In celebration of the Chinese New Year and the start of the Year of the Dragon, I thought I’d share a few photos from the Fireworks at Rock Harbor last July Fourth.

Instead of setting a course for our usual peaceful and less crowded double-secret spot in the marsh, our party muscled their way through the crowd and got right out onto the shoreline opposite the launch spot, so for a change we were right there for the bang and the boom, which was pretty cool.   This also meant different photographic opportunities, as well.

The deck here is really ideal for growing them, what with the stellar morning light and all.

In previous summers I hadn’t gotten my act together in time to do it right.  And by right, I mean that I want them growing everywhere, wandering over doorways, along rooflines, under porch railings, making a Jungle of the whole world.

Or something like that.

Last summer, I may have achieved Evil Genius (well, so FAR…bwa ha ha ha...) status with the morning glories.   I had started some indoors, well ahead of the outdoor season, so they were ready to climb and bloom early on.   Another pot of seeds was started around Memorial Day and then the last planting came together with some remaindered, unmarked morning glory vines I found at my favorite local nursery somewhere around mid July.  Those really came into their own as August became September (after the vines of July and August had been defoliated by Hurricane Irene’s salty winds) and bloomed well into the autumn.

For trellacing, I created webs of twine over a network of cuphooks and thumbtacks and barbecue skewers, a sort of playground for the eager vines.   It was fun to lay it out, and really the best way to get them to run where in the narrow spaces I wanted them to, around posts or under railings and such.   And if you can keep up with the watering, they will run like crazy, so its important to get a jump on them with the trellacing.

And the nice thing about the Twine Plan is you can always add new sections as you need them, too.

The seeds of those first two major plantings, by the way, came courtesy of my favorite City Gardener and his Harlem windowbox vines of the Grandpa Ott’s variety.  They are – naturally – the purple ones.   This post also serves as a visual guide to the mixed parentage of the package of seeds which should shortly be arriving in his mailbox.   Who knows what the bees might’ve gotten crossed.

The Catsby doesn’t like me to sleep in, and even when he can be coerced to cuddle, the Nest is a nice bright place, so I’m slowly becoming a morning person.  Sort of.   Morning glories encourage me that way, too.   If I must be awake, then what fun to take my first cup of coffee out into their pre-dawn company, watching them unfurl to meet the rising sun.

It’s been snowing while I write this and the nighttime view outside my window is becoming brighter as it starts to accumulate.  I’m glad it’s finally turned wintery, because seriously, what’s Spring without Winter?

But ahhhh, those Summer Mornings.

Now that it’s late enough in the new year that I remember to write 2012 on things, and finally cold enough to make me think its actually winter, I find myself thinking about last summer.   As it approached, I was busy.

Busy installing brick edging in the gardens, and addressing changes in both my work situations and  exploring the bike trail and digging in the garden and having great fun with friends old and new.  For so many reasons, I was long overdue to post here at the blog when Midsummer came steamily into town with the high summer holidays of Independence Day weekend quickly afterward.

And then, just when I had a free moment and was feeling inspired about writing, this nasty electrical storm (<—that one there) came along one humid night and took out my home computer.    Gasp.   No email at home.  No blogging.   No Facebook.  (Suddenly, a wealth of infinitely clever status updates sprang freely to mind.)  No online banking or weather forecasts or movie schedules.    No endless hours of meaningless internet clicking and surfing.    No Joe.My.God.  No Post Secret.    No funny cat videos or porn.   Even without the internet, my computer is also my home stereo.  Ugh.

It was annoying and inconvenient and boring and irksome and (except for the music part since my iPod was stranded with just two podcasts of Selected Shorts which I listened to over and over again for about a month) possibly the very best thing that could’ve happened to me.

There was more time to putter in the garden.  More time with friends.   More time for books:  I read The Great Gatsby in an afternoon!   More time on the bike trail amounted to about 15 pounds lost!   I saw more sunsets and even shared a few sunrises in the company of my prolific morning glories and a certain gray feline.

Even without the computer, I was still filling the memory card of my camera.  Here’s some of what you missed.

It didn’t look very hopeful, I confess.   The poor thing had been rapid-grown in some Franken-nursery for the holiday season and had almost no root structure to support it.   There were three or four green leaves and maybe as many pink ones.

