The Females Who Saved Me From Myself

I have cried and sighed with Anne of Green Gables.
I have loved and wondered with Anne Frank.
I have lamented Scarlett O'Hara's self-centered ego but applauded her stamina and wished I had her waist.
I admired Nancy Drew and her fearless independence and money.
I learned determination and stubborn argumentative ways from Jo March.
I wanted Karen Blixen's sense of adventure.
I helped Charlotte weave her web and fell in love with Wilber.
I wanted Rima's ethereal presence in her Green Mansions.
I wanted Elspeth Huxley's childhood and powers of observation.

I am sure there are more as this was a stream of consciousness post, but these were ones I read when I was younger (Teens and Twenties) that influenced me the most.

Who are some female characters, fiction or non-fiction, in the land of books that influenced you in as a teen or young adult?

King Arthur, Spoiled Brat

Arthur came rushing up like a banshee getting angrier and angrier with its temper tantrum until it hit the shore and colder waters.  It was almost as if it had been punched in the nose as it slowed and moved back out to sea.  It completely avoided my little pocket of land on the Eastern shore.  A cool weather front met Arthur's challenge and we now have spring weather for a few days.  Sweater weather...almost.

On the down side we got only a tenth of an inch of rain and winds too strong to go out in a boat.  We headed down  to the local town for an old-fashioned fireworks show being surprised that parking was not full and there were still many places to set up chairs on the church lawn.  We had not seen the fireworks from the land side and asked a dear old lady (younger than me probably) sitting on a folding chair about the best vantage points.  She explained the fireworks had been postponed and she was just waiting for her family who had decided to walk around town before sunset.

A number of years ago a restaurant fire on this island coupled with heavy winds almost burned down the entire town as firefighters worked desperately to bring it under control.  The tally was only two buildings lost and some smoke damage.  With the wind causing unpredictable drifts that evening, fireworks had to be exploded another day.

I am no longer a child and was happy just to get out for a bit and then back home.

Re-entry

I, like many of my readers, do not like programmed vacations filled with artificial entertainment.  I did like the Williamsburg visit.  They had a game for young historians called RevQuest where they use clues, decoder charts and talks with staff in costume throughout the historic town.  The children and young adults pretend they are spies for America working with the French during the revolution.  They meet in secret places and wear a scarf so staff know they are spies. They have to text messages from cell phones to get confirmation when they think they have solved a part of the puzzle.   I do not think this part of history gets enough promotion.  Oldest grandson, who loves puzzles, did very well.

Re-entry after our week away was a slow process as I caught an intestinal and other illness (probably from sharing water bottle with granddaughter or visiting two 'amusement parks') and had to schedule an appointment for antibiotics yesterday.  I actually enjoyed sitting around and reading and going through the mail and sitting close to the bathroom and not seeing the problems in the yard yesterday.

Gardeners are the type of people who would rather stay home during the growing season than go off and explore some other parts of the world.  It was daughter who chose this time of year and because we want very much to be with them, we agreed.  We came back to a lot (A LOT) of rabbit devastation.  Almost every one of my sunflowers, some over 6 feet tall, brought down by little teeth.  We were not there to spray with a noxious minty smell every few days and they discovered that sunflowers and parsley were not mint but a delicious breakfast and dinner!  They also dug under the fence of our vegetable garden and we have had a real set back with almost everything planted except the tomatoes, of course.  Fortunately gardeners have a strong heart.

On the plus side, the five bluebirds have hatched and are being fed by mom and dad throughout the day.  Feeding five!!  That keeps you busy.

I did take a short time to visit the used book store in the store area of Williamsburg and purchased a collection of poems by Pablo Neruda, motivated by my recent read of "Paula" by Isabelle Allende, and a memoir written by Katheryn Hepburn on the making of "African Queen" which is one of my FAVORITE movies.

