My July

Bronze fennel tentacles

Lilium 'Conca d'Or'

Crimson gala apple

Hemerocallis 'Hot Toddy'

Dianthus 'Chianti'

Insta Garden

A client requests a modest vegetable garden at the height of the busy season and the end of veggie-plot planting time... What is the harried gardener to do? This, accomplished in about 3 hours (including supply shopping).

The roll of poultry netting is 25 feet long, so measure a square with 6 foot sides and pound four wooden stakes in the ground.

Forget the shovel; sheet mulch! As luck would have it, the lawn mower man has been shredding leaves and chipping brush for the past few years and piling it at the back of the client's lot. The piles are at varying degrees of composted-ness. The least rotted leaves are the first layer, because they'll slick down into a nice greasy barrier against the grass and weeds below.

Add a few inches of semi-rotted leaf compost.

Third layer is purchased - four 40-pound bags of a nice black peat-and-compost mix. Heavy on the compost, yes, but since not all of it is entirely broken down, not all of it is accessible to the roots. It will feed them over the season as it settles and is processed by earthworms, who are cordially invited by the slimy leaves to enter and eat.

Time to plant - and densely, because if Mother Nature doesn't thin 'em, I will.

Fencing up. Wood chip path added. Because I can't count, extra stakes had to be harvested from the hedgerow, sharpened, and pounded in for the gate opening. One more stake for the gate latch, which I am particularly tickled with. Here's how it works...


Lift up the wire loop...

...and then lift the gate post over the peg. It might take a human only a moment to figure this out, but I am quite sure it would take a Tiny Bunny a lifetime. However... can he squeeze through the space between gate post and stake? Of course! After gorging on parsley and young cucumber leaves, will he be expanded and trapped inside like Winnie the Pooh? Surely.

Finally, a ring of wood chips is added around the outside to make things easier on my friend the lawn mower man. The end.

Visit my mother's garden

In the early morning, each poppy - frilled, crinkled, doubled - holds a cupful of honeybees. Their buzzing is broadcast outward and upward by the flowers, like little petal-walled amphitheaters.

Rodrica Tilley, my mom, is a professional plein air pastel painter. If you are within driving distance of northeast PA, you can visit her garden, now through July 11. And if you fall in love with the living composition, you can take home a piece of it in the form of a painting!


You'll find details here (click on "Summer Show at Studio").

Camouflage

I finished a day of paperwork and jumped in the truck to visit a friend for wine in the backyard.

Oops - still wearing my slippers... Not a good enough reason to turn around.

Shit - I have nothing to bring my friend's mom. How can you visit the home of a dear old lady named Muffin and bring her nothing?

So I drove around the block, parked, and ran into the backyard to cut a bouquet - white and red Rocket snapdragons, red zinnias, purple larkspur. I threw the jar of flowers in my cupholder and, pulling out while cranking the radio and admiring my composition, noticed that, strangely, this snapdragon had a deathgrip on a perfect, fresh fly...

On closer inspection... a spider - pristine, cryptic in color and quality.

Snapped some pictures, and thought to bring predator and prey as part of my hostess gift.

But does a white spider need a garden with white flowers? Of course it does. So, home again, to deliver my passengers back.

Last I checked, white spider still on white zinnia. No fly.

Opening Day of the Wilkes-Barre Farmers' Market

Summer arrives at our house when Matt pretty much moves into the bakery in the basement. I don't think he knew how appropriate the name "Mockingbird Bakery" was when he chose it a year ago. But now, he and the neighborhood mockingbird are the only ones awake and working diligently through the wee hours - Matt baking to low-volume Nina Simone or some brand of death metal, mockingbird making his own music. I am sleeping upstairs, but when the box fan starts to pull in the earthy aroma of sourdoughs or the sugar tang of cream scones, I do take notice...


Last year this time we were scrambling to finish construction downstairs. This season, it is wonderful to be back at the market and interacting with the great folks who buy his bread. Handing someone a paper sack of something nourishing, tasty, lovely and exciting to eat is really satisfying. So helping Matt out on market day is the highlight of the week for me. (My job is bagging breads and making change - other than pre-market breakfast delivery, I pretty much stay out of the production area.)

My leisure knife, on the job

I decided to tackle the removal of a massive old mat of ferns in a client's garden first thing in the morning, before sweat and bugs and dehydration got the best of me. Within five minutes, my shovel was in two pieces. Useless. I moved to task number two - weeding mint out of ivy, oh joy - and immediately stuck my (gloved) hand in a pile of stinking cat poop. So I moved back to task number one, enlisting my pitchfork, which totally didn't work at all. Deflated at the idea of driving back across the tracks to retrieve the other shovel, I wondered what on earth I could do...

And then I remembered my leisure knife! Was it in the truck? It was! Would it work? Let's try!

I have pretty much never used my leisure knife, but have been carting it around in my little purple tub of tools. It was a gift from Matt's mom and stepdad a couple of Christmases ago. We all had a good laugh when I opened it: it's called a leisure knife, but it looks like a one-slash death shiv. To take out a rhinoceros. Does anyone do that in their leisure?


Not me, but at work I occasionally come up against something that needs out but can't be outed with leverage. My leisure knife cut through that miserable, woody old fern like it was nothin'. Impressive!

Further research shows that my leisure knife is really a Japanese hori-hori. Wikipedia says to be careful with it, because it's sharp. What they mean to say is: "Use it to saw leisurely, without force or frustration. Else you will very cleanly sever whichever hand is not holding your leisure knife."

South Side Scranton's World of Birds

It is a soggy wet morning, so I am typing and drinking coffee at 9 am, and the mockingbird is singing outside my window. When I woke up at midnight, he was mimicking the robin, who was likely sleeping. When I woke up at 2am, he was performing his twenty minute car alarm rendition. Maybe if I could learn to scream bloody murder a little more prettily when the baby squirrels use my delphiniums to pole vault into the pear tree, he would imitate me.

Every once in awhile, he makes a little loop-de-loop in the air above his elm, without pausing in song. What is he doing?


But who is even noisier than the mockingbird? This gang of four, South Side Scranton's very own roving guinea hens - in this picture, threatening to attack my poor old dog.