i looked out the dining room window into the front garden this morning and saw a small goldfinch perched in the cosmos, munching happily on some seedheads i hadn't yet removed. it was joined shortly thereafter by another, bigger goldfinch. they snacked together companionably until a grackle buzzed the scene.
today i feel good about neglecting the deadheading.
today as i was out harvesting weeds from between the bricks of the front walk, i got inspected by a hummingbird.
a juvenile male or a female — meaning small, gray-brown, and uninteresting in appearance — browsed around the bee balm for a while, then hovered up to look at me, hanging about three feet from my head.
i stood as still as i possibly could.
then it buzzed closer, about two feet away, at eye level.
i didn't breathe.
then it moved closer, until it was no more than a foot from my head, looking me straight in the face.
it hung there for about fifteen seconds, checking me out. i could feel the air move from the beating of its wings.
when it had decided i was neither a predator nor good to eat, it wheeled around and went back to its breakfast at the bee balm.
here's a view of the garden from my office window. it's not enough of a close-up to showcase everything that's in bloom, but everything's in bloom. if it weren't currently 60 degrees out, you might be tempted to think it's summer.
oh. wait.
i've tried and tried to take good pictures of my gardens as a whole. they just never look nearly as good as they do in person. most of the time, in fact, they look like ratty beds of scrubby weeds. in person, i swear they are gorgeous.
to give you some idea, i've taken pictures of some plants up close. please enjoy a delphinium, a peony, and a limited glimpse of
the back shade bed.
this morning it stopped raining for about five minutes — just long enough for me to go out into the yard and take a few pictures of what's in bloom. (it is worth pointing out that it's rained maybe 11 days out of the last 15; we were lucky that sunday, the day we went on a picnic and ventured out to the nursery was not one of them. today, alas, is. as was yesterday. as will be tomorrow. as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, rain without end, amen. at least the slugs like it.)
the garden overall won't hit its prime until late june/early july. for now i'm happy to see the few early bloomers* that dare to show their faces between rain showers. and zealously prosecuting every slug i see, to the fullest extent of the law.
___
* "early bloomers, julie? it's june." i know. i have a calendar, but apparently no one told vermont it's supposed to be summer now.
snow. on the ground. on may 4.
yesterday i planted a forsythia!
now, i had to move a hydrangea bush to do it. and in relocating the hydrangea, i accidentally dug up about half a dozen lily bulbs. so the plant tally stays about the same. but the forsythia is in at last. right now it is wee, about two feet tall. it's supposed to grow to about six feet — the better to camouflage the unlovely oil pipe, the hose spigot, the electrical outlet, the meter...
it was a big day in the garden. i did all the spring cleanout in the front, to the tune of five trugs' worth. i mulched (having once again bought the wrong color mulch, and having once again decided that in the grand scheme of things it didn't really matter if my mulch was sorta swirly). and i planted the forsythia, plus two icelandic poppy "wonderland"s, a plant i loved last year, and a blue butterfly delphinium, kind of a bushy dwarf delphinium instead of the magnificent spikes you usually see.
paul was busy outside, too. a couple of weeks ago we had an enormous dead pine tree, about 60 feet tall, taken out of the no-man's land between our house and the neighbor's. paul manfully carried a bunch of the debris over to the ravine (for that is what i have decided to call the wilder side of our driveway), thanks once again to the mighty trug.
now, when the trunk of the tree was being disposed of, paul had the foresight to ask the men to cut it into big slices, about 8 inches thick. the resulting slabs are about two feet in diameter — really huge. we had no idea how we'd use them. there are about a million.
i had this idea, though, that we should provide some path for the gentlemen who read our meter and fill our oil tank. four years ago, they could bushwhack their way through the dense and ugly roses. before yesterday, they could tromp haphazardly through the bed, trampling the wild violets. now, to keep them from bruising my young and tender forsythia, they can use a path of two giant slices of wood, securely set into the ground. (they'd better.)
the hyacinth in the picture was a sad casualty of the slice-moving. it died so that my forsythia might live. amen and so be it.
