Laughing Ravens

  There are some evenings where I keep going long after I should have gone inside for the night. Sometimes it is because I went back out to the garden after dinner. Tonight, there were a lot of perennials and shrubs I wanted to get into the new beds in front of the solar panel, before the rain starts. We're expecting to get rain off-and-on for the next three days, followed by a jump in temperature into the high 80's. Considering that this week has struggled to get to 70F, that will be quite the shock to newly transplanted plants. Getting them into the chips, surrounded by coarse compost, and watered in... that makes the transition so much better. Tonight, the solar lights that dot the garden came on not long after the sky yellowed, then darkened. As the little lights started popping on, and swaying gently in the last breezes of the day... I realized that it was probably time to head inside. I still needed to get everything watered in, which of course made it absolutely dark as ...

  What the heck is this?  Anyone who knows me would agree that organization is NOT my strong suit. Curiosity, absolutely. When May rolls around (and in April too!) and I start looking at signs of new growth in the garden, one of the first things I say is: "What the heck is this?" Sounds funny when I write it that way, because as anyone who has been around me for five minutes knows, there's a whole lot of profanity left out of that question. Why is this an issue and why should anyone care? Organization is a very personal thing... on the same level of personal as what happens behind the bathroom door. Organization is what separates everything (see what I did there?).  Years ago, when I first started gardening, I could remember all the names of all the plants I put in the ground. My neighbor, Marge, told me the name as I stuck the cuttings into the South Florida sand/dirt and that was that. The plant grew. The name was the name. Done. Then I got old. I gardened in lots of di...