Have been having problems with bunnies raiding in my pepper patch and eating all the sprouts. Put down strawberry cages to protect the plants. The bunnies have responded by tunneling under.

They're taunting me, I swear.

Ladies, we're following our mothers and grandmothers like the trendy fashion plates we are. We're container gardening our organic veg, bypassing pre-packaged convenience for the whole foods section, and knitting and crocheting our own couture. I swear, foxxydancr just started the next big hipster trend: canning.

The tomato bushes and squash vines I started from the seeds left on my cutting board before Easter have grown to pretty fantastic heights/lengths and are producing fruit pretty prolifically. So prolifically, in fact, that I don't think three people can keep up with the sheer quantities of tomato and squash that my little 10-sq-m veg plot is producing. The squash I can store in a basket for a couple months and it'll be fine, but fresh tomatoes don't fare quite so well. Thus, taking a page from my mum and my great aunts, I've turned to canning as a way to keep the fresh tastes of summer around a little bit longer.

Mom made strawberry jelly and apple butter by the bucketload when I was a kid, and my great aunts laid up sauerkraut and applesauce in their pleasantly cool cellar. I've made rose-apple jelly, and lättwerk when the pectin failed, so I figured that simple canning couldn't be terribly difficult. It's not, but I don't recommend it for the terminally accident-prone.

( How I Managed )

Okay, so the Foreigner lyrics may be a little off, as I don't usually qualify for boyness, but I have been called an acceptable boy substitute.

The past few days in the garden have been pretty productive. I've whacked back the azaleas to a more manageable size and have been entirely ruthless in my quest to eradicate the pokeberry infestation. Now, if I could just get rid of the poison ivy for good....

The veg plot is humming along nicely, except for the rather anaemic showing by the pepper plants. Think I shall deem those a failure for this year and rip them out this evening in favour of letting the tomatoes and squash take over. Have quite a lot of fruit on both these sets of plants, including some that are starting to ripen. Several tomatoes are in the running to turn red first, and at least one butternut squash is paling up quite well.

Turned over most of the compost pile before I decided I was entirely too sweaty to be comfortable, and harvested some of the new humus to fertilise the veg--not like it needs help. Consequently, I ended up getting myself extremely dirty, but I've spent a couple hours with my heart rate over 120 bpm and temps hovering around 30° with little in the way of ill effects (so far). I may make myself a smoothie or an iced mocha and futz until I have to start supper.

"When he woke up, the room looked so funny. The sun was shining into part of it, and yet all the rest was quite dark and shady. So Jack jumped up and dressed himself and went to the window. And what do you think he saw? Why, the beans his mother had thrown out of the window into the garden had sprung up into a big beanstalk which went up and up and up till it reached the sky. So the man spoke truth after all.

The beanstalk grew up quite close past Jack's window, so all he had to do was to open it and give a jump onto the beanstalk which ran up just like a big ladder. So Jack climbed, and he climbed, and he climbed, and he climbed, and he climbed, and he climbed, and he climbed till at last he reached the sky."
~Jack and the Beanstalk

wyli wanted a vertical perspective, "Like an insects view of whatever is going on." This is one of my tomato plants, which has just started to blossom. The perspective makes me want, were I very small indeed, to climb it into the sky.

Might do more of these, soon. Vertical perspectives are fun. :)

When I woke up this morning, I had a goodly think about going back to sleep for a couple hours, as I still feel like dreck after yesterday. Then I noticed the sounds of breaking concrete, stacking wood and an overexcited Doberman.

The neighbour's workmen were taking down the fence, a week bloody early.

Having spent almost all of Saturday in transplanting lilies to save them from being trampled, yesterday was a bit of a wash--I only managed to get to a few of the black-eyed susans, which are a pain in the tocus to try and sort out. If workmen were going to be stomping around in the side garden, though, I had to get the irises out. Arraugh. No rest for the wicked. Luckily, consuming a litre of peppermint tea means that I'm not likely to be sick for an hour or so, even if I'll be flat on my back later.

The irises are now living on a mound of compost inside the hole left by a near-20-year-old "archaeological excavation" undertaken by smarriveurr after he'd first seen Indiana Jones. Here's hoping they're not too peeved at me for moving them. I'm certainly annoyed.

Spent last night with my left knee under an ice pack and elevated, but as there seems to be some Grand Project to move the neighbour's fence I'm going to have to move around 20% of the garden plants to new locations if I'm not going to lose them. Can't afford to continue to go easy on myself if I'm even to pace myself on this project. What I wouldn't give for one of those Stargate sarcophagi right about now, or at least a Mutant Healing Factor. Stupid, stupid immune system.

