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gardening

Planting

Tuesday 21 April 2009

April showers bring May flowers: so the saying goes. Hopefully, they’ll bring summer veggies as well.

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We’ve already got the flowers covered. Those are nature’s doing, though. We do very little. Strike that. We do nothing.

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The veggies require a little intervention. Fortunately, we have a helper these days.

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At this point, L is so fascinated with imitating us that she gladly helps. She’ll clean, mop, “clip” her finger nails, clean out Mama’s ears — everything we can do, she can do, if not better in her own eyes.

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Hopefully, we can keep that willingness — that desire — to help developing.

Gardening

Monday 20 April 2009

We’ve planted our garden. Actually, that should be plural, because we’re planting all over the place: some veggies in the back, some in the front.

Nothing we do will compare with Pani Barnas’s garden in Poland. I live rented from her for a couple of years and every summer, she had a garden that amazed me.

Cabbage
Dream Garden || September 2, 2002 || Lipnica Wielka, Poland

“One day,” I tell K, “one day we’ll have a garden like this.”

Then I go out to prepare our two small patches for planting. The next day everything aches in a most splendid way, and I think, “Why rush?”

A Turn in the Garden

Wednesday 14 February 2007

We took J out to the local university’s botanical gardens Sunday. We knew that, being a gardener herself, J would be fascinated by all the various species that might not necessarily be unique to this area but certainly don’t grow in Poland.

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What was most amazing for her was the number of deciduous trees, Poland being mostly forested with coniferous varieties. Of course, with the leaves off the trees, said deciduous trees aren’t nearly as lovely as they’ll be in spring — and of course autumn, but by then, J will be long gone.

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However, she will be here in spring, and so visits to all the various parks and gardens in the area are already in the works.

(More images from Sunday at Flickr.)

Vine Update Update

Monday 31 July 2006

The growth of the middle vine in twenty-four hours:

Vines

“Incredible” does not do it justice. (Click on the image for a Flickr enlargement.)

Vine Update

Monday 31 July 2006

The back-porch vine — a potato-something — has been growing at Jack-and-the-Bean-Stalk-ian proportions.

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It literally grows a measurable length every every day.

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It’s difficult to tell, but the middle vine has already, within a week, reached the bottom of our neighbor’s deck — our “roof,” I suppose — and will soon be snaking its way across, eventually to drop down to the banistar and begin weaving in and out of its rails. At least that’s how we’ve run the guide wire.