Monday, 20 June 2011
Before we left, I helped The Botanist with some chores. I had the most fun looking for the earliest fresh peas (English peas, they call them in the Deep South, to distinguish them from field peas). We also removed a few old dead raspberry canes from the plants Gail gave Dad the fall he had the triple bypass surgery, cut off canker infested limbs from the plum tree, and checked out the basil that I germinated and Dad transplanted into his garden.
Friday, 17 June 2011
The lupine are…rampant this year, both in the orchard and across the field.
Guess it’s no longer any good for hay.
Monday, 13 June 2011
For a while this afternoon, the car said it was 100 big fat Fahrenheit degrees out. Then, for a little while it reported 102°F.
Sometime later it dropped to 97, and I began to feel better.
Saturday, 11 June 2011
Surprise! My bee balm also comes in pink—same planting….
Friday, 10 June 2011
Yes, I admit it’s an out-of-focus crappy picture, but it delivers the pertinent info: the pepper’s almost in bloom.
Friday, 3 June 2011
Bee balm with lavender flowers, a Monarda species.
I’m disoriented by the time change—to say the least. Up at 3am, nap from 1 to 3pm, and again from 6 to 10pm. Yawn.
Now you know for sure that we’re home—I’m presenting a flower picture…(from right outside the front door). Reading about the bee balm, I discover there are two plants tagged bergamot. One is a Monarda species. More commonly, however, the term is used for a citrus that looks like a yellow-green orange, and is commonly grown in Calabria, and used especially to flavor Earl Grey tea.
And now I realize that some of the citrus trees I saw in Calabria and Sicily must have been Citrus bergamia—my ignorance of the diversity of the Citrus genera.
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
…so this must be Cefalù.
I’m unsure what it means that a church and a store named Socks face the same little salita (tiny piazza).
A few blocks down the same street, you can climb steps up from the Piazza di Duomo to the cathedral. If you look back from the nave toward the door instead of at the fancy altar, you will see that otherwise the church has little interior decoration. You probably can’t tell that the stained glass/colored windows are modern and in a modern style; does this mean that the windows were plain before this late 1980s installation?
After Cefalù, we cut inland and climbed into the Madonies—or our Ford did. These are the highest mountains on the island after Mt. Etna. On our way to driving into a cloud we discovered a cork forest, Quercus suber. I found this fly-decorated flower amongst the well-browsed (cattle, sheep, goats, probably) undergrowth.
Sunday, 1 May 2011
My basil seed experiment fizzled, so I dropped in nursery plants, a patio tomato and a wee basil cluster. I think they’ll be okay, but I did see lots of sow bugs when I upended the squirrel cage to set the plants into the safe zone. Will it turn out that the plants are safe from the rodents, but sitting ducks (you might say) for the smaller creepy-crawlies?
Saturday, 30 April 2011
I love how the morning sun illuminated my neighbor’s peony. And, yes, ants strolled nearby blooms.
Monday, 25 April 2011
Some days pass in more of a blur than others. I achieve blurriness via multiple routes, however. I’m not sure the source of today’s…. Still, I did manage to return an overdue library book and take care of the last step of the root canal (installation of the porcelain crown).