But I do love a challenge and so I carefully watered it through the winter and when Spring came, I brought it home and moved it into a slightly larger pot with fresh soil.   It was a surprise to discover it’s feeble root system was growing through the foam core it had been seeded into.   It did reasonably well in the summer sunshine, as poinsettias will do.   I’ve had success with planting them out into sunny borders in summers past; they bush out nicely, but generally, they’ve died at summer’s end when a surprise frost got them before I could repot them for wintering indoors.

This one I’ve kept containered, summering on the porch the last two summers and then coming in to a sunny southern windown this time of year.   This past summer the plant seemed to falter a little, perhaps from too much rain early on.  When autumn came, I was just happy it was still alive and didn’t give much thought to asking it to bloom this winter.

I’ve read in the past tricks and techniques for getting one’s poinsettia to rebloom.    The production of red bracts is a product of reduced levels of sunlight and in order to encourage them to bloom in time for the Christmas season, I’ve read all kinds of instructions for covering them with black plastic, or stowing them in dark closets for part of each day.

Unfortunately, I’m a visual sort of guy.  If my plant’s in a closet out of sight, I’m just as likely to forget about it altogether.  This means no water, no sunlight and e’relong, no plant.   I know this from past experience.    I’ve been tempted by this proposition before.  So I was more concerned with whether the plant was going to rebound at all, much less do anything fancy.

You can imagine, then,  my surprise this morning when I discovered my little planty was doing it all on it’s on, and at just the right time of year.  Yippee!!

Now…I don’t want you to worry about the Gray Catsby.   Yes, we know all about poinsettias being poisonous, but I’m pleased to say he’s a rather bright kitty and seems only to have a taste for long, thin grasslike leaves.   I keep this plant out of his general flight pattern and he seems as happy to avoid it.

2011 has been a good year for me, even though I’ve not been much on documenting that here.   There’s been good work to do, plants to tend, kitties to snuggle, great music, good theatre, a whiff or two of Romance and  an abundance of opportunities to celebrate Life in the company of friends new and old.   There are probably a few stories to share, and probably a few photos.   Who knows just what you might hear from me as the Winter unfurls before us.

Meanwhile, I hope December finds you and yours well.   Whatever holiday you’ll be celebrating, may it bring you much love, laughter and light.

A mourning dove has been singing and cooing on the railing of our deck most mornings this week.   But its windy here last night and this morning and our dove is nowhere to be seen (or heard).   Wind’s not a new thing here on the Cape and this isn’t a particular big deal by our wind standards, but it keeps one mindful of the severe weather events plaguing so many this week.

Last evening after work was overcast and breezy, but warm.   Also damp, from the irregular spatterings of rain we’ve been getting here the last twenty-four hours.   Not the right kind of weather for actually doing much out there, but the tulips are coming along as we begin our transition from April to May and sometimes its nice to just walk around and look (and take a few photos).   Still, it wasn’t long before I was back inside, enjoying the way one purple hyacinth can perfume an entire apartment with its sweet fragrance.

My heart is with those who’ve been so awfully impacted by the deadly storms in the south, and also with those who are battling/fleeing flooding in the north.   My prayers and best wishes go with you all.  May some of Spring’s more peaceful moments find you soon.

Those April showers have been doing their work.   As they have kept our focus indoors, turned toward other, dryer pursuits, all the outside world has been greening up and growing, to the point where attention must be paid.   I’d finally made a serious start at raking away the winter debris and doing a bit of spring weeding, when I planted the pansies a while back…but more rain, and then a week’s unexpected dog sitting took me away from my evening garden activities, as my ToDo lists lengthened.

I was disappointed when my plans to see my family fell through this weekend, but then also – I confess – excited at the prospect of having both days of a weekend available to me for the purposes of working in the yard.  There’s certainly more than a weekend’s worth of stuff to do this time of year, after all…and it’s so much fun.    Saturday’s forecast was less than thrilling, with heavy rain forecast to start around noontime (but having been away, there was/is a certain amount of housework to attend, too).  The Catsby was kind enough to let me sleep in a little, but I was still outside by 8:30, where I made the roses by the driveway my first priority.
The rosehips and dead branch tips of last season were waiting to be removed, whilst new foliage was unfurling everywhere else on the three bushes along the driveway fence.  I’m sure there are those gardeners who might try to Should on me…you know, “that sort of thing should be done at the end of the season“…but these roses are pretty prolific.  If I’m not mistaken, these guys bloomed until just before the snow came, so really, this is a fine time to do it…and look how nicely shaped the bushes are now to start the season.

