Making Adjustments

I tend to have grand visions of what each part of my garden will look like before I get started on a new project. Sometimes the visions are rather unrealistic, but now that I am becoming more of an optimist, I like to think that even though they may be difficult to attain, they still represent a useful goal. More often than not, though, I find that I do have to make slight alterations to my plans.

The bean tunnel is one such example. I realize now that I didn't fully think through the whole construction. While I did run twine horizontally at intervals of a foot, I neglected to consider the fact that the bean plants would be lolling about with nothing to cling to every 12 inches. In the absence of any good support, they've basically been hugging each other. It's been quite an ordeal this week separating them from what seems a rather passionate embrace. I spent some time today giving them something more productive to climb. Next bean season, though, I think I'll just attach hardware cloth to the PVC supports with zip ties. It will make the structure stronger, and it won't take so long to get it set up.

Vertical twine lines for the beans to climb

I will also have to make some adjustments in the secret garden. A couple of months ago, I sprinkled seeds into a bare spot. I thought that I had used cosmos seeds, but since I am appropriately referred to by Turfman as "The Absent-Minded Professor," I honestly couldn't remember. "No worries," I thought to myself. "As soon as they come up, I'll recognize them by their leaves." Well, up they started, and I was pretty sure they were, indeed, cosmos. But then the plants kept getting taller and taller, much bigger than any other cosmos plants I had ever grown, and so I began to doubt myself. After all, I had absolutely no recollection of what I had planted there. (Turfman suspects that when I successfully defended my dissertation and was congratulated by my doctoral committee, I must have happily walked out of the room and left my brain behind. He may be right. I can't remember.) Well, now the plants are ridiculously tall, completely inappropriate for the front of a flower bed. They're almost as tall as I am.

The gargantuan plant!

Luckily, one of them started blooming the other day, and I finally got full confirmation that they are, indeed, cosmos plants. But they'll have to be relocated.

The recently-revealed cosmos

And then there's Sneezy, the dahlia, whose shy little bud appeared on last week's post. He's quite lovely, but it seems he is, in fact, a dwarf. I should have guessed that by his name. So no one will really see him this year, as I put him in a space behind other things. At the end of his growing season, I'll lift the tuber and place him somewhere a little more suitable. For now, he's my special little secret to enjoy on my own.

Hello, Sneezy!

So, sometimes things just don't go according to plan. In the garden, I'm learning that even if things don't turn out exactly as I envisioned, they can be fixed later and enjoyed for what they offer in the present moment. Isn't that the way we should view all things in life?

Before we part company for the week, though, I need your assistance on one more adjustment that needs to be made. The path through the vegetable garden is not what I had imagined. It's barren. I wanted creeping thyme running through all of the little cracks. I can't seem to get that to grow there, though. If you have any suggestions for what might work in a zone 9b garden that gets full, brutal Florida summer sun, please do point me in the right direction!

Keeping in Tune

By now, those of you who are regular readers are probably aware that I am a rather proud nerd. I have no problem telling the world that I do, in fact, recite poetry when I'm out in my garden. Actually, I can be found quoting snippets of poems in just about any venue, which can sometimes make others feel a bit uncomfortable, I've found. At least, it occasionally draws a raised eyebrow or two. No matter. I recite on, undaunted. But there's something about being in the garden, in particular, that calls to mind a few of my favorite poems.

This past weekend was an absolute source of delight, and I might add, real succour. I found myself frequently exhaling deeply, as I spent almost the entire weekend outside. Some people do not have any interest in gardening. I get that. Plenty of activities don't interest me much at all. I must admit, however, that I am suspicious of people who do not derive any pleasure from being in gardens or seeing flowers. Sitting on the swing in the secret garden this weekend, I began hearing Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much with Us" in my head. I was quite relieved not to feel implicated by his words in the first several lines: 

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. (Lines 1-9)

One might argue that my garden is too much with me, late and soon, but I find such joy and comfort by being out in nature and being more in tune with it. I like being moved by the smallest changes in the garden, and this weekend really started revealing many more transformations.

It seems as if everything is happening at once in the garden, but I know that it can't be, because I know there are so many other things still coming on. I'm in a constant state of anticipation. The hydrangeas are now blooming in the front garden, joining the roses, salvias, Euryops, and Gaillardias that have been flowering for some time now.