 

Today we begin to move deck and patio chairs and small items to prepare for the tropical storm that is heading up our way. I have many photos to process.  Actually I took less than 500 for the whole week, so I am getting more precise in what I want to take.  I have a house to clean.  We are picking quarts of red raspberries which are not being totally removed by birds and squirrels.  I have to make an apple raspberry pie and hubby is putting up pints of raspberry jam.  I have to do all this before we may lose electricity in the next day or two!!

A Summary

Did you ever stop and look at yourself in the moment and think ... "I never thought I would be this cliche." ?  Perhaps most of us like to think we are unique and a multi-prismed person of fascinating interests and activities.  We are thus different from the masses.  Yet, I  must admit that I am not.

I am one side of a set of grandparents that own a time share that is movable.  I am one of a set that vacations with grandchildren in all the traditional places such as beaches, cottages by lakes, amusement parks, major historical monuments. I am one of a set that loads a car to the brim and overflowing with bicycles, towels, coolers, snacks, games, drinks and DVDs.  One of those people I used to observe never thinking I was anywhere like that.  (Just look at that knobby-kneed grandma attempting to fit one more cooler into the back of that van!  Look at that balding man trying to get his bike lock around both old bikes!)

I have a son-in-law and daughter who manage to program every single hour of every single day on a family vacation.  We can go to a place that my husband and I went to years ago and see far more of it than I ever knew was there!  Of course, much of it is geared for a younger audience and that is why we bypassed it.

Son-in-law is adamant that every single thrill ride MUST be experienced.  He does push to include the kids, but since they are young he cannot get them on EVERY ride.  He is into mathematical data and knows which one has the most turns or goes the highest or has the biggest drop and maintains a memory list of those he has experienced as closely as a birder keeps his life list.  As he described a ride I would be terrified.

Of course time must be left to stand in lines (they were very short this year) for rides that barely move but make the small kids think they are running the show. 

And grandparents forced time to be left for the animal shows, the stage shows and the diving shows.  With the price of tickets we felt these shows were really high end and professional. 

No, it isn't Broadway...it IS an amusement park.

Daughter wants to hit the TravelAdvisor's top rated restaurants and we include as many as we can within limited budgets and small children's tastes.  Both parents set aside an evening to hit the outlets.  Son-in-law got several free vouchers for the golf course so he worked that into the very end of the day and skipped a few dinners with us.

Hubby really wants to be anywhere on the water, but when he cannot do that he is happy with a history lesson or two or just spending 20 minutes talking to the stranger next in line.  His neck surgery means he can no longer go on crazy rides, but his ego is small and he will ride the smallest of rides with grandson.

We did sleep in every morning until about 8:00 and then were out of the unit by 9:30 and not home again until after 7:00.  I was amazed and glad that the little ones had no melt-downs and were able to keep up with their parents.  It was a very telling time when the oldest boy, nine, did say on the last day he was looking forward to getting home as he was getting tired of going to "fun places."  When I commented that they were so upper middle class, I did get a surprised look from Dad.

Never knew I would be one of those folks who go on master vacations.  I used to be the weekend camper.  Times change.

Winding Down

Our week's vacation with three little ones and their parents located near an amusement park, a water park,  and four historical parks is winding down this morning.  Got up early and packed food and clothes.

Hubby is cooking banana pancakes, two little ones are already eating them and the third is playing his recorder...three songs he knows well...over and over and over.

There are swim goggles, board games and DVDs scattered in various corners throughout this two bedroom time share.

Parents are busy in their bedroom sorting clothing and charger cords and packing bags.

I have got the two kids set up to eat and am now quickly blogging while waiting for the dryer to buzz, but now I have to go and check on little ones eating once again.

On the way out we will hit Williamsburg village one last time.  I hope to check out the used book store there which is one of my favorite places to browse.  Us old people like old books!

Check in later.

Drowning in activities

Sunrise to sunset working on a schedule.  Spending time with schedule junkies, amusement park junkies, restaurant junkies, swimming pool junkies and one history junkie.

No time to blog, but maybe tonight will read some other blogs!

