Gardening: Plotting and Planning

• The six-foot-wide, sixty-foot-long row that only gets automatically watered on the right-hand two feet and that I can't reach the middle of, isn't a good place for bush beans.
• However, it seems like a perfect place, next year, for vining winter squash. And pumpkins. I can plant the seeds on the wet two feet and let the plants sprawl over the dry four feet. And I'll only have to struggle and stretch to get the finished squashes, not strain my back picking beans every four days.
• Of course, that assumes that the squash can get along with only two feet of irrigated root zone.
• Also, that's a lot of squash. Maybe melons, too?
• Or tepary beans. They're harvested dry, which avoids the every-four-days thing, and sources claim that if you plant them immediately after the monsoons, they'll grow the rest of their lifecycle with no added water. OK, yes, we don't have monsoons; that's when they're at home. But we do have a wet winter.
• Tulips don't like to be watered, either. I've ordered an alarming number of tulips. They might be too many for their allotted space in the cutting row. But would the tulips' proximity to the irrigated two feet give them too much water?
• On the other hand, a sixty-by-six unbroken expanse of cucurbit vines sounds cool. I think I'm going to stick with the squashes and pumpkins and melons.
• And no cucumbers. They not only need to be picked every four days, they hide. With malicious intent. My back can't take that.
• That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: The Cutting Row

So, we've declared that one of the long rows in The Farm will be devoted to cutting flowers. That's eighty feet by four feet of space, all of it with at least half day sun.

Woohoo!

I've already started planting perennials. Two each of a few kinds of Japanese anemones, including Honorine Jobert, my favorite. I'd tell you what the others are, but, um, I forget. I'll have to make a note when I get out there.

Two plants each of a single-flowered and a double-flowered coreopsis. (Cultivars, you ask? I avert my eyes and promise to go make that note, too.) Two Magnus coneflowers. Two black-eyed Susan plants. Eight assorted columbine. In case you're wondering what the unifying theme is, it's that I went to the Grange and bought two of every plant that (1) I like, that (2) wasn't rootbound, and that (3) at least one source claimed was suitable for cutting. Not exactly systematic, but there was bare space out there!

I also bought some unsatisfyingly short things - squat little dahlias and, even worse, squat little sunflowers. I refuse to buy the sad, short cosmos seedlings. Why won't nurseries sell the tall ones? I suppose it's because people who aren't me like "bedding" annuals. Plus, people like to buy annuals that are already blooming, and it's hard to get a blooming four-foot-tall soft plant home without breaking it in half. So if I want the tall stuff, I have to seed it myself. This year I seeded Art Deco zinnias and Double Click cosmos, with delightful results; I'll repeat both next year, plus more kinds of  cosmos and zinnias, plus sunflowers.

I'm busily hunting online nurseries for more perennials. Vintage Gardens is going away in 2013 (noooo!), so I'm making lists of roses and possibly hydrangeas to buy from them--and Himself and I are discussing the possibility of devoting another long row just to roses. And every year I regret my failure to plant dahlias and chrysanthemums, so I plan to finally correct that error, though I haven't begun to narrow down the hundreds of options. I like the whacky ones that look like they need to comb their hair, or they're ready to blast off for Alpha Centauri, or they're waiting for you to get a little closer so that they can shoot spores in your face. That kind.

Then there are bulbs. Tulips, of course. At six inches between bulbs and a four-foot-wide row, that's sixteen bulbs per linear foot of row. That's a lot of bulbs, and enough space to offer at least a chance that they'll come back next year.

And...

Um...

My brain just stopped. Maybe those short squat little dahlias successfully aimed their spores.

First vase photo: By trish. Wikimedia Commons.
Second vase photo: By Patrick.Charpiat. Wikimedia Commons.
Third vase photo: By David Palterer. Wikimedia Commons.
Dahilia photo: By Vulkan. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Random Randomness

