Garden Check-In

 For my own future reference, i decided to take some garden status pictures today!

Hairy beardtongue; 4/5 are doing okay under the watchful eye of the Great Turtle.

Coreopsis: same, 1 of 5 is not thriving but the others are okay. In front, we had 3 salvias but only 2 returned this year. 

Center garden, where I planted three dark red mums last summer. They're doing well, though I clearly kind of planted them in the middle of a daffodil clump.

These were a pair of orangey-yellow mums, with a hyssop plant behind them. Also accidentally planted these amid some daffodils!

Just a note to myself that there's a decent bare spot here that something else could be added. 

The thinned-out irises are doing okay. They're still getting the nasty spots, but nowhere near as badly as their un-thinned fellows. They're also a bit happier than the newly-planted ones by the house which are all flopping over. 

Reminder to myself that the three daylily (?) plants behind the irises are not looking great, and they have lots of those fern weeds grown into them, plus one has poison ivy recurring. Possibly pull these and replace? 

The other set of mums/hyssop planted in the late summer. I realize now I forgot to photograph the set of 5 asters that are on the other side of the stump; like all of the plugs, out of five there's one runt but the others are doing okay. 

New perennial bed coming along nicely! I'm not expecting anything to bloom this year, though there are some buds on one of the monarda plants closest to the camera.

The un-thinned section of irises - full of weeds, tons of the nasty spots. If I thin these in the fall, I think I'll get red of the dull red ones in the center altogether. 

I stuffed five northern blazing star plugs in between the hosta and the first few irises. They're okay, although they've got some brown leaf spots.

The rest of the thinned-out irises. I don't think they're really loving it here, since they're all flopped over. I think I might have planted them too deeply, and definitely need to scoop mulch away from them. But there might also just be too many. Only 1 is putting up a bloom so far. 

The milkweed patch by the pond! 

The area with darker soil is where I painstakingly weeded and solarized all last summer, then spread wildflower seeds. Yup, it's mostly weeds coming up, along with a healthy dose of milkweed. I tried! (Never again - it's milkweed's land now.)

The willow tree that cracked in half and fell a couple of years ago is coming back gangbusters from its own stump! So glad we didn't bother trying to plant one. 

Trying to take pictures of the water's surface with my phone camera never works. But there are so many goldfish in there! And they love to hang out right on the surface, too. We saw the heron the other day, but he was immediately harassed by the songbirds since it's nesting season. 

Restart

 I started running a 12-week lifting program, a spinoff of GZCLP called the Rippler, back in mid January, and finally finished it in mid-May! And now immediately restarted it at (slightly) higher weights.

Squat: 95 —> 95

Deadlift:  125 —> 140

Bench:  75 —> 75

OHP: 55.5 —> 60

Not a huge amount of progress, though to be fair the calculated 1RM is higher for all of these but they suggest being conservative and skewing down; in the case of the bench, which I did today, the program calculates my 1RM as 82, so they assigned me 3x5 at 67.5, which was too much, so i dropped to 65 for the second two sets and reset my 1RM to 75.

My squats, on the other hand, are simply not good! I have tight hamstrings and not so much ankle mobility, but even using small plates to elevate my heels doesn’t help. You’d think having thicker legs and being female would help me here, but no. Definitely the exercise I like least.

The deadlift on the other hand is my favorite of the core  lifts, even as it is the one most likely to cause injury if I’m not paying total attention to form. Hopefully I will be on track to reach my body weight deadlift by the end of this cycle!

Pride and Prejudice

 

Definitely posted out of order, but Sara and I met up in Danbury last month to see the 20th anniversary screening of Pride and Prejudice! We saw it in Florence on Valentine’s Day 2006, along with seemingly every other American study abroad student. I’ve definitely watched since then, but I had forgotten how excellently made the whole film is. Seeing it at a cinema let you appreciate elements of set dressing and lighting that are really part of the background, but contribute so much to what the director Joe Wright in a brief foreword said was his desire to make it “gritty.” Usually I roll my eyes at that word, but it made sense here; period pieces are usually super cleaned up, and even the “poor” areas seem sort of sanitized for visual consumption.

Just went back to “the archive” to recover what I said about it then: “ In other news, Monday night we all went to see Pride and Prejudice at the English theater, along with Sara, her amusing friends, and about 100 other females, plus the odd unlucky male. I definitely didn't expect the movie to be as entertaining as it was, but I absolutely loved it! Carla said that it was one of the best movies she'd seen lately and I quite agree. It was funny, and had a lot more fun with sly jokes than the six hour series could manage. Mr Darcy was smoking, and even Keira Knightley I didn't hate quite as much as usual. There's something extremely enjoyable about watching such a film with your close friends and having the entire audience oooh and ahhh at the same favorite parts. Except for the end, where they apparently cut the kissing scene. So yes, I felt cheated that after a two hour romantic comedy it ends with a kiss ON THE HAND. Come on. Europeans love sex! What's the deal?”

Me, 20 years later: LOL

Garden Adventures

 I have to laugh at what I wrote in my last post, assuming I’d dug most of the giant rocks out of my new garden bed. Ha! Every time I’ve gone in there in the past couple of weeks - adding soil, digging weeds - what have I found but more rocks. Giant rocks! This continued even into my planting day with on Wednesday. Dig a plant role, find a rock or five.

About half of the plants I got from Prairie Meadow fit into this space - the center is butterfly weed, rudbeckia, and coneflower, with some grasses, mountain mint and a few others in there.

Amazingly, the 50-ft roll of fencing fit around the perimeter! It’s not terribly secure, just zip tied to garden stakes, but with any luck it will be a basic deterrent to the bunnies and squirrels. They have so much else to eat around here.

The rest of the plants were added to other beds; northern blazing star near the lilies, asters in the center circle, hairy beardtongue by the Great Turtle, and coreopsis right in front. None of these are getting any protection, simply because I am out of fencing. Sink or swim!!

None of the other beds have the same size of rocks, but rocks they have, plus random roots, etc. All told this tool me about five hours worth of work - and I still need to finish the mulching this weekend! At least my 100-foot hose can reach the new bed from the back porch, so it’s only the other smaller groupings that I have to carry water to. And today it will rain, so that’s one day of free watering!

ETA: and now post-mulch! We ordered five cubic yards this time, which translates to roughly a metric fuck-ton of mulch. Sean helped me distribute the remaining 2/3 of it yesterday. We thought we had over-ordered - no way we need this much even with the new beds! But by the time we were done we could have used justtttt a little bit more, haha.