A lot of my friends, on LiveJournal and elsewhere, are downright religious about food. I'm not just talking about diets predicated on a conventional religious belief system, such as keeping kosher. I have friends who are vegetarian, or even vegan, as part of an ethical belief system, although different friends have different motivations for their choices (concern for the conditions feed animals and fish are raised in, concern about the ecological impact of raising animals for food, a belief that it is simply wrong to eat previously-living flesh). And then there is the whole locavore movement, eating food from close to home. One of my LJ friends, sizztheseed, has written extensively about his efforts to grow what he can and supplement that with food raised close to his home, which is, apparently, fortuitously near the farmlands of southern Ontario. I admire his efforts, but can't imagine sticking to such a program myself.

On the other hand, I grow what I can. And I have gradually identified local sources for produce and eggs. Given a choice, I will, almost always buy local. Or local-ish, at any rate. For instance, I can get locally-made cheese and butter, but I honestly don't know where the raw materials come from. Likewise, there is a sausage producer in New Haven, but their meat surely comes from somewhere in the midwest.

And between the vegetable garden and my favorite local farmstand, I've been eating quite well lately. I stayed home from work today to do some errands. So, lunch was a large spinach salad. The spinach was purchased from the farmstand, and grown at a farm elsewhere in Connecticut. I have no idea where the red onion came from. The tomato was also purchased at the farmstand, and grown in southern Ontario. The cheeses on the salad were imported, as were the ingredients in my home-made dressing. For a mid-afternoon snack, I had strawberries from the farmstand—the first of the season, and the email from the farmstand Saturday night crowing about the harvest got me out of the house much earlier Sunday morning than is my usual habit; I needed these strawberries. (Of course, the cream on the strawberries wasn't local, but, dude! Strawberries! And cream!)

For dinner tonight, along with my chicken (supermarket all-natural brand), I had a salad of freshly-picked greens from the garden (lettuce, arugula, beets), some chopped scallion from the garden, and the first radishes of the season. When I picked the radishes, I noticed that the greens were in good shape, albeit fuzzy. And i remembered that last year, Norma of Now Norma Knits had had several posts on preparation of radish greens. So, I figured, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I treated the greens like spinach or chard. I washed them, spun them dry, and braised them in peanut oil with two sliced garlic cloves and a bit of scallion (I have lots of scallions!). I finished them with a bit of balsamic vinegar (also imported!). They were, in a word, OK. Not spectacular, but, on the whole, not bad. Next time, I'll season them with hot pepper flakes, I think. But, there will be a next time.

I took a vacation day today, as the forecast was for great gardening weather, and there was day baseball on the radio. In three bursts, here's what I accomplished:

• I cleared a bunch of leaves from a corner in the back yard where they accumulate.
• I planted petunias in the three boxes on the deck.
• I spread fertilizer on the veggie patch.
• I sifted compost and spread some on the veggie patch.
• I fertilized the lilac.
• I pulled out some proto-dandelions.

And here's what I learned:

• Compost doesn't decompose as quickly as they say it does, even if you turn and aerate it. Eggshells and avocado peels are especially recalcitrant.
• You can't cheat mother nature. If you leave the SKU stickers on your avocado peels, out of sheer laziness, you're just going to have to pick them out of the compost when you sift it.
• The scallions I planted on the deck a few weeks ago are coming up. And the chives are coming back. I should have a chive omelet for breakfast tomorrow.

And the shawl I'm knitting is coming along. I've finished 10 out of 14 repeats of the main chart, and have more than 300 stitches. That's a fuckton of stitches, and by the time I'm done I'll be well over 400.



The blue/purple/brown blob is the shawl as of a few days ago. It doesn't look like much. But the thing about lace is that it comes into its own when you block it, as shown in the gold swatch. That's made from leftover yarn from a pair of socks I knit last year.

The pattern: Adamas, by Miriam Felton
The yarn: Socks That Rock Mediumweight, in the Jubilation colorway (the swatch is in 24 carat)
The needles: US 7 (4.5mm)

Last week this time it was starting to snow. And snow. And snow. Today, the second day in a row of 60°F temperatures, the snow is almost gone. Yesterday when I went out to retrieve the lid to the compost pile—it had blown off in the storm—it was so muddy and slippery that I couldn't survey the back yard without slipping. Today was another story.

