This afternoon we drove out to one of our favorite greenhouses. The woman who runs it had baby goats two years ago running free in one of the three greenhouses, and every year we see hummingbirds there well before they show up in our garden.
No hummers today (and no goats): we're under a wind advisory, and the constant snapping, vibrating plastic was a bit unnerving. Long rows of hanging baskets swayed as the poles they hung from vibrated and quivered, the whole creaking structures feeling as if they wanted to take flight. I snapped the photo of these zinnias with my phone camera. We bought some lovely cream-striped ornamental grass (it's outside on the patio table; I'll check the name later), a few yellow pear tomato plants (Randy's favorite tomato), and a big flat of cosmos, which I plan to set in a big mass into the garden this year instead of popping them here and there all over the place.
We've shared fish pepper seedlings with the owner in past years, and I fleetingly thought about taking along a six-pack (I have eighteen plants growing on the windowsills) but didn't. Turns out, she didn't have any. We said we'd bring them next time, and made arrangements to trade them for some ancho pepper plants. (I really don't have room for eighteen pepper plants, but that doesn't usually stop me from growing them!)
Windy and cool--I almost said cold. Windows barely open. Glad I'm wearing socks.
Working on getting some review copies sent out of
Rebecca Lauren's new chapbook, then assembling more copies of a few other titles. I'm hoping to catch up this month but could really use some help. If I put out the call for a summer intern or two, I wonder if anyone near enough would respond?
Tonight's the long-awaited episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Betty White: can hardly wait!
I can trace this iris back 45 years to the first garden I remember, though what I recall most intensely is lying on my back beneath a blue sky full of papery Oriental poppies--bright orange--waving on hirsute, wiry stems. The original garden was bulldozed to make way for a convenience store the summer I was ten or eleven, along with the first house I clearly remember living in. The iris--or a piece of it--moved when we moved. Most recently, I snagged a fan from beneath an encroaching blue spruce at my parents' house about five years ago. I planted the spruce trees--25 of them--and can't believe how large they've grown.