The first hydrangea flower of the year

Still to come, though, are the 'Emily Mackenzie' and 'Lucifer' Crocosmias and the 'Bishop of Llandaff' and 'Sneezy' Dahlias. The Bishop of Llandaff plants are still only putting on height and leaves. But Sneezy is starting to make himself known, something I happily discovered this morning when I walked out front with my camera. He's meant to be 1-2 feet tall, but here he is at 6 inches today, and already he has a bud. 

Dahlia 'Sneezy' looking a little shy

In the back garden, the fig tree is now absolutely full of little baby figs, six weeks after I photographed the first leaf (see earlier post). I love them in this state, tiny, but full of promise. They are safely tucked under leaves, protected from bird attacks. I also love them when they are swollen and sweating beads of sweetness. I love them, if I'm honest, almost continuously because they always put on some kind of show, however modest, and I get to marvel at every phase of their growth.


Four baby figs on this branch alone!

The plumeria, which, like the fig tree, had put on its first leaves just a short while ago, is now blooming. I cheerfully picked the flowers and handed them to our house guests this weekend. Seeing them walk around with a tropical flower tucked behind an ear filled me with deep satisfaction and made me smile. Even better, we were visited all weekend by a host of butterflies, and my house guests seemed to enjoy them as much as I did.


Another plumeria flower unwinding

As I sat on the secret garden swing on Saturday, I was amazed by all of the 'Jackmanii' Clematis flowers that had opened in just a couple of days. Sitting there, taking in the whole of the garden, I thought of lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "God's Grandeur":

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things (lines 9-10)

And that's it. That's the great miracle of nature. It moves me every day. 

The 'Jackmanii' Clematis bursting into flower

Life's Little Surprises

I am a worrier. When I was studying for my doctoral exams, I met with my dissertation director every week. One week, I must have appeared especially distressed because he said, "You seem really stressed. What can we do about that?" Hanging my head, I replied, "Oh, if I'm not stressed, I'm not breathing. Best to just move on." I've even told people that if worrying could be made into a career, I'd easily be the CEO of a worry company by now. I used to think this was funny. Now I find it rather sad.

Worrying about everything under the sun really has gotten me nowhere in life. It hasn't made things easier. It hasn't kept bad things from happening. It has simply made me terribly tired and caused me to remain in situations that have been downright destructive for me. It's now time this CEO of Worry resign her position. I have taken one major step in the right direction by refusing to continue working a job that I have known for some time is not good for me. I worried for too long that quitting would call forth countless difficulties, but when the moment came, I told the worrier in me to shut up and quit already. The remarkable outcome of this decision is that I have been presented with three jobs that are all immediately appropriate for and interesting to me. In all my time of fretting, I could not find one job, and now that I have sworn off the fear, the opportunities seem to be falling like manna from heaven. Each day is, as Tennyson's Ulysses puts it, "a bringer of new things," and I actually look forward in anticipation. I am beginning to wonder if my garden hasn't been instrumental in my transformation.

Take, for example, the seed that is the bean. As my regular readers know, I planted beans in my veg garden last week. To be precise, I planted 30 seeds. As of this morning, 26 of them are now up. What a miraculous thing it is to creep out each morning and find something that was once a dried, hard bean peeking its head out of the ground, unfurling in a fresh shock of green, often donning its hardened shell as a cap, and then casting it aside later that same day to start its great ascent.



It's Christmas (Lima Beans) in May!



Or imagine how dubious I was when digging a hole to put in what looked a bit like a skinny sweet potato but is meant eventually to be a stunning lily. I planted the tuber as a memorial to my sweet Wolfie, so the stakes felt a little higher. What if it didn't grow? For a month there was nothing, and then one day, as I sat out in the secret garden on the swing, I noticed something 18" tall where I had placed the tuber. Just when I had begun to lose hope, there was a surge of great joy in the form of a plant.