I had lunch with a friend and ran some errands afterwards (yet another garden center doesn't have onion sets in yet). When I got home, I wanted to do nothing more than take a nice long walk. But I took a look at the yard and decided that I could start cleaning up.

Looking at my LJ records, which serve in some measure as a gardening journal, I see that my first cleanup of the year last year was some two weeks later. One result of deferring the cleanup was that my crocuses weren't happy. There were enough leaves over them that they didn't thrive, and, when I finally raked away the leaves, those crocuses that came up were bruised. And so, I didn't have the carpet of purple crocuses that I had envisioned. Thus, one of my first priorities was to rake out the area where the most crocuses were planted. I think my timing was OK. There are a few crocus leaves peeping up, but no blossoms to be bruised.

The tulips on the side of the house have been peeping up for a while. In the winter, that area gets a lot of sun, and the wind patterns were such that there wasn't a lot of snow drifting there. The daffodils? I'm kind of letting them fend for themselves. The main daffodil area is mixed in with the pachysandra in front of the house. There are still leaves to pull out of those beds, but they'll wait. I contented myself with cutting back the snapdragons that I hadn't gotten to in the winter. The snapdragons aren't supposed to be perennial in this growing zone, but, planted right next to the house, they do seem to come back. My mother has tried to convince me that they must just be reseeding themselves. That may be. But they also have live stems in March, so I rather doubt it.

I also picked up a bunch of sticks and such like from the front yard and cut back dead flowers from the border to the front walk. The Dusty Millers still look OK—the nice man at the garden center tells me it's hard to kill them—so I left them, and will leave them until there is new growth. Once I cut back the dead stuff from the sedum, I saw some nice new growth. But not much of anything else.

It's still too wet to do much with the large flower bed and with the patch of irises by the stairs to the deck. And I'm going to try not to think about the area in the corner that needs major fertilizing for anything to grow. I put in a flat of vinca there my first year in the house, and there are maybe 5 plants left alive out of a flat of 40 or so plants. And we won't even talk about the poor excuse for a mountain laurel that's too stubborn to either die or bloom. (I don't get weeds either in this area.)

It was nice to get out and work in the yard—a lot nicer than the snow shoveling that was my exercise at the beginning of last week. But I'm still annoyed that I can't get onion sets to plant on the deck. Agway says they'll have them in on Wednesday. I'm tempted to give them a call to check and then take off from work early to grab some. After all, it will still be light when I get home, and I can plant some before dinner.

I haven't written much about my veggie garden this year, something I'll probably regret next year when I'm trying to recall what did and didn't work this year. But I have been gardening. Because I've also been over-indulging at the farmers market and local farmstands, more of my beans have made it into the freezer, to be consumed some time over the winter. And there has been a bumper crop of beans. I planted a different variety of pole beans than in the past, and they started producing earlier. With some pauses where I really wondered whether I should just pull them out, they have been producing since early in July.

I had a decent arugula crop, planted with seeds that I saved from last year's plants. And I have sitting on my kitchen counter a little dish of seed pods for next year. Even better, one of the plants that I didn't pull out when it started to get hot in August looks like it will give me a few salad's worth of arugula whenever I want it.

However, bunnies ate much of my lettuce. And, when a friend gave some Swiss chard plants to replace the lettuce, the bunnies got at that also. But the bunnies have moved on, and the surviving Swiss chard seems to be reviving. So, some time before the first frost, I should be able to get at least a meal or two worth of chard.

And then there were the familiar-looking mystery plants. I didn't plant these, honest. But they didn't look like weeds, so I let them be. The leaves looked familiar, and the smell and feel of the stalks was familiar also. Finally, last week, I twigged that they really looked like tomato plants. Tomatoes that I didn't plant. This week, they have blossoms, and one of the plants has set fruit. It may be too little, too late; frost in October wouldn't be unprecedented. But, today, I caved, and staked those suckers, those tomato plants that I didn't plant. I don't know how they got there. But, damnit, they're mine!

When I bought my house, I identified a spot on the side of the house that would be perfect for peonies. When I'd been in the house a year or two, I ordered a set of peonies in assorted colors from White Flower Farms and planted them, following directions carefully. The first spring, they came up, but the guys who mow my lawn weren't careful, and they attacked the peonies when they were in a vulnerable state. Other years, there have been other problems. Finally, this year, I have peonies, spectacular peonies. Well, two of the three plants are blooming. And, I staked them early enough that I didn't end up with droopy peonies after the recent storms. I especially like the pink one.