Give It Your Best Shot and Then Get a Beer

Good, better, best,
Never let it rest,
Until the good is better,
And the better is best.

Or....if it is not your life at stake,
You can accept the reality that you are not perfect.
You can accept the reality that you are somewhere in the middle.
You can accept the reality that you have lots of company.

You can accept the reality that while we honor and love the best in us and others, we feel most comfortable with someone who gave it their best shot and then can laugh about it when they missed the target.

Or, perhaps accept it was the wrong target after all?

Just Naysaying

I am tired of the naysayers.  Those who are the first to tell us why we cannot do something to fix something to test new waters.  Those who are the first to state how and why it will not work before giving it a real chance.  Those who offer no alternative but more of the same.

We cannot make school lunches healthier with more fruits and vegetables because the kids won't eat them and the school districts cannot afford the expense.  (Yet we seem to be able to afford the health consequences of obesity in our population years down the road.)

We cannot restrict the air pollution with newer laws because it will cost jobs and raise the cost of heating fuel.  Yet we can afford to listen to children have asthma attacks every evening and afford to give them more medicine, and perhaps watch them die an early death. 

We cannot expect cities to survive on solar panels as they are too expensive.  Some costs are projected at $30,000 per house!  Yet we can afford the endless resources needed to inject precious fresh water and chemicals into the ground and bring up finite fossil fuels, a process that also results in the release of carcinogenic chemicals into the air into nearby neighborhoods.  (I will also mention the idiot Congressional Representative who claimed we would diminish the winds on this earth by using wind power and thus make the earth warmer.  Please do not re-elect him.)

We cannot enforce laws that make men behave like civilized human beings, and if they do not, take away their guns, but we can expect women to carry their car keys as weapons on the way to parking lots, and know that the laws cannot assure them they will not be attacked by a male they know.  And we will make sure women are questioned on where they were, why they were there, why that time of day or night, what they were drinking, and how they were dressed during the attack.

We cannot expect students to be given reasonable loans for their college education because it would hurt the economy to socialize such a program and help future citizens get advanced education, but we can expect that large corporations get very reasonable loan rates on their HUGE federal loans after they destroyed the economy and created massive job loss.

We cannot socialize medicine, because although it works quite well in many, many other countries, in our country it will put the decisions of living or dying in the hands of state and federal bureaucrats and not the profit motivated insurance companies where it now lies, and of course, it will cost just too much.

I am happy to see that other countries such as Australia, Denmark, and the Scandinavian countries are moving forward on both social and economic fronts and proving us wrong.  Years from now they will be the standard for an advanced society and we will be the joke if we do not change our ways and put all of our people before the shameful profits of the oligarchy.

But then again we can just stimulate our economy by getting involved in another 1,000 year war as one Senator is promoting.

Traveling with Tabor, Norman Rockwell Style

I was going to avoid posting travel photos, because I do tend to feel a little like Betty White who when discovering that people posted their travel photos on Facebook explained that during her younger years "Seeing pictures of people's vacations was considered a punishment."  Some of you remember those slide shows at neighbor's houses?

Well, it appears some of you are masochists and wanted a more visual version of my recent trip with family.  Because I want you to think we are just a really happy, wholesome, all American family I have filtered out all the bad stuff on the photos.  ;-)  The filters are from some free software I downloaded off the Internet (Xero) and other filters from software I own.

We did not walk into the campground, as someone asked.  With all the stuff we brought in the back of three cars, that would have been a real effort.  We drove right up to the front doors of the three cabins (one off to the right in the photo below.)

We did take one small hike down the hill to the Blackwater Falls.

We did take one ride up to the top of one mountain on a ski lift and found it was the best place to have a picnic.  What a view!!

We did check out the yellow of buttercups and we did blow dandelion heads all over the place.  (Isn't this just so Norman Rockwell?)

The only source of water was from the well and the kids made a game of it!  What was wrong with those pioneer children who considered it a chore?

