late night hijinks

Idea for using those giant zucchinis your neighbor sneaks onto your porch in August:

life is good!

The weather has been beautiful here. The sun is shining, everyone is smiling, and spring is unfurling right right before my eyes. Yes, life is very good. 

the rites of spring

I know spring officially began a week or so ago, but up here in the Pacific Northwest, it ain't really spring 'till the sun comes out and the forecast looks like this:

there are other signs, too:

the Knuckleheads basking in the sun like the matched bookends that they are,

The plum trees are in full bloom,

I weeded the raised vegetable bed and found the biggest carrot I've ever seen

(here's another shot just for scale)

and the most important sign of spring? 

Walking around barefoot all afternoon!

Here's wishing everyone a warm and sunny spring, wherever you are!

home sweet home

The view from my kitchen window this morning. 

wordless wednesday no. 29

daily photo {no. 3}

(click on photo to see a large version)

Today was full cold sunshine topped off by an amazing blue sky...but down here on the ground, the garden looked pretty bleak.

It's a good thing my mood matched the sky and not the roses!

unsolicited advice, part three: are you happy now?

A few months ago, a concerned neighbor left a note on my car kvetching about the sorry state of our parking strip. Apparently, she/he was worried about our weeds spreading to surrounding gardens. This anonymous neighbor (and I'm pretty sure I know who you are now), who evidently has a bird's eye view of our property and all the time in the world to critique my gardening skills, somehow missed the countless hours we've spent trying to battle those very same weeds over the course of the almost 20 years we've lived here.

So to make a long story even longer because I know you're just dying to find out what happened, here's the progress that has been made since my last update:

I dug out the dreaded horseradish and Canada thistles once again

and cleared the patch for phase two of what I'm now calling Operation Victory Garden.

Here's the pile of cedar 2x6's we saved from our deck remodel a couple of years ago. I've been planning on building some new raised planters with them. After scaring away about a hundred spiders, I picked through the boards and hauled them out to the sidewalk.

I measured and cut all the boards and waited for Dave to get home,

because assembling those suckers turned out to be a two person job.

While taking a break from screwing assembling the boxes, Dave inspected my weeding job and pointed out I'd missed some horseradish that was growing in the street in a crack between the curb and the asphalt.

He determined it was time to try a new method of eradication.

And discovered it takes a lot of heat to burn horseradish leaves.

In a last-ditch effort to keep the horseradish from coming up again, I decided to line all the planters with 1/4" metal screening and covered that with a layer of weed-blocking fabric. That step took a ridiculously long time, because the screening doesn't come in sizes wide enough to cover the bottom of the bed in one piece, and I figured if I didn't sew all the seams together that horseradish would certainly find its way through any crack.

My friends Iris and Laurie stopped by and helped shovel dirt for awhile.

This entire project has turned into a communal garden of sorts. Dave and I built the beds and provided the land and water, and my friend Laurie bought the dirt and helped fill all the planters in return for the use of the one farthest from the camera. We finally got all the vegetables and seeds planted at the end of June.

Here's what the garden looked like last week:

The corn is well over my head.

Laurie went on vacation, and by the time she got back,

her radishes were the size of torpedoes.

And I thought I was being smart by planting only one zucchini, but I've harvested four in the past week. (Those giant leaves hide the squash until they're the size of baseball bats!)

Anyone got any good zucchini recipes?

unsolicited advice, part two

Last week, after an unidentified neighbor left an anonymous note on the windshield of my car, I wrote a blog post about it. (Click here to read part one of this little saga, and don't forget to read the comments) It seems that in their opinion I have been slacking in my gardening duties, and therefore, by my sloth, have raised the Noxious Weed Threat Level to ORANGE (see chart below)


I received many supportive comments from my friends in the blogging community (I'm truly touched that you're all so pissed off for me!) as well as from my lovely neighbors who assured me they wouldn't hesitate to come over and pull the damn weeds out themselves if they could only identify them.

What the passive aggressive note-writer didn't seem to know is that I have been battling this particular patch of weeds for years. In fact, along with the dreaded Canadian thistles (Cirsium arvense) the parking strip is also overrun with horseradish, for which there seems to be no known enemy. In fact, I'm now convinced that in the event of a nuclear bomb blast, it would just spread bits of roots everywhere and the radioactive horseradish would happily repopulate the earth.