• I cut my first winter squash today. Unfortunately, I don't know what it is; the pencil-written wooden tag was rubbed off by the time I thought to make a note, and the woman who sold it to me and said that it tasted like chestnuts wasn't at the next farmer's market. I know that it covers an amazing amount of ground and produces an amazing number of squashes, for a single plant. And the squashes look rather like pictures of white acorn squash, though they turn a slightly darker tan when they ripen.
• A friend ate one of the Delicata Honey Boat squashes at the summer squash stage, and said that it was good and sweet. I've rarely eaten a summer squash that didn't taste like water. Maybe I should start eating immature winter squashes instead.
• I planted three kinds of squash and no pumpkins. What's with that? I'll correct it next year.
• I cut a zinnia and put it in a vase. Two weeks later, it was still alive. This is both good and a little bit frightening.
• There are unidentified round fruits on one of the plants in the cucumber patch. I still don't know if they're cucumbers, melons, or alien pods. 
• I still haven't eaten a sunflower bud. This was one of my big planned experiments this year, but I slacked off. If I don't get moving, all the sunflower buds are going to flower.
• Apparently, I sold about half of my vegetable gardening books to the used book store when I resigned myself to a small garden space. Now I need to decide which ones to re-buy. But I'm more pleased with myself for having done the decluttering than I am annoyed with my errors.
• The two watermelons in the garden are each only slightly larger than a softball. Next year I'm going to try Blacktail Mountain watermelon, if I can get the seeds. I read about it in Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties; it's supposed to successfully ripen melons in cooler and higher parts of Oregon than I live in. I think.
• This is the first time in months that I didn't have a sad, reproachful cluster of plants in pots huddled around the hose bibb waiting to be planted; a friend and I got the last of them in the ground this morning. Of course, I'll buy more any minute now.
• There's a volunteer petunia in the corn. That's just weird.
• Speaking of the corn, the main corn crop is ready to eat! We're in the middle of the generosity/gluttony dance where we want to give lots away to keep it from going to waste, and want to keep it to make sure we don't give away so much that we can't eat ourselves silly.
• I know that corn is supposed to have lots of genetic diversity, but does that extend to pure white kernels and corny yellow kernels on different ears that came from the seed packet? The silk colors were very different, too. Is this normal? And shouldn't the white and yellow be mixed in the same ear, depending on what fertilized what strand of cornsilk?
• Is it wrong to plant tulips as annuals? I need to know!
• Either way, it's time to order tulips. And to make sure that I ordered enough shallots and garlic and potato onions and Egyptian walking onions. And gopher wire. I read that without gopher wire, there will be no garlic whatsoever.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Link: Perfume vs The Farm

A babble about The Farm on The Other Blog.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Garden Space

I've rarely had a lot of space for vegetable gardening. When I was very small, I remember trying to grow carrots in a flowerpot. When I was a bit older, a friend and I started a small garden in my back yard, but I remember each bed being perhaps the footprint of a laundry basket, and I think that there were only four beds. I don't recall whether we stayed interested long enough to see anything sprout; the friend seemed most interested in digging the watering trenches.

In adulthood, Himself and I had a twelve by twenty-five foot plot in a community garden, and while that was enjoyable, it was our only garden, and therefore I promptly filled the ends with roses and rosemary and a bay tree, all of which grew enthusiastically. This left us, after paths, with perhaps 150 square feet of space for annual vegetables. Fun, but not really enough room for a big block of corn, much less corn plus pumpkins plus tomatoes plus beans plus... well, you get the idea. Then we moved into The Best House Ever, but Himself has a great fondness for lawn, so the vegetable area is both smallish and limited in sunlight.

But this year, and likely next year, and not inconceivably for a few years after that, I'll have access to a fair-sized back yard's worth of garden space, more than I've ever dreamed of before. Enough that I worry that halfway through the summer we may need to declare failure and plant half of it with a cover crop and just mow. But I'm not spending much time worrying; I'm spending a lot more plotting what to plant. For the first time in my gardening history I can seriously consider pumpkins, and melons, and winter squash, and more than three tomato plants, and enough strawberries for more than a token taste now and then.

Since my access to this garden is for a limited time, I'm taking it as my opportunity to find my favorite varieties. When the time returns that I have room for only one pepper plant, or one tomato, or a dozen heads of lettuce, or I have to decide whether any melon or squash at all is worth the space, I'd like to know what my very favorites are.

And that means starting seeds--also something that I can do this year for the first time. We've added a tiny greenhouse, roughly the size of a double closet, and I'm already well on my way to filling all of the space available with plants in progress.

It's exciting. Assuming that it happens, there will be Pictures.

Rambling: What's up? And the film festival.

