Interstice of Sun

Interstice: A space between things or parts, especially things closely set; a narrow chink; a crack.

We had no rain on Monday -- or, at least, we had 31 hours with no rain, with Monday afternoon conveniently landing in the middle of that interstice.  I was able to squeak out and get the last remaining bed planted with the petunias and marigolds that I bought on a sunny day, back before the rains started in early May.

(South side of the fence: all flowers.  It doesn't look like much now, but -- fingers crossed -- it will be lush most of the summer.)

I don't hate petunias and marigolds, but they aren't particularly adventurous in a northern American garden. However, they are cheap (about 100 plants for $20), and they grow without requiring much maintenance, and they are ruffly and pretty.  Going quite against my all-inclusive heart's preference in the past, which is to have two or three plants of every color, I stuck to my head and chose all white petunias. (The marigolds, I admit, vary from bright yellow through orange to rich dark burnt sienna.) Marigolds have the added advantage of naturally killing nematodes (and I think other microscopic pests) in the soil, so they are an organic pesticide to plant around tomatoes.

(North side of the fence: mixed marigolds and vegetables.)

And I did plant tomatoes, provided by a friend who goes to the trouble of starting Heirloom Tomatoes from seed. From West (bottom of the second photo) to East (lost in the distance), we have Sun Gold Cherries (the same sweet ping-pong-sized fruiter we so loved last year), Black Krim (a different meaty dark Russian tomato than the Paul Robeson I planted last year), Stupice (to fill in for gourmet heirloom, like the Pink Brandywine last year), San Marzano (romas) -- and then, at the far end after a long gap of no tomatoes, a Sweet 100 Cherry Tomato. Last summer I planted the two cherries next to each other; they intertwined so luxuriantly (although planted three feet apart), that we couldn't tell if a golden fruit was a golden cherry, or still-immature red cherry. This year, we'll know.

(In the Topsy-Turvy, one last holdout, a hybrid Early Girl.)

That left only a part of the bed that gets less sun (when there is sun) -- more than six hours a day between now and about a month after Mid-Summer's Day, but the shadow of the roof glooms increasingly long after July.  So, not enough sun for tomatoes just when they need it most. Instead, because I had the seeds anyway, I planted a line of cucumbers and a longer line of green pole beans.  Dotted periodically with healthful marigolds, to provide pest prevention and color until the veggies grow in.

I had one more tomato plant, which I put in a topsy-turvy on the other side of the house. Last year I had a cherry in there; this year, a small beefsteak tomato, Early Girl.  This one, I purchased.

You might wonder at the wisdom of planting tomatoes -- the bountiful reward of summer, easing one's transition to the shorter days and colder nights of fall -- in a house which we may or may not be living in by then.  The Early Girl was my tongue-in-cheek gauntlet: from flower to fruit in 50 days, it claimed.  Are we going to be out of this house by July 20th? Bring it on.

Of course, that presumes we have some sun.  We've had over an inch of rain since June started, and today's forecast is for an "unusually heavy rainstorm" lodged on us by a stalled jet stream.  The slugs are happy at least.

The rain it raineth every day

The rest of the USA is experiencing record heat and sun, from what I read in the papers. Not here. In Portland, we've had "measurable rain" every day for the last 2 weeks. We are almost double our usual rainfall for the month of May, and -- after a couple of years of being about 30% below our average annual rainfall, we've made up to within an inch this spring.

And this is not your typical Portland rain, which is light showers and general drizzle -- annoying, but not even umbrella-worthy.  No, this is torrential downpours, with thunder and lightning (still nothing like a good prairie thunderstorm).  The ground is completely soaked, with muddy puddles on every paved intersection. Tree limbs block the way as you walk down the sidewalk, marinated leaves heavy with all the extra water.

