The garden…I have a kind of love-hate relationship with the garden.  On one hand, when I bought this house last fall and it had the large garden with raised beds, 2 patches of strawberries, some rhubarb, asparagus, fruit trees and other stuff I couldn’t identify – I thought, what fun!  I hadn’t really grown stuff I could eat since my Ohio days – a lifetime ago!  And my last house had a beautifully established herb garden – perennials – all I had to do was weed, water and enjoy…and I planted annuals around and in pots for color.  But here was a REAL garden.  Turned out that it was/is a lot more fun in theory – at least for me.

I spent several weekends in the spring cleaning up the raised beds – the strawberry patches were particulary awful as they should have been cut back in the fall so I had to cut dead runners, pull weeds and try not to kill the new growth in the process.  By the time I left for Colorado, the entire garden looked wonderful – I had been able to enjoy the rhubarb and the strawberries were in bloom with little green berries starting, and some Iris planted along a border had bloomed.  Iris are a particular favorite of mine, but ironically, I am not a huge fan of strawberries – I like a few now and then. I spoke to my neighbors about keeping an eye on the house, yard and garden while I was gone – making sure my “irrigation system” did not run amok, etc. and said they were welcome to all of the strawberries – which they were thrilled about.

On my return, the neighbors had had their fill of strawberries … the irrigation system did fine and everything thrived, including a LOT of weeds…  I found out that I wasn’t really into gardening on the scale of the BIG garden.  I have decided – I think – to take it out.  A little more grass would be easier and I have another smaller spot by the garage that would make a garden area – veg garden – plenty large enough…and in fact I think I’ll just do container stuff – a pot of tomatoes, peppers, etc. – and easy to rig up a drip system and cover them with some sort of mesh to keep the deer out – so that is the plan.

And in the meantime, I have the plants that I brought back from Colorado – Egyptian Walking Onions, Pimiento and a Pepper started by my step-Dad, Bill.  The pimiento was eaten to the quick by a deer but Bill says it will recover and I should be able to winter it in the house – ditto the pepper and he says the onions “are not mortal” and I definitely cannot kill them!  These onions are wonderful – something on the order of sweet scallions – and you can see below – they make “babies” on the tops – cut the “babies” off and put them back in the dirt – more onions – it is like magic!  Well, it’s fun.

Above right – the photo makes the garden look much better than reality at the moment…I have a bumper crop of thistles, quack grass and other weeds I don’t know what they are called.  It is green, though….

Wasps, yellow jackets – whatever, they are still around and not only more active the last several days, but I was stung AGAIN – and IN the house… one of them must have followed one of us inside and it was “sitting” on the cord for one of the blinds.  Just before going to bed, I open the blinds in preparation for opening the windows when it cools outside.  I put my hand right on the wasp – the cord is 3 feet long!  and I picked the exact place the wasp was sitting.   I got stung on the little finger of my right hand – first joint above the palm. In 24 hours my entire hand was swollen and looks like the paddle foot of some sci-fi water creature – itches like crazy and the skin on my pour little finger is so swollen that it split in a couple of places – OWWWW!

Desparate times call for desparate measures aka revenge is sweet! A woman in the health food store had related that she set out a bowl of beer and a lot of wasps drowned in it… aha – I had tried glasses of grenadine – syrupy sweet – no luck.  So, today, set out 2 glasses of beer…   YES!!!