In September of 2008, I finally gave the go ahead to use Roundup to clear the patch, after 17 years of attempting to eradicate the stuff organically. We sprayed it, and left it to die for several weeks, after which we covered it with thick black plastic and let it sit over the entire winter and well into the spring of 2009.

We finally pulled up the plastic in June, only to discover snow white shoots of horseradish growing everywhere, followed several weeks later by sprouts of Canadian thistle. I set to work once again, digging deep craters in an attempt to get out all the roots, then bored holes in the roots that remained and poured undiluted Roundup into them.

This was nearly a year ago, and with the arrival of warm spring weather in 2010, the buggers are back with a vengeance. And now some busybody is giving me crap about slacking.

I have been considering my options for the past few years and have come up with another strategy to thwart the weeds' plans for world domination, but I just haven't had time to implement it yet, as I've been too busy working hard trying to keep the mortgage paid and food on the table. So in the meantime, this will have to do: I posted a discreet sign in the parking strip to ward off any more well-intentioned public diatribes.

unsolicited advice...

To the thoughtful neighbor(s) who left me this note on the windshield of my car today in the pouring rain:

Thank you SO MUCH for your helpful suggestion. I will attend to it IMMEDIATELY.

Anything else you'd like me to attend to while I'm at it? Perhaps the color of my house is not to your liking?

And I really do appreciate you leaving the note on my car instead of knocking on my door and telling me in person. My psychiatrist says I need to avoid confrontation because I have serious anger management issues, even though I hardly ever act on my violent impulses.

Now, if you could excuse me, I must go fertilize my dandelions.

Your slightly disgruntled neighbor,

Petunia

green saturday

Can't we just all get along?

not exactly wordless wednesday: green

Jodi over at the Women's Colony has issued a photo challenge featuring the color green. Here are a few of mine...

Can you tell that green is my favorite color?

(It's a good thing I live in Oregon)

Now head on over and check out more

verdurous leafiness at the Colony!

wordless wednesday no. 16

wordless wednesday no. 14

flower power!

My weekend's been full of flowers.  On Friday, I drove our van loaded with flower arrangements out to our friends Melissa and Doug at Brick House Vineyards, for their Memorial Day Open House. You can see more photos here.

On Saturday morning, I went with my friend Suzie 

and her granddaughter Daphne to a magical place called Lonesomeville.

A one-acre garden in the middle of the city, Lonesomeville is a 20 year labor of love that belongs to two talented people, artist Danny Hills and partner Wayne Hughes. Danny and Wayne brought a decrepit old condemned farmhouse and overgrown grounds back to life, infusing it with art and flowers and magic. They also produce stunning pottery in a studio on the grounds.

These amazing tulips were practically the first thing I saw as we entered the garden.

Followed by this incredible blue Iris.

Then I came across this cute little Daphne in a sunny clearing...


The bees were also enjoying the flowers and the warm spring weather.

And Daphne was enjoying the hidden parts of the garden and all its winding paths.

Daphne and her grandma, Suzie.

There were birdhouses and birds everywhere.

And here's my favorite rose in the garden at Camp Cactus.

 It's a crazy climber called Talisman.

Mmmm. Can you smell it? Heavenly!

flower power

grape hyacinth (muscari)

It's a glorious spring day...the sun is shining, everything's in bloom, and the colors are so bright they hurt my migraine-distressed eyes. But this week's Thematic Photographic subject is floral, and I've sure got a lot of those to share! 

heirloom rose "The Impressionist"

I love this rose. Oregon is not an easy place to grow roses. Gardeners here all have favorite remedies for the dreaded blackspot, a fungus that thrives on cool, mist leaves and can defoliate a rosebush in a matter of days. But this rose seems immune to it. It thrives on neglect, and blooms like crazy in partial shade against the east wall of the studio. I bought it as a tiny, single-twig start from Heirloom Roses in St. Paul, Oregon. In the spring the multilayered blooms are a bright yellow-gold. In the fall they change to an orange-tinged deep gold. And it smells heavenly!