Carnage

This is what remains of the lovely Amaryllis the downstairs neighbor gave us:

The other night, it was completely dismantled by the disgruntled housecats. 

Plate: smashed,
Amaryllis: in tatters,
trash bag: shredded. 

They were in rare form.

I was particularly upset because not only was it *just* about to start blooming, but also, they seem to keep dashing my hopes that I'll be able to grow things in this flat without them being destroyed.  My only hope may be to grow things in the bedroom because they aren't allowed in there.  Ugh.  I love the little mongrels, but they do put a damper on my gardening around here.

Happily, there is good news on the community garden front!  They had a lot of applicants, but they decided that they want us all to have a chance to garden and as such, are going to be organizing us into teams to take over certain areas of the garden.  My team should consist of a range of experience levels and be made up of about 6 other people.  On February 12th, I'll get to meet them and start in on my Glaswegian community gardening.

Thank goodness.  I don't know if the cats and I were going to be friends for much longer.

Of Bow Ties and Bulldogs

I'm feeling like this:



Like a tired bulldog who just wants to take a nap with her bow ties.  Is that so much to ask for?



Apparently I have greatly underestimated the time and energy required to move an entire pair of lives (plus mongrels) overseas.  Every day I look at the calendar and think "Ooo! It's one day closer to moving to Scotland!" immediately followed by "My dear sweet Jesus, how on earth is this actually going to happen?"  Yup.  That's my world.  Wake up, rinse, and repeat.

So how, precisely, did I think I could carve out time to plant lettuce, carrots and radishes for Thanksgiving???  I believe I must be delusional.  Two weeks have passed and no seeds or seedlings have entered the garden.  It is clearly time to give up on the root crops, but I am holding out hope that I can still manage to get the lettuces into the garden in time (see above regarding delusional).  We'll see if that actually happens.  Thankfully, I live (for now) in the world of the year-round farmer's market so I know that I can always pick up anything I need in time for the holidays.

Meanwhile, my nieces (owners of the photogenic bulldog) built a snowman back east.  What?  Before Halloween?  I remember the year it snowed at Thanksgiving (in coastal Connecticut) and we were ecstatic to go run around the yard with the cousins before it all melted.  Yet out here I still have a bunch of tomatoes hanging off the vines, peppers of every variety, eggplants, and squash ready to harvest.  I better enjoy all this summer-veg-in-fall now because this will not be happening in my future Glaswegian Garden. 

Wish me luck with that Thanksgiving planting...

Nap Time

I was puttering around in the garden recently when a rather unexpected thing happened: T-bone climbed up to investigate my half-empty bag of compost.  I figured, what does a cat want with compost so let him sniff.  And then, he proceeds to squeeze his little kitty self into the bag and curl up as if this is the perfect place for a nap.  Seriously?  A stinky bag of compost? 

Apparently, yes.

Spied on the ground:

A partially-eaten fallen Pluot. According to Snoutface, the pluots aren't quite ripe yet.

A Madness of Rhizomes

Oh, Bermuda grass!

You torment me SO

I dig and dig and dig

and dig and dig

Yet you still continue on

Under the ground

ad infinitum

Perhaps to China

But more likely

to Bermuda.

I wish you would have just stayed there to begin with.

*************

And now, to mangle some William Carlos Williams:



so much depends

upon

a green weed

barrow

filled with grass

shrapnel

beside the grey

kitten.

*************

  

You know how it's called a pride of lions or a murder of crows or a pod of dolphins?  I have come to the conclusion that we gardeners should start calling Bermuda grass, with its unbelievable tenacity, "a madness of rhizomes."  Those rhizomes will surely drive me to the brink of insanity.  Behold above, the results of 8 hours hard labor: a weed barrow.  And still the Bermuda grass persists.  I'm telling you, it's definitely a madness of rhizomes.