Anyone who says gardening isn't proper exercise is full of...

So, since both of our Mothers are far far away from us and we couldn't spend the day with either of them, we spent our Mother's Day reclaiming our gardens. 

We started off the day with an early morning trip to Dickman Farms Greenhouses and Garden Center, which is pretty much Mecca for gardeners.  It's an overwhelming place to visit, solely because there are so darn many choices for plants and they all look so gloriously lovely!  I find greenhouses to be intoxicating, and somehow they make time slow down for me.  I could spend forever in a greenhouse.  Instead, I spent (eh hem) probably what should have been the money for groceries this week instead.

We came home with our purchases, and set to.  I have never, ever allowed a garden to get into such horrid shape as we allowed our front garden to get into this year - truly, it was incredible.  I should have taken "before" shots, but frankly, it was too embarrassing.  The back perennial garden was pretty bad, too, considering I had in fact given it a once over in the fall to remove the dead stuff. 

So, in total, here's what we accomplished in one very long day:

> Planted two earth boxes, one with peas and lima beans, and one with two varieties of heirloom tomatoes.

> Shooed Pippin off the tomato earth box.  Apparently the black cover on it gets invitingly warm in the sun.

> Weeded and mulched the big back perennial garden, which is my pride and joy.  I have been slowly adding to the plants in it each year, and it is finally bursting with all kinds of lovely things.  I was surprised and delighted to find that my last year's sickly columbine is threatening to take over the universe, and the new asiatic lilies have all multiplied several times over.  The astilbe is spreading, the elephant ear hosta is finally healthy, the wild ginger is growing, the coreposis has doubled in size.  I think my only disappointment in the whole garden is that my one lowly hollyhock is still pretty scraggly.  But in a few more weeks things in that garden will start blooming, and I should have flowers through late fall.

> Fought another round (the second this spring) with the bleeding hearts, trying to prevent them from smothering everything else in the garden.

> Shooed Pippin off the tomato earth box. Again.

> Removed a bunch of grape hyacinth (I have an unreasonable prejudice against the stuff), and some sumacs that had set up shop in the middle of the garden. That stuff grows fast.

> Affectionately renamed our Bear's Breeches "Brickle Bush".  If you haven't read Dr. Seuss's "What was I Scared of?", featuring the spooky pale green pants with nobody inside them, you should.  It's just about the best children's book ever.

I ran and found a Brickle bush

I hid myself away.

I got brickles in my britches

But I stayed there anyway.

> Shooed Pippin off the tomato earth box.  Yet again.  Cursed him soundly.

> We (I should say, my husband) finally dug up the stump of the ancient massive pricker bush that we had cut back to the ground last year from our weird fence garden.  That poor garden has had nothing in it since we moved in, aside from two sickly rose bushes and that massive thorny thing.  So, we dug up the whole thing and planted a bunch of sedum, which I chose largely because it's hard to kill, but also in hopes we might attract a butterfly or two.  Now the random section of fence in our back yard looks slightly more like it's supposed to be there.

> Put down something like 20 bags of mulch in the back gardens.  Yes, I know, I ought to have it delivered by the truckload rather than buying it in wasteful plastic bags.  I somehow didn't plan ahead far enough for that this year.  Bad human.  No cookie.

> Weeded the front day lily garden by the porch and mulched it.

> Planted the urn in front with a mix of geranium, some kind of decorative grass, marigold, and a few other odds and ends that are very hearty.

> Finally, we could not justify putting off the evil front garden a minute longer, as we'd run out of other gardeny things to do.  So we started weeding.  With rakes, and shovels, yanking out handfulls and bunches.  No exaggeration, I'd say we pulled at least 100 lbs of leaves and weeds from the front garden.  We filled two paper yard waste sacks with the stuff, I could barely budge those sacks when we were done.  My husband bent the hoe on one stubborn weed, so now it looks a little like it's giving us the finger.

> I harvested enough dandelions from that garden to eat them with every dinner for at least a week.