So, sometimes when I post non-perfume posts in The Other Blog, I find myself thinking, Oh, noooooo!, the readers on This Blog will miss learning about critical facts about my life!

Then I get a grip.

But all the same, I seem to have been doing all my recent posting over there, including non-perfume posting About the move, and, now, the film festival that I'll be attending for the next five days, and a glance at cocktails and Saturday night. So I figured I'd point to those posts, just for, well, context.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Ramble: Books and E-Books

I own seventeen e-books. (And how do you spell and punctuate that word?!)

On principle, I disapprove of e-books. The fact that my copy of the book will go away when the technology goes away, the fact that I can't bring them to the used bookstore, the fact that I can't lend them or only lend them so many times, the fact that some books could go to a pure e-book publication and that when those books go out of copyright they could be flat-out lost forever. All that is bad.

But I downloaded the Kindle reader for Mac and for my phone, and bought a cheap out-of-copyright e-book to play with them with. And then I bought another e-book at a moderately discounted price. And then I bought one at the ridiculous (given the extremely low per-unit cost for e-books) full price.

And now, a few months later, I have seventeen of the things. Three technical, two how-to, one self-help, one reference, five novels, three biographical nonfiction, two "other nonfiction."

So I disapprove of them, but I have seventeen, and I'm reading more than I was before, and reading relatively new books (which I rarely did before), and authors are making more money from me than before, because I used to mostly buy used books. So, well, maybe it's not such a bad thing. Except financially, for me. Well, and for my local bookstore. Eep.

My original plan, as much as it could be detected mixed in with my denial that I was buying e-books at all, was to restrict my electronic buying only to those books that I don't want to own permanently in paper form anyway. There are a lot of these. The shelves are full, and while I never actually want to get rid of any book, most books must go, promptly after I've read them. Or if they stay, something else must go. Turning my head left and right, I see two stacks, representing about fifteen books, that are destined for the used bookstore. And that's just what hasn't been boxed yet.

Come to think of it, fifteen is almost the count of what I've read for the 100+ Reading Challenge. So given that some of my 100+ books were electronic, and assuming that I actually drag myself to the used bookstore, I'm more than keeping up with one book in, one book out. Yay me!

Um. Where was I? Oh, yes. The e-book versus paper judgement has failed three times, which is a rather high rate. I bought Betsy Lerner's Forest For The Trees (one of the "other nonfiction", about writing, though there's plenty of biographical stuff in there too) in e-book form, and I liked it so much that now I want it permanently.

I should have learned my lesson, but, no, I just downloaded and finished her Food and Loathing, and while I'm letting my impressions settle out before I rush to spend more money, I think I'll want a paper copy of that one, too. I think that my recent post about writing while grumpy/cranky/angry reminded me of Betsy Lerner and sent me looking for her latest book--while Forest For The Trees wasn't all that grumpy, her blog often is, and so is Food and Loathing, and I love her writing, grumpy or non. It makes me wonder if, like it or not, I should grab a keyboard when I'm gnashing my teeth and see what comes out.

And I'm in the middle of Dominique Browning's Slow Love, and judging from my fondness for two of her other books (Paths of Desire and Around the House and in the Garden) I'm also going to want that in paper form. (As a side note, I find myself wondering if I should email to the author that her website makes it impossible to link to a single specific book. Would she care?)

So, really, I have no grounds for claiming surprise in the last two cases. Frankly, I just wanted the books and I wanted them now, so I downloaded them.  I tell myself that I'm supporting the author. And the publisher--I have no problem supporting publishers either, I'm just more excited about supporting the authors. And by buying the things a second time on paper, I can even ease my guilt about the local bookstore, because I can order them there. So, really, everybody but my pocket wins. That'll have to be good enough.

Roundup: Kindle review from All I Am - A Redhead.

Image: By Andreas Praefcke. Wikimedia Commons.

Link: Rambling. And cheese. No, not really.

Just a pointer to a post on the other blog, where I ramble about... well, where I ramble.

Theater Image: By Smatprt. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Bad Peony Timing

So. Gardening. This blog once had garden content. Then the garden filled up. Then winter came. Then NaNoWriMo came. Then I started the 100-fiction-words-a-day resolve, which is still in effect as a goal. And there wasn't a lot of gardening, in my writing or in real life.