We sat around a campfire and played songs...so romantic.

We took a small hike to the nearby fire lookout.  Some of us ran and some of us sauntered toward our view from the tops of spruce trees.  One side was hidden in clouds and the other side gave us the view we were looking for.

While I told you we got lost...it was in pastoral fields of spring green!!

There, have I painted this trip as a perfect experience?

Long Weekend

Last weekend we celebrated Father's Day, yes, early.  My daughter had planned a long weekend away in a (another) state campground at some rustic cabins knowing that my husband loved being in the outdoors hiking all day and then sitting around a campfire as the sun set and dinner was cooked over an open fire.  My daughter, who has a very demanding job as a director of some such or other and is the mother of three all under nine, planned all the activities, made the reservations, planned the menus, and packed all the food, and packed all the stuff needed for her three children as well.  This cannot be my gene pool, but perhaps I can ride the thrilling tail of this rocket.  My son and his wife also joined us.

We always have S'mores (graham crackers, campfire toasted marshmallows and chocolate sections all put together like a sandwich) for dessert in the summer if there is a fire.   But this time daughter saw one of those new Pinterest ideas and also packed some sugar cones, miniature marshmallows, chocolate chips and sliced strawberries and whole bananas to slice.  When the oldest grandson saw all this chocolate and sweet stuff he said gleefully, "Wow.  This isn't going to be a very healthy camping trip!"  We filled the cones with the above, wrapped them in heavy duty foil and then placed them on the very warm coals at the end of our meal of foil dinners (meat, veggies, etc.) to heat up for a few minutes before dessert.  They were delicious and cool enough to be handheld!

I could post a bunch of photos to prove all the fun we had on trails, on rocky outlooks, at the top of spruce forests and at one huge waterfall, but instead I will tell you that we went to the mountains of West Virginia and got lost several times on winding dusty roads with no signs before we found our cabins tucked away in some lone valley.  When we reached the campground we struggled for some time before we got the lock combination on the road gate to work so that we could get in.  Hubby forgot the fire starters, but being a former Eagle Scout he managed to get enough twigs, with grandchildren help,  to start a great campground fire.  Son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter were the only ones who could carry a tune while son played his guitar, but it still made for a lovely accompaniment to our evening fire sitting.  And one little mouse managed to eat through the plastic cooking oil container during the night which kept me a bit awake in my sleeping bag in the dark and otherwise silent cabin.  We still managed to end up smiling all the way there and back.

Some of the pretty photos of the great outdoors will go on my other blog.

See Ya.

Not blogging since I was away for the long weekend because I had a bunch of laundry to do, a bunch of email to delete, a bunch of bills to pay and then all got interrupted by this after the morning storm.

The big culprit, the 30 foot pine tree, had been leaning for a year after the last storm and so when he finally gave his last sigh this morning he brought down a locust, a dogwood and a maple in front of him!!  At least he left my bay shrub and the little landscape bed safe.

We are busy cutting wood, and hauling branches.  See you later.

Getting More Zen

More on the theme of my prior posts, living and dying.

I had a big crush on a certain guy in my younger years and this conversation written by his daughter when she questioned him about death and heaven and ever seeing her grandparents...his parents... again reflects his character and soul and is probably why I felt so inspired when watching his show:

"“You are alive right this second. That is an amazing thing,” they told me. When you consider the nearly infinite number of forks in the road that lead to any single person being born, they said, you must be grateful that you’re you at this very second. Think of the enormous number of potential alternate universes where, for example, your great-great-grandparents never meet and you never come to be. Moreover, you have the pleasure of living on a planet where you have evolved to breathe the air, drink the water, and love the warmth of the closest star. You’re connected to the generations through DNA — and, even farther back, to the universe, because every cell in your body was cooked in the hearts of stars. We are star stuff, my dad famously said, and he made me feel that way."