the only things blooming at the moment are the daffodils, which were first to bloom and are still going strong; the hyacinths, unbelievably fragrant and royal blue except for the one pink outlier, now sadly departed; and, as of this morning, one of the eight million tulips mom planted last fall. but everything else is ready, crouching, poised to spring any minute.
this afternoon i started the spring cleanup in the yard. three wheelbarrows of sticks later, i settled into the front perennial bed for a preliminary evaluation. i am happy to report that spring appears to be on its way.
it is taking its own sweet time.
the lupine has leaves about as big as my thumbnail. it should look like this eventually — but i make no promises.
then we have the dozens of lipstick-red tulips mom planted in the fall. they're barely peeking up through the mulch at the moment. as i cleaned out some debris from around the plants, i was astonished to see that the new shoots push right through any dead leaves that get in their way. note to self: don't mess with a tulip when it means business.
finally, i was happy to see that the daylilies and daffodils under my living room window are pushing up. these plants come courtesy of my neighbor and my grandmother respectively. when the daffodils are finished, the foliage of the daylilies hides their tattered leaves nicely. zero maintenance: my kind of garden.
as excited as i am to see signs of life in my yard, i have to confess that i'm emerald green with envy. mom and betty e-mailed me pictures of their gardens, vivid enough to make me weep — that is, if i weren't already weeping at the mole trails and snowbanks that are the most noticeable feature of my yard these days.
..and there's no one around to hear it, do i still have to pay to get it removed?
this morning the tree has leaned appreciably by another few feet.
yellow = vertical
red = saturday am
green = saturday pm
orange = sunday am
we've had a couple of very heavy snowfalls in the last couple of weeks. many of the trees on our property are bowed down with the weight of the snow. some of our neighbors' trees have fallen over. and now, now one of our venerable evergreens looks like it's on the verge of pushing up daisies, if daisies could indeed be pushed through three feet of snow.
yesterday as i was talking on the phone, i stood at the dining room window and looked out. what i saw made me hang up the phone and yodel, "paul! you gotta come see this."
one of the large pine trees on the far side of the driveway appeared to be leaning way over. here is what it looked like this morning from the front steps:
here is what it looked like three hours later from the same spot:
if you'd like to gain a true appreciation of how far it's fallen in a few short hours, check out this composite. the yellow line is perfectly vertical. the green line shows the angle of the trunk this morning, while the red one shows where the trunk is now. i made one of the photos transparent so that you can see the tree's former position as well as its current one.
not good.
i called the tree man this morning and asked him to come look at it (read: get rid of it) any day this week. in a rare display of good planning, i parked the car way up the driveway this afternoon — in case the tree falls during the night, i want to be able to get to the airport on time tomorrow morning.
at last! my recalcitrant burning bushes have finally consented to burn, about a month behind every other one in montpelier. i suspect they are simply lazy, just like their caretaker.
since rain is forecast for tonight and tomorrow, and we might get snow on wednesday, i figured it was time to get myself in gear and blow the leaves out of the back yard.
now, a careful person with a rake would have done a much, much better job than i did with the blower. but then a careful person with no arms, one leg, and a pair of tweezers clamped between her jaws would have done a better job than i'd have done with a rake — so let's just call it even. the grass is still pocked with leaves here and there, but at least now the grass is visible.
to show the contrast, here's a picture of how it looked when i was halfway finished. (click on the teeny picture, just like i've taught you. that's right! good! you can also click here for another view.)
our resident woodpecker scolded me relentlessly as i worked. he was so loud that i could hear him above the roar of the blower. he might have been indignant about the noise, but since the suet feeder was empty, i'm guessing that's what he was complaining about. seems to me that woodpeckers are supposed to, you know, peck trees in search of snacks. figures we'd have the lazy-ass kind who prefers to set up shop on the feeder for easy pickins.
as i worked, i saw a pale green globe about the size of a golf ball nestled in the grass. it had a citrus-looking skin. being me, i poked it ungently with the nozzle of the blower. the globe instantly burst, emitting a dark cloud of dust containing god knows what kind of spores. approximately nine hundred billion of them are currently setting up shop in my lungs. i always knew yardwork was bad for my health.