But the days are getting longer, and this weekend was deceptively springlike. And, most important, I may have access to some fresh gardening space soon.

Bwahaha.

So it's time to start the spring gardening dance. Seed catalogs. Websites. Peonies. At this moment, particularly peonies. And, yes, I realize that it would have been much better to have thought of this in the fall.

I used to garden in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bay Area weather doesn't support peonies--there isn't enough winter chill. All the same, many of the garden centers sell the things, presenting me every year with those gorgeous pictures on glossy boxes of peony roots. Every gardener knows that there are plenty of things sold in garden centers that are highly unlikely to do anything at all in the garden, but that's usually about skill. And skill improves every year, so each spring the gardener buys a new batch of plants, and most die, but some unexpectedly live, or even bloom, and so everybody's happy.

But when the garden centers sell something that simply won't bloom unless you live a few thousand feet up a mountain or dump a truckful of ice on it every few days through the winter, that seems to be an unfair stacking of the deck. I planted and lost a couple of peonies before reading about them and learning that they were a doomed pursuit. Then I ignored what I read and planted some more. But nothing ever bloomed.

So when I moved to a Southern Oregon garden that not only supported peonies, but had one already blooming, I was excited. I planned to plant many more.  But we had new paths made and new beds built, and in all that tromping around, peony roots seemed somehow too fragile to insert and too hard to keep track of. So we installed roses for me and irises for Himself, and space filled up.

And then one fall I had a spark of peony determination, one that wouldn't wait for catalogs and mail-order, and I planted six of what they were selling at the hardware store. And then we revamped the irrigation system, and then we did remodeling, and people did their very best not to walk on the flower beds, but planting more seemed like a mistake. And then, two or maybe three years later, those peonies bloomed, and they were lovely, but they were still what they were selling at the hardware store. They weren't gasp-and-fall-down peonies. And the garden was full.

Anyway. Enough history. Now I may have another chance to plant the really glorious peonies, the ones that transcend the hardware store. Except... it's spring. And I should have planted them in the fall.

Hmph.

The quick thing to do would be to search local nurseries and buy any potted peonies that I can find. The sensible thing to do would be to accept reality, prepare a luxurious bed, perhaps plant a few annuals to keep myself entertained, and order roots for perfect, glorious, transcendent peonies, to be received and planted in the fall.

What, I wonder, are the odds that I'm going to do the sensible thing?

First Pink Peony Image: By Epibase. Wikimedia Commons.
Second Pink Peony Image: By Epibase. Wikimedia Commons.
White Peony Image: By Usien. Wikimedia Commons.
Striped Peony Image: By LapisLauzli Tomorrow. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Rambling

So, as I've mentioned on the other blog, I haven't been doing much writing this past couple of weeks. And it's not just writing that isn't happening; my brain's usual production of silly daydream stories has been drastically reduced as well. In fact, even my dreams aren't offering much in the way of plot. But I have been doing a lot of reading. Unlike last year, this year I'm keeping up with the 100+ reading challenge, and I can imagine exceeding it. Maybe.

This made me wonder if my mind is unidirectional, either absorbing or producing, and not both. But what causes the direction to flip? Seasonal change? The end of the holidays? The tragic resumption of work at the end of the holidays? Seasonal Affective Disorder? What's the deal?

I also (whispering) read a novel that didn't involve a murder.  Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, a nice low-key story with no crime to speak of. Is it possible that aliens borrowed my brain and didn't get the fluff and fold process quite right before returning it? I read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, too, but that one does involve a murder, even if it is sold with the regular novels at the non-mystery end of the bookstore.

Puzzlement.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Ramble: Fiction and Blogging and E-Books and Whining

"So what do you think?"
"Um..."
"Yeah, I know."
"Well, I mean, it's fine. It's perfectly correct and the grammar's fine and the paragraphs break where they should, and so on."
"Uh huh."
"It's just..."
"Yeah."
"...just..."
"Dull."
"Well, I wouldn't say that."
"But it's true?"
"I'm withholding my answer."
"It's like I'm shoving words around with those things. Those things that they push those things around with in that sport. Stop looking at me like that. Curling! You know, curling, where they push boulders around on the ice very very slowly."
"Yeah. Got it."
"That's all you have to say?"
"How about a nice cup of tea?"