(1) The new hand-knit swiffer cover did a good job cleaning my kitchen floor. I rinsed it after using it, and it's now drying in the bathroom. I knit another cover, but have to sew it up.

(2) My freezer compartment does a very quick job making ice cubes. I've filled the bin (it takes about 5 trays of cubes), and, even though the tray cubes are a slightly different shape from the cubes made by the broken automatic icemaker, they still feed through the dispenser reasonably well. This means that I can have crushed ice, which I have come to prefer, in drinks. (And, when I was in Shaws this evening, they had ice cube trays which, I swear, weren't there on Sunday.)

(3) I stayed home from work today, as I was having work done on the house. I now have a much better patio door than I had before. Not only does it latch shut, but it locks. And the guys who installed it were very careful, so it's well insulated around the edges, which the old one wasn't. This should prevent heat leakage next winter. In addition, I now have a wall air conditioner in the living room. The guys made a hole in the wall and put in the A/C. They'll have to come back Friday or Sunday to do trim. In addition, the air conditioner needs a dedicated circuit. We turned it on, briefly, to make sure it worked, but the TV and DVR weren't on.

(4) I finally got the beans planted in the vegetable garden. It's been over a month since I planted lettuce, radishes, arugula, and scallions, and I've been picking the arugula and lettuce thinnings for salad for about a week. Norma of Now Norma Knits posted today about radish greens, and the comments to her post are full of serving suggestions. So, next time I thin radishes, I'll take the greens, wash them, and do something with them. I'm leaning toward starting slowly and putting them in chicken soup; I have a carcass in the fridge that has to become soup sometime in the next few days.

(5) I have a work-related cocktail party to go to tomorrow evening. The linen pants I want to wear were way too long (despite their classic cut, they're apparently designed to be worn with fuck-me shoes), so I had to hem them. I bought matching thread a year-and-a-half ago, and, while doing laundry over the weekend, I ironed them and marked where I want the hem to lie. It's probably been 30 years since I've actually sewed a hem, so I had to fake it a little, but at least the stitches aren't visible on the right side. Small blessings.

I have come to the conclusion that I can't do heavy garden work two days in a row. Oh well. I did some indoor chores yesterday (laundry, vacuuming, starting to pack up the winter clothes so I have room in the dresser for the summer clothes). That left today for the garden.

After lunch, I did the following:

First I finished turning over the veggie garden. Then I got distracted. I needed a rake to deal with the smaller rocks in the veggie patch. On the way to the shed to get a rake, I noticed that my neighbor has planted baby trees on both sides of his driveway. Fortunately, he's placed little reflectors next to each tree, to distract lawn mowers.

At that point, I realized that I hadn't finished raking crud out of the front lawn. So I grabbed the leaf rake and started dragging stuff down hill. There was a surprising amount of crud: dead thatch, acorns, pine needles, blown down branches and not a few leaves. The advantage of raking is that I noticed a bunch of things that I hadn't noticed previously. In particular, there's a lot of ground cover that flourishes in the shade. There's something with speckled leaves. And I see clumps of violets (or, at least, violet leaves). I got about 80% done with the raking when I realized what the prime disadvantage of raking is. Even with the gloves I was wearing, I still have two blisters, one at the base of each thumb.

So I took a feeling sorry for myself break to watch the hockey game. Afterwards, I went back outside. I raked the vegetable garden. Then I spread the compost over the garden and raked again. And then I planted. I planted one row of radishes. The seeds are from 2005 so I may or may not end up with radishes. Interspersed with the radishes is lettuce. (This was based on a suggestion on the radish packet.) I planted a row of scallions as well. And, on the other side of the garden, I planted another row of lettuce and a row of arugula. There is space in the middle for beans, which I will plant in a few weeks.

I then watered briefly, pondering the compost and the arugula. I bought my house in 2001 and started the compost pile in 2002, 6 years ago. For six years I have saved organic garbage for eight months of the year. I supplemented the food garbage with occasional armloads of yard waste and one big bag of shredded paper. I have a compost aerator tool, and I'm not afraid to use it. But this is the first year, I've felt that there was enough actual compost to use. So, on Friday, I opened up the side of the composter and sifted compost. The sifting is necessary, as some things don't compost as quickly as others. I probably spent an hour or two sifting, and returning eggshells and avocado peels to the bin. Today, in 10 minutes or so, the seven gallons of actual compost disappeared into the soil in the veggie plot: 6 years and two hours are now invisible. The upside of this is that the spaces left by the compost that I removed will probably accelerate composting of what remains. And plenty does remain. And I've learned a few things about composting. First, there's the issue of the eggshells and the avocado rinds. Secondly, I really can't cheat. Those little plastic sku labels on fruits and veggies really won't rot. Not at all.

