/dev/mull

i continue to be displeased with how the iphone focuses, or not. but these the best that i have. *sigh*

a few of the fritillaries i planted years ago are hanging on. one seems to be new, so i guess they're not doing too badly.




i'd write these off as squirrels digging for their nuts, but the middle one seems too wide and deep for that. but i was wrong about the woodpecker holes, so what do i know?




a tiny snake hiding in the litter i was clearing to plant dahlias. the whole thing might have been just six inches long.

today's menu changes: carrots out, sautéed green beans in. and we started in on the wild rice. i think we overdid it with all the starches, but it was worth it.

before we turned into bloated, waddling blobs, i lifted my dahlia. it's going to get well below freezing tonight, and we've already had a killing frost, so it had to come out today. the low will be 27°, which might be enough to freeze the crown. while some tubers might survive, that's probably the end of the plant, and i didn't want to risk it.

this one was a new one, because last year's drought while we were on vacation mortally wounded the two from the previous years. one made it to the end of last summer, but it wasn't in good shape. i planted the scrawny tubers that were left, but it never came up, which i figured would happen.

it looks like i never posted about this one before. so, here, have a picture of one blossom that started out a little different from the rest of them:



it eventually looked more like the others, but the side view still shows that it had only a little white early on.





the dahlia did extremely well this year, meaning that it has a huge clump of tubers. i wanted to get them out intact, so i spent about two hours grubbing around the tubers with my fingers, exposing them all and loosing their roots so i could lift it out.

part of the problem was that some of my saffron crocuses had grown up around it, so there were lots of roots, and lots of corms. that made finding the bottom of the clump challenging.



i also had to rip out a lot of grass that grew into the garden bed. so, i replanted the saffron a bit crudely by loosely planting the corms, tossing some topsoil over them and then covering it all with inverted tufts of grass, followed by loose grass i'd ripped out to get a good grip on the rest of the grass to rip it out.

now these are happy tubers:



oddly, even though they're large tubers, and there are lots of them, none of the tubers have any eyes. so, i don't think i can divide this clump.

i'm going to have to talk to somebody who knows more about dahlias to see if can divide it, and if so, into how many pieces. i'd like at least two pieces, so we'll have two mature dahlias next year. if i can get a third, it's probably going to my oldest friend, since she's also a gardener. if there's a fourth piece, maybe that will be up for grabs. maybe.

i finally found a deer repellent that works, so i have nice tall glads again. but a powerful storm casually swatted them down, so i brought some indoors.



it's propped up in a corner of a window, since it's too top-heavy to stand by itself. this is one of the ten or twenty cent bulbs i got from a box one of my local supermarkets was selling cheap at the end of one summer a few years ago.

anybody know what this beetle is? it's over an inch long:



previous years' guerrilla gardening at the park have yielded some results, but the stands of wildflowers were pretty thin, and not very photogenic. this one looked good, if somewhat wilted.

i went for a walk this evening and then went for another because it felt so wonderful outside: low 70s, breezy, and for this area, dry, a combination we rarely get. i enjoyed it greatly.

just before dark, i counted noses in my bee house: ten. i bought twenty pupae and set them out a month ago, so not all of them opened, or not all of the bees stuck around. and apparently none of the bees from the old pupae stuck around either, since some of the previously-filled nesting tubes are clearly open. very strange.

all three of my older blueberry bushes have flowers, though relatively few. maybe the drought and heat last year was just worse than i thought, and that finished the one bush off. both of the new bushes have also managed a floret or two, so i should get to see what their fruit is like.

it did pour today; we got just under 3" of rain.

but besides that, my new blueberry bushes arrived in the mail, and they're gonna need to be planted pronto. a dahlia tuber also arrived, though planting that is less urgent.

this is in addition to the housework i need to do. three sinks need repairs of one sort or another. two will be easy, but the third may be difficult and time-consuming to fix.

the weeds that i threatened last week, that is. the promised cold front delivered, and it's now cool -- highs just above 80° -- and dry here. so i weeded my gardens. there are still some weeds left, but the major troublemakers have gone to that great compose pile in the corner. (well, small compose pile, since i don't have room for a bigger one.)

the sickly blueberry bush is on its last roots. i have no idea what happened to it, but it's gonna join the weeds soon. hopefully, i can figure out what variety it is, so i can replace it. it generally did well here, other than the dying part.

i mowed the lawn, too, which also needed it (see: hot, wet weather). i cleared out more of the brush behind the ex-thicket. i think i need a machete for that, since there's lots of random dead thorny vines, and just hacking at them will go faster than cutting them up with big pruning shears.

friday, i cut some paths into the brush in the trees behind the house, using the lawnmower as a brushcutter. this is not the best for the blade, but when your only vaguely-suitable tool is a lawnmower, everything looks like a weed.

the paths are only a bit wider than the lawnmower, but they extend five or six feet into the woods. more importantly, they extend the sightlines from the back yard about ten feet in, so there's much less cover for the antler rats.

i also sprayed the tall plants in my garden with deer repellant. between that and the mowing, there's been no sign of the deer. they're not even eating the plants deliberately i didn't spray.

so far, so good. i brought in another batch of glads and a lily. i probably should bring in more glads just in case the walking lunches return.

a little seed porn, since all of this spring's seeds have arrived.



one company offers a collection of ornamental sweet peas. i'd wanted a darker purple variety to contrast "cupani's original", which is what I usually plant, but they exercised their option to substitute the "beaujolais", which doesn't work as well.

the top row are the varieties i'm definitely going to plant. we like those. i'm not sure what i'll do with the bottom row.

( more seeds )

gladioli, that is. the antler rats came back again, so i've been cutting glads and bringing them in as soon as the buds start to open, along with some other flowers the damned things seem to like. so, the house is decorated in flowers, with glads on every available surface we're likely to notice.

one of my big revelations from a couple of years ago is that flowers go where the people go. so, it's only useful to put cut flowers where we're likely to see them a lot, like the kitchen and some of the windowsills. (the spots also can't be in the way, so no flowers in the bathrooms. we just don't have the counter space.)

also, i have discovered that i've been harvesting most of my blueberries too early, which accounts for part of the off taste. wild-type blueberries and lightly domesticated varieties turn a much deeper blue than the store-bought ones. now that i know what to look for, i've been leaving them to ripen for a lot longer. the good ones¹ now taste better, with just a little sweetness to go with the intense blueberry taste.

lowering the pH also helped a lot; i'll have to keep an eye on it.

1: one bush is the tasteless variety stores usually carry. it's there for its precious bodily fluids pollen, since blueberries bear heavily only when pollinated by another variety.

i'd finally gotten the time to post about my gardens, and i was going to write how wonderfully they were doing, but deer have done a number on my lilies. ate all the buds off, they did. stupid antler rats.

but *most* of the gardens are doing well. the blueberry bushes are again covered with berries, and i spent a while this spring adjusting their soil pH, so i'm hoping the blueberries will be food this year.

i managed to lift a mass of dahlia tubers, store it for the winter, and get it to regrow. it had developed some fuzz over the winter, but i took random online advice, and sprayed it with dilute bleach. that seemed to kill the sprouts it had, but i decided to plant it anyway. and once again, it's growing from several ends. it's a very happy dahlia.

the violet cornflowers are just starting to bloom, and i'm expecting a stunning display. pictures soon.