Weather:

Reading:

Listening to in the car:

Here is what I just wrote on my page on GardenWeb. This seemed like another good place to put it.

We just bought our first house. The yard is newly laid sod in front (not our fault) and bare in back, and man, are there ever a lot of rocks. I think this property was under the Columbia River a few centuries ago. Since it's virgin ground, all the rocks are right there waiting to be discovered. Lots of them aren't even waiting, but hollering "Look at me!" with their backsides in the mud and their fat bellies up to the sun. The soil here doesn't smell right or feel right -- not enough loam. There is good topsoil in spots, but it's all mixed up with the clay and rocks in unpredictabel places from the scraping and digging of putting in the house.

I enjoy a challenge, but this one would be more fun if I had a bunch of money to throw at it. I'd buy the finest topsoil around and raise the level of the entire yard about a foot and plant whatever I wanted. As it is, I'm digging wherever I can and planting donations from Mom's garden, good tough stuff, wherever I can dig holes. I am going to sow crimson clover and sweet alyssum in the back and side yards over the top of what's there so there will be something to keep the mud at bay. I'll have three roses planted the first year.

The roses are a rugosa, I don't remember the name of it, an offspring of one I gave my mother some years ago, and Kateryna, a landscape rose from Heirloom Roses and Good Ol' Summertime, a shrub rose from Heirloom. Good Ol' is yellow, Kateryna is pink, and the rugosa's a deep pink, not quite cerise.

The other things I have are borage, from Mom that she got from me several years ago when I lived in a rented house not far from her. She gave me some Stella d'Oro lilies, some of those other kind of daylilies, the orangey type. A calla lily and three or four different types of iris. Not bearded iris, but this short kind and some Dutch iris. And a geranium, not a pelargonium, but a true geranium -- it's pink, maybe Wargrave's pink, also a descendent of some of mine from another house. I bought another kind, a Bevan's variety, but something bad happened to it involving a dog and a garden hose -- it's too awful to speak of. I have coral bells and foxglove. I have mostly pink and yellow and blue flowers. It was going to be all pink and yellow, but stuff happens. I think I could use more pink. The few orange things are being relegated to their own little spot where they can't throw me off track any futher than I already am.

I have a few odds and ends coming mail order, some Hall's honeysuckle and a fern (I'll need more ferns) and a couple of trilliums. Oh, and I bought a winter savory, too. I love that stuff.

I had all these great plans, but the rocks threw me off, and lack of funds, and free plants. It's going to be a happy hodge-podge like every other garden I've ever had. I thought I'd start from scratch and have only what I wanted to have, but it's not going to happen. It's probably better this way. I wouldn't want this part of my life to be radically different from the rest. I have a reputation to uphold.

I am married to my true love, the man I met when I was 45 and mostly grown up. We have four children between us, none of whom live with us, thank goodness. We have a very nice dog and three rowdy ferrets and two full-time jobs and daily commutes. He is a photographer, and I am a writer, but our main income comes from the jobs. We'd like to get rid of the jobs so we could spend time doing the more interesting things in life, but we just got this big old mortgage. *sigh*