As for the arugula, last year I was blessed that the arugula that I planted didn't die off in the heat of the summer. In part, there were no particularly lengthy heat waves. And, in part, the arugula was shaded by the bush beans. (I've planned this year's garden to allow for the same shading.) But, more than anything, the garden was simply telling me to eat more arugula. Late in August, I realized that my arugula was growing seed pods. I ended up saving a little bowl of seed pods. This bowl sat on my kitchen counter all winter, as I couldn't think of a place to put it. The seed pods dried out, not surprisingly. Yesterday, while I was waiting for the contractor to show up, I cracked the itty, bitty dried pods. And ended up with enough seeds for a row of arugula. It's a grand experiment. And I'm entirely prepared for the possibility that these carefully saved seeds won't germinate. I won't starve if I can't eat arugula from my garden this summer. But I'm not really all that far removed from that level of dependence. I can buy food, and I can buy seeds. More to the point, there is a distribution network so that I have food and seeds to buy. Nonetheless, I have recycled on a grand scale today.

So, yeah, after lunch accomplishments:

Raked some more leaves from the front of the house and dumped them in the woods

Sifted about 6 gallons of compost

Turned over about half of the vegetable plot

Pulled a hose out of the shed and connected it

Fertilized the cherry tree, which has buds, many buds, and drip-watered it

Fertilized the eastern redbud tree, which has no buds and looks deader than a doornail, and drip-watered it (hope springs eternal)

Pulled up some dead fronds from some of the irises

Contemplated raking up a bunch of pine needles from under the forsythia, but realized that there was pretty much bare earth, so pine needles are good

Dumped the vegetable waste into the compost pile

Watered various planters on the deck

The forecast for today was good, and I got my compost sifter, so I decided to take a gardening day off work (well, according to the records, it'll just be a normal vacation day). The plan is to sift compost, turn over the vegetable garden, and, maybe plant some stuff.

Over breakfast, I made two business-hours phone calls that I preferred not to make from work (a question about medical billing and arranging for a contractor to come give me a quote for some work on the house). Then, I went outside to pick up the newspapers. Once outside, I noticed that there were still leaves in one of the front beds. So I grabbed the rake and a bin, and started filling and dumping.

While I was raking, I noticed that there were a lot of wasps flying around. Some seemed to be homing in on the gutter, but there's an actual hive inside the light fixture by the front door. So, back in the house, and down to the basement for some wasp spray. (It's amazing how pacifism and respect for life flies right out the window when there are flying, stinging insects by your front door.)

While I was down in the basement, I remembered that I hadn't turned the outside taps back on. So I pulled out a stool, and turned the two taps back on. (Note to self: must remember to put stool away.)

Back upstairs, I grabbed the gardening gloves conveniently abandoned by the front door, went outside, and started spraying like a maniac. (So much for the idea of cutting some more daffodils for inside the house, at least until it rains.)

I filled another few tubs with leaves from the garden bed, and decided that I really ought to rake some cruft from the side of the lawn that I didn't rake a few weeks ago.

Once I'd done that, I realized that, if I'm going to dig the veggie garden, I would need pitchfork and shovel, stored in the shed down by the woods. So, I grabbed the snow shovel and ice chipper from the end of the driveway, and walked down to the shed. Then I brought the pitchfork and shovel around the house, so they'd be near the garden when I get around to digging. They're leaning up against the house near the back outside tap. It occurred to me that it would be a good idea to check that I'd turned the inside spigot in the right direction. I had.

I walked back around to the front of the house, to pick up the newspapers, so I can read them while I eat lunch. Maybe after lunch I'll actually get to the compost and the veggie patch!

My sister came to visit for the day, and joined me on my Saturday shopping rounds. We hit the LLBean outlet and Trader Joes, the stores she most wanted to get to. Then I took her to my local produce market and to the Italian cheese shop.

