Views of the Long Border

It may always be a work in progress; just not quite "there". Each  year I tweak it here, tweak it there. I try to remove the quack grass and June grass, it seems to little avail.  Voracious ground-chomping plants eat up the real estate. This is a predator-prey environment. Eat or be eaten. Filipendula, sundrops, phlox, beebalm, geraniums, trandescantia, rudbeckia, asters, chrysanthemums, and heliopsis give no quarter.

I weed out enough flowering plants for more than a couple gardens each year. I pinch and prod others to play nice. It is easy to lose yourself whether you are plant or gardener. It gobbles up garden tools set down for a moment, leaving gardener vowing to paint each and every tool handle a shocking RED.

Animals have crawled in to die escaping more blood-thirsty predators of the four legged kind. It sports habitat for giant larva of untold insects and even a moth as big as my fist a couple nights ago. Hummingbirds attempt to chase me from in it July when beebalm begins to scent the air. The neighborhood bees smile and are as busy as...bees... working over the population of the long border.

Talking About the Garden

Turns out daffodils and blue muscari are top of the list for the Gardening Nephews.  I try to explain how they are bulbs and will have to be planted in the late fall.  " In winter?' they are incredulous. "No, fall," I repeat.  "Aunt 'Chelle, what is this fall?  We have summer and winter!"  Hmmm... a bit of wisdom there, I think.

There are days when I am finally feeling more like the normal me.  Up the stairs and walking around the rambling historic home my nephews are calling home, I can keep up going down the stairs; going up, my nephews are waiting for me at the top, even the next to youngest.

The boys know spring (AKA warm weather) is coming,  The topic turned to gardening initiated by the twin I think of as the "lead" gardener among them.

"Aunt 'Chelle, we need to talk about our garden this year," he states in a very serious tone.  "It needs to be smaller."

"Yes, smaller, " the other twin chimes in, "so we can weed it! Our sweet corn did not turn out so good."

"It needs to be gooder," lead twin adds.

"Better..." I correct.

"I don't know where you learned 'better'.  Here 'gooder' is a word," lead twin, 5, admonishes me.

(Sounds like something his Papa decreed.)

Free Range Tomatoes

Yesterday I caught about ten minutes of Garrison Keillor doing his NPR show segment on "Guy Noir, Detective". In it Guy is investigating something to do with free range organic bourbon whiskey.

It was silly, especially the certification requirements for the "free-range organic"label.

So here I have my first tomatoes, and they are not tomatoes I started as seed in the dark of late winter. No, they are seeds that came in with some municipal compost two years ago and which have sprouted and reseeded two years now in my shrub border, in the unlikely location alongside my alleyway.

There you have it. Free range, certainly. I have just sort of "captured" them.

Like Jurassic Park, "Life will find a way."

I think I'll save seed this year, sort of like an heirloom.

More farm market art:

And I don't usually cut bouquets for indoors, but it's Sunday.

Have a good one.

Scenes from the Garden

The long border is just a long expanse of green. The rest of the garden does have its moments.