The azaleas are taking it badly. Ours bloomed last weekend, and normally we have a few weeks of bright, sunny pink fluffiness. The buckets of rain have saturated and collapsed the blossoms, so instead, we have the remnants of a giant child's ice cream in the front garden, the mint-chocolate-chip mostly scraped away and the raspberry sherbet left for later.

They say the rain is supposed to taper off, but not for a few more days yet. We shall sea.  (hee hee)

When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy,

For the rain it raineth every day.

- Twelfth Night

Beans

In September, these were on the vine (a Scarlet Runner Bean that I planted merely for the red flowers). I harvested as many as I could when I cleaned out the garden in October, and dumped them on a table in the basement.

Today I realized they were crisp and dry.  The pods are huge -- 10 inches (25.4 cm) on average.  They were easily cracked open, and the beans inside removed.

The beans themselves are lovely. Bright pink (not "scarlet", according to my personal color definition), shiny and plump.  A very few had gone moldy -- the rest are perfect. I've got almost two cups worth -- now I have to figure out how to cook them.  I mean, what seasonings -- cooking will be easy.

I might save a handful to grow again this year.

"Can't you see, Jane," Adam continued, "that there's magic all about us? None of it can be explained and there isn't a single soul who really and truly knows the secret.  Supposing, for instance, you tell me how this is done." He picked up an old, brown acorn from the ground and, holding it between thumb and forefinger, he indicated the spreading branches and shining leaves of the ancient tree towering above their heads. "From this, comes that," he said. "Well?"

"It -- it just grows."

"Oh, yes. But how does something so tremendous come from something so tiny? And why? And when was the first one? And how did it all begin?"

Jane reflected. It had never occurred to her before that oak trees, or for that matter any tree, must have had a beginning.  Now, no longer quite so sure of herself, she replied, "I don't know."

"Can your father, or Malvolio, or Fussmer, or anyone in Mageia do this trick?"

Jane whispered, "No. But you made a real rose come out of a staff and put an egg back together again."

"Is that so very remarkable?" Adam asked...

From The Man Who Was Magic, by Paul Gallico (1966)

Snowdrops

I returned to Oregon last night, after a day's travel.  (Which, in the mindset of the colonials who I learned about on the East Coast, and the pioneers who wagon-trained across the Plains to this coast, is pretty dang miraculous, to travel that far that fast.)

I skipped to the end of the season, too.  We have a full bed of snowdrops outside! The bulbs' greenery are poking through the dirt, too -- crocusses, daffodils, bluebells and early tulips.  My carrots appear to have survived the cold stretch we had in December, and I may be able to harvest some by the end of February.

So far, so fast!

Green Things

I bit the bullet and hauled in all the remaining fruit in the garden last night, because temperatures were predicted to drop near to freezing.  (Our average first-frost night is a month away -- another side effect of global warming or natural variation?)

I haven't written much about the cucumbers or beans.  The cukes have been a veritable embarrassment of riches -- we've had two or three gigantic slicing or burpless (or both) cucumbers every week since July.  Aside from the bounty (glut?) on the tray here, we have three foot-long ones in the fridge, and last weekend gave another three that long to a friend who loves them as much as we do. (For size, the tray is 18'' across by 12" deep. I've got to start putting size comparisons in photos of produce.)

Also in the photo are some of the heirloom Scarlet Empress beans (one almost a foot long is snaking up from the lower right corner).  This plant was a throw-in-the-cart addition, simply to fill a corner with something pretty -- they have a delicate red blossom all over a robust heart-shaped leaf vine. I was disappointed in the harvest -- finding one bean, literally, before late August, when friends J & S came to plunder our early tomatoes.  J wandered off, and some minutes later I found him plucking handfuls of beans off the vine -- I just hadn't cued in to look for a bean-y shape amongst the leaves.  Turns out, the vine drips with beans, many more than we two in the house can eat.

