HeronDragonWrites: Home from F-FL: Part 5

This god-awful mess, if it were in a room instead of my garden, could be one of my F-FL Hoarder Friends’ constructions. See, I learned something useful while I was down there in the Land of the Damned.

This construction is the third or fourth attempt I’ve made in the last few weeks to keep Rasta Furian, that eminently creative and not-easily-alarmed beast, from digging up my pea and onion bed, which he’s done at least 4 times and I’ve replanted at least 4 times.

I think I finally got it covered (partly literally), and I’ve put the scary-looking bird, and a big solar light, and a metal frog in the three potato bags that he was also digging up (and tossing potatoes out of so I had to replant those, too) – at least I think it was him. The Husband found him sitting in one of the bags looking guilty one day, but I’m fully aware that the perp could have been the garden gnome/gremlin, since the potatoes were sometimes tossed 4 feet from the bags. Whoever was doing it, since the garden junk got put into the potato bags, there has been no more potato digging.

The problem child, looking for trouble

However, someone has dug a big hole in the rows of okra and cilantro I seeded two days ago. I’ve only got so much garden junk and old window screens and they’re all pretty much in use, now!

I have a big f-ing garden, and two chest freezers in the cellar. Into them go most of the vegetables we eat all winter long, plus fruits we grow, and local meats we buy locally. On a good year, I also make zucchini relish, tomato juice – unless you’ve had home-made tomato juice you have no idea what tomato juice actually is! – dilly beans, curried summer squash pickle, and whatever else I’ve got time and energy and enough veggies for.

We grow, as well as the vegetable garden and the perennial borders that surround it and the annuals I scatter amongst it (always calendula, nasturtiums, cosmos, bells of Ireland, amaranth, and some morning glories), herbs – dill that reseeds yearly, a massive sage plant, Egyptian onions, which are perennials, French tarragon, thyme, bee balm – which has taken over most of the field, marjoram that I’d love to eliminate but it spreads like crazy, bee balm, basil, catnip, sweet woodruff, borage, and winter and summer savory – the latter reseeds itself annually, the former is a perennial. There are also tarragon and yarrow and masses of daisies that have planted themselves, Dame’s Rocket, a biennial that reseeds itself all over the garden, Johnny Jump Ups that do the same, sunflowers for the birds, milkweed for the butterflies, and often a few unknowns that are sometimes very gorgeous.

Clematis against black house

In the field around the garden are peach trees, a sweet cherry bush, a pie cherry tree that the birds always beat me to, a pear tree, and apple tree, and raspberries and blueberries, as well as a giant rhubarb plant that my father dug up decades ago from an abandoned homestead in the woods somewhere, planted in his garden, and when we built this house he divided it and gave me half. It’s now even more decades old, and twelve years ago after Dad died and was cremated, some of his ashes fed the rhubarb. They apparently like each other because the rhubarb is huge and near the pet graves bed (Dad loved the critters) and it gives me a focus when I’m muttering curses out in the sometimes recalcitrant garden. So far, he hasn’t answered back, but it wouldn’t surprise me to discover he has something to do with the garden gnomes/gremlins that have raised havoc the past two years. He had a sense of humor like that.

Right now we’ve been having stupid weather: too wet then too dry then too cold now too hot. I’ve been planting the garden anyway. I’ve got 9 beds planted, doing various degrees of not great; 3 more beds partially planted; three beds not yet started; and two more to build. The Husband and the Teacher tell me the block I got this year, to build those beds, weigh 33 lbs each. Oy. What I usually use wasn’t available and this is the best I could find. If I disappear some day, you’ll find me having muscle spasms out near the peach trees.

Dame's Rocket, compost bins

This weekend: the Tall Guy is bringing by the tomato plants, which will fill one empty bed and two of the partially-planted beds. I have two perennials that I haven’t gotten in the ground yet; and I need to find a good spot for basil, besides the bunch I planted in a pot near the porch (the “porch” is what used to be the wart, but now it has a roof, I think it’s a porch).

On the porch I’ve added a chaise longue, so I can take a nap from time to time out in the outdoors. My old sleeping bag pad fits it perfectly, but they’re lower than I remember, and watching me get up off it is…..interesting. The Hoarder hasn’t made contact for 2 full months now, so I figure she and her mass of mess are on their own at the assisted living place; she fired her care-giver, who was going in once a week to help her get appointments scheduled and otherwise acclimated, so I have no idea what’s going on down there. I do still have lots of books, however, which I stole from her, bought at the 5 Colleges Booksale in April, and accumulated last year from Thriftbooks, a few from the Norwich Bookstore, and three of The Husband’s Christmas books that I also want to read. So I’ve been reading. A lot.

Now books --- books aren’t hoarding, and my F-FLF is proof of that. So, OK, they can be, but they aren’t if you actually read them, and actually get rid of the ones you’ll never read again, and can actually tell the difference. I counted my to-be-read books yesterday morning, and then I made a list because, you know, I LOVE lists and putting lines through things on the list that I’ve finished. I have 75 books waiting to be read.

I’ve also gotten rid of something like 20 or more books in the past two months, so don’t judge me. Some of my patients get books I’ve finished that I know they’ll like – one likes Chris Bohjelian novels, another likes sci-fi/fantasy, a third likes garden stuff and vampires and other oddities, a fourth likes novels about Vermont. The Sailor will take anything with a ship in it, and I know the Artist likes certain kinds of novels, which I send her if she’s interested. The Teacher took an entire box full to bring to his Maine cabin, where he’s spending the summer.

Calla lilies, on the porch rail

The rest – almost all these books are old books, used books, so not contemporary; but those that are often become birthday or Christmas gifts for friends and family, or parts of the collections of certain authors The Husband and I really enjoy and consequently keep – the rest, as I was saying, go in boxes to the Free benches at the Tiptop, where all we residents leave things we have no more use for but that other people might. I bring them when I have a box full, and some of the books have been to the Free benches before, because that’s where I found them. When I have one about cooking or food, I make sure to leave it on the bench near the Café kitchen, so the young cooks can find it (or it goes to my ex-nephew-in-law, who is also a chef). Right now I’m also getting rid of the magazines I used to save for the Hoarder – I made promises not to add to the hoard, and she hasn’t divested herself of the 3+-foot-high stack of old magazines and catalogs she insisted on moving, so I have many months’ of saved magazines, none of them topical news so still very readable, that I’m slowly bringing to the benches, also.

I love the Free benches. We all at the Tiptop love the Free benches. We love finding stuff on the Free benches, and we love giving away stuff via the Free benches. Every public building should have a Free bench or two!

For what it’s worth, all those books are mostly ones that are too old to find in a library, and they also give me a chance to very inexpensively try out authors I otherwise wouldn’t read. I mean – who knew there was a whole series written that the Murdoch Mysteries is loosely based on? I hate mystery books, but these are great. And who knew MC Beaton wrote so many different kinds of novels? I didn’t.

And for what it’s worth: Iris Murdoch sucks. I’m glad I spent only $2 for that novel!

Flax in bloom! Early this year...

For the blog, 1 June 2023: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com

All photos Deb Marshall: addendum photos from our friends in Hawai’i!

Addendum:

Bob Toda sent new photos. His grandbaby is not yet crawling, but clearly a happy, happy and, grandpa says, very intelligent boy. And – there’s a new one in the oven!