So, it usually takes some struggling to get me to write my self-assigned two hundred words of fiction a day, but I'm usually moderately satisfied with the result. Lately, however, it's been more of a struggle, and the product has been bad. Not even a good, entertaining kind of bad, but a dreary, plodding kind of bad that makes me imagine someone reading it and keeping their eyes down after they're done, pretending to still be reading while they desperately try to think of something pleasant to say about it. That's why you haven't seen a vignette here in, er, ten days.

So, OK, fine, how about doing some reading? That's been weird, too. I keep setting out to read a book, and looking up twenty minutes later to realize that I'm on the computer, in a blog or forum.

It's partly the books that I'm trying to read. For years, I've been selecting used paperbacks using what I call the first paragraph test, and for years it's worked.

What's the test? Well, a first paragraph has to have at least a little action. It shouldn't have any character description, a character's full name, or any setting detail, without a darn good excuse. Anything along the lines of "Jane Janet Jones, accomplished actress, pushed her rippling midnight-dark hair behind her delicate shell-like ears, a tiny line forming between her fine green eyes as she looked out at the November weather through the window of her small but luxuriously appointed third-floor Boston brownstone apartment ..." will send the book right back to the shelf. And after it avoids those pitfalls, it needs an "I know it when I see it" engaging surprise about it.

I just picked up my copy of Final Curtain, by Ngaio Marsh, expecting a good first paragraph, and I was rewarded:

"Considered severally," said Troy, coming angrily into the studio, "a carbuncle, a month's furlough and a husband returning from the antipodes don't seem like the ingredients for a hell-brew. Collectively, they amount to precisely that."

Now, that's a first paragraph. I'm even willing to forgive the full name ("Katti Bostock") in the following paragraph.

But Final Curtain was written in (let me check) 1947. It appears that in recent years, writers and/or publishers have learned about the first paragraph test. I'm a third of the way through a paperback mystery that sported a very promising first paragraph, but quickly shifted to Generic Witty Banter between Generic Feisty Heroine and Generic Protective But Slightly Controlling Hero. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with Banter and Feisty and Protective; it's the "generic" part that I object to. At least I didn't buy the whole series. I've been known to do that, when entranced with a good first paragraph.

Um. What was my point? Yes! My point was why I'm not reading. It's partly books that cheated on the first paragraph test. And it's partly Internet addiction. So that's where the E-Books come in.

(A digression: How do you spell E-Books? Ebooks? eBooks? e-books?)

I find that if I have a book open in my Mac Kindle reader thingie, I occasionally look up to realize that I'm reading the thing. And if I have the same book in my phone, I can read it during those few-minute pauses out in the world when, lately, I too often find that I don't have an actual print book on me. So E-Books, while I vaguely disapprove of them, do get me reading.

And to circle around to my original point, it's possible that my inability to write is coming from my failure to do enough enjoyable reading. In an effort to fix this, I'm hunting down new books by writers whose writing I like--Martha Grimes, Calvin Trillin, and Margaret Visser, to start. I've already violated my anti-E-Book principles and downloaded The Black Cat by Martha Grimes, and I may move on to Margaret Visser's latest book, the one about "thank you" customs.

(Another digression: Do any of you read Martha Grimes? How do you feel about her recent tendency to fully verbalize the thoughts of cats and dogs? I love the rest of her stuff, and I've always loved the opinionated animals, but the verbalizing? Not working for me.)

So. Um. There we are. I continue to produce two hundred words on many days, but for now, they continue to be drearily, twitchily bad. So I'm reading about Richard Jury. Yay!

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Link: Rambling on the other blog

So, I've been rather quiet on this blog, not so much as a word about the holiday, because I've been participating in a holiday-related joint perfume blogging project on the other blog. Normally, I wouldn't come here to point to my perfume posts there, because if you wanted to read about perfume, you'd already be there, right?

But these posts seem to be ending up only about twenty to forty percent perfume, and the rest could just as easily be over here. So I'm going to link to my gold post and my frankincense post.

And that is all. For now. I still have to figure out something to say about myrrh. (And now I have.)

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Link: Ramble: Tryptophan Girl

A link to a ramble about worrying, over on the other blog.

Image: By Unisouth. Wikimedia Commons.

