Late Spring Ramble

Lordy, this Jack in the Box coffee is terrible! I had hoped that adding creamer would noticeably cut the acidity, but I think said creamer just sank to the bottom of the cup and died. So, now my coffee tastes like fermented roastiness with just a whiff of creamer-ghost. Oh, man. I can actually feel the hairs sprouting from my chest. A primal howl is bubbling up from my throat and I suddenly feel the urge to fling excrement at passersby. My fingers fumble at the keyboard; my knuckles begin to drag acrofds6^@fjlop90&;iqw!?

Ahem.

On to the garden!

It's the first dry, sunny day we've had for some time. My mood is uplifted and my camera is at the ready. (If only my husband were feeling uplifted and at the ready, maybe the blinking lawn would get mowed. Alas, he is lately impaired by a migraine that it seems we cannot assuage. All the king's aspirin and all the king's ibuprofen couldn't put Hubby together again.) Despite the sunlight glinting blindingly off of the LCD, I got a few pictures of the things that are growing outside. I had stupidly brought my coffee outside with me and, therefore, had to carefully juggle my cup and my camera in order to avoid spilling the hideous beverage onto the lawn. (It might've burned right through the grass and created pockets of [possibly radioactive] dead space that nothing would grow in ever again.) Here follows today's selection of photo-growy-planty-pics.

Voilà—violas!

First, the only annuals in the garden: my little pot of violas. They were cheap and brightly colored. How was I to resist? I did a quick and shoddy job of potting them. There are empty spaces between each root bundle. I should have waited for the soil to settle after the initial watering and then added more soil to fill in the gaps. Of course, you can only see that there are gaps when they are wilty and they only become wilty when they haven't been recently soaked. So, I tried to drown them shortly before taking this photo and—voilà!—instant perkiness! If only I could achieve similar results by watering my own breasts.

Perhaps "hydranip" would be more apt.

Another potted plant with an almost masochistic desire to be watered mercilessly and often: catnip. This little pot of nip was looking pretty scraggly just before the week or so of intermittent pouring rain we just had. Now it, too, has perked up and sprouted some happy, new growth. You should have seen the way it flourished at the beginning of the year. "Drown me, drown me! Spank my naughty leaves with your massive, wet raindrops! Aw, yeah! Gurgle gurgle!" Too bad it doesn't equally enjoy being mauled by cats.

Hydrangea paniculata 'Wim's Red'

Here we have my newest acquisition: Hydrangea paniculata 'Wim's Red'. I have hesitatingly stuffed this hydrangea into a pot because the spot I want to plant it in is currently occupied by a Hydrangea macrophylla 'Nikko Blue' and I dare not transplant the latter until its dormancy period, for fear of setting it back a couple of seasons or losing it altogether. Meanwhile, I shall have to monitor the 'Wim's Red' closely and water it frequently. I love terracotta, but it does dry out quickly.

I can't wait to see the color-changing blooms this cultivar promises.

I look forward to studying the bloom cycle of this hydrangea. Its flowers are expected to open creamy white in early summer, then turn pink in mid-summer, and finish deep red in autumn. After months of sighing over images of 'Vanilla Strawberry' and other color-changing panicle hydrangeas, I happened across a batch of 'Wim's Red' while perusing shrubs at the local Home Depot. These plants were hard to miss. Picture a pallet crammed full of very upright, bright red stems, covered in bright green, easily recognizable hydrangea leaves and thousands of tiny flower buds. At about $18 apiece, I had to work to restrain myself from buying more than one. It's not as though Hubby would have stopped me. He just smiles and laughs at my plant-induced mania.

They're not even the magic kind.

Weeds. It's bad enough when your lawn seems to be made out of nothing but crabgrass and clover. The unexpected appearance of mushrooms is really quite unnecessary.

You've come to the wrong neighborhood, Weedy MacWeedster.

Catchweed bedstraw. Sounds like the name of a bucktoothed, backwoods, inbred porn-star. Oh, no. Oh, no thank you. I'd better pull out this horrible mess before it seeds itself all over the bed. There's a gas meter in there, somewhere. Puget Sound Energy will probably add a fine to my bill if they have to pull aside a mass of weeds every month in order to read the meter. Oh, joy.

This concludes today's photo-tour. Perhaps tomorrow I'll get off my rump long enough to clear away the weeds around the gas meter. I've got plenty of garden maintenance jobs to perform, more than enough to warrant a Before & After post. The question is, how long will it take me to get it all done? I'm shooting for anytime before the end of June. May the weather gods grant me an agreeable atmosphere in which to work. Amen.