ONE RACOON. TWO RACOON

 "This early piece of the morning is mine..."
                                             -Wallace Stegner (Walking to Safety)

 Racoons in early morning.

 Please don't eat the PumpkinWatermelonthingy that grows on the hill. It must look luscious to young racoons.

 Cordelia sees the racoons walk. From the safety of her fence.

 PumpkinWatermelonthingy breathes a sigh of relief.....

 One Racoon.....

 Two Racoon....

 In the early light of day.

 One Racoon....

 Two Racoon..

 A couple of Pumpkinwatermelonthingys shiver under their leaves.

  One Racoon..... 

 Two Racoon......

Digging for grubs. Digging for worms. Yawning as they walk.

 Simon squints his eyes in the sun. They dig. He squints. He stays still.

 One Racoon.....

 Two Racoon...

 The Sun is up. Everything wakes. They toddle off. Yawning as they go. One Racoon.....Two Racoon.....

 "Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at a most inconvenient time of day...." -Glen Cook ( Sweet Silver Blues)

 And out peer Spencer and Rona  from their hiding place. All is well......

photographs 2020

Only the Cabbages have survived....

 "Despite the gardener's best intentions, Nature will" improvise. ~Michael P. Garofalo

                     
 I have been scrounging for sweet peas this year. Eking out a few here and there.Tugging them off stalks that look promising, but go nowhere.  Vines should be up over the fence, as per usual, This year they look like gremlins cut them down.
 Over all, the garden is lush and green and pretty nice. Long, wet icy winter, cold wet spring, slow start.......some things just couldn't take it. Others, absolutely did fabulous.

 But the carrots....oh those darn carrots.....look like they need haircuts. They're all tops, no carrots.

  the sunflowers are  just fine. So far.  I'm  waiting to see if they keep growing. They do look a bit spindly. They teeter-totter in the wind. They tower, somewhat, over the remaining cabbages. 

  Dahlias are coming along. Lots of buds ready to pop. They have done so well. And I thought they would just rot.They are,  so far, rocketing skyward and blooming.

 Patience the gold, furry house mate of Cordelia, makes an appearance,here and there,  something he doesn't always do.  Spencer and Smokey  keep their distance from him. Most days.The garden cats. The neighbourhood cats. They seem to thrive.

 "A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust."   - Gertrude Jekyll

  Poor veggie garden. Only three ( count them) THREE CABBAGES left. I leave them because I feel sorry for them. They seem to be holding their own.....sort of. Wobbling about on little stalks.

 Sunflowers are a little thin looking. I'm hoping they will fatten up. I stole geraniums from other pots to  bank around the lonely cabbages. Hoping they will  perk up. It's a weird year for growing things. Geraniums seem to be thriving.

 "We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?" Wendell Berry


 All the POTS are huge this year. The sweet peas dwindle. Cabbages survive. Carrots look like parsley ( maybe I had the wrong seeds). Sunflowers look like they could use steroids. Or a good workout  at the gym.

 The beets disintegrated into the soil. The lettuce bolted before it even grew into lettuce.The cabbages  look like leftovers.Missing leaves. Holes in their wings.  Maybe I will make cabbage soup out of them at some point.

 Maybe the sweet peas will do better next year.BUT at least the CABBAGES have survived.

"INHALE and HOLD EVENING IN......"
                                                                         ― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

Photographs 2017

Veggie Garden

 My Majesty made for him a garden anew in order to present to him vegetables and all beautiful flowers.

-  Offerings of Thutmose III to Amon-Ra (1500 BCE)

Well, Thutmose III may have had   a great veggie garden. He would not be envious of mine.   I'm just not a veggie-growing person. Flowers are more my speed.  After the excitement of the hummingbird the other day, cabbages and  radishes needed to be dealt with. They just weren't pulling their weight.

 The whole veggie growing experience is basically an experiment .  

  I'm partial to trying out new flowers. And of course SWEET PEAS.....seen above. I can grow those. The broccoli I planted went to little yellow flowers and keeled over this week. So, I ripped them out. 
 
 Then I dug up the knee hi sweet peas I had buried at the back of the hill, and plopped them where the broccoli used to stand.  ( Oh and the fence. Remember  to remind me to never do a fence again. Just didn't work quite that well. Very claustrophobic inside the dirt patch. No room to dig. Was a good idea at the time, but the deer don't seem too interested in this hill garden, so decided it should go.) I took the sweet peas with a good chunk of dirt attached. Then watered them like crazy. So far, so good. they are doing fine. Much better than the broccoli.
                                     
 So now that the broccoli was gone. I decided to rip out the radishes. They were shaking in their little radish boots, going to seed, and weren't making any little radish balls. Instead of  radishes, I moved the oodles of marigolds I  planted down the edge of the fence ,now gone. They seem to like growing in groups, so I stuffed them all together in the dirt.  Up by the sunflowers. The slugs had been chewing on them. 


                                       The cabbages I pulled up from underneath the blueberry bushes. I I thought they should grow  by the sweet peas. So off they were  re-located.  The leaves have some slug holes in them . The beer bait seemed to work for a while, but I forgot to replenish it.  I think the slugs drank the beer then went looking for the marigolds.

 In the night the cabbages catch at the moon, the leaves drip silver, the rows of cabbages are a series of little silver waterfalls in the moon.
                                                                           -  Carl Sandburg
Lettuce thrives . SO maybe the cabbages will like living next to the lettuce for a while. They can encourage each other. I'll need more beer bait traps.
             

Just cabbages and lettuce left. Gives me more time to make up Bee drinking bowls. Take a bottom drainer of a small pot, fill with water, and the bees will drink out of it. Helps save them from drowning in larger containers.

 What vegetable did Noah not take on the ark? 
Leeks. -unknown

 The rejuvenated veggie patch looks more like this. Well, it looked better a couple of days after this.  The sweet peas  perked and the cabbages seemed happy with sunflowers growing above them.               

Sowe Carrets in you Gardens, and humbly praise God for them, as for a singular and great blessing.
-  Richard Gardiner
   Profitable Instructions for the Manuring, Sowing and Planting of Kitchen Gardens (1599)

 Oh, and I forgot about the carrots.  I left them where they were, by the sunflowers, hoping they will do better. If not, then they will suffer the same fate as the broccoli. For now  they are safe. And so the garden continues, broccoli-less and radish-less ( I don't think those are real words, but for now they will do).  I think the carrots  quiver in fear........

 I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm President of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli.

-  George Bush, U.S. President, 1990

2017