Saturday morning was never delightful, exactly, except that I got to spend time in the garden.   There was a drizzly mist in the air and the dampness made it sort of chilly.  I will say my rain slicker was a great protection against the roses, who are often trying to distract me from my pruning mission by pawing and grabbing at me and my clothes.   I must remember to wear it for future pruning sessions.

Next on the list were the lilacs.   Now here I will cop to having been too busy/lazy last season.    Because lilacs bloom on old wood, the best time to prune them is right after they have finished blooming in May.  This means that our three bushes are already thick with the buds which will be scenting our air in just a few weeks and I had to work a little more carefully.   And anyway, the rain arrived and – after another wander around the yard to see what else is going on – I was inside for the day.

Those white violets beneath the catawba are in full swing now.   Not far away, I discovered a whole bunch of tulips rising from the ground and setting buds.   Until recently, I’d completely forgotten that I’d added more of them last fall.   A nice surprise that brought me over for a closer look at a particular flower bed.   There I found my baby lupine plant.    It’s still only two years old and yet to flower:  I hope this Spring will show us what color it holds inside.

The rest of Saturday was meant for other things, and the freshly pruned roses got a good rain bath.   Sunday started cloudy, allowing a bit of a snuggly lie-in beneath the Catsby, but then turned all lovely and golden pretty early on.   Since there was some question in the forecast about when the rain might return (it is still April, after all), I got up and out pretty quickly.

One of the lilacs – it turned out – I had actually done a bit of pruning to last summer, but there were two others in need of some serious attention.    One had actually suffered a bit of winter damage from the fall of a large maple branch, so a little re-shaping was required.   But before long, the lilacs were in good shape and I was turning my attention to the four or five hydrangeas in the yard, pruning off last year’s dried flower heads and shaping the branches which are bursting with fresh leaf buds.

Oh, the sun was bright and warm yesterday -  I was a little surprised around noontime when I started shedding layers to cool down.   One the hydrangeas were done, I was on to pulling/raking assorted debris out of the rest of the gardens.

I recently found some more old bricks – and during the rainy part of Saturday discovered another ample supply of them elsewhere – so I’ve also started edging the rest of the gardens around the house with them, which should reduce the creep of the grass back into the garden (and maybe reduce the need for so much weeding) while making them look a little more tidy and fabulous.

Raking the lawn is an on-going project, what with all the thatch built up from last year’s drought, but the progress yesterday was good.   I finished my efforts for the afternoon with some lawn mowing, having recently had the blades on my reel mower adjusted.

All in all, it was a good weekend of yard work.  I enjoyed spending so much time outside and found that Sunday’s efforts brought a little color to my pasty winter complexion, just as the tulips and daffodils are doing the same for the landscape.

Wishing you sunny days!

I don’t look forward to Earth Day anymore.    Two years ago, I went for a walk on a sunny morning in late April and discovered a days-old development newly carved out of a patch of woods by the bayshore.  Lots for Sale.    The splendid yellow bulldozer still lingered on the scene, the air still toxic with the fumes of the macadam cul-de-sac.

Then last spring, I turned on the radio and heard about an oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, the start of a summer’s long environmental crisis in that part of the world.   This year, Earth Day is still a week or so away and we have sewage plant disks that will linger on our shorelines probably as long as that pesky little radiation problem in Japan will be a devilment over there.    They sent work crews down to the Cape last week to clean up the disks, but there are still plenty to be found.    If I’d gone for the close-up, I have no doubt you’d find half a dozen in this photo below.    Hidden pictures, anyone?

Fortunately, April is also about rebirth.    Everywhere you look, there’s a slow motion fireworks display getting underway, with bright colors bursting out of almost every corner of the landscape.    Nature’s cycle begins anew, growing fresh green over the scars of the past and rewarding the faith of gardeners everywhere.

In the last week we seem to have turned a corner with our weather.   Our temperatures are just a little warmer, now.  This past weekend, we slept with windows open for the first time, the peepers in the surrounding wetlands singing us off with a springtime lullabye.   Oh, what a treat!

