One of the lesser favored plants we “inherited” with the property was burdock. We spot it–along with other non-native invasives–all over when we amble about the neighborhood. I took the image below on May 9, 2017 when I was starting to document what plants we had inherited along with the house. Some I thought I knew, some I had no idea. The caption is exactly what I labeled it then.
While waiting for the kettle to boil for tea, I happened to look over at the outside door while giving one of our cats skritches. The deadbolt was not locked. As I drifted away from our biggest floofer to lock it, there it was–the foretold May snow. I didn’t reach over to turn on the outside light to see how deep, but from what light was behind me it looks to be at least an inch, possibly two. Continue reading “May morning snow…”
For newbie gardeners, some hard lessons can be learned when you work on your garden sooner than was wise due to your local climate. In the three years we’ve been here, we’ve had some spectacular wishful thinking failures. This was due to a combination of things, but one prevalent factor was our last frost date. Continue reading “Last Frost Date Lessons, Part One”
…I started to tell the story of our garden here in Gardner, and even posted the image above that showed part of the garden’s past we had inherited when buying this land.
In truth, I’m now writing this quite late–on May 11, 2020. I abused the magic of backdating to get the date at the top right. As folks reading this know, our whole world was swept up by March 31st with news about a novel coronavirus spreading. At the time, Massachusetts was just one place struggling with it in spades. I was spending more time than I like to admit watching the daily videos our local hospital was putting out, scanning news articles, watching broadcast news, and bookmarking more C-19 stat sites than now seems sane in hindsight. Can you blame me, though? My partner is “an essential worker”, a postal carrier. Heck yeah, we had some scares. But enough with the excuses! (I will end this topic by saying if he did get it from work and passed it to me, we still don’t know.) Continue reading “Two years ago today (sort of)…”
