The Havens “Blue-(ish) Period”

It seems like the garden goes through color phases each year, starting yellow and transitioning to blue before bursting into the hot reds and oranges.  Of course, this falls into the category of “glittering generalities” that we were warned against severely during high school English essay production.  Needless to say, with my eclectic taste in flowers, there is never a time when there is only one color showing at The Havens.

Once I toyed with the idea of creating a “Moon Garden’” having been enticed toward the idea by a lavishly illustrated article in some gardening magazine or other.   But when I started trying to plan the thing, I realized that I am constitutionally unable to make a garden that only sports silvery foliage and white flowers.  Heck, I couldn’t even plan it without feeling the need for “just a touch of color.” (Afficionados of “The Bird Cage” will get that reference.)

Last year my method of dealing with my unruly wisteria vine (is there any other kind?) was to walk around the pergola with my pruning shears and whack back anything that dared to hang over the edge and intrude on my personal space.   Apparently this was just the treatment it needed, because this year it is absolutely stunning in bloom.

Getting this photograph illustrates a problem in The Havens yard vis-a-vis photography.   Frankly, this place would drive a professional photographer stark raving mad, since it is never properly prepped for a photo op.  Right now the area near the pergola is a construction zone as we work on the barbecue/wood fired bread oven area.   So my initial attempt at getting the glorious wisteria looked like this:

Even careful cropping cannot rescue this version.   However, it does add a note of realism to the image.

Another part of the yard that is very blue right now is the front.   The peonies are still only buds, so the pink that will become prominent soon is not evident.   Also, the redbud is finished blooming.   Instead, we have lots of wood hyacinths and veronica.

Okay, okay.  Yes, there is an iris in there.   I told you I couldn’t do monochrome!  Actually, that is a reblooming iris that shows up again in the fall.   I believe she deserves a closer look.

Actually, there is more than one iris out there, and in short order there will be many more.   Then the Blue Period will be only a memory.

But I digress.   The Stroll Garden has quite a lot of blue showing right now, especially the Scree Slope and Rain Garden areas.   The main blues here are the ajuga and veronica, but the foliage of the dianthus back there definitely falls into the blue category.

You really need to have a look at that bank of candytuft closer up.   It is really “on” right now.

The very last daffodils are still out there, but they will be gone soon.   This is a late blooming minature (she’s about 4 cm in diamter) called “Chiva”.

Cat owners will appreciate the fact that I got up from my computer chair for about 2 minutes to go look up “Chiva’s” name and when I got back Mallory had established herself in the chair and was studiously engaged in washing.   “I’ve been here all morning, what do you want?” was the look she directed at me when I sat down.   Not on her, mind  you, no matter how tempting it was.

Just behind “Chiva” you can see the blue of a stem of camassia, also referred to as quamash.   This is a plant the Midwest Native Americans used for food.   Since it is a native of the area, I have it liberally scattered all through the Stroll Garden.   Here it is setting off the Japanese kerria bush, which is in full not-blue bloom right now.

Here is a drift of it sharing space with the day lilies.

You will note evidence of the lack of photo op preparation here if you look closely at this shot.   It includes such various weeds as white violets, lady’s bedstraw, and henbit.   When I was shooting the Scree Slope for the veronica and candytuft, I pulled out a few errant wild lettuces before I took the picture.   But this area requires more attention than I was willing to devote before I made a blog post.

Actually, I am on my way there.   I started over by the swing and worked my way along under the pine trees, removing hen bit and wild oats for the most part.   I had to make a detour past my large clumps of miscanthus grass, which I neglected to burn off this spring, and remove all the old stalks and foliage that were suffocating the new growth.   While I was back in that corner I worked myself into an emotional tizzy as I weeded Mike’s grave.     What a gorgeous boy he was.

I still miss him.  I had a little blue period about him….  But I’m better now.   After all, I have Impy and Mallory now.  And they are wonderful cats too.

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Spring is here again

After a lot of fitful starts and stops, it appears that spring has finally come to the Ozarks.   We had a lot of swings in temperature last month, one day it would be in the 60s and then the next it would be freezing and snowing.

