for a good 30 yards along the road was almost gone, the ground now plain, boring, good as dead. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but it’s worth noting that the decimated umbels were happily showing off right outside some greenhouses and plastic-mulched rows for dozens of varieties of cultivated flowers (who gets them on their table is a mystery), and maybe Queen Anne and that tatty lace were just too…unbecoming.

Reminds me of the scene in the Alice in Wonderland movie:

Rose bud: I think she’s pretty!

Rose: Quiet, bud!

Alice: But I’m not a flower!

Snap-dragon: Aha! Just as I suspected! She’s nothing but a common mobile vulgaris!

Flowers: Oh no!

Alice: A common what?

Snap-dragon: To put it bluntly: a weed!

Alice: I’m not a weed!

Tulip: Well, you wouldn’t expect her to admit it.

Lilac: Can you imagine!

Marguerite: Well, goodness!

Lily: Don’t let her stay here and go to seed!

I’m only calling this a wildflower tragedy because everyone but everyone besides us has these growing 4-ft tall. There is one, one, blooming on the street just over the line into the neighbor’s property. We have the chicory though–I love blue.

 

Happy Monday

“How I Met Your Father” on Cute Overload

“Lordy me, that picture takes me back. It was at the Rotary Club picnic, and there was this boy — and I swear he must have followed us the whole afternoon, working up his nerve. Finally he comes up to me — and of course he was much thinner then, dont’cha know, and he still had all his fur — and he just stands there, staring.

“Well, after a few minutes of this, I give up and turn to get some more tuna casserole, and he just up and bites me on the tail! Right in front of everybody! And well, of course I’m just madder than I-don’t-know-what-all, and I’m about to haul off and slug him, when I get a look into his eyes. And it was like they were pleading with me: Don’t go.

“And I figured, if a feller wants a girl bad enough to bite her on the tail, he must want her awful bad. That was forty-seven years ago, and we been together ever since. Missed the fireworks and everything.

“Well, not entirely.”

 

Happy Monday

42 countries and a cast of thousands. Sure to make you smile.

Thanks to Chad for the link!

 

“a page of their own” - Women in Photography

Women in Photography is a brand new online gallery dedicated to women artists, women at all stages in their artistic career, and submissions are open. The photo blog world is a vivid and powerful place, but this is just a little extra mega cool.

And look! Sally Gall’s work is just the stuff I love to do: crawl around on the ground and look at spiders and weeds, blur out the foreground and make you unsure about where you are. In the garden? In the wilderness?

This reminds me that I don’t go visit my favorite web gallery for emerging artists enough anymore, at photo-eye. Go look at The Garden exhibition by Todd Stewart. Vermeer light on a tractor. This, and Sally Gall’s beetles, remind me that art is all around us, and I love that they do it so well.

Source: PopPhoto article here.