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Jun. 2nd, 2015 04:12 pm
Plant fanatics
This really is the most beautiful time of year. I was trying to figure out what it was, over and above the lush greenness of the foliage that was making me think that. It's how perfect everything is. Until the midges arrived today, I'd hardly seen any bugs, so there's been nothing to much away at all the tender young leaves. And the weeds really aren't out yet--which is odd, because I attribute their success to getting a jump on more desirable species. But where the unsightly clumps of lambsfoot, plaintains, and trash trees that I'm used to seeing in vacant lots and along alleyways are conspicuous by their absence.
Things are happening in the garden. The spring clemates are coming into their own, and naturally ours is the most spectacular of all. At the same time, the woodruff hasn't ceased blooming yet and the lilacs in the gangway are just now peaking. Several weeks ago, because I wasn't sure what else to do with it, I sprinkled lettuce seeds all over the garden. Now it's so crammed with greens that the Old Man was able to assemble a salad yesterday with almost nothing but. When I got home, I seasoned it with several heads of blooming chives.
I've planted a lot already, and there's more to come. About a month ago, I constructed another hügelbett in the hellstrip. I went to Gethsemane to find things to populate it with and returned with wild ginger, wood asters, and Jacob's ladder. Then my buddy Fig invited me to come up to Wisconsin with him to hit a few nurseries and I returned with even more stuff: Pennsylvania sedge, Solomon's seal, maple-leaved alumroot, Chrysogonum, an oak fern, a Buglossides, and an aralia. Tonight, I supposed to head to the neighbours' to dig up and remove some of their native plants, then on Saturday, Fig is supposed to bring by some rejects from his garden.
The trip, incidentally, was a grand adventure, even if the weather was terrible--windy, rainy, and cold. The best that can be said of it was that it kept away dilettantes, so we had the nurseries basically to ourselves. The Prairie Nursery up in Westfield was kind of a bust: steep prices (though with significant discounts for buying in bulk) for small plants. But the Flower Factory south of Madison was tremendous. More than a dozen greenhouses with all sorts of beautiful plants. They had more varieties of daylilies than any place I've been and this was after they'd sold out more than half their stock.
The timing worked out so that we were passing through Madison around both breakfasttime and lunchtime. For the former, we stopped in at Sardine downtown. Not cheap, but then--despite Madison's amazing situation--there are surprisingly few restaurants in town which can boast a lakeside view. It was raining most of the time we were there and Lake Monona was so misted over it felt like we were in some remote resort town rather than in the centre of a city of a quarter million. It had cleared up by midday, although the wind was even worse. Fig wanted Culver's, so I managed to talk him into eating at the Tipsy Cow instead. Both of us would probably be better off in the long run not knowing that deep-fried cheese curds tasted that good.
Things are happening in the garden. The spring clemates are coming into their own, and naturally ours is the most spectacular of all. At the same time, the woodruff hasn't ceased blooming yet and the lilacs in the gangway are just now peaking. Several weeks ago, because I wasn't sure what else to do with it, I sprinkled lettuce seeds all over the garden. Now it's so crammed with greens that the Old Man was able to assemble a salad yesterday with almost nothing but. When I got home, I seasoned it with several heads of blooming chives.
I've planted a lot already, and there's more to come. About a month ago, I constructed another hügelbett in the hellstrip. I went to Gethsemane to find things to populate it with and returned with wild ginger, wood asters, and Jacob's ladder. Then my buddy Fig invited me to come up to Wisconsin with him to hit a few nurseries and I returned with even more stuff: Pennsylvania sedge, Solomon's seal, maple-leaved alumroot, Chrysogonum, an oak fern, a Buglossides, and an aralia. Tonight, I supposed to head to the neighbours' to dig up and remove some of their native plants, then on Saturday, Fig is supposed to bring by some rejects from his garden.
The trip, incidentally, was a grand adventure, even if the weather was terrible--windy, rainy, and cold. The best that can be said of it was that it kept away dilettantes, so we had the nurseries basically to ourselves. The Prairie Nursery up in Westfield was kind of a bust: steep prices (though with significant discounts for buying in bulk) for small plants. But the Flower Factory south of Madison was tremendous. More than a dozen greenhouses with all sorts of beautiful plants. They had more varieties of daylilies than any place I've been and this was after they'd sold out more than half their stock.
The timing worked out so that we were passing through Madison around both breakfasttime and lunchtime. For the former, we stopped in at Sardine downtown. Not cheap, but then--despite Madison's amazing situation--there are surprisingly few restaurants in town which can boast a lakeside view. It was raining most of the time we were there and Lake Monona was so misted over it felt like we were in some remote resort town rather than in the centre of a city of a quarter million. It had cleared up by midday, although the wind was even worse. Fig wanted Culver's, so I managed to talk him into eating at the Tipsy Cow instead. Both of us would probably be better off in the long run not knowing that deep-fried cheese curds tasted that good.