They won’t coexist. They strangle any competition. At heart they’re boa constrictors with stubborn roots. And if that won’t work, they’ll just suffocate it.
Yes, grass. When it gets in the garden beds, it pushes everything else out.
Ground ivy. We have two types all over the place.
Virginia creeper.
Multiflora roses.
Japanese honeysuckle.
Goutweed (St. Jerome wort?).
Stealth maples. Don’t laugh. Twice in two decades a pleasant little shade garden reverted to forest.
Japanese knotweed.
Dandelions, with their deep roots. Ditto for Queen Ann’s Lace.
Mint comes close. We have both spearmint, east of the house, and peppermint west of the Smoking Garden. But sometimes it comes in handy. Especially for folks who want contractors bags filled to brimming.
~*~
What would you add to the list?
Virginia creeper is an attractive weed … until it starts smothering everything it’s overrunning.
In the cardio aftermath, I was generally laying low, apart from my immersion in some serious revisions of my previously published novels.
And then? I looked at the window and saw an outburst of green – on the trees, especially. I had a sharp sense of having lost a big chunk of time.
We had some hard storms this winter, and some major branches came down from our trees. We were lucky they missed hitting roofs, cars, or outdoor furniture.
Still, it’s meant a lot of cleanup, and there’s more work to be done with a chainsaw.
The gardens, too, are behind schedule. I never got to the beach to collect seaweed, back before the seasonal out-of-town parking ban kicked in. Hauling those buckets and extracting the collected bags from the car trunk takes exertion, beyond what’s considered safe during recovery. I mean, I’d hate to take a nitroglycerin pill at the beach while working alone.
Nor did I get to some interior painting and picture-framing, as planned this winter. Some? There’s a lot.
We are watching some big changes downtown, especially where the city is carving away a hillside to extend our riverfront park and open space for new housing as well as open direct access to a hilltop park above, which is also being expanded and developed. This development, which crept up on me while I was recovering and not heading down that way to the indoor pool, will greatly enhance the central focus of the city.
Downtown is also undergoing the razing of an old retail block to make room for a five-story retail and worker housing structure. It will also eliminate what’s been an annoying traffic obstruction.
Glad I’m back in action. Wonder what else I’ve been missing.
Me at the compost bin at the far corner of our lot. Every year I empty the finished compost, which gets worked into the garden beds, and reload it with more leaves and the like to start over. Producing a full bin of compost takes at least five times that volume of raw material.
Carmichael’s, the restaurant her family owns in my new novel, has me looking more closely at others.
The daily soup special at the family restaurant in my new novel, What’s Left, was one way to introduce the now widely touted practice of local sourcing, perhaps with a hint of organic gardening. Here it begins when Cassia’s great-grandmother and her sister make rounds of nearby farms, gardens, and orchards in search of fresh produce, eggs and dairy, and perhaps meat. (I never get quite that specific, but a quick brushstroke will do.) The action picks up with her parents’ generation and its back-to-the earth movement – one in which I suspect some bartering might have occurred. Used cooking oil, for instance, has found value as motor fuel for some farmers.
he could die now flattened by wheels electrocuted, biting a live wire poisoned or simple disease or drown all the complications, amassed * * * somewhere, in the limbs what had riled him so early? Blue Jay squawking could be confused for squirrels (What was the opera, anyway? Certainly not Cinderella with her matching fur […]
picnic table with a block of snow 2-feet deep atop it and a hole at the center extraordinary deep purple in the Siberian irises Quaker ladies abloom on the meeting burial ground – even on the Friends graves in Pine Hill Cemetery the ox-eye daisies I lifted from rock and sand to transplant here – […]
he’s not a bird eating fish or worms see how frantically he spades without weeding how voraciously he climbs out on the seeded maple twigs * * * incisor domestica rodentia in residence * * * a squirrel with a martini too much too often fog in treetops before the wind blows how do sparrows […]
yes, they lived in a small city where he would Pull maple seedlings, in spring Mow the lawn, in summer Rake the leaves, in autumn Watch out for falling ice, in winter they should be celebrating all this wonder, opportunity, unacknowledged ritual, never-wrapped presence now, light another candle looking ahead, then, and looking back Poem […]
