Flowers. Always, let there be flowers in your life. If not fresh, then artistically sketched. Let their audacious color, their brilliance and their sweet magic creep into your life. Pick your favorites and plant them, paint them, sew with them, or simply imagine them in their best moment.
For day lilies, the best moment is right now. Indeed, if numbers talk, I'd say that their best moment was yesterday or the day before. Today, in a very leisurely stroll through all the flower beds, I clipped just under 700 spent lilies. That's several hundred less than in my mad dashes during the week.
You will get a lot of flower photos today. It's inevitable -- my day is spent in their midst. The camera follows me and does the job of recording all that I love out there.
I'm thrilled that the mosquitoes are down to a very manageable small number. In places, I forget that they're even there. It's just me and the butterflies and the occasional dragon fly. Well, and the cats and cheepers and birds and bees.
Breakfast is very late. I'm still picking day lily stalks for the table, but I wont do that going forward. Whatever remains, deserves its moment in the garden. Ed hates chopping down trees and I'm the reluctant flower picker. Odd to have a full vase always on my table, even as the flowers are rarely from my own garden. But today, they are from my garden.
In the afternoon I pause just a little -- really, just to drink eighty cups of water (it's hot outside!) and to pick up our CSA box (more corn!) and then it's back to work. The bug repellent isn't very strong and within a few days, the bugs will come back for another annoying surge. I have a whole day. I must make inroads. I want to make inroads!
By evening, I am spent. And stiff. I weeded the courtyard and three beds, including the Big Bed and there are monstrous piles of pulled weeds that attest to my work. Was it worth it? Ed comments -- it's so much work... you must like doing it.
Do I? When you snip spent lilies, the improvement is pronounced. But when you pull weeds, you're doing your flowers a favor, but it's a secret favor -- between you and your flower friends. To the casual observer, the before and after photos are pretty much the same.
In working closely with the base of each plant I did notice that things are looking pretty dry out there. We need rain!
A quiet evening. I reheat soup and make a salad and I try not to worry about the state of the world, about the state of the health of yet another friend who has come down with a fever, about all that everyone else is worrying about as well.
Want to start a new British crime drama? -- I ask Ed.
He pops some popcorn, we turn on our evening distraction.
For day lilies, the best moment is right now. Indeed, if numbers talk, I'd say that their best moment was yesterday or the day before. Today, in a very leisurely stroll through all the flower beds, I clipped just under 700 spent lilies. That's several hundred less than in my mad dashes during the week.
You will get a lot of flower photos today. It's inevitable -- my day is spent in their midst. The camera follows me and does the job of recording all that I love out there.
I'm thrilled that the mosquitoes are down to a very manageable small number. In places, I forget that they're even there. It's just me and the butterflies and the occasional dragon fly. Well, and the cats and cheepers and birds and bees.
Breakfast is very late. I'm still picking day lily stalks for the table, but I wont do that going forward. Whatever remains, deserves its moment in the garden. Ed hates chopping down trees and I'm the reluctant flower picker. Odd to have a full vase always on my table, even as the flowers are rarely from my own garden. But today, they are from my garden.
In the afternoon I pause just a little -- really, just to drink eighty cups of water (it's hot outside!) and to pick up our CSA box (more corn!) and then it's back to work. The bug repellent isn't very strong and within a few days, the bugs will come back for another annoying surge. I have a whole day. I must make inroads. I want to make inroads!
By evening, I am spent. And stiff. I weeded the courtyard and three beds, including the Big Bed and there are monstrous piles of pulled weeds that attest to my work. Was it worth it? Ed comments -- it's so much work... you must like doing it.
Do I? When you snip spent lilies, the improvement is pronounced. But when you pull weeds, you're doing your flowers a favor, but it's a secret favor -- between you and your flower friends. To the casual observer, the before and after photos are pretty much the same.
In working closely with the base of each plant I did notice that things are looking pretty dry out there. We need rain!
A quiet evening. I reheat soup and make a salad and I try not to worry about the state of the world, about the state of the health of yet another friend who has come down with a fever, about all that everyone else is worrying about as well.
Want to start a new British crime drama? -- I ask Ed.
He pops some popcorn, we turn on our evening distraction.