Through it all the crocuses carried on bravely.   I had daffodils that got snowed on and showed no ill effects.

In the interim I have started going to water aerobics on a regular basis.   When I first started, there were things I really couldn’t do, and I certainly could not keep up with the instructor.   Now I can keep up with her and my core has gotten strong enough that I can do the things that were impossible before.   And my love handles have shrunk.

I started out a little too fast and intense, and wound up being very sore.   After a few weeks, my dear husband commented that perhaps I ought to give myself a chance to get in shape.   “After all, you aren’t twenty five any more, it takes longer for your body to recover.”

Of course, this elicited a bit of a grumble, but I had to acknowledge that I am staring sixty in the face, and June isn’t that far away.  So I cut back to three days a week, and I find that my body is much happier with me.  If things keep on this way, after next week I will start going four days a week and see how it goes.

I have been to Texas since we last were together here at The Havens.   I visited my older sister for a few days, took my quilt to her quilt guild to be admired (which it was).   I find I am quite the anachronism as pretty much everybody does their quilting by machine nowadays.   I chose to hand quilt the baby quilt so I could work powerful protective and loving energy into it.   I don’t think you get the same result with a machine.

While I was in San Antonio, I was escorted about to some of the numerous stores that sell quilt fabric there.  I felt much like a kid in a candy store with only five cents to spend, but I came home with a lot of beautiful stuff, including the rest of the fabrics I need for the next quilt I am going to make, which will be for Jesse and Lynette.   I have the strips cut out, but have not started sewing them together yet.   Soon.

Another thing that has happened is that young Mallory has gone blind.   Several trips to the vet and we discovered that the lesions she had were the symptom of a deterioration that appears to be congenital.   We believe she may be able to see large dark and light areas sketchily, although lately I doubt she even has that.    It hasn’t slowed her down much.   She still plays chase games with Impy and they wrestle.   He chirps at her so she can locate him, and he is very kind about now cheating in the games and sneaking away from where she last heard him.

Occasionally she gets confused as to where she is, but that is happening less and less.   She really gives us a dirty look if we leave the chairs out from the dining table and she runs into one.   Also, we have had to acquire a trash can with a lid for the kitchen as the heightened sensitivity of her sense of smell has led her astray in that direction.    She stole a chicken bone out of it the other day; I guess it just smelled too good to ignore.

So, the vegetable garden has seeds planted in it, but nothing is up yet.   No big surrprise there.   Soon.

So, I shall go off to give the latest massage and talk to you all later.

 

 

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Is it really 2013? Already?

I know that I may be pushing things a little bit, but the number of the year has me a little amazed, and it is NOT because we survived the Mayan New Year.   You see, dear readers, when June arrives this year, I will be 60 years old.   Almost twice as old as the woman in this picture, who happens to be my mother.   She is posing in front of the mountain which was a talisman for my father all his life, largely because it was the first mountain of the Rocky Mountain National Park that he climbed.   Mt. Meeker.   Where I will be in mid-July on pilgrimage with my brother to cast his ashes to the winds high atop this peak and allow him to become one with the place that was always his favorite in the world.

 

He certainly had experience enough to know that this was actually his favorite place.  Somewhere there is a map board that he created many years ago that had flags of countries he visited and worked in during his life stuck into the appropriate places.   It was impressive, actually.   Last time I counted there were well over 50 flags.

But I digress.   Here is another historic photo, taken the same year as the one of my mother above, by the same loving photographer.

 

This is me, of course, engaged in delicate exploration of the beach at La Jolla Shores.  Even then, at the tender age of six, I preferred to have my hands in the dirt rather than putting a utensil between me and the medium.

A lot has happened over the last few weeks.   My “Pet Contractor” finally went under our house to see what he could see.   What he saw was so alarming that he moved our job from “sometime soon” to “I’ll have guys there tomorrow,  I’m having lumber delivered to your place this afternoon.”   Yes, dear friends, the rot situation that had not been addressed because we couldn’t find someone who wanted to crawl around under our house to do the work and also because we had to deal with the downstairs neighbors before we really wanted someone doing that had progressed to a potential disaster.   One of the four beams that support the house was actually broken in two places.    Any engineer can tell you that the loss of 25% of the total weight support of a structure is bad news.