Writing: Finding The Drive

I've been thinking lately that I need to write longer, deeper, more complicated, er, stuff. On the blog or off the blog. And I've been wondering why I seem to write mostly little short things - by which I mean, just a few paragraphs or even just a few lines, especially on the perfume blog. But I tell myself that short is the way I write, and I should embrace my own preferences, and blah blah blah.

But wait a minute.

I just started reading The Forest For The Trees, by Betsy Lerner, and read a bit about having to write - something like if you don't have to write, feel the need and drive to write, maybe that means you should wait for the drive. Something like that. And I thought, well, no, I like to write, but I'm rarely driven to write a blog post or story or some such thing. I rarely feel the words trying to escape, wanting to be written whether I like it or not.

But wait a minute.

I am driven to write. Long (comparatively) bits of writing, written eagerly, with a strong desire to express and persuade, and often with fascination with the structure of the writing, and eagerly edited and tightened and rearranged and re-read and re-read. I often write these several times a day - or, really, several times an evening. But I don't count them, because I'm writing them for forums, of all places. Internet forums. So for me, the urge and inspiration and the flood of words determined to escape comes on Internet forums, and apparently not anywhere else. What's with that?

I think that part of it is interactivity. I'll get back to that.

And part of it is the extent to which I feel that the writing represents me. Or, to put it another way, stage fright. The blogs have my name on them, and the presumption that I'm trying, at least a little, to write coherently and to write something that's interesting to someone other than myself. I think that I feel that coming to my blog has a "price of admission" aspect, and as such I owe people more. And so I end up giving people less, out of self-censorship. On the forums, I can contentedly write long, potentially self-indulgent, potentially overwrought, posts, and if I feel doubts as I press the submit button, I can quite easily shrug, "If they don't like it, well, too bad."

There's also anonymity, either real(ish) or imagined. On many of my forums, I've left (I hope) no link between my forum identity and my real life self. And on the others, my posts are buried in the forum clutter - it's not as if there are any secrets there, or even any guaranteed secrets on the forums where I hope I'm anonymous, but what I write doesn't feel nearly as "published." So if I want to ramble on and theorize about a problem with a toxic person, or my fears about something, or an attitude that I fear might be condemned, I feel more relaxed about expressing that.

So, back to interactivity. Forums hand me subjects, and people already prepared to disagree with me, or already eager for input on an issue. Like a recent NaNoWriMo debate about whether words unacceptable in everyday speech are acceptable in fiction. Or the ongoing debate on a blogging forum where I participate, over whether blogging is about money or not. Or someone asking for advice on what to do about a problematic family member. Stuff like that.

Do I have a conclusion? Not yet. But if you find that I start posting long, self-indulgent, overwrought posts, well, that'll be part of the experiment.

Image: By Ziko-C. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: The Craving For Empty Spaces

Years ago, I remember reading an article by someone who successfully grew a "meadow in a can". Unsurprisingly, the idea of just scattering the seeds and waiting for flowers didn't work out. As I recall, she planted, and weeded, and hoed, and transplanted, and did the same thing the following year, and eventually she had a space filled with tough wildflowers, all set and ready to self-maintain.

Then she plowed it under and planted something else.

It often seems to me that the pleasure of a garden is in the planning, and an empty space can give the gardener more pleasure than all the flowers or foliage in the world.  I never used to understand annuals; you have to chose and buy and plant them every year, often more than once a year. Now I'm realizing that that may be the whole point.

See that photo up there of our side gate, with all that foliage and all those red roses? I admire it, but when I look at it part of my mind is saying, "Hmph. Ground's full."

Gardening: Fall

In less than two weeks, we've shifted from sticky summer to cool, damp fall. Not "countdown to freeze" fall, but harvest fall - the plants are still thriving, but without that desperate grab-some-water-and-growgrowgrow! air that they had just week before last. They seem, well, relaxed.

The rose next to the neighbor's garage is blooming - I can't remember if I've ever seen its flowers, but they're lovely double white things with an unsweet, peppery scent. Sir Thomas Lipton, over by the shed, is producing disease-free flowers for the first time in years. L. D. Braithwaite is producing big, slowly opening, relaxed red roses. Sally Holmes still has that frantic air, but she always did have more work ethic than is really good for her.

And the Japanese anemones are blooming everywhere. Oh, and the hydrangeas. And the butterfly bush. And the unnamed hybrid tea.

