Cherry Picking

I had never done it, picked cherries in Door County. 

Tart cherries

So bucolic

These step ladders are great.  So stable!

We picked our cherries at Cherry Lane Orchard.  They didn't pay me to blog about it, though.  They have a website, but I doubt they know about blogging.  They kept sales records in a handwritten sales ledger.

Sorry out of focus!  I don't usually have any sort of vista at which to aim my camera, but you get the idea.  While I was driving, my mother kept referring to the Bay of Green Bay as the ocean,  we're very (pen)insular here!

I had a great aunt who died at 16, having contracted typhus in the 1920s cherry picking in Door County.  I brought my own water, just in case.  Her last sister, my great aunt Lucille, died just this last year.  I think Lucille was 105, lived on her own and kept a shot gun by the door.  Always advised me to get a dog rather than additional husbands; dogs are more "reliable", even if they don't last quite so long.  (I think she buried six-- husbands.  I think she was talking about dogs' lifespans, however.)

 
My mother and I had a great day in Door County, ate at a Kristi's Pub, picked cherries, saw the King of the Garden Gnomes and took in the Door Garden run by the Master gardeners of Door County, which is a very talented bunch of people.  I'll do a separate post on that, but the bench from this post was at the Door Garden on the Door County Agricultural Research Station.

KItsche-y Garden Tour: Ground Zero

 

Grumpy Cat was there as welcome committee...

 Just to be clear, these images are not from the Outagamie Master Gardeners Garden Walk.  I hesitate to say on which group's garden walk these were taken.  Most of these vignettes were seen in two or three of the gardens on the thour, but all were ornamented in a similar style, so I started thinking there had to be a "Patient Zero" or ground zero from which this contagion spread.  A style arbitrator, of sorts, which sort of set the "standard", so to speak.  The last garden I visited that day, I felt was indeed that ground zero.  Horticulturally, they probably had the best grip on growing detail; obviously, not a lot of taste, though.  Since they were the area's expert in one dimension of gardening, they were able to spread not only their expertise in one area, but their non-expertise in another.

Of course there were gnomes!

Fly your freak flag!

Patroness Saint of wharf albatross and gulls (note the wire fence around the micro-bed)

Crafty (we aren't) glass something

Once upon a tree face

Can one poorly displayed worm spoil all the apples, I mean gardens?

Rasta pot boy?

Call me!

I turned blue hearing these called "Wax Wing" begonias. I know Dragon Wing begonias are a cross, but...

Didn't know badgers lived in bird houses; I learn something everyday!

Not sure why this is here at all

Styrofoam boat dock buoys adding a decorative touch

So faux, I just can't....

Prize for ornamentation outnumbering plants?

Hmm, garden in need of a theme?

..."and this is my imitation of the Scarecrow juggling thee flower pots, ...if I only had a brain..."

Gnome and Cow Mailbox at High Noon Stare-Down

What!

No sense removing that Christmas angel!

Young love...

 Surprisingly, there were NO flocks of pink flamingos!

Imagine!  A rock inscribed with your every thought...

There a few of these non-functional, "eco-invoking" windmills...

And the failed attempt at hide and seek with the sanitary sewer clean-outs

And oodles of shepherd hook hangers for yet another basket of annuals

In one garden alone there were 50 or so garden ornaments in a single view.  There were lots of plants just stuck in a spot in a lawn around which a "micro-bed" (Handsome Son coined this new garden style expression.) garden evolved. These micro-beds were enclosed with flimsy wire fence to denote the bed and to which one or more piece of garden "art" and a shepherd hook with a hanging basket were then added.

This garden walk made me want to run home and throw out every piece rusty iron, my front porch's bright pink chairs, and Chinese rabbit and frog statuary (one piece each) immediately.  Decidedly an inoculation against poor ornamentation in the garden,

it made me want to...

Dog vomit fungii