The beans taste best, as green beans, when they are about 5 inches long. Beans this long in the grocery store would be stringy and chewy, but these are the flavor of Green, of Summer.  Shorter than that, and they are flour-y, unready, longer and they've started to produce bean-seeds (I don't know what else to call them).  The bean-seeds are a pretty pink color, and taste like fresh fava beans (which I like), except they have a slightly bitter shell over them which is a pain to peel off.  I've read that, dried, they taste excellent, too, but I haven't dried any yet.

I also picked all the tomatoes left outside (except for entirely forgetting the two plants in the front -- as compared to the side -- yard, the Celebrity and the Oregon Extra Early plants).  Another 34 heirlooms (I didn't bother to work out how many were Robesons and how many Brandywines) and 33 Bloody Butchers, a mere two dozen Romas and I didn't bother to count the cherries (I didn't pick all the cherries, either, just the ones that had started to ripen).  They are now laid out on a counter in the basement, underneath a full-spectrum light. I'm curious to see if they ripen better off the vine with the light than they were doing on the vine in fading light.

Late Season Tomatoes

The gardening column in the paper said to pick all green tomatoes and bring them inside to ripen when the nights got down below 45 degrees.  I read this after three nights of 40 degree lows, so I figured it was already too late.  I have draped a sheet over our fecund but late heirloom plants, dripping with green fruits, hoping to protect them through the nights and yet allow ripening on the vine during the last of our warm, sunny days.

This morning, for no particular reason, I find I have picked a number of slightly reddened tomatoes (and very reddened, in the case of the romas). Another haul. Roughly, in the photo, are Brandywines on the east and west, Romas in the north, and Robesons in the south. (In the middle, for color comparison, is a perfectly ripe Brandywine which I picked a few days ago, just barely before time.)  There are at least twice this many of all of them left on the vines, greener, not to mention a bushel of Bloody Butchers, and a peck of cherry tomatoes.

We have discovered that the Robesons need to be picked before they turn completely red -- by which point they are mushy and have lost a delicate layering of flavor. Sad, because I allowed as many as two dozen to overripen, and now that I've tasted them at peak, I realize how much was wasted. Fortunately, these are only a couple of days (assuming 70+ degree days with sun) from perfection. I hope the kitchen counter provides a near substitute for August heat.

Flurry of household tasks

I painted the bathroom this weekend (a pale pale blue-grey, photos wouldn't do it justice), which involved also scraping peeling paint off the ceiling and priming it, too (I still have to paint the ceiling at some point).

I also cleaned up the yard, at least well enough to last until a temperate day in November, when I'll do the last winterizing.

Spiders have taken over the tomatoes -- you can see the webs in the photos. (We call the two largest Shelob and Shelob's Cousin Bolesh.) A major part of the yard clean-up involved pruning back the flowering tendrils of the tomatoes, and exposing as many as possible to the weakening, lowering sun. (I worry that rather than get sun to them, I have just cut off their insulation and now they'll chill over night. C'est la vie.)

I discovered a treasure trove of golden Sunsugars behind Shelob's web -- we have unintentionally avoided picking there, for obvious reasons. I picked about 2 pounds there alone, with a careful eye on the her, but I left her web mostly intact.  I also harvested about 5-6 pounds of full-sized tomatoes, mostly Romas, and more than a pound of rhubarb.

To preserve (or to use up) the tomatoes, I made three batches of variant sauces and then froze them: 1) a plain Tomato Sauce, same as I've been making of each species of tomato, but this time with the Sunsugar cherry tomatoes -- it is golden as saffron, and sweet as an ice cream topping; 2) a Marinara Sauce of simply garlic and basil complements; and 3) an Amatriciana Sauce -- which is bacon and hot chiles, and has a nice kick to it. (All recipes were from Joy of Cooking.)