The Gloriosa superba Rothschildiana (foreground)



The little suprises just keep coming. I have had a Clematis Jackmanii for three years now that has not performed up to expectations. Initially, it grew rather tall, and just as we made proclamations that it would soon cover the swing arbor, it simply quit growing. In its next year, I was too fearful to prune it back, and I was repaid with virtually no growth at all. This year, in the spirit of no fear, I cut it all the way to the ground. It is now over the arbor in just a matter of a month. So once again, my garden teaches me a life lesson: fear stunts growth.

Jackmanii exceeding expectations (through center of photo)

I like the education my garden gives me about life. Often, it's just when we've completely given up on something that it bursts forth, like my Josee lilac, which seems to be telling me that I'm impatient.


The lilac in bloom

And when we have to uproot something from its home (something I've had to do a lot in my adult life), it may suffer a period of shock. But given time and care, it will eventually cling to its new home and flourish. I'm finding that in the garden, as in life, there's really not a lot to worry about because something wonderful is always about to happen.


The Jasmine I had to cut back and move last year



The Magical Fruit

Stop it. I know what you're thinking. I'm sure some of you are tittering right now, remembering the humorous rhyme about beans that we all chanted as kids. I was taught it by my grandpa. I've heard two forms of it, one referring to beans as the "magical fruit" and  the other as "musical fruit," but I'm focusing on their real magic this week. You know, the Jack and the Beanstalk kind of magic--that awe-inspiring ability of pole beans to grow to great heights in a matter of days and put food on the table. Giants are optional.

I've been thinking a lot lately about growing more of our own food here. I've been influenced to this thinking by watching Alys Fowler's BBC series, "The Edible Garden," and Carol Klein's "Grow Your Own" (also from BBC). In fact, it was by watching them that I actually began to believe that I might be able to feed Turfman and myself mostly from the veg garden. With my courage fortified last week by them and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I was off to my home library to consult the two books I have on Florida gardening. I really wanted to learn what grows best here in the summer. That's when my eyes fell on the mention of beans.


Lima Bean "Christmas"

Shortly after that, I was on the computer, furiously typing in the web address for Seed Savers Exchange again. I was focused first on putting a packet of the Christmas Lima Bean in my online shopping basket. I grew them last year and was amazed by how prolific and lovely they were. I had created a bamboo pole teepee for them, and they absolutely smothered it. It looked like they were participating in a popular pastime at my college, in which one young male would yell "FUMBLE!" down the hall of the dorm, and every guy on that floor would tackle and pile onto the unsuspecting victim walking in front of the instigator. In no time, the beans had toppled the teepee. I wanted more of that kind of bean magic. And, as always happens when I'm on the Seed Savers site, I also wanted quite a bit more: Lazy Housewife (love the name), Purple Pod Pole (I'm a sucker for alliteration), Bountiful (for what the name promises). I also added in a packet of Shirofumi soy beans, Marconi red pepper, and Emerald Green melon. If things go according to plan, I doubt people will want to come over for dinner. There will be basically one thing on the menu.

All of the beans but Bountiful are pole varieties. In preparation for those lovely little packets of protein, I began thinking of what kind of support I could give them. I wove arches made of dried willow last year. That didn't work out as well as I had hoped. We just don't have access to a lot of freshly cut willow, and the dried obviously does not bend well. They worked well enough to support the beans, and it was great fun to walk through the arches, picking beans along as the hung inside. But I wanted arches that were little more sturdy this time. And they had to be something that I could easily assemble and disassemble. I presented this little problem to Turfman. We puzzled together for a while, and then he set off to the local hardware store. He returned with 10' pvc poles and 45° joints, and then we tried to come up with a solution. And here's the final product.

Bring on the beans!

I simply cut some of the poles into 5' sections and others into 2.5' sections. I used no glue, simply pressed the 45° joints over the ends of the pvc sections to join them. To keep them steady inside the planter beds, I used metal straps from the electrical department. Then I used twine to further strengthen the structure and give the beans a latticework to climb. It's not perfectly symmetrical, I realize, but hopefully in a month they'll be so overtaken with vines laden with beans that no one will see them. I think they look fine now anyway, though, and they are plenty sturdy. Now it's just a matter of waiting for those little seeds to start their magic. If only they grew as quickly as the ones Jack had. If we keep getting good rain like we did this past week, they might do just that.

