I am not a gardener.
But I can be an industrious laborer when sufficient pressure is applied.
My fine, five readers (and I’m assuming without any objective support that I still have five) know that I have been trying to use the coolness of September weather to finish up getting the front area in shape, before the snow buries it all for the winter. Timing is everything.
Technically, I got it all done on the last day of Summer.
Today is the Autumn Equinox.
Most of that work just required humping heavy shit into place.
But yesterday the really heavy humping was behind me and I just needed to switch the flowers and plants into their future and final resting places.
Luckily Lisa bought a large bag of potting soil to help me along.
For example, the main three flowers/plants (I cannot tell you what they are – Lisa bought them) had to be shifted from their large, nice, ceramic pots, into three of the same painted planter pots Lisa selected from our Sculptor Guy Josh’s place in Boulder. Fair enough.
Now, I’m not sure they’ll make it through the winter. They may be annuals. But they’ve had a really fine run this summer – when the very hot sun has a tendency of frying them by late August – so I thought they deserved to ride out their story in the new pots.
Now their perfectly good and pretty large existing ceramic pots were repurposed to accommodate upgrading some of the other plants that I know are perennials because I bought them off the Home Depot Perennial table one day when I was sans wife – who refuses to buy perennials.
So, I shifted the Russian Sage and Lavender plants from their shitty plastic long boats to two of the nicest large round ceramic pots. I’m hoping they come back next year and expand to fill those pots buy the gravel path gate.
Even now you can get whiffs of the Lavender as you sit on the stone bench.
Now I’m not really sure what these last two flowers are, but I had purchased the larger group off the perennial table and Lisa recently bought the smaller group in hopes that they spur each other on over the winter in these nicer, larger ceramic pots, and return to us with new vigor next spring.
Fingers crossed.
Now, I had a long plastic boat of various vine based flowers (maybe morning glories) – the only one of the three to survive the summer – that really needed a new home. Lisa had purchased a huge concrete planter when we first moved here and made me place it in the back yard. Unfortunately, Claire loved every flower we planted in it, so for the last three years it has sat fallow like a large paperweight taking up a corner of the concrete patio. So, a week or so ago, I humped that heavy planter on my handy hand truck up the hill of the side paddock and out to the driveway, where it now functions as the new home for my viny plant as the flora Walmart greeter to any visitor to Casa Claire.
I’m hoping our relocated plant will return next year in full morning glory. It’s flowers were quite pretty.
My hands will take a few days to lose their earthy patina – they now match my feet – but I managed to get most of the dirt out from under my nails.
But I have three more long cement planters that sit on top of one of my back retaining walls at the perfect height for Claire to gobble up every pretty flower we have planted there for three years in a row, at which point Lisa refused to replenish them. I’m sure I can find a spot for them in the Jack The Spruce Grotto. It’s fenced off from the front property, so, unless Claire kicks down the front gate, the flowers should be safe.
Swallowed lots of Aleve this weekend. Back is still tweaking.
But today is another Monday. So let us shake off our dreams of weekend pleasures and do something productive.
I still need to figure out how to completely recover this computer. I spent most of the early hours deleting a million things to free up space but as of now my main screen remains black so I must let my fingers do the walking like Helen Keller when it comes to retrieving anything, even photos for this blog. I am determined to salvage this computer. Stay tuned.
Finally, I watched bits and pieces of the CVK memorial yesterday. As I have mentioned, I have my problems with the ardent born again religious bent to his storyline. It goes against my more animist belief in a mutable multiverse that responds to energy, frequency and vibration, with a perfect, all loving, non judgmental creator behind it all who will love us all no matter what road leads us past the veil.
But other than that, I’m all in on the idea that we need to keep talking to one another rather than dehumanizing each other to the level where it is acceptable to kill each other.
Love him or not, CK walked the walk of the talk he talked. He was a good man. His death was a major loss to this energy plane.
And bless his wife, Erika, for finding the strength to publicly forgive his assassin.
I’m not sure I could have.
Well, enough of that. Let’s move forward from this tragedy.
And no matter what else we get up to, let us give each other the benefit of the doubt and make today a great one.