> I also removed enough spearmint from that garden for about 1,000 mint juleps.  The only thing I have to say in defense of spearmint is that at least it smells good while you're pulling it up by the fistfull because it has taken over everything.

> Spouse dug up MASSIVE roots from these awful weeds that have plagued me since we moved in three years ago.  I don't know what they are, but the roots were larger than my calf, and went several feet into the ground.  No wonder I couldn't get rid of the damn things merely by chopping off their heads.

> We sacrified a pathetic rose bush, and a bunch of scraggly tulips (I'm just not a tulip kind of a gal - they always look messy to me, unless they're planted in a lush thick carpet, which mine decidedly were not).  We also decided to sacrifice the sickly rhododendron after it blooms this year.  I have spent three years trying to make it happy and healthy, and if it hasn't worked yet, it isn't going to.

> We shooed Rocky out of the garden, who was happily "watering" the soil we'd just loosened.

> Then we planted more asiatic lilies (because I cannot help myself).  We also planted some kind of purple flowering plant that looks like miniature salvia, which we gleaned from my next door neighbor's "thinned out" pile (which - poor thing - promptly went into shock).  To fill up space this year while the new perennials get going, we planted a whole bunch of portulaca.  Because, let's face it, despite our best intentions we simply never ever water that garden.  Maybe portulaca can handle our neglect.  Watch, now it will rain incessantly all summer, and the stuff will drown.  Or, probably even more likely, the cats will do it in.  This was what I found when I came home today.  Gr.

All in all, we accomplished a tremendous amount in one day.  I have never gardened that ceaselessly in one day before.  Neither one of us could really move this morning - things are creaky and aching, and I was a little out of it. 

We still have a long way to go before our front garden matches the kind of splendor my back perennial garden is finally achieving, but we'll get there I think in just another year or two.  I have started some baby seedlings that still aren't quite ready to go into the ground, including some black eyed susan, some more hollyhocks, and some poppies.  If they make it, I'll add them to the front garden, too.  Some of my kale has turned into a perennial, and I left it there in all its wavy decorative glory.  The lavenders we planted last year look a bit bedraggled, but they've quadrupled in size so I guess we're doing something right - apparently they liked being ignored.  I'm good with that.

Once we finish putting perennials in that garden, I am already planning where to dig the next garden out back.  If I could, I would do away with nearly all our grass and turn the whole yard into a maze of paths through all kinds of flower beds.  Here's what's on my current garden plant wish list:

Jack in the Pulpit
Japanese Lanterns
A Japanese Maple
Primroses
Lily of the Valley (more than the few lonely sprigs that I currently have)
Hens and chicks... somewhere.  No idea where I'd put it, but the stuff is cool.  If I kill the front urn by failing to water it again this summer, maybe I'll give up and put hens and chicks in there.
More peonies, in more varieties.  I can't ever get enough.  Probably same with lilies.
More ferns.
And while I'm at it, dreaming big: a pond.  Some day, maybe.  I hope.  With a bridge.  And plunky splashy frogs.

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April Showers and All That

It was officially the rainiest April ever recorded for the Syracuse area.  Let me tell you, it felt like it.  The whole month was gloomy and dreary and drippy, then we had a couple of whopper thunder storms this past week that caused a lot of damage and brought a whole hell of a lot of rain.

Mind you, I am incredibly grateful Syracuse's damage was just some flooding, hail damage, and power outages, and not the kind of deadly tornado damage some other states saw.  It still did, however, cause things like several feet of rushing water on Route 81, backed up sewers,  and damage to the local parks, among other things.  The hail did a lot of damage too, including to my Dad's car, which he had been contemplating trading in next month.  Spectacular timing.

Check out some of the massive hail stones from his yard.  You can see why they dented the car:

By the way, when I say backed up sewage, I'm not exaggerating.  The County sewers were so overloaded by that one massive storm that sewage erupted out of the toilets at my husband's office with such force that it blew the toilets clean off the seals on the two lower floors of the building.  That should give you some idea how much rain we got in that one storm.  Ew ew ew ew ew.