The produce market also sells bedding plants, herbs, and vegetable plants, in season, of course. Today, the shelves outside the store were full of herbs, parsley, basil, rosemary, and sage (at least), as well as lettuce plants. And there were rafts of petunias. I limited myself to a rosemary plant and a pot of basil. (If I'd seen the parsley before I checked out, I would have bought some of that also.)

After my sister left, I took two of the pots that had held herbs last year out on the deck, tossed out the roots, moistened and worked the soil, and added some fertilizer. The rosemary is, I hope happily, living in one pot, and the basil in another. I brought the pots in for the night, though, lest the overnight cold shock them too much. In addition, I cultivated the soil in one of the deck boxes. To my surprise, the chives from last year have come back, so I left them there. And I planted a bunch of onion sets for scallions.

Life is good.

I took a day off today, not off work, just off. There were leaves to deal with, and leaves were dealt with.

I have a space in my back yard that's closed in on three sides. It's open on the side that the wind blows from, so leaves pile up there in the fall. And, unlike the leaves in other parts of my yard, they don't blow away. The forecast was good for today. So I pulled out my leaf tarp and an old garbage can from the shed. Both had signs of critter damage, but not enough to preclude using them for dragging leaves away. I spent two hours before lunch and another hour and a half after lunch filling the garbage can with leaves and dumping it out in the woods behind the house. Some of the leaves were still wet, so a full can of leaves was heavy.

I probably could have worked more efficiently. But, when you're out in the yard for the first time in the season, it's inevitable that you'll wander around a bit to see what's growing. The tulips that I planted last year are coming up, just where I planted them. Funny that. The crocuses in front of the house are blooming and one batch of daffodils is coming up nicely. These I'd noticed on my way to work in the past week or so. But, since I was in back of the house, I noticed other things. The peonies are starting to come up, for instance. They don't exactly thrive where I've planted them (I suspect there isn't enough sun), but they haven't died either.

The thing about yard work is that there's always more. It's a good thing it's so satisfying,

The thing about a garden is that you don't grow it. It grows itself. You provide seeds, manipulate, to the extent that you can, growing conditions (soil, water, light, nutrients). But the garden does what it will. You may think that a deck support is a perfect place for clematis or morning glory. But nothing that you do will make a clematis grow. I can provide soil and water. But I cannot provide sun. And I cannot will the clematis to grow.

I have a small vegetable plot. In past years, I have tried lettuce, cucumbers, zucchini, beans, radishes, scallions, tomatoes. Some grown well, some have grown poorly, and some have grown not at all. I may have failed these plants by not providing proper conditions. Or, it may be that this plot is simply not their place, or that this year is not their year.

Normally, by late August, what lettuce I have planted has grown tall and rangy, its leaves sparse and tending toward the bitter. This year, not so much. I have barely enough lettuce to trim some leaves for my weekend morning BLT wraps. Perhaps, as the days shorten and overnight temperatures chill, it will revive.

In compensation, there is the arugula. Last year, I planted arugula only on the deck. It grew in early spring, providing a nice zestiness for salads made from store-bought lettuce. But, once the actual garden started producing, the arugula on the deck withered away. So, this year, a few weeks after I planted arugula on the deck, I bought another packet of seeds, and planted a row in the vegetable plot. And, oh what a success it has been. Even after bolting, the leaves are still good. A single plant, pulled out just at the point that the leaves are about the yellow, provides enough greens for a lovely arugula and tomato salad (made from tomatoes gifted by a colleague or purchased from a local farmstand). And there is seemingly an endless supply of such plants.

This evening, after picking the beans that have ripened since Saturday, I pulled out another plant. I sat on the retaining wall bordering my flower garden, watching a child disobey his mother and pulling the leaves off the arugula plant. And I noticed what I should have noticed earlier: little pods. I opened a pod with my thumbnail, and there they were, itty-bitty arugula seeds. I quickly pinched off a handful of pods, and made my way inside, with the bowl of beans and arugula leaves in my arm, pausing only to deposit the denuded arugula plant in the compost bin.


