Purple crocuses

From my front garden. This is slowly but surely becoming a botanical blog.

It's spring!

First crocus of the spring

Something got into me last fall and I bought around 200 spring bulbs. This was unusual for me because I have a love/hate relationship with landscaping. I want things to look nice but I dislike the entire concept of a lawn. I see a flat, perfectly cut grassy monoculture to be gigantic waste of time, money and energy and my lawn shows it. It's patchy, generally scruffy looking, and full of weeds and moss but it's also full of life. Insects and spiders of all sorts and a large number of monarch butterflies, since I mow around all the milkweed that pops up.

But back to 200 bulbs. Historically, I have not been a very outdoorsy person, especially not the dirt-under-fingernails variety. For most of my life, "outside" was the giant room with the bright light and the blue ceiling. It started looking more and more like a bad decision with all the work required to dig out sections of lawn or restoring neglected flower beds. It was certainly more work than repotting some plants and remembering to water them. It look a few weekends and some more weeknights, but I did it. I got them all in the ground before the first frost and some areas even look halfway decent. Now everything is coming up - crocuses, tulips, daffodils, giant alliums, leucojums, and hyacinths. I'm practically giddy checking what's popped up overnight or during the day. I have spring fever!


A good book on the history and ridiculousness of the lawn is The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession. It influenced my attitude towards the lawn and got me a bunch of dirty looks from certain suburban types on the commuter rail.

Aloe fhtagn

The aloe plant that I rescued from death by neglect in my son's room has taken a turn towards the Cthulhu.

I swear I just repotted it and watered it regularly, and didn't invoke an Elder God.

"Where did you get that beagle?"

While I was out walking our dog yesterday afternoon, I was stopped by a passing driver who wanted to know where we had gotten our beagle. This has happened four or five times now, including at the vet's office. Each time the questioner is surprised and somewhat disappointed to find out that she's a rescue dog from Puerto Rico. Most times they are looking for someone in the area selling or breeding beagles, and once we were asked rather directly if we were breeding our dog. Maybe I'm a prude, but is that really a question for polite society?

Deep in contemplation about how best to
steal something off the kitchen table.

Pure bred? No idea. Former street dog? Quite possibly. Eats cat poop? Constantly. More photos below.

Christmas Cactus

Our Christmas cactus is in full bloom for the holidays

My 9 year old son collected house plants for a while but rarely watered them, so most of them were dead when he finally turned them over to me this September. I didn't think that this Christmas cactus would make it, let alone bloom this year. It was very withered and hadn't been watered consistently for months.

That's all that I did with it and these other rescue plants. Repot, water every two weeks (every week for the croton) with plant food and place in a sunny location. There's another shelf below this with more cacti and jades.

This next set of plants is the result of two years worth of careful watering. They were all part of a single plant that had been in my wife's family for decades but was starved for sun, water and attention. The core and roots were rotten and all that was marginally alive where the bits on the ends. After a bit of research one afternoon, I decided to chop off the salvageable pieces and see if any of them would grow. To my surprise, they have and now I've run out of room! The leftmost plant in the first photo was the largest surviving piece of the original plant. It seems to have been permanently stunted and has grown a few new leaves over two years, but not much. Subtract those leaves and it looks much like it did when I performed the surgery on it. The last photo is all that's left of the original plant. Only in the past few weeks has it been moved to a sunnier location, so what green that was left has been dormant the entire time.

Power outage

Two feet of snow for Halloween, no problem. But a dusting of ice and snow brings a line down today.

Illegal dump site

The normal forest underbrush was crushed with the heavy snowfall on Halloween and we haven't had any snow since, so there are some clearer views than usual into the woods on either side of our road. I found two illegally dumped piles of tires today while walking my dog at lunch. This is the larger one and has been there for some time, judging from the amount of pine needles and moss on the bottom tires. The other pile was more recent and was near where I found a pile of car batteries a few years ago.
This is an unfortunate fact of life when living on a dirt road in rural New Hampshire. Besides a steady stream of alcohol containers of all kinds, lottery tickets, fast food and other household garbage, I've found a mattress, a folding chair, a vacuum, a pile of computer equipment (CRT, desktops, printers, smashed scanner) and other miscellaneous junk. Why do people feel they can do this on my road? There are scrap metal dealers and tire recyclers nearby, and the fees at the local dump aren't *that* much.