Drowning in Good Fortune

Not to rub my blessings into the noses of the New England folks, suffering from tomato blight, but we have more tomatoes than we can eat. This is yesterday's harvest -- 7 Paul Robeson's, 6 Brandywines, 6 Bloody Butchers, 41 Romas, and 40 or so mixed cherry tomatoes. We also discovered another half dozen of the huge tomatoes -- the Robeson's and Brandywines -- which had rotted on the vine. They were deep behind the greenery, and dark colored, and we simply didn't look hard enough.

There are only two of us in the house (the cats refuse to help out). We are sharing with friends; the neighbor next door, whose driveway is probably responsible for the heat which is bringing so many fruits to ripen, have been told to help themselves, and they are.

I am trying to remember the last day in which I did not eat tomatoes. Yesterday, for instance, I had 20 cherry toms in a fry-up for breakfast, lunched on leftover pico di gallo, and for dinner we went simple and had a salad with cherry toms in it and a Robeson on the side. Tonight we are having Cypriot Chickpea Stew with Spinach and Tomatoes. So far, I have cooked:

• Ratatouille,
• Cuban Tomato Egg-Drop Soup,
• several batches of gazpacho,
• Tomato and Eggplant Gratin,
• Cherry Tomatoes with Tuna,
• Chicken with Tomatoes in Basalmic Vinegar
• Kebabs of various meats with grilled tomatoes and onions,
• not to mention lots of uncooked tomatoes in sandwiches, as snacks, in salads.

We have already roasted and frozen two batches of plain Romas for sauce, and currently I am roasting another large batch as Oven-Dried Tomatoes (like sun-dried, but chewier, with thyme as a seasoning) and a batch of Oven-Dried Cherry Tomatoes. I'm looking forward to baking a Southern Tomato Pie (when you read "Southern" think butter, sour cream and pastry) when a friend visits, to share the calories. Before then, we'll have Tomatoes Stuffed with Lentils and Rice. I'm saving a Spicy Green Tomato Bread recipe for the desperate last ditch harvest before the first frost, whenever it comes.

We hope, by giving away the entire next harvest (due in a couple of days) that maybe we can go for a day or two without eating any tomatoes at all. Just for a break. The problem is that I know that in December, I'll be longing for some garden fresh tomatoes, so I hate to squander them now. This afternoon I am making two batches of Tomato Sauce, to be used for pizza and pasta, one entirely of Brandywines and one of Robesons, so we can see if there remains a difference in taste once cooked. I really don't like canning, so I'm planning to freeze both batches, and possibly extend September into deepest winter that way.

La Festivus Tomatinus

We are no La Tomatina, (and here) but our tomatoes have started producing. I am smug (few friends have as good a crop) and so expect some disaster to cut the full crop at the knees (rainy, cold September, perhaps?).

We also have daily cucumbers, and a last minute crop of spring onions and some sweet red peppers, too. Shown in the basket are Bloody Butchers (tasty fruit, but disappointingly un-bloody) and a collection of Sweet Millions, Sweet 100s, and Sungolds (all cherry tomatoes). Delicious! (The Brandywines and Celebrities have not reddened yet, and we've only had two Paul Robeson, which we ate before I could photograph it.)

Fruits of my labor

It's lucky we got back when we did -- the Texan might have been smothered in growing things else. When we left, the new north garden looked like this:

When we returned, it looked like this:
The tomatoes are taller than I am.

I had planted radishes on both sides of the fence, which the Texan hadn't realized -- so she didn't harvest those on the north side (or, geographically speaking, on the south side of our neighbor's house, where the growth is even more verdant). I pulled them a couple of days ago -- all the radishes themselves too woody to eat, but mighty fine specimens all the same. (This was a packet of "heirloom varieties", a mixed set of seeds -- hence all the different roots you see here. I learned that I like ordinary little red globe radishes best.)

The carrots, which were a purple-y organic heirloom variety I tossed into the bed as an afterthought, reacted wonderfully to gravity, until they hit the clay soil under the raised garden. I also didn't thin them very well, leading to some unusual looking globs.