Beans and Greens



Arugula Seeds

I had it all worked out, I did. Wednesday night, I thawed out the last of my beans from last summer. There were about four servings, in two bags. So, I had beans for dinner instead of salad Wednesday night. Last night, I made a cold bean salad, using last year's garden beans, the white part of some scallion from this year, and a bit of dill from this year (it didn't do very well, so that's the last of it, unless I can find some more to plant). I had bean salad for dinner last night, and brought some more in to the lab for lunch today. The plan was to finish the bean salad tonight, and pick new beans tomorrow. But when I went outside just now, to pick some lettuce for a salad, I just couldn't help it. I picked a half pound of beans. I could have picked more, but they'll be there tomorrow, when I try to work out a way to stake the bean plants. I have a feeling I'm going to be eating a lot of beans this summer!

Last summer I ate a lot of beans, fresh from the garden. I had pole beans and I had bush beans. Sometimes my bean plants produced more than I could eat (gardens are like that). But there weren't enough for me to give away. So I blanched and froze a few packages of beans, with the intent that I could eat garden produce in the cold depths of February. I had the conceit that I would ration out the frozen beans until this year's beans started to come in.

This year, I planted two rows of bush beans, using seeds left over from last year. The heat wave this week came at exactly the right time, as the bean plants had started to blossom and set fruit. This evening I noticed that there were already beans a few inches long (they seem to have doubled in length since yesterday!). If I were really eager, I could even have picked one or two. Instead, I'll let them go, and, instead of salad tomorrow night, I'll have a big serving of frozen beans.

Shortly after I moved into my house, I planted a cherry tree. In 2004, it produced a few cherries, but local birds got all of them. In 2005, I covered it with a net, and ended up with a small bowl of cherries, pictured in this icon. It made some nice Ukrainian cherry soup. Last year, I wasn't terribly vigilant. I picked a few cherries, but not enough to do anything with, and the birds got the rest. This year? There were lots of blossoms, and, for a while, I was monitoring the cherry production, to the extent that I noticed that the unripe cherries on the top of the tree had become bird food. But, then, I kind of forgot about it. Until today. Today, after I'd picked some lettuce and radishes for dinner, I stopped by the composter to discard the radish tops. I then glanced at the cherry tree, and noticed some splashes of red. I left the bowl with the salad by the composter and, rather quickly, picked a generous handful of cherries. There were clear signs that the birds had preceded me. But there were plenty of ripe cherries left for me; some were ripe enough that they just pulled off, leaving the pits behind. Tomorrow after work, I'll stop off and buy some lemons so I can make cherry soup. And, perhaps, there will be some more ripe cherries left behind by the neighborhood birds.

Last weekend, I went back to the garden center (yet again) in search of parsley. They finally had some decent looking parsley, so I bought some. Despite the fact that I wasn't planning on buying more flowers, I somehow lost my resolve. What can I say? I'm just a sucker for cream marigolds. But I didn't get around to planting them (it helped that I wasn't sure exactly where I wanted to put them), and they were a little droopy by the time I got home from work yesterday. I watered them well, and planned to leave work early enough today that I could plant them, somewhere.

There were some gaps in my large raised flower bed, so that's where I planted them. While digging, I noticed that, despite the rain over the weekend, the soil was awfully dry. The beginning of summer heat will do that. So, when I'd planted the marigolds, and picked some lettuce for dinner, I set up the sprinkler, with the intention of watering the flower bed for about half an hour. On the deck, I put the parsley into one of the planters, and finally got the chives (that I'd bought, oh, six weeks ago) out of the little plastic box they came in. I went inside and turned on the Mets game in the bottom of the first inning, at about 7:20 (for some reason, I noticed the time). Then I washed the lettuce, and sat down to read LJ and catch up on non-LJ blogs. Around 8:45, I started cooking dinner, and ate around 9:15, finishing around 9:45. Then, back to LJ, and the golf sock I'm knitting.

Conspicuous by its absence in the above boring narrative of my evening is a second mention of the sprinkler. About 15 minutes ago, it suddenly occurred to me that I had no recollection of turning the sprinkler off. I grabbed a flashlight and dashed outside and down the stairs from the deck. Indeed, there was a distinct spritzing sound. It was 10:40 or so when I turned the sprinkler off, so I watered the garden for over 3 1/2 hours. And the teaser for the late news that I just saw mentioned possible thunderstorms later tonight!

Yesterday when I was puttering in the garden, there was one lone bean plant poking its way out of the soil.

I just looked at the window in my bedroom. There were two entire rows of bean seedlings. They erupted overnight.

I love this time of year.

That is all.

