Friday, 10 April 2015
Thanks, D!
These lovely flowers are tough to shoot, especially as today when I had an armload of groceries….
Oh, the cough…now taking cough medicine (flavor has NOT changed since I was a child), with a chaser of bourbon come evening…and things got worse as…you don’t want to know…and now, fingers crossed, improvement….
Thursday, 9 April 2015
I’ve been fighting this cough, you don’t want the details. Today, it seems to be diminishing…slightly but that’s the trend….
Wednesday, 8 April 2015
This year the white azaleas opened several days ahead of these.
The miniature plants (just low-growing) have almost died, so they don’t count (small-normal flowers, though). What to replace them with? Wonder if there are low-profile gardenias?
Or I could reorganize the planting areas…whatever, it’s a shady area.
Tuesday, 7 April 2015
We spent quite some time watching the clouds zip over this like-a-shrubby-moorland hillside, framed here by a Krumholtzed tree next to the overlook.
Then I noticed that JCB was standing in the parking area but near the driving lanes, very gently corralling something with his feet. What a lovely little critter! The rescue was tricky, but accomplished, or at least I hope so, and that s/he lives long and prospers (however that plays out in the salamander world).
Internet info suggests that this was a specimen of Plethodon teyahalee, and indicates that an individual will produce “slimy, glue-like secretions when it feels threatened.” Yup, this one did; took a bunch of scrubbing to get it off finger tips that came in contact with his lithe body when the leaves I was cradling her/him with slipped.
Monday, 6 April 2015
We drove through clouds for a while this afternoon. Some miles were pure pea-soup, and we could see almost nothing beyond a grey-white that hemmed us in. Other miles were a fog-blurred reality, with looming ghostly trees that, opposite expectations, honed my sense of what I was seeing, or at least that was my perception.
Sunday, 5 April 2015
Viburnum?
I brought these in, a casualty of trimming back the now-aggressive Cherokee rose*, and other nearby woody shrubs.
While the Guru brought the wildness back under control, I shifted to the front garden, finally getting the plants we bought last week into the ground. Two kinds of basil, two of tomatoes (heirloom and an early variety), and one pepper (not sure why I didn’t get a pair of them…that was the pattern, after all…).
* I was excited to get this plant, years ago, from the BotGarden, when they still sold plants…. Then it did little, other than staying alive. After more than a decade, it took off, and now that the big tree above is gone, whew, I’ll have to reshape it and bring it “under control.” And, I’ve also discovered it’s an invasive plant. Trust the state of Georgia to pick an invasive plant as the state flower.
Saturday, 4 April 2015
Things I knew before today: matzoh is a plain food…really simple…cracker-bread; they can be used to make a yummy soup.
Things I learned today: the plural of matzoh is matzot (sometimes); matzot can be transformed into a tasty albeit not-so-pretty chocolate-drizzled sweet; they can be used to make bitter-herb-and-horseradish-and-apple-cinnamon sandwiches.
Friday, 3 April 2015
The redbud buds are being supplanted. I noticed today that the trees are producing real shade, spotty still, but shade. Some of that is from spring-parts and not leaves, however shade is shade on these sunny, warm days.
Thursday, 2 April 2015
The revamped Piedmont Park sports a lazy route for the creek, rather than the channelized, streamlined paradigm that had been employed. This is a ponding area where a huge amount of flood-runoff water dumps into the creek (below my feet as I clicked). As I stood over it today, I could hear a symphony of bullfrogs.
Note that behind that line of dark green trees in the background skyline from the middle to the right is a multi-story (like 6!, almost all “below ground”) parking garage, totally disguised from this angle, mostly by the bank and partly by those trees.
Wednesday, 1 April 2015
Yesterday I invested in this year’s garden. I planned to prep-and-plant this morning, but rain (a good thing) made the soil too wet, and I didn’t want to compact it by tromping on it.
I did water them, each wee pot zone, I promise.
I’m especially looking forward to enjoying the Thai basil….