Yet to Do Today:
Weed back lily bed
Transplant tiger lilies and most of day lilies
Kill poison ivy under southernmost tree Got nearly all of it in the yard, until I got hit in the face with some debris while pulling a travelling vine. Dropped everything, put all the leaves/vines I'd gotten into two bin bags, stripped off and showered, but I seem to have gotten some urushiol-bonding on the inner corner of my left eye, which hurts every time I blink.
Keep track of skin to ward off sunburn Slight pinkness. Frak.
2 self-portraits
Firm up plans for next weekend

Today was a placeholder. Dug over some of the flower beds so they can be planted, now that the average last frost date has past. Did the rose campion bed, and then the largest of the existing beds, the corner bed. Some day lilies had volunteered themselves in the lawn near the edge of this bed, so I dug all of them out and replanted them in turned-over soil. There were so many of them that I was able to fill the bed. Did way too much manual labour today because of it, but hopefully it'll look well in another month or so.

My great aunts, who always had a fabulous garden, owned a little placard that lived among their plants. I remember its motto quite fondly:

"The kiss of the sun for pardon
the song of the birds for mirth.
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
than anywhere else on earth."

It now lives in my parents' garden relatively close to Aunties' old statue of St. Francis, and I've found the text to be various degrees of true over the years, but I do enjoy the gardening I bother to do. This year, being around and in the country for the entirety of the growing season, promises to be interesting.

As I'd mentioned a couple weeks ago, I'd started some rose of sharon seedlings in a pot, and they're growing quite happily. On a whim, I'd also scraped some tomato seeds from my cutting board into a sprouting pot, and to my moderate surprise they're growing quite well. Have separated them out into the cups of a paperboard egg carton to grow a little more before I'll cut the carton apart and plant the individual cups. With that success in mind, tempered by the fact that none of my pumpkin seeds bothered germinating for whatever reason, I've stuck some butternut squash seeds in some dirt to see whether they'll do anything. Am considering doing up a wattle-work fence with the pile of sticks I pulled out of the compost heap, probably to surround the tomatoes once I let those go free-range, but if the squash grow I'm not sure where to put them, yet. Maybe next to the garage, in a rather unusable couple-metre strip of dirt that always breeds the worst weeds.

Am hoping finally to plant my woad seeds this year, as they ought to be sown in situ in April and I've not been around for some years to do that on time. Nothing I've found from the NJ Department of Agriculture leads me to believe they're indicated as noxious weeds in our state, and if I catch the seeds before they blow away I shouldn't make the neighbours hate me for planting it. I'd have harvestable dyestuff from July to September, according to one of the experts on one of my mailing lists.

Also have nicotiana, red firecracker flower, bee balm, mini petunias, the wildflower mix from wyvernfriend and the daisy packs from femmetofarad and drmcsexypants' wedding. The petunias may take some forcing to get them to germinate, which will take a while (probably ought to have started them a month ago, but I wasn't reading up on flower cultivation until today. Catlin: what did you do?), but the rest can probably be sown in situ when I dig over the garden and clear away the dead stuff from last year. Most of these are half- to full-sun varieties, so they'll go back behind the pine tree to get enough sun, but I may do the nicotiana and one of the daisy packs closer to the house for colour. Now I just have to decide when I'm going to take the gamble and spend a couple days tearing up my hands with the spade and turning fork.

I'm a dirty little girl these past couple days.

I went for a run through Green Brook Park yesterday. I've come down with some variant of plague from when I was in Baltimore last weekend, so I had to stop fairly frequently, but it gave me a chance to appreciate some things at which I mightn't have looked so closely were I in motion. My usual approach is simply to listen to the birds while I run and watch the ones that cross my path, but in stopping yesterday I spotted a golden-crowned kinglet (which I can add to my life-list, if I ever find it--I think it may be in the back of a bird book at my parents' house, but I would have to update it with all the birds I saw while in Europe). Unfortunately, with all the stopping, I didn't make it terribly far (maybe a little over a km) before it started to rain, and was rather mud-spattered by the time I got home. Scrubbed off in the shower and spent a rather luxurious time in the bath afterward, thinking lovely thoughts and being glad of the smell of damp earth.

Today, I dug over our compost heap, which I started a couple years ago. Had to pull out a lot of the sticks I'd left in the leaves I'd added during the autumn, partly because I was a bit too lazy to separate what I'd raked up and partly to keep some air circulating over the winter. We'll have a lot of new mulch for the soil this year, as even though it's been cold we've had a good bit of decomposition and the piles are down to about half their autumn volume. Disturbed some earthworms the size of garter snakes, so I must be doing something right. It's not quite late enough in the season to start digging over the garden soil itself--last frost isn't for a couple weeks--but I've started rose-of-sharon seedlings and am dusting off envelopes of seeds from Catlin's fabulous garden. Am debating how best to go about vegetables this year--whether to bother buying seeds or to try starting from food waste--the latter being much more within my idiom of laissez-faire gardening.

Off to Basking Ridge for the evening to warm a dear friend's new house.