We had an incredible amount of rain last week. In fact, yesterday was the first day in a week when it did not rain. That made gardening difficult, especially during the periods when it seemed like we were in the middle of a tropical storm, but the plants absolutely loved it. So I have to show you how they responded to the good, long drink.

My Don Juan rose putting on a show



The front beds are overflowing!

The first of my favorite flower, the Daisy, has opened

And the zucchini continues to grow. I considered using a leaf as an umbrella during one of the downpours. 

The mammoth zucchini

Now all that's left for me to do is wait for those beans (okay, and a whole lot of gardening in between). I suspect each time I walk into the veg patch, a neighbor might just be able to hear me chanting a familiar rhyme over and over to myself. "Beans, beans, the magical fruit, the more you eat..." Well, you know the rest.

The Inevitability of Things

I was never serious about gardening in my earlier years. My mom was always in the garden, and neighbors frequently asked her for gardening advice. She was a member of the local garden club. She was a child of my grandfather's hog farm, where they grew quite a lot and helped other farmers with their crops. For those reasons alone, of course, I was meant as a teen to reject gardening until I could mature a bit and get over thinking that my parents only participated in ridiculous activities.

It's strange to think about my early childhood now as an adult, with those defiant adolescent years in between. The early years fade into the background at times, but I have very fond memories of working in my grandparents' back garden (after they had sold their farm and moved into town). I loved the days when my brother and I could climb the cherry trees to get the fruit that no one could reach with the ladders. And I loved pitting those cherries. We did it together, aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, and grandparents. Picking and snapping beans on grandma and grandpa's patio was another great favorite. But becoming a teenager has a powerful way of setting us on a strange road, away from who we are. I remember proudly proclaiming in those awkward years that I was a city girl who had no interest in farm life. I didn't like getting my hands dirty. I curled my upper lip at the mere mention of gardening. I'm sure I deployed more than a few eye rolls, accompanied by an "Oh, brother!" or two to illustrate how ridiculous it seemed to me. And now at 40, I often daydream of owning four acres (or even just two), keeping a substantial veg plot and some chickens, and leaving space for a lovely flower garden. Eventually, it seems, we all come home.

So here I am, a gardener, a grower of flowers and food, marveling at everything that happens in my own nature preserve. The weeping peach tree last week continued carefully and selectively putting on flowers, dotting them here and there among the great new flush of leaves.


Peach tree blossom in the morning



Don't they make a lovely pair?

My Mexican sage is still putting on a show, three years after I brought it home. Every time it gets a little leggy, I cut it hard back, and it always rewards me. In fact, when I cut the longest branches, I always find, tucked away in the middle of the plant, a whole new clump of fresh growth. The flowers are so fuzzy and beautiful. I like to run my hands over them.

 

Love the fuzzy flowers of Mexican sage

Right next door to the sage is my Kew Red Lavender. I will forever be in love with this plant. It makes for a sea of silver and magenta, and the texture just adds to the visual appeal.


Another bloom about to burst open



This week I also have what I consider to be a miraculous photo. Lizards are a part of my garden. I even talk to them. They keep me company while I'm working. They are so varied in appearance, and some of them seem to claim specific areas of the garden as their home. Turfman especially loves one he calls "Stumpy," who is devoid of a tail and lives in the vegetable garden. I love the ebony lizard that lives in the secret garden and is often sitting on the bunny's head (it's a sculpture). I've never really seen them do much of anything besides chase each other, stop and do their push-ups, or puff their red dewlaps on their throats. On Saturday afternoon, though, I saw a lizard on the pool enclosure screen who had a mouthful of bug. I had never seen them eat before. He proudly posed for the camera as I congratulated him on his catch.

A magical moment

It was probably inevitable that I would become a gardener. Thanks to the influence of my grandparents, my mom, and Henry David Thoreau (via Walden), the garden--and the food, flowers, and creatures in it--consumes most of my thoughts, and I couldn't be more grateful to them.

This week brings preparations for what I'm calling "The Great Bean Seed Planting Event" in the veg garden. Summer is our curtailed growing season, where we're really limited to growing eggplant, peppers, cantaloupe, and beans (and a few other items). That's exactly what I intend to do. My goal is to get a bean yield large enough to save for the winter. And just wait till you see to what lengths I'll go to get as much food out of my "farm" as I can. It's going to be a fun week, and I can't wait to show you next Monday!