Pansies have appeared on the landscape, too, on plywood display racks in front of nurseries and groceries and garden centers everywhere.

A hanging basket of assorted colors was my first purchase this year, but just the thing to encourage me out onto the deck to re-install the first of the shepherd’s crooks.

Similarly, it was purchasing a whole flat of pansies in a range of purple-blues and tiny violas in yellow for contrast that got me to start raking out beds and cleaning up the lawn.   There’s an extra layer of thatch to be teased free after last year’s droughtiness, but the raked spots green up so nice, it’s worth the effort.   The robins stalk my progress, digging worms out of the ground where I’ve been.  Cardinals sing down the sun as I rake.

It feels so good to be outside, to be finding everything coming back to life:   the tulips that will be blooming before long, the heliotrope which will tower shortly thereafter.    All the perennials are lush and green looking, as I clear away the debris of last season and the leaves which gathered through the winter’s storms.  I think it’s fun to put on the yard’s happy face at the start of the season, as I consider all the possibilities that lie ahead.
The signs of the season are all around us.   All of the different blackbird varieties have now returned, their presence noted in and around feeders.  Last weekend, a convention of raptors was spotted overhead in our yard, seven or eight of them.    They were up pretty high and we weren’t trying too hard to identify them, but the likeliest suspects are red-tailed hawks, ospreys and/or turkey vultures.    Down on the ground, chipmunks are beginning to scamper about, cautious of the danger overhead, but eager to find food.

This young flicker has been advertising his baser instincts by jackhammering against the vinyl siding right behind where I sit at the computer each sunny morning this week.   You’d think this would give him a wicked headache, but this is how his people attract the attention of a pretty young girl flicker.  There’s a whole family of flickers visiting the yard this spring, in fact.   I’ve seen one or two in the past, but they have apparently found something to bring them back here with their growing family.

You can be sure that I am not the only one who’s noticing the change in the seasons.   Spring (and no doubt the scent of all those birds) has most certainly gotten into to the nose of my roommate and we have been re-introducing after-dinner walks around the yard into our evening routine this week.

My pal Badum is always happy to get out and do a little exploring, but especially so at the end of a long winter (but not all thaaaat long, as we did manage one of these walks one surprisingly-warm day in early January).   It’s fun to see a different side of his personality when we get outside and I try to stay out of his line of sight, when possible, to give him the authentic “I’m outside on my own” experience.   I sometimes suspect he’s as pleased to have some protection from that large birds we now-and-then see overhead.

Anyway, it’s mostly about him finding the kind of grass he likes to nibble on best.   Once in a while, tho, something catches his eye, like the black cat he spotted lurking in the woods at the back of our property tonight.    Fortunately, he didn’t bolt, since he might easily have escaped the harness and I used that…and the falling dark…to justify the end of the evening’s explorations.

Still, it is loads of fun to get out there and see the world through his eyes.   I never know just what it is we’ll find.   For instance, it was the Gardener’s Cat who pointed out the wild white violets which were quietly starting to bloom at the feet of our aging catawba tree.    Amusingly enough, he seems not to have a clue that a family of squirrels have been seen building a home inside.

“Hoe while it is spring, and enjoy the best anticipations.

It is not much matter if things do not turn out well.”

~ Charles Dudley Warner

Now that we’ve Sprung Ahead, P and I have been getting ourselves into some nice late afternoon walking habits, getting ourselves to the bay and back a few nights a week.   After a long and sometimes lazy winter, the exercise feels good and its so nice to be out there in the fresh air.    Our route offers all kinds of wildlife viewing possibilities, what with geese and ducks and herons in the  marsh and all sorts of shoreline wildlife once we reach the bay and we never know quite what we’ll encounter.

Anyone who’s walked along the shore knows that all kinds of things wash up in the seaweed left by high tide.    Sometimes we fill our pockets with pretty shells or pebbles or interesting bits of driftwood.   As often as not, there’s a dead fish or bird or crab in the wrack, but all kinds of brightly colored evidence of Man, too.    Just the other night, for not the first time, we bemoaned not having remembered to bring trash bags to collect some of the garbage that floats up.