It is so gratifying to harvest these little crops. We've already eaten all the carrots, but the spring onions are just getting going, not to mention the tomatoes. And cucumbers! We have several large ones in the garden, and have already eaten a few. Tomorrow night we'll be having cucumber soup.

On the disappointing side, the zucchini so far has produced nothing, and the basil got so over-crowded by the tomatoes that it is healthy but only an inch tall. We have one Italian pumpkin, which I'm not sure what to do with (it's already gorgeous and orange, but am I supposed to wait for October to harvest it)?

(except for the bundle of purchased spring onions in the background,

all this pile came from our garden)

Garden Signs

HomoDommi, busy as ever, has been adding signs in places around the garden. These are the newest, hung over our vine-covered trellis corner. (After the particularly hard storms last winter, we lost the manzanilla and passion flowers that had been the greenery. The new plants haven't grown in yet.) The signs say,

A world of dew
is but a world of dew.
And yet, and yet...
(Basho)

and
* Umbrella * Light * Landscape * Sky *
there is no language in the holy
the sacred lies in the ordinary.
~Tao

The Laundry sign (and the painted starburst of flowers) has been up for at least a year now. Unfortunately, the reverse does not hold: Just doing the laundry does not guarantee prior enlightenment.

Cable management

(Not exactly the same model as ours, this is

grabbed for illustration purposes from amazon.com)

Endeavoring to be good to the earth, economical and reduce noise pollution, we have been using a reel lawn mower for years. (Note the two e's. I frequently hear the word as real, and am momentarily distracted, wondering what a fictional lawn mower would be like.) This is one of those old-fashioned push mowers like my grandparents had, from the days before single-engine motors, ready gasoline, and a roar rising from the suburbs on Saturday afternoons like a neighborhood of cars rounding the bend on the Indianapolis 500. The reel mower, quiet, human-powered, compact-sized, near-zero carbon footprint, has meant that the yard has generally looked unkempt and over-grown.

It's not that we didn't mow, although the push mower takes, of course, much more effort to use than a powered mower. Or that it didn't cut well -- when it cut. HomoDommi had done his homework, and we owned the "Mercedes of Push Mowers", he said. But it doesn't cut certain types of rye grass well, or broad-leaved grass (and our lawn is made of about 300 different weeds, grasses and tangles). Despite repeat passes, every mow left a random scattering of round flowering stems towering above an otherwise smooth green carpet of lawn. Also, compact though it is, the wheels are taller than the reel, and so there is no way to cut alongside the edge of a raised bed -- every session would require another circuit round with a weed-whacker. And last, the spinning of the self-sharpening reels is "powered" by the turning of the wheels -- requiring that the wheels find purchase in the ground in order to cut the grass. This is fine in the long, dry summer, but every wet spring, the balance between long, thick grass and friction for the wheels would be breached, leaving divots of mud everywhere.



So, this spring we gave up, and the Texan bought an electric mower. A compromise between reel and gas-powered -- it is reasonably quiet, easy to push, cuts evenly and doesn't eat holes in the lawn. It deliciously turns on and off with an easy flip of a lever. It does have a cord, however. (Battery-operated were significantly more expensive, and solar-powered aren't even available here in retail outlets, not to mention even more expensive.) It's now a whole new ball-game, mowing the lawn with a 40foot tail.

Promise

9 Tomatoes
1 mound zucchini
1 mound cucumbers (two varieties)
1 mound canteloupe
1 scarlet runner bean, supposed to fruit all summer
2 mounds pumpkins
1 sweet banana pepper
2 rows carrots
10 peas
4 fava beans (the only ones of 24 that survived the winter)
12 lettuces (half green leaf, half romaine)
24 garlic
2 basil (fancy styles) + 1 row ordinary sweet basil

Aside from a few "safety" tomato plants (Celebrity, Roma, and Oregon Spring, all modern hybrids) and two cherry/grape tomatoes (Sweet Million, Sun Sugar), the tomatoes are all heirlooms. I couldn't resist, standing in the new Organic Nursery section at Fred Meyer, names like Bloody Butcher, and Paul Robeson (most politically un-correct, a black tomato) and Brandywine. There must be a couple of others but I can't remember the names.