 

Outside the Walls

Lately, as I've been driving to work, the opening line of Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" has been running through my head: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." One day last week, I especially thought of that poem as I headed to the office after a lovely morning walk with Tippy. I'd been struck by the colors of the Florida sunrise. It's often smooth blue with hints of pink. But on Thursday there were a few scattered clouds, and they were deep plum, underlit by a burnished rosy pink. As we continued on the walk and the day began to brighten, the pink became a vermilion; the sky lit up. The air was perfect, the breeze soft on my skin. On days like this, I invariably think of what it would be like to work all morning in the garden.

But, like the narrator of another Frost poem asserts, "I [had] promises to keep," and so I drove in to work, where I entered a building, walked down tight hallways, and stepped into my cubicle. When I sat down, I thought, "Yes, Mr. Frost. Something there is that doesn't love a wall. In fact, something there is that loathes it."

I will forever hate cubicles. No one can explain to me what good purpose they serve. They provide only a pretense of privacy. They don't keep the distractions of others talking at bay. They separate us from our colleagues. As I brood on it, I recall the narrator's words in "Mending Wall" again:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know 

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down. (lines 32-6)

I want those walls down, want to be outside of them. I understand that for a person like me, the walls are necessary. Without them, I'd be gazing out on the nearby lake, watching the tall grasses bend in the breeze. My thoughts would quickly turn to my garden, and I would accomplish nothing. The cubicle serves as my blinders, keeping my mind off of the beauty outside and more on the work in front of me. Good walls may make good workers, but they don't make me happy.

Outside those walls, in my garden every single day, something new unfolds. I feel like I've done very little work there this past week, but things in the garden have their own blinders, working well enough without me. The Pink Cascade Weeping Peach tree, but a bare root introduction to the garden this time last year, is now four feet tall and putting on leaves and flowers. 

The first flower on the weeping peach tree

The potatoes are growing furiously, and I'm finding it a little difficult to keep up with the earthing up required to keep those lovely tubers they are producing beneath the soil. Apparently, my grandpa, who was a farmer, often said that if you stood out in a field of corn, you could hear the corn growing. It grew that fast. I'm beginning to think the same of my potatoes, and I love that they make me think of my grandpa.

The potatoes are coming!

The zucchini plants are coming along nicely, though I cannot understand why most of them look rather normal, while one of them looks a bit like a Gunnera plant. I am not especially concerned about its gargantuan size, mind you. After all, that just means that the flowers are considerably larger and therefore have more space for stuffing fresh mozzarella or Boursin cheese inside before I dredge them in my homemade batter and fry them for a little appetizer. I keep telling myself that I need, at the very least, to let the female flowers produce their fruit, but I'm currently addicted to stuffed zucchini flowers and cannot resist raiding the plants.

Hello, future appetizer

Zuke flowers, Boursin-stuffed, battered, fried, & ready for eating

My tomato plants, which are the same ones I grew from seed beginning in August 2012, are still producing delicious fruit. They are beginning to show signs of slowing down, but I still see new clusters forming each morning as I make the rounds.

The tomatoes' early morning greeting

As the garden gets on with its work, I get on with mine at the weekend. I finished the enclosure for the rain barrel. The door is on, the other side of the structure built, the green roof waterproofed and planted. I'm pretty pleased with the result.

One more item off of my to-do list

I made several gallons of compost tea last week, and once the rains move out here, I'll be giving everything a delicious helping of my healthy brew. Tippy has been my ever-faithful companion while I work, making the rounds with me, checking on the plants. When we have a few moments to sit and relax, we return to the secret garden, where our memorial to Wolfie is. Tippy seems to know the exact spot, as she invariably lies down in the field of alyssum surrounding it, even though I beg her not to squash the flowers.

Always near her Wolfie

You will never find us mending any walls here. We like to be out in the open. Outside those cubicle walls I dislike, inside my garden, we are mended every day by the beauty that surrounds us. 

Anything you'd like to see next week from my garden? Any questions you'd like me to try and answer? Just leave me a note here.