The man, of course, was Carl Sagan, a magical, happy, elf of a man who loved his universe.  The newer version of a Cosmos explorer, Neil deGrasse Tyson, is more of a teddy bear type who can scare you ever so slightly with his passion for knowledge.  Yet, I feel safe with him as a guide through this universe, as well.

Thus, when thinking about death, I think about Carl Sagan and I get more Zen about life. 

Tick-Tock---How Do You Measure Time?

Two months ago one of our volunteers started giving so much of her time to the various group's projects.  When I asked about it to a friend, I was told that her husband had died recently without any warning.

My neighbor emailed me last month that the bearded man that jogs down our road every evening from another neighborhood had died of a heart attack.

My dear husband had his fishing trip cancelled two weeks ago because his fishing buddy had a "little" heart attack and is now awaiting surgery on that.

My neighbor on the right side needs to have back surgery to alleviate some serious pain, but he has to have surgery on an embolism near his heart first.

I missed the busy sound of the neighbor on my left side this week and find from a phone call from his wife that he had a "hard" pearl shaped blockage in an artery and had to have bypass surgery.  He is still in a lot of pain.

I used to joke with my husband that if he kept going down to check on his trees in the ravine he needed to let me know because he could pass out and I would never know where he was.  This is no longer a joke. I admit that I think about how I would deal with life if he passed on before me.  I envision we have decades ahead of us, but no one really knows how much time they have, do they?  I wonder if I would have the strength I see in the women around me and the bloggers in front of me.

(About fifteen years ago I told my son at dinner that I hated when the phone rang because I was afraid that one of my parents had passed on.  He looked at me with that insightful realization we all get at sometime in our lives. Both parents have since passed on, but I still hate the sound of the phone ringing in the early evening or at night. )

The Greatest Generation

She is small and wrinkled like a blonde raisen, with dark button eyes intense in their observation of those heads close to hers.  There is a small permanent smile on the 87-year-old face.  And she has shrunk again this year becoming more like a house mouse.

I move gently around her, afraid I might break that fragile frame with a bump.  She moves with less care and faster than one expects through the crowd of our peers.  She earned her first college degree the year I was born which intimidates me in no small way.  What magic I wish I had to have seen the fire in those intense eyes when she was 20.

She also brings something tremendously delicious to each meeting.  Something that tastes as if it came from an award winning European bakery.  Something with chocolate and buttercream and that has more calories than she carries in that tiny body, and yet, she dares to call herself a nutritionist!

She approaches me with a miniscule frown between her brows and takes a deep breath before she thrusts the paper beneath my nose and begins her questions and critical comments and barely waits for my response to each.  Then without pause she turns toward her next victim and throws a smile over her shoulder as she comments, "Well, just so you understand for next time!" and she shuffles on.  I would lose in a debate with her hands down.

She has three beautiful daughters who are leaders in their own great generations and all stand a head above her as if they were well-selected hybrids of her gene pool.  Had she been born in Germany during the great war, her gene pool would have been ended on her way to synagogue.  None of us would have felt her ripples on the water of the community she graces.

Last week she won a prestigious award for the giving of her time.  Her mother and grandmother lived to 103, so she is not done yet!

That Is Not Fair

There were interesting comments on my prior post.  I just wanted to clarify that I was not against the Afghan immigrants moving here, working here, and going to school here, and of course, spending money here!  I am assuming that those who waited on me were citizens of the United States although still having close ties to their homeland.  That freedom is what makes this country great.  Yes, we have those Americans who are prejudiced against these folks and that really came to the foreground after 9/11.  But we also have laws that protect them against most of that.

I just keep trying to get my mind around helping a country that has a large wealthy class while our middle class is shrinking.

I just had problems with the dichotomy of having so many of our college graduates not finding jobs and carrying college loans with a Congress that does not seem to care to support our own college students while voting for a war.

I have problems with our soldiers families living on food stamps after protecting Afghans from an invasion in their country with a U.S. Congress that has vetoed several veteran's support bills this past year that may have also avoided this health care issue.

