Bonnie got adopted to her perfect family last week, as you can see by the matching hair coloring (at least for mom and son, sorry dad!). I've had such good reports from all three of my (former) foster dogs, it's a pleasure to think of each one happily wagging tail or lack thereof in their various safe and loving homes. Especially since there are continuing sad stories, in dogdom and so many other places these days ...
Now temporarily dogless, I returned to the unending War on Weeds which will in fact outlast any other wars as it will never be completely over. Some parts of the garden had done reasonably well during my season of neglect, but in other places the weeds were well over three feet high and one had to know just where to look to see the plantings. Days and many bug bites later, at least the flower beds are re-emerging. My reward for this night's round of weeding was to add the long stems of yellow day lilies to the bergamot, coneflowers and hosta sprays. The deer have graciously been absent or grazing only lightly, thus we actually have lilies and hosta flower sprays. For the time being, anyway.
The vegetable garden cage is working in that no wood creature has breached the chicken wire yet, and our tomato plants are about four feet tall and loaded with small green tomatoes. The cucumbers have already been tasted, and I will probably take a bag of them over to the monastery as when they are ready, they are ALL ready, and I have no genius idea what to do with a dozen cukes except chop and eat. Recipes, anyone? The oregano and Italian basil are doing great, the purple basil not well at all. Next year no purples! The Cubano chilies have four big potential rellenos on the plants already, I'm hoping for two more before we fire up the grill and roast them. And what I thought might be parsley, and carefully dug up and transplanted safe behind the wire, is a carrot, wild or otherwise, which is now sending up stalks of "Queen Anne's Lace" flowers that are as tall as I am. For some reason this plant really annoys Brian, who keeps threatening to come out one night and yank it up. I'm not sure why, it's not particularly in any plant's way and the flowers are quite nice, I think, though their tendency to drop little specks of white flower petals everywhere don't work so well on the table.
And so it goes, dogs and flowers still my main focus, with the occasional power outage (only 4 hours Sunday night, over at 4:30 a.m., an hour earlier than predicted) to make me feel grateful for electricity and running water as well as the generator, my favorite appliance. Thanks to Gen, no need to trek up and down to the pond for toilet flushing water! What luxury! And I can only hope you feel the same.