Spring is Springing

Sorry not to be posting more often. I've taken lots of photos, and mentally written several entries, but there hasn't seemed to be enough time to actually make them into something you can read with current technology. No mind-blogging available yet.

Anyway, I still don't have time today. I've spent the week completing an online test for an online job -- the kind of thing that won't make my career (nor even balance my checkbook, although this will stem the financial hemorrhaging). 30+ hours of testing -- training, really, for the work I'll be doing. But I passed, and now move into 3 weeks of probationary training, for which at least I'll be getting paid.

So here are a couple of photos that I took more than a week ago, of the tulips in our yard. I planted them last fall (I blogged about it, but it's not the kind of thing one remembers, unless you yourself planted the nearly 300 bulbs). As a whole, they brightened up the yard, but didn't cohere as much as I had hoped they would.

I did manage to get a near-perfect ring of successively flowering bulbs around the tree -- little harebells in front, then a mid-sized wild parrot tulip, followed inside by a slightly frilly taller red tulip, and then crowned ultimately by very tall, sophisticated, fringed yellow tulips (which hadn't bloomed when I took these photos). It was as if I knew what I was doing!

This weekend is supposed to be hot and sunny. We'll be out planting summer tomatoes and squashes, and the dahlias and glads for later in the year, too. So I should have more photos to share in a day or two.

Dahlias

In late May, I bought a few bags of dahlia tubers from some half-price bins at Home Depot, because the season for planting them had already passed. And then I forgot about them. By late July, the tubers were a little soft and dried out, so I plopped them into the ground as an emergency measure. I didn't think they'd bloom, but I wanted to give them "soil-time" to rejuvenate so that I could plant them for flowers next year.

Imagine our surprise with these beauties (photo taken a couple of weeks ago). I don't recall seeing dahlias as huge (5-6 feet tall) or as productive as these before: they started blooming in early September, and even today (Halloween) we have over a dozen blossoms (and as many buds yet to flower).

Below them are a run of marigolds which were also very happy by the end of summer; on the left is yet another dahlia-emergency planting -- another gorgeous bloom, but overshadowed by their huge brighter cousins alongside.

Prepping for winter in the garden

Our winters here in P'land are so mild that I hesitate to call it "winter", after decades of Minnesota cold and storms. On the other hand, it does get cold enough to freeze, and the rains get as depressing as the dry coldness in Minnesota, so, if one associates the term "winter" with "unpleasant weather", then we have winter.

Our fall has been unusually warm and dry. At the end of October, we have had about 1.5 inches of rain, about half of normal. The last two weeks have been unseasonably, unreasonably, beautiful, with intense leaf color, balmy afternoons and sun and clear skies every day (even better, every morning has started with atmospheric mist -- "atmospheric" meant both literally and figuratively -- which burns off about noon). I haven't spent as much time outdoors relishing the weather as I should have done, but about every other afternoon I've tinkered about the garden a bit.

I won't post photos, because it's all boring dirt to look at. The good photos, I hope, will come next spring. I've planted about 100 tulip and daffodil bulbs all over the front yard, and another 100 or more bluebell bulbs, plus another 50 crocuses, snowdrops, and other early small blooming flowers. I've also pulled up about 50 dandelions and other deep-rooted weeds from the weediest part of the lawn (so weedy, almost no grass is there, just clover, moss and weeds).

Yesterday I finished by tossing grass seed over all the bare parts of the lawn, and I moved the hydrangea to a more prominent position, and I planted 24 fava beans and about that many garlic cloves in the old tomato bed in the back (the best thing about the lack of a tough winter is that we can actually grow some stuff still). I'm smug about the work, because this morning opened with a pouring rain that hasn't stopped in 4 hours, and which is predicted to last as far as the forecasts go. November usually gets twice as much rain as October (over 5 inches), and we have an inch and a half to make up for -- it looks like Mother Nature is starting early.

