Last week at work was quiet enough that I'd been leaving work with enough time to go out to Sebago. Of course I wrote up my full-moon paddle; the other days, I hadn't gotten going early enough to paddle, but I still went out & messed around with my garden. We had had a dry spell, it was pretty warm, I had some very new seedlings that were either sprouting or had been transplanted the week before, so I wanted to water & weed. I'm finding that that's a nice way to spend the part of the evening with light.
This week's been a bit of a different story. The fiscal year at the Really Big Children's Publishing Company follows the school year - unfortunately that doesn't translate into "yaaaay! school's out 'til September!", especially in the finance division. No, that translates into "Time to close the books on the old year, and open the new year!"
So I've been working some long hours. We had that all-day drenching on Monday, so I figured they'd be fine on Tuesday. Yesterday, I was finishing off a little too late to make it out to Canarsie before dark, but I did want to see how things looked.
So I made a highly uncharacteristic decision to get up a couple of hours early & go do a little gardening before work.
Oh...btw, I think I said here that I was going to stop using the word "gardening" until I stopped killing everything I planted?
Well -- check it out! My bed is definitely lagging behind the beds of the more experienced gardeners, but things are actually growing now!
The parakeets were of course up and working away already. There's a new entrance on the side of the nest - I only saw one bird at any given time, but I wonder if the new door means that our nest has gone from single-family to duplex?
A few more pictures, not of my bed, but of another bed that turns out to be pretty specialized. This bed belongs to Professor M., who was telling me about it on Sunday, when I'd stopped by the club to water & weed & also drop off some gear I'd taken home for the safety class.
I knew that she was one of the club's birdwatchers from other days in the garden, or on the water - but it turns out that birds are not the only winged things she loves -
Her garden is a butterfly garden! There's a little basin of water, and all sorts of plants that butterflies love. This, for example, is a dill plant, which she said is a favorite plant of the black swallowtail - and as she said it, she was pointing out the tiniest caterpillar! I never would have spotted it on my own, but she knew what to look for.
She said that the caterpillars could end up eating most of the dill eventually - but she doesn't like dill that much, so that's OK with her!
Here was the caterpillar this morning. Twice the size and much easier to spot; it's still less than an inch long, though.
Good morning, indeed. Only tough part was coming to work after that - it would have been such a lovely day to play hooky!
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