We still have one or two left . . .
. . . but after their glorious peak, it’s only a few days until most of the petals look like this:
Still, we shouldn’t shed a tear. With a little luck, there’ll be even more next year.
Gardening
Camellias in bloom
Saturday afternoon, in the triangle garden.
Wikipedia Reference: Camellia
Magnolias in bloom
Above, 6:30pm Wednesday 14 March 2012. Below a shot in the dark from tree number one, about 6am Saturday 17 March, then again below, tree one about 9am. (About 5:30am, I’d been awakened by an owl of the variety “ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, UH-OOOOOH”, and subsequently dragged out of bed by young dog Cadbury.)
Wikipedia References: Magnolia, Magnolia Soulangeana
Last afternoon of daylight savings time
The Cherokee Princess dogwood about 3pm on Guy Fawkes Night.
A table for two
Sandy’s woodland garden
Sandy’s woodland garden at dusk after the rain today.
Tomato Cage
Elspeth designed this tomato cage for Sandy’s birthday, and I helped her and Tim put it up last weekend, though not quite all the chicken wire is up yet, and it still needs a door at the back. Maybe next year some of the tomatoes will come to us instead of the squirrels.
Famous last words
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This is the creature which fell out of my shoe this morning after I got back to the house with the paper, aware of a growing pain on the top of my right foot. Its body is only two or three millimeters wide, but the sore spot on my foot is about an inch wide, where the skin is red and feels clammy. The soreness reminds me of severe sunburn I had on the tops of my feet at the beach once, years ago, but the entire foot has an ache also. Initially I thought it was a spider, but now I think maybe not. Perhaps it got into my shoe from the compost heap, where I had been to dump lawn clippings Thursday evening. [Update, Sunday morning: I added the third photo, since I was still alive, and the insect is still dead. My foot seems to be recovering — less red, less achy, less itchy, and the very minor swelling has now gone.]
Growing tomatoes
Have you seen the net we put up to keep the humans out of the tomatoes?
Squirrels don’t steal squash
Here are our very first red tomatoes not stolen by the squirrels. By comparison, Elspeth and Tim have already picked over twenty pounds.