I guess I also was having trouble with life not being fair.  But then...when has it ever been?

City Conversations

I was at a LARGE eyeglasses shop trying to select new frames for my new prescription.  I update my glasses about once every 5 or 6 years because insurance covers such a small part and I tend to like only those designer frames.  I think eyeglass frames are the biggest rip-offs on the face of the planet and if I had decided to be a designer, that is the direction I would have headed.

But this is not about my going slowly blind and broke.  This is about the people one meets on that journey. 

On my drive to the large shopping center with the large eyeglass store (I spend way to much time the country and am impressed by size) I noticed an unusual number of women wearing headdress in hijabs walking along the roadways and in the housing areas as I approached the mall.  These were the traditional dark lengthy coverings with neutral head covers...not the exotic mysterious clothing where only netted space for eyes is allowed.  They were all ages, some alone and some in groups.  It reminded me years ago when shopping this same mall I rarely heard English spoken in the stores.  I rarely heard any accent I recognized spoken although all the shoppers were at that time all in western dress.

Now I see many Middle Eastern people in western and traditional dress wandering the mall.  The eyeglass store employed ONLY Mid-Eastern people, all dark skinned, dark haired, dramatic looking people speaking with Mid-Eastern accents. 

When I had selected my expensive eye wear and handed the tray to one of the clerks, she bubbled brightly helping me choose among the selection as hubby has not a clue.  As we measured my eyes, talked about the gazillion choices in lens types she was most friendly before turning me over to a young man for the sale.  He and I discussed  discounts, insurance, and warrenty and as we waited for the computer to change screens, I said something about data and expressed that probably the NSA was inputting my eye prescription to their database and that was the slow-down. 

The young man with a mustache and wearing glasses looked away from the computer screen and smiled and said (he had little or no accent) that he was sure the NSA was tracking him and his computer and phone calls.

I asked if he thought that was because he was from the Mid-East.  He responded that "No." he had been born in Connecticut, but his mother was from Afghanistan and currently worked as a contractor for the US Army and was in Afghanistan translating.  We talked briefly about the book "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled  Hosseini and "In My Father's Country" by Saima Wahab, the latter a true story about a woman who was doing what his mother was doing. Like US Southern writers, Middle-Eastern writers have their unique style which means they tend to have a rich way of describing things and a great complexity in their characters.

The flamboyant, dramatic looking woman returned at the end of the sale to measure me for sunglass frames which were next on my way into debt.  Since we had been chatting so comfortably about love and marriage and having children...something us old folks can get young folks to do...I asked why there were so many people from Afghanistan in this area.  She responded that the Afghan government paid for them to go to school here, paid for their airfare, their schooling, their living expense and their health care!  She could not explain why this area was the one selected, but we were close to DC so that might have something to do with it.  Clearly they brought their large families along.

I could not help but feel chagrined that we send our young men and women to live in tents, eat canned or dried food, and risk their lives every day, so that these very wealthy citizens of another country can come here.

It did not ease the sour feeling in my gut when upon leaving I passed a beautiful young woman in a flowing pastel silk hijab sitting on a bench in the mall center using her cell phone which was attached to a huge jewel-encrusted chain around her neck looking like someone who belonged on Rodeo Drive in California...or more likely in a nightclub in the Mid-East.

The Worker Bee Takes a Nap

This photo below illustrates what this worker bee feels like as my days start to open up with more time.

I find a cool green place and just collapse and stare into the sun.

Or perhaps, I am more like this Naval Cadet below but weigh a few more pounds.

By afternoons I do look like my grandson.

And yet wish I was more like my granddaughter!

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Not What One Would Think

(This post is lengthy but important so please take time to read it all the way through.)