Brick Pathway: Completed

Photos from last summer, and from yesterday. I first started laying out bricks for a pathway from front yard to side in August, 2007; wrote about the project in September, and again a couple of days later.

Sometime in October, I gave up for the winter, and left the bricks laid out on top of the grass, hoping perhaps that nature would work her wonders, kill off the greenery for me, rot the roots to make them softer to dig up, or possibly even sink the bricks down into the earth to save us the trouble.

No such luck. In fact, the grass grew thick and wild over the bricks, leading HomoDomi to twist his ankle in the thicket a few weeks ago (because of the bricks above the level of the rest of the lawn, we couldn't mow the area, either). The dense too-long grass and piled bricks have been a real eyesore, and this pathway a task guiltily avoided all spring.

Well, the Texan took it upon herself to cut the space out for the path last week. I sand-filled and bricked in about half of the resultant ditch, and then she finished it off when I was out of town last weekend. It is lovely, smooth (ish) and best of all, finished. You can wheel the garbage can from the back all the way to the front yard now, something we couldn't do before.

More work is required, half of which is "gardening" (getting blooming plants in the stretch of dirt on the right of the photo -- dahlias, iris and gladiolas have been planted, but the bulbs/tubers were all nearly rotten, so I doubt if any will pop up -- we're too late for blooming this year anyway). The other half may wait for next summer, after other projects have been finished: We will be pulling forward the fence to meet the front of the house, from where it currently is halfway back. More about that when it's done.

Gardening is hard work

(Oriental Poppies)

I've been gardening, from 3 to 6 hours a day, every day for the last week or so. I ache all over, and have little to show for it. Like the child moving 7 cars down the toy race track, I have been pushing every car a little way forward every day, and some day (soon, I hope) they'll all achieve the finish line about the same time.

In lieu of a long-winded description of what I'm doing (which I'll get back to later -- it involves digging, transplanting, moving mountains of dirt, fencing, pruning, staking, training and even a little weeding and planting here and there), I'll just append some photos of the highlights of the garden this year -- it's been a cold spring, but it's been great for the roses, in particular.

What are these flowers?

Can you recognize these flowers? I don't know the names, and I want to know the names.

This one is a volunteer in our rock garden -- the purple blossom, not the azalea buds in the background. It has one stem only; the leaves are small and fringy, like chamomile. The blossom is about 4 inches across. It's beautiful, and I'd like to plant more.


Following is a shot along the north side of our house. The pink and white are tulips, of course. The other is what I'm trying to identify. It grows in clusters of blue bells, from a bulb. Can it be BlueBells? I didn't plant these, but we have a much more thrilling crop this year than last, literally dozens of blooms. Perhaps I fertilized the soil last fall? I can't remember what I did, but it wasn't much. (Sorry, the camera battery died before I could get a close-up. If you need one, let me know and I'll post one.)

Checking In -- it's almost spring!

As usual, returning from a trip takes as much energy as being on one, and I haven't had much time to blog. I will post soon about my trip home, because I saw some wonderful things (rain forest bordering on beach at Second Beach, and beautiful elk grazing in the undergrowth of the true rain forest at Quinault Rain Forest, and last but not least, a Pacific Northwest setting for Rivendell at the Quinault Big Cedar Tree).

In the meantime, some photos of the marvelous spring clematis bloom we are treated with this year. (I took these during one of those Portland breaks in the rain -- you'll note the sunshine and the blue sky; it lasted about 20 minutes.) Note how it's growing up over the weeping birch tree in the neighbor's yard -- a choke-hold that we will probably have to cut back this summer to save the tree, but right now it looks like a wedding decoration.