Beltane Beltane Moon
Flagged off my Latin tutor for this Friday. Bees, garden, retreat, finishing Missing combined to soak up my good work time. To do well at the Latin I have to have a full day; it takes me awhile to turn on the neural network that recognizes cases, remembers Ovid’s peculiarities and enjoys the play of connotation and denotation. Once I get in that place, which may take as much as a morning, then I can translate faster, with more facility. But. I need that unbroken time. Just the way I work.
Rain kept me out of the garden last Thursday so I’ve got to out there right now and plant potatoes and chard. The garden’s looking good, daffodils and tulips, bleeding heart and hosta, pachysandra and maiden-hair ferns greeting the strawberry blossoms, the asparagus spears, the green shafts of the allium family: onion, shallot, garlic and the small leaves of the emerging beets.
Today, too, is another round in the Can I keep Gertie in the yard game? I added another wire and plan yet more moves. I’m smarter; she’s more persistent. An equal match so far.
doing is gradually filling in spots on our grounds that seem to always require weeding, maintenance with plants that are hardy, go it alone types. The hemerocallis, like the hosta, receive scorn from landscape designers and permaculture folks, but like all God’s creatures, they too have a place. And their place is to grow in those places you don’t want to have to worry or fuss about. As we get older, we plan to retire more and more beds to this kind of planting, reducing the ongoing work until we have only some vegetables in a raised bed or two and the orchard. The rest will be in asiatic lilies, hemerocallis, hosta, bugbane, grasses, ferns, bulbs like tulips and daffodils, monkshod and various shrubs.