Anyway, on to pleasanter subjects.  Today dawned bright and clear and deliciously sunny - an incredibly welcome change from the gloom and rain.  Could this signal a brighter May?  Late in the day we stopped at Onondaga Lake Park to see just how flooded it is.  I had heard that the lake was well beyond flood stage, but Onondaga Lake Park tends to develop a lot of mini ponds on the lawns at the northern end in the spring anyway.

I certainly did not expect to see as much water as I did.

Parts of Onondaga Lake Park have basically turned into lake soup.  It's truly impressive.  Actually, for me, it was a little creepy.  I happen to have a nearly pathological fear of things submerged under water, and I often have anxiety dreams about having to walk on docks that are sinking into water.  Let me tell you, there are some things in the Park right now that are the stuff of my nightmares.

One section of trail disappears under a foot or so of water:

There are several docks that are nearly in the water (*shudder*) and which one could only access by wading:

The really sad part is that it's done some real damage to the marina, and undoubtedly some other areas too.  And my word, it has also dumped a whole lot of gross debris along the shoreline.  It's going to be a huge undertaking to clean up.  The poor docks in the marina are new, and I hope the damage isn't too extensive.

Thankfully, the worst of the debris is largely concentrated near the southern end of the Park, and much of the park was still pretty and inviting.  There were certainly folks out enjoying it, because it was hard to resist going for a stroll in all that sunshine, despite the damp.

The sunshine and all the water made for some beautiful photos, even if I couldn't get to all the benches to enjoy the view.

Here's hoping for a brighter, sunnier May to dry us out a bit!

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Happy Easter

Happy Easter from the Easter Bunny's distant cousin, the Easter Basset! (not to be confused with the Easter basket...)

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Cabin Fever

The winter just won't let go of its death grip on Central New York.  40 mile an hour wind gusts are (again) buffeting the house.  There is a grim warning of snow in tonight's forecast.  If I wake up to a white Village tomorrow morning I shall scream.

Anywho, we've all got cabin fever.  All eight of us.  Yes, that's right, all eight.  That includes the Attic Ghoul, who just this past weekend wandered out of his fiercely guarded attic hideaway of his own volition.  I was making myself a snack around 8:00 Saturday evening, and heard a meow several times before it registered in some dim recess of my brain that the meow didn't seem to belong in the scene.  I looked down, and discovered Rocky sitting on the kitchen floor, looking up at me, meowing curiously.  It was as if he was saying, "Hey Mom.  Is this where you go when you're not petting me in my attic?"

The former recluse hasn't looked back.  He wandered about exploring a little that evening, cool as a cucumber, as if he had been living comfortably with the rest of us forever.  Sunday morning, I awoke to find him sitting draped over my husband's legs, purring comfortably.  Why it took him seven weeks to emerge from his attic, I shall probably never know.  In a couple of days, he's progressed from practical non-existence, to being a persistently purring ankle-bumper, who follows me from room to room and is surely going to cause me to trip down the stairs in the immediate future.

Somehow our giant 2,200 square foot house seems to be shrinking with each pet we add.  It seemed HUGE when we moved in here with just five of us.

What with the miserable weather, we all need something to occupy our attention, so while my husband braved the winds to glue parts of his car back together (curse the road debris from someone's @#%$*^! uncovered load on the highway!), I got the bright idea to construct a cat playhouse.

It took three sizable cardboard boxes, a box cutter and some tape. I had to dump cats out of it several times before I could finish it, which I took to be a good sign.

Ta da!  Hours of feline entertainment.

Here's proof Rocky has emerged.  There he is, on the left, looking burly.  I love how the boxes have sprouted a tail.

Watching for paws to come waving through the hidey holes:

Thus far it's the biggest hit with the young 'uns.  Pippin is only a bit over a year, and Wednesday, though past two, retains an eternally kittenish disposition that I expect she'll retain forever.  The three year olds, Sneakers and Rocky, are more dignified, and though intrigued, will likely only explore it when they think no one else is looking.

And grouchy old Tucker?  He would never stoop so low as to acknowledge the presence of something the "kids" play with!

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