I usually declare that May is my favorite garden time, but maybe late September is winning me over.

Image: Mine.

Rambling: Enabling the nonsense

OK, this is an old mystery, but, hey, it remains unsolved.

I can write about perfume. Incessantly. Without worrying about whether I make any sense, or have any expertise to offer; I just ramble happily. So the other blog goes rolling along, with many silly posts and cat pictures and the occasional coherent observation.

I can't seem to write about gardening - or, for that matter, chocolate or bacon or fried chicken or murder mysteries or any of the other topics that are on topic for this blog - in the same way.

Why is that?  It might, of course, just be practice. Maybe I need to write a few hundred gardening posts before I'm entirely comfortable writing nonsense about gardening.  And, yes, I think that  comfortably writing nonsense about gardening is a worthwhile goal at this point, because I have to be comfortable with the nonsense to have any hope of writing sense. I discussed that recently... in the other blog. In fact, come to think of it, the other blog also got the latest bacon and fried chicken post! That's not fair! This is the saturated fat blog!

Ahem. Anyway. The goal is to write just as much nonsense here, as I do there. So there.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: So why do I only photograph the Before?

When we first moved into the house, I took photos of the garden. Lots of photos. As I look through them now, I notice that my photo-taking focus seems to be on the construction and planting phase of the garden areas that we changed. So I have lots and lots of pictures of areas of the garden looking like this:

or this:

But far fewer looking like this:

Or this:

The prettier the garden gets, the fewer photographs I take of it. Why is this?

Photos: Mine.

Ramble: And I still don't get Twitter

I noticed today that I've produced five hundred tweets. Five hundred and three, to be exact. And I still don't get Twitter. Much.

I get bits of it. I've participated in a few interesting TweetChats, though there seems to be a critical mass factor - too few people and the chat is dull, too many and you can't possibly keep up. And I enjoy the remarks from people that I know. (But I read those people's blogs, and a blog seems like a much more reliable way to catch what they had to say.) And sometimes the conversation going on while lots of people are reacting to a television show or news event can be entertaining.

But when I consider it as a daily tool, or entertainment, or whatever it is, I remain puzzled. It feels mostly like eavesdropping on a mass scale. It doesn't have the ethical issues of eavesdropping, of course - everybody knows that their every word is available to everyone. But all the same, I suppose that I consider partial privacy and a limited audience to be an essential element of any conversation.

Rambling: Hobby Overload!

I used to sew. Long ago. Well, not that long ago, but it's been a couple of years since I fired up the sewing machine.

All that time, I've had two skirts hanging in my closet, one in linen and one in silk noil, both made from the HotPatterns Miss Moneypenny Trumpet Skirt pattern. These were, uncharacteristically, finished projects - I altered the pattern, made the muslin, and cut out, stitched, topstitched, and even (gasp) hemmed the skirts. I even hemmed them with a little extra in the back, to account for, er, extra on my person, so that they'd hang even. Then I hung them in the closet and never looked at them again.

Until today. When I wore the linen one because the only other option was black polyester, on a summer day. And I liked it. It was nice and long and swishy, and the little flare at the hem worked just the way it was supposed to, and it looked good with my new girly sandals. And after that couple of years of aging, I was no longer aware of any flaws in the construction - at least, on the outside.

So, of course, now I want to start sewing again. Even though I just took up knitting. And there are still the 100+ books and chicken frying and gardening and blogging and the tricycle and my likely participation in NaNoWriMo and and and. And. (And now I've gone and written a post about my hobby cycles. Here.)

But I'm doomed. I already went to look at PatternReview. And HotPatterns. And no doubt I'll be looking through pattern books before the month is out. And digging through old boxes to find, I fervantly hope, that already-altered skirt pattern. And inventorying my remaining fabric and pattern stash.

Will I actually start something, and finish it, and use it? That is the issue. If I start small, I might. Like with pajamas.  Or, for months I've been imagining a Chicken Frying Coat to keep me from smelling like the chicken after I fry it - something silly, with three-quarter-length sleeves that won't catch fire, and something to tie a kitchen towel to for constant hand-wiping. I could make it in, say, blue chambray, with white pique cuffs, and applique a chicken on it...

Maybe I should lie down with a cold compress for a while.

Image: By PKM. Wikimedia Commons.