The good news is the other beams held, they have been sistered and the house has been shored back up and we are good to go.   So now we only have to replenish the savings account, which took a Huge Hit (see, a crew of six construction workers only costs around $800 per day and clear 2x10s 14 feet long carry an impressive price tag).  Fortunately, since my contractor is my “Pet Contractor” he was willing to accept payment in three portions so we never actually had to take money out of our IRAs, which is a good thing.    And it is gratifying to be able to walk through the dining room and not feel the floor sink beneath my feet.

The whole construction escapade was ruled a virtual hell on Earth by poor Impy, who has barely adjusted to the new turn his life has taken since my father died and we adopted Impy.   There were disembodied voices yelling from below, saws, hammers, creaks and groans as the house straightened back up, thumps, people walking across is lawn (horrors!).   There was nowhere to go where he could not hear, no place safe enough to hide.   I found him crouched on the bed, eyes as big as the full moon, ready to disappear into thin air if only it was possible.   Fortunately (for my bank account, too), his travails only lasted two days, and a kitty heart attack was narrowly averted.

Mallory, on the other hand, remained supremely unconcerned about the whole thing, at least until the construction worker came into the house with his level to make sure that the floors were being jacked up to even status and not beyond.   Then she felt it was important to supervise his activities.  I was not able to get the camera going fast enough to catch Mallory with her head down between him and his level, watching the  little bubble and exuding the attitude “Are you sure you are doing this right?”  The expression on his face was classic.

Well, I’m looking forward to the next year, when we will start replacing carpets with something more amenable to being clean.   I’m sure that the lack of traction will change the way Impy and Mallory play.   While I am looking forward to the new flooring, I am NOT looking foward to moving all the furniture which includes huge bookcases full of books and an entire stereo set up including every sort of component from phonograph up to and including the BluRay player.    I’m not sure how many cords there are behind that particular piece of furniture, but I do know it hasn’t been moved since we moved in here in 1996, so I imagine there is an impressive collection of dust to go along with the cords.

I really need to get busy and take down the Christmas tree.  It would be horrible to have just fixed all the underpinnings of the house at great expense only to burn it down accidentally.

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Surprise, surprise, surprise!

I wonder if any of you are familiar with the character Gomer Pyle.   He was a naive marine recruit from Mayberry, N.C. (of the Andy Griffith show fame) who was a constant thorn in the side of his drill sergeant.   This was actually one of the shows I watched when I was a young thang, and when you read the title of this post you have to hear it with a Southern twang.

Anyway, you are probably surprised to have two posts in one day.   I have had a couple of surprises this morning.

The first was an inevitable progression.   Mallory and Impy have been playing together, chasing each other up and down the hall and batting at each other from opposite sides of the cat tree.   So I suppose I shouldn’t have been very surprised to see this this morning.

I suppose that now that I have embarrassed them by posting actual evidence of their relationship on line that they won’t sleep together for another month.

The other surprise came when I was out digging in nutrients in the garden in preparation for planting more of my winter cover crop, also sometimes called green manure.   The place I was working was the bed where I grew sweet potatoes, and imagine my surprise when I discovered that I had missed some of them in the initial harvest.  I have this vision of sweet potatoes scrunching themselves down and saying “Not me!”

Now, honestly.   I can understand how I missed tubers that were this size:

I can even rationalize a few escaping my vigilance when they have reached this proportion:

But for the LIFE of me, I cannot grasp how these monsters escaped me:

 

COME ON!  That one is TEN inches long.

As it was, the pile I brought into the house from the second harvest was pretty good sized.

These guys sustained a lot of damage, so I’ll be grating them up for the sweet potato slaw which is my planned contribution to the party potluck on Saturday.   That and the carrot cake which Jim has requested for a birthday cake.

Okay.   Now really, I’m done.   Really.

 

 

 

 

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My days are numbered

The cats have developed ear mites, so I put the awful stuff in their ears the other day.

Vile torturer that I am, I then had Jim procure photographic evidence of the aftermath.

Our days are numbered.

 

“I hate you.  If I had opposable thumbs the ASPCA would be hearing about this.”

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