Tag Archives: garden

Discount equals self-esteem

New rules about apple picture storage meant I started looking for alternatives. I do not want to pay for cloud storage. Period the end.

So I downloaded Amazon pics app yesterday. An Amazon prime account offers unlimited free picture storage (but not unlimited video). I set it to automatically download my images but then wondered, if I exceed the free video storage amount are they gonna automatically subscribe me to one of the paid plans, thereby ruining my cloud work around? So I interrupted it.

Started looking through them. Lots of videos of the dog. And Lila, Billy’s dog.

Mostly though, it’s those collage slideshows that I’m sure you’ve seen. They’re important to me. Even though unsophisticated (I use only a free app and my phone to create them) they provide a record: what I was thinking about, what I was feeling. Attending to the repeated imagery reveals some themes: racial inequity, trauma, the overturning of Roe v Wade, trump’s destruction (ongoing).

I thought of posting a bunch of videos here and then deleting them from my phone but then wondered, what happens when I run out of the space offered by WordPress business (which is decidedly NOT free but which I kind of had to upgrade to after I ran out of the space afforded by the free WordPress platform)?

I’m not adept at this crap and I do wonder why $12.00 a year for the cloud (or whatever) is provoking this penurious response.

Are we allowed our inconsistencies? I spent $250 on annuals yesterday. Boom. And it wasn’t a first trip.

The fact that I get a wholesaler discount and saved $100 does not make the total a penny cheaper, but somehow it feels better? A tad victorious, even, which is a good thing when I am feeling defeated by so much else.

Where am I going with this post?

To the garden.

Garden notes:

** Almost all filling-in around the new patio was achieved with divisions. ** My new copper bird bath has yet to see any action (that I’ve observed), so I keep moving it. ** When I run out of steam, I put divisions on the curb and they are always taken. ** The feeders attract: blue jays, purple finches, nuthatches, sparrows and wrens, cardinals, woodpeckers. Yesterday I saw my first red-winged blackbird.

For those of you with more tech savvy, feel free to educate me. My husband and older son are blasé about this upcoming change. Maybe it only applies to “recent uploads” (1,000 pix) which apple used to automatically upload to cloud so they’d be available across devices — a feature that has never mattered to me because I don’t use my iPad for picture stuff and my laptop is not a Mac. Oy.

So the real limit I need to worry about is the storage in my phone. I guess.

Me not gardening

Dig up all the yellow invasives, front and side. Pick up catalpa pods. Cut back ornaments grasses to make room for new growth.

Garden many iterations ago

Shop for plants to bring back structure to front bed: iris, peonies, and euphorbia (because there was no ligularia). Don’t bother with shrubs because dryer vent in foundation kills them all.

Rake front bed, half of south bed, dethatch parts of lawn. Pick up catalpa pods.

Pull out dead blades from spider plants. Remove desiccated leftovers from around the hostas. Fill two bird baths — one new one, a pretty copper bowl! Pick up catalpa pods.

Remove dried stalks from sedum — carefully! —remembering the time you got three nasty splinters in your thumb doing just that and that asswipe doctor didn’t believe you and kept asking you if you bite your cuticles.

Scoop up and remove some sunflower hulls. Pick up catalpa pods. Fill the porch planter with pansies, petunias, and allium. Brace yourself to begin removing echinacea from the front bed.

Talk to Scott about chipmunks. Shop for a second umbrella. Unwrap patio furniture.

And now, I’m pooped. Have stock on the stove for butternut ginger soup for dinner. Easy peasy.

I can hardly wait til tomorrow for the new Perry Mason. May go back and watch episodes four and five again. The plot is densely woven (in a good way).

“It’ll start getting cooler”

It’s 60 degrees here. Crickets sing their autumnal songs. Hard not to feel blessed, with zero hurricanes coming at us and zero fires raging nearby. The finches are feeding on the echinacea seed heads near the side door. When I come out, they fly off, startled and pretty.

K went to work today for only the second time since March 13. There were 313 Covid cases in Massachusetts yesterday, so I don’t know? Finn understood the change and stayed up in bed with me.

I am adding batting to the single-layer sections of the global warming quilt. Tricky. Fussy in a way that would be avoided if I were a Point-A-to-Point-B creator. Believe me, sometimes I wish I was.

But just look at that amaranth! It is one of the few glorious results of my seed planting efforts this year. Exactly ONE of the dozens of sunflower seeds I planted survived the rabbits.

The huge squash leaves came from a rogue seed that took root when a piece of compost fell into a yard waste bin and took off! I love how surprises arrive in the garden with a casual regularity that defy their miraculous nature.

June flourish

We planted a new bush out front — a Sweet Bay Magnolia– to block a fairly recently denuded corner.

And look how this new Arbor Vitae nearly completely screens out the neighbor’s car! This is the view out our living room windows, so it matters.

I succumbed to an ad inserted in my Instagram feed. Yikes! What’ll happen next? But look at the sweet solar powered bird bath bubbler I got for under $15. After just a little sun, it shoots up a five or six inch spray.

So many plants thriving, I’ll try not to get too hung up on the climbing hydrangea that died this year (another victim of the black walnut?). Out back, we splurged and planted some decent-sized birches and a lovely large pine. They’re all beautiful and functional as screening and, as it turns out, economical because I no longer feel any urgency about replacing our fence.

Ciao! Off to watch the Belmont Stakes.

A Temporary Guest

“Landscape has a secret and silent memory, a narrative of presence where nothing is ever forgotten.”  John O’Donohue (this and all following quotes from “Anam Cara, A Book of Celtic Wisdom”).


According to the ancient Celts, “Landscape is not matter nor merely nature, rather it enjoys luminosity. Landscape is numinous”.

To “consider yourself as a complete stranger … who has just stepped ashore in your life” is to realize that you are not “the helpless owner of a deadened life but rather a temporary guest gifted with blessing and possibilities you could neither invent nor earn”.

Have a great weekend! I am off to the garden center with a friend and not likely to have clean fingernails for awhile.

Anam Cara is Gaelic for ‘soul friend’.