A Different Perspective

I always looked forward to the days when I taught Tennyson in my British literature survey courses. Of course, if I'm perfectly honest, I also loved the days for Virginia Woolf, Tony Harrison, Philip Larkin, and quite a few others...but I see I'm already getting off track. Especially enjoyable was the day in the course when we discussed "The Lotos-Eaters" and "Ulysses" together. These two poems counterbalance one another, the former focusing on rest and relaxation and the latter touting activity and adventure. For a long time, I sided with Ulysses, who complains that life is too short just to sit down and do nothing. But as I get a little older, I am discovering the merits of those "lazy" Lotos-Eaters, who want a respite and to enjoy themselves.

Actually, the Lotos-Eaters make an argument for rest that most gardeners would be hard-pressed to contradict, as they compare themselves to nature:

All its allotted length of days

The flower ripens in its place,

Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil,

Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil. (lines 80-83)

But then there's Ulysses with all of his nervous energy:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

As though to breathe were life! (lines 22-24)

I'm certain that nearly every gardener has a bit of Ulysses in her (or him). You know exactly what I'm talking about. You create a beautiful garden people just want to sit in and enjoy. You proudly agree to join them, but the second your backside hits the swing, you see a weed, spring up as if you're on an ejection seat, and you're off tidying things up whilst your guests are left to shout to you through the bushes. It can be a little embarassing.

Of late, I have been trying to channel my inner Lotos-Eater, relaxing a bit more in my garden and enjoying it. But forever in the background is that "Type A" Ulysses, reminding me that there is much work to do in the garden. So this past weekend, my inner Ulysses won...up to a certain point.

I have two large rain barrels in the backyard. One is white and currently being overtaken by a bush, thus blending it into the landscape. The other is in the vegetable garden and is a shocking electric blue. Turfman has not been a fan of its garish presence. Now, I'm a lover of power tools. I look for any reason to use them and to use a wide array of them. So last year when Turfman first brought up his desire for the blue rain barrel to be camouflaged, I decided that I would build vertical planters on the sides (jigsaw, compound miter saw, power drill). Those turned out to be less than successful. We dismantled them a few weeks ago when we had the house painted. We added that wood to the pile of wood I had from dismantling my compost bins (which have been replaced with homemade bins that are less susceptible to animal infiltration...don't ask). So there stood the ugly rain barrel, out in the open for all to see again. And then I had an idea: why not build a small shed on one side of the barrel to house all my garden supplies? The other side could just be a wall upon which I could hang wide planters. And the roof could be a green roof.

Now had I been a true Ulysses, I would have built the entire thing, but those Lotos-Eaters inside me are gaining some ground. They were reminding me that if I did build the entire structure, seal the green roof and plant it up, my legs would find it impossible to walk me into work this morning. So I stopped even before affixing the door (though I still can barely walk today). I recognize that in it's half-finished form, it does have the look of an outhouse, what with the downspout appearing like a chimney, but I'm certain once I finish the other half and get the green roof in place, it will look much better. And that barrel will have to get a paint job. It's just far too out there. 

The new garden shed!

Inside the shed



I had to buy just a little bit of wood, but everything else is reclaimed from the previous two failed projects. The camera perspective in the inside shot makes it look a little like something the Mad Hatter might have, but I can assure you that it is completely symmetrical. And really, that's all we need in life--a slightly different perspective.

I love taking close shots of my flowers, but I realized this weekend that I rarely pan out to take in the full view, the larger home in which a given flower lives. When I crouched in the grass to capture this Salvia farinacea "Evolution White" (purchased last year from Santa Rosa Gardens), I had to remind myself to take in the larger picture, give myself a different point of view. When I did, I saw that the salvia held a different beauty in the context of its neighbors.

"Evolution White" Salvia, soft and fuzzy

The salvia in its larger context

And that's what I've come to value about both "The Lotos-Eaters" and "Ulysses"--they provide a different perspective, two ways of looking at things that are equally valid and are probably best taken in equal measure. Sure, it's great to work, to break out the power tools, to accomplish something, but it's pretty incredible to take a different perspective, sit back, and enjoy the view, too.

Now for the big seed giveaway winner, chosen at random by Turfman reaching into the garden hat: Maureen! Give me a shout, and I'll get those in the mail to you!