today i will be spending the bulk of my time outside raking leaves. most of the leaves are off the birch in front, so it's mostly safe, and the maple in back has jettisoned everything. (the oak still has a ways to go.)
you can watch me on the webcam if you dare.
thanks to the rain last night and this morning, the crabapple tree was beautiful today — every berry (for how can they truly be called apples?) had a big drop of water hanging from its that shone in what little light we had. (click to enlarge. eventually i'll have y'all trained and won't have to give these instructions.)
on another note, the people at the nursery insisted on referring to my centurion crabapple simply as a "crab."
on another note, it's hard for me to type "crabapple" — my fingers keep wanting to shorten it to "crapple."
yielding at last to peer pressure, i have begun a compost heap. right now it's more of a compost bump, about 6" square by 3" high, but i suppose we'll get there eventually.
i found a good list of what i can and cannot add to the pile. (hair: okay. meat and bones: not okay.)
i may have to take up coffee drinking so that i might add the grounds to the pile. in about a year i expect to have enough to add a modest top-dressing to the two houseplants i currently own. agway will have to supply the rest.
after planting two gorgeous new trees this weekend, we are all too tired to say much more than this:
(okay, some of us did more supervising than actual digging, i admit.)
if my grandmother is reading this, i hope she'll go no further — not only because she'll weep at the current state of my garden, but because i'm about to use some very bad words.
okay.
you'd think i'd feel better after such a cathartic string of vulgarity...but no.
i went outside today to check the burning bushes under the dining room bay window. last year, inexplicably, they did not burn, so i wanted to take a close look to see if any conflagration was imminent. what i saw made my hair stand on end.
(okay, it's the lack of conditioner that did that. but work with me here.)
exhibit a. the chokeberries. i planted two chokeberry bushes a couple of falls ago, one on either side of the front step. they're known for showy fall foliage and tasty-looking red berries. they've been doing okay, growing, leafing out obediently if not exuberantly. here is one of them — you can see the bright red berries down by the ground.
and here is the other, now shivering naked in the coming chill:
exhibit b. the hole. i cannot swear in a court of law that the deer did this, though i am not above perjury if that's what it takes to send those goddamned deer to the motherfucking electric chair. there is a big hole in the ground, from which several fall bulbs, lovingly planted, have been cruelly extracted. the carnage is highlighted in yellow.
here is a longer view of the same hole, including the displaced bulbs left on the walk.
exhibit c. hydrangea "annabelle". imagine my surprise when the hydrangea bush i planted in the spring actually bloomed. true, it didn't bloom until the beginning of september, but it had three pretty lacecap blossoms still on it...until the rampage of terror. here it is stripped of its glory, never to regain its onetime splendor:
(i admit that "splendor" may be too grand a term for a bush that is, after all, only about 18" high.)
exhibit d. the peony. what? you can't tell it's a peony? well, peonies have foliage you'd recognize if...oh. what's that? there's no foliage left on it? say it ain't so, joe!
i'm afraid it is, kid.
exhibit e. sedum "autumn joy." it took me a while to warm to sedum; their dusty-red color when in bloom doesn't do a lot for me. but it grows reliably, requires little care, and, in winter, sports these wonderful seedheads that gather snow into cheerful little caps. i like sedum now...but now my dreams are dead.
in a few days mom will be here. we'd planned to work a bit in my garden. but dare i revisit the scene of the massacre? i'm not sure i can take it. the ground will be sodden with the bitter, bitter tears of my regret.
paul goes down to the pond several times a day to look at the froglings.
the latest news from the garden...
here are some of the lilies currently rioting across the back fence. thank you, deer off, for protecting them from evil. this closeup sort of looks like the kind of thing you'd find on a greeting card.
this is a shot of one of the raised beds paul built me. i had the idea that i'd plant a cutting garden. the cosmos are going great guns, very satisfying. the zinnias, though, are a little too dwarfy to be useful for cutting. next year i'll plant something different.
here's the front bed, complete with purple glass birdbath. (it originally looked very naked, but then the bee balm got tall enough to camouflage it some.)
i've been spending zero time working out in the garden, but the mulching i did early in the season seems to have paid off in terms of weed control.