Really, it’s how the whole tidal marsh system works:   the high tide carries in all the refuse of the sea, which is filtered out of the water by the tall marsh grasses, which then settles and builds up the layers that form a salt marsh, and eventually more land.  Sort of a compensation for erosion elsewhere.   Of course the system was designed to address and recycle organic materials, not all the plastic cast-offs our culture creates.   All kinds of stuff washes up on the bay shore, which is why Provincetown artist Jay Critchley‘s been making art of washed-up tampon applicators for years.

But then we heard about the disks.   Somehow the story only got out into the media this weekend, even though the original incident happened back on March 6th:    a sewage treatment plant in New Hampshire experienced an “escape” of some 4 to 8 million of these little two inch disks, which are used to filter bacteria out of waste water.

What a convenient word, “escape”, excusing everyone responsible by imbuing these filty plastic filters with a desire to break out of captivity and taste freedom.    Here’s the whole story.

Probably not the whole story, though.    After I posted a link about this “local”/regional story on Facebook this evening, Jess pointed out that a seemingly-identical “escape” occurred at a sewage treatment plant in Westchester County on the very same day, causing those discs to begin washing up on Long Island’s North Shore beaches now.  That nearly identical story is found here.

So WTF is the real story, eh?   Is it just mass simultaneous incompetence?   I suppose that’s easy enough to believe.   But now I wonder if there are other coastal communities experiencing similar things from their moron-operated sewage treatment plant.   My personal conspiracy theory so far falls short in imagining some appropriately-nefarious “real reason” behind these little disks’ great adventure, but it must be something bad.   As if trashing our precious waters isn’t bad enough.

In any case, we are assured they are harmless.   Isn’t it funny how often we hear that song anymore these days…?   The disks, they say, have spent enough time in the water that there’s no more bacteria to worry about.    Just as we hear there’s no reason to worry about the radiation, it’s blowing out to sea.    We ask so much of our oceans.

Having heard on the radio this morning that these discs were beginning to find their way onto our shores, tonight we armed ourselves with gloves and trashbags and when our walk brought us to the shore, we began looking around for the things.    At first, we didn’t spot them.   But then we began to see them everywhere.

We collected discs for about an hour, adding deep knee bends and squat thrusts to our regular walking exercise, as we teased apart the piles of seaweed along the wrackline, finding them full of discs and all sorts of other manmade debris.    Dead cigarette lighters, a flashlight, various bits of rope and netting, twisted tangles of pretty colored ribbon attached to now-dead latex balloons, tampon applicators, ToGo containers and Starbucks cups, golf balls and condoms (both used and unused, apparently), plastic water bottles, that little plastic ring you peel off your milk that the cat likes to play with, fishing lures and miscellaneous plastic bits and discs, everywhere we looked more discs.    Augh.

Wouldn’t you hate it if you lived in one of these shells and then these things washed up in your front yard?

After picking along the shoreline for an hour, we’d each collected hundreds of the things, along with all that other debris.    It was a good hour or so of work, and as the sun sank it was getting colder and the tide was creeping in, pushing the dampness ahead of it.

It was time to stop, but so frustrating to do so.   The tide would just bring in more and move around the ones we hadn’t gotten to back into the spots we cleaned.    A couple of hundred discs that felt like an accomplishment a few minutes before seems suddenly a drop in a bucket of 4 to 8 million.

All along the beach are still hundreds, probably thousands of them.    They are washing up on beaches all along the bayshore and have been found on the oceanside beaches, as well.    If conditions are right, some could catch a ride on the Gulf Stream and find their way to Europe.

We’re going back again after work tomorrow and we’ll see what we can accomplished.    We’re hoping we’ll see more people there, so if you’re on the Cape (or the North Shore, for that matter), grab some gloves and a bag and come join us.   Or go to some other beach near you.   It sounds like there’s plenty to go around and though it’s frustrating work, every bit helps.

If only we could get everyone to show up at the beach and pick up a few.    It would start to put a dent into the millions.    As we worked, we pondered aloud the idea that  you could get more people to come help out if you presented the possibility of winning prizes for the number of discs collected.    What a shame it comes down to bribery.   You’d think it’d be more clear that cleaning up our environment is its own reward.

Whoever cleans up the most trash gets to save the Planet.    OK, go!