It didn't seem like I did all that much yesterday, but by dinnertime I was utterly exhausted, and I went to bed earlier than I have in a long time. Even though I didn't sleep all that well, I got up entirely too early.

Over breakfast, I made lists. After eating, I posted some things on Freecycle and did a survey of the garden to see what I needed to fill in. I did some puttering and then ate lunch.

After lunch, I headed back to the garden center. I got some more alyssum and dianthus. For the front bed, I got two campanula plants. There's one section where campanula grows very well, when the guys who mow the lawn don't get carried away doing spring cleanup. So, even though I picked varieties that I haven't had before (campanula portenschlagiana Resholt and campanula punctata "Hot Lips"), I think they'll do well.

When I moved into the house, I had to do a fair amount of fussing to get the selling realtors to take their sign away. But the spot in the front yard where the sign was proved to be a good location for some flowers, even though I wage a constant war with the lawn mower guys not to mow whatever flowers I have there. The little bulbs in the spring do fine, but they flower before lawn-mowing season. The phlox I had there last year didn't come back this year. It could be due to the lawn mower guys, or it could be just because. In any case, I bought some scabiosa (now that I know the difference between that and nemesia!) for that location. It's supposed to bloom all season, and the plant I have is already blooming. And, since they had one, I bought another nemesia!

I also added to my collection of gardening gadgets. I bought a large watering can with a disperser head. It's a little hard to fill at the back faucet, but that's OK. It works. And I bought a larger clay pot so I can repot the sage that I had stuck in a too small pot when I bought it, because that was all I had. It's a good thing I got a larger pot as the plant was already root bound. I hope the new pot is large enough!

I've had nibbles on three of the four items I listed on Freecycle, and one was picked up already.

So, it may not seem like I did all that much (I didn't describe every little thing I did!), but it still feels like I had a productive day. I have some new Argentinian wine to open, and I have fresh garden produce for dinner. What could be better?

I was planning on taking a vacation day today, to have a long weekend. But, yesterday afternoon, an email came around giving everyone the day off. It was a stinky hot day, the first hot day of the year. Nonetheless, I wore myself out.

I did three loads of laundry. The towels went through the dryer, but the other two loads I line-dried. I also have done most of the clothing changeover, taking summer clothes out of the storage box and putting winter clothes away for the summer. I'm not completely done, as there are a few more things that need to be washed one last time. However, I did remember to wash the gauge swatches for the spring (well, now, fall) sweater I want to start on.

Then, I planted all of the plants I bought last weekend. It sounds so simple when I put it that way. But there were four larger pots of nemesia, and eight sixpacks of assorted annuals. That means that, on a rather hot day, I dug 52 holes, mixed a spoonful of fertilizer into the bottom of each hole, broke apart the root ball of each plant, and patted it into place. And then I watered. I ran the sprinkler over the raised bed twice, once when I was taking my lunch break, and once when I was done for the day. In front, I used the hose. And I carried gallons of water up the stairs from the tap to water the stuff growing on the deck.

For some reason, my brain wants to confuse dianthus and diascia. No matter what I've said in other entries, what I have is lots of dianthus, with lots of lovely magenta flowers. Last year, I planted them rather haphazardly, thinking that they were annuals. But, no, they're perennials. And they're so much lusher the second year. Towards the end of the summer, I should think about transplanting some of them into a more sensible arrangement.

The irises have started to bloom, at least those that get the most sun. They were divided and replanted two years ago, when I had the driveway redone, along with the installation of the large raised bed. But, some of them need to be divided again, after they stop blooming. I'll have to think about whether I have any reasonable place to plant more irises. I want to have more waves of purple; one can't ever have too much purple in one's life. But I have to be reasonable. Even though iris tubers get planted rather shallowly, there are stretches of my yarn where I can't even dig a shallow trench for iris tubers. And there are other areas that don't get enough sun, once the trees have leafed out. If nobody at work wants some, I can put them on Freecycle, and I'm sure they'll find a good home.

The fans are on, and I have a ballgame on. In a few minutes, I'm going to fire up the gas grill for the first time this season and grill me some ribs.

And tomorrow, I'll survey the garden to see what I need to fill in the few remaining gaps. And then I'll head to the garden center yet again.

It's time for a new game, perennial or weed? In either case, these are plants that appear in the spring somewhere in the garden. Some of them will turn out to have nice flowers and make an aesthetic contribution to the garden. Others? Not so much.

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