proof that paul's smarter than i am: you don't see him with his arm trapped in the coiled extension cord, do you?
today i mowed the back yard. we have an electric mower, so cutting the grass involves managing a 100' extension cord. after i finished, i decided to be a good citizen and coil the cord back up so paul could easily drag the mower to the front for his stint.
so i did that thing where you wrap the cord around under your elbow, then over the palm of your hand. i was proud of how tidy a job i was doing...until i realized i'd wound it so tightly that there was no way i could get my arm out of the coil.
i bent. i stretched. i pulled. no avail.
i had to uncoil the entire goddamn thing again to free my trapped forearm.
paul finds a lot of gross things.
this morning on my garden tour i noticed that the lavender plant sported several little spit-like clusters clinging to its stems. i was sure they were slug eggs, so i got out the sevin (the very sight of which will scramble your dna faster than you can say "egg sac") and carefully doused each clump.
turns out they're probably not slug eggs. i guess we'll find out what they actually are when my garden is overrun by spectacularly mutated mystery creatures.
today paul pointed out an eggshell on the deck below the nest — i guess we have hatchling(s). we didn't see the mother bird anywhere around, nor did we hear any telltale peeping, so i hope everything's okay.
our first orange poppy bloomed a couple of weeks ago. now several new blooms are burgeoning, and two sprang into loveliness today. what i didn't know is that our plant is configured to bloom in two colors! today we have orange and pink!
so there i was, just minding my own business. well, actually, i was looking through my office window down into the front garden. my garden, my business.
anyway, i spotted a butterfly and almost broke my neck barrelling down the stairs to take a picture.
it's on a bush that's become excessively overgrown. i'm appreciating this bush more since the great lilac debacle; it blooms at the same time as the lilacs would and it smells very sweet. apparently the butterflies think it's a-okay, too.
last year i thoroughly pruned the overgrown lilac bush at the corner of the house. so thoroughly did i prune it that this year we have
i'm expecting a bumper crop next year, but this year i'm bereft. i used to be able to open the living room windows and get drunk off the fragrance. this year, the only aroma is...well, the hamster-cagey scent of the damp cedar mulch.
now, most of my neighbors have lilac bushes that are just groaning with blooms. a lot of the public buildings do, too. even the dilapidated rental house on the corner has more blossoms than they can possibly use.
i would like to know your opinion: how wrong would it be for me to sneak out like a thief under cover of darkness and trim a few branches for my own personal use?
paul's mowing the lawn right now. maybe you can see him on the webcam. if not, check him out here.
i'm on tap as soon as he finishes to attack the back, which is overrun with dandelions so vigorous i think they've evolved into carnivores.
i hope i don't disturb the mother bird who's built her nest atop one of our outdoor light fixtures just above the deck.
the seeds of my doom are aloft.
i wish i could show you this on the webcam. the air outside is just clogged with some kind of fluffy windborne seed. i don't think it's dandelion or thistle; paul suggested milkweed. whatever it is, it bodes ill for my lawn.
it's strange to be able to see the course of the air currents so clearly.
and it makes me want to buy a 55-gallon drum of round-up.
hummingbirds caught in the act!
last time i checked, it looked like the same bird was feeding at 5:36, 6:07, 6:23 and 6:44. is he just a glutton, or do we have doppelgangers?
did anyone see me on the webcam as i mowed the lawn today?
today i planted...well, everything:
i took it as a good omen that some of my plants had wriggling stowaways — earthworms that traveled all the way from burlington in the pots of my new plants. they will add a much-needed jolt of genetic vigor to the current population here, i'm sure.
| not to be outdone by terry, yesterday i began my yardwork for the season. i cleaned out all of the front beds, raked about a ton of thatch from the lawn, and attacked many a burgeoning thistle with round-up. i broke my first sweat of the year and developed an impressive blister on my palm, but i didn't mind: the sun felt good after the long winter and the air smelled like hyacinths. unfortunately, now it is only a matter of time — perhaps mere days — before i accidentally touch a slug. paul helpfully suggested that i touch one on purpose to deprive them of the element of surprise. |  |