I am pretty sure that the average person has a pre-conceived idea of what a Master Gardener is.  Perhaps you think they are people who know the names of 99% of the plants in a garden, people who know what soil Ph is by looking at it, people who have answers to every disease or pest problem in your garden, and people who have truly lovely yards.  Well, you are wrong, wrong, wrong.  Yes a very few Master Gardeners can fit into this mold above, but most are really environmentalists with a tendency to like learning about science and a lot like you in other ways.  Their lives are busy and they get distracted and they make mistakes in their yards.  But, having written that, I admit that I got a little anal before having 12 Master Gareners come to look at my yard for an evaluation on whether it was Bay Wise ... good planting decisions to improve water quality for our rivers and bays.

Wanted colleagues to see my yard in the spring when things are blooming and weeds have not taken over.

I am the type of gardener that just lets stuff grow when and where it likes after I plant it.  This is the Master Gardener hodge podge bed.  I almost lost all of this dianthus to moles but soaked the bed with a mixture of cod liver oil and soap and that seemed to discourage them this year.

Master Gardener yards can range from floral displays to woodland hollows, to a simple lawn and vegetable garden.  They do view yard work as therapy and prefer that to watching TV.  They do have a love of eating fruits and vegetables and tend to be purists if these are not freshly picked.  They do tend to avoid planting exotics that can be invasives.  You will not find a butterfly bush (Buddleia) in a Master Gardener's yard.  Yes, we love butterflies.  But this bush is somewhat invasive (in 8 states), does not provide any food for the larva of butterflies and other beneficial insects although it does provide nectar.  Therefore, why not plant something that allows butterfly babies to grow? I will not ask you to dig up your butterfly bush, but please do not plant more when there are other shrubs that are good for butterflies.  (It is a controversial plant but I tend to agree with this lady.)

I had to wait sometime before I would allow Master Gardeners to judge my garden as to whether it would pass the Bay Wise test.  The test is really easy to pass, but I did not want them to see the mistakes I had made.  I dug up my butterfly bush, my black bamboo (it was lovely for 4 years before it started to take off), and all of the Miscanthus (a tall grass that looks very lovely but is also invasive and is not eaten by deer and seeds are not eaten by birds.)  Some nurseries will tell you they sell a non-invasive version of this grass...yeah, they tend to say that about a LOT of plants.  They also sell or sold thousands of ornamental pear trees for subdivisions and road sides that were supposed to be sterile and they can be found growing extensively along the edges of roads and highways in the mid-Atlantic.  (We do have a native Miscanthus but no one sells it.)

In the photo above was the last invasive I had yet to remove (red arrow).  It is isolated but still spread seeds in the cracks which I have to pull.  It is Catmint Walker's Low.  Yes it is related to the mint family and that is why it is an invasive.  It spreads by seeds and runners.  It has the most beautiful blue fringey flowers each summer  and gets to stay one more year until I can find something that is the same color, shape and bloom time.

If you research you can find nurseries that sell native plants and can tell you where they grow best.  Yes, SOME natives are as invasive as some non-natives, but you can feel less guilty and know that there are natural predators.

Above two photos show my ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolias).  This one is a cultivar as it is lime green and tends to be smaller than the 8 feet high version.  It is native, tolerates a huge range of soils and moisture levels, and blooms in May, and makes a lovely hedge or single mounding plant when trimmed.  Called ninebark because the bark exfoliates.  NOTE not everything in my yard is native.

I was judged on whether I encouraged wildlife.  I have bird houses, piles of broken branches, bird baths, and hummingbird feeders and lots of downed trees as food for everything under the sun.  We do not (actually in my area ... another post...CANNOT) bring down dying or dead trees (example is second photo below).  In the photo immediately above the right arrow is pointing to my butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) related to the milkweed.  I thought the winter had killed this native.  It is hard to grow from seed, but I will keep trying.  It is one of the few plants that the larva of Queen and Monarch butterflies eat.  Butterflies and humming birds love it.

Above photos are NOT the ugly.  The compost container which hubby waters and shovels monthly from side to side makes the best compost for top dressing of our gardens in the fall.  We have a jar in the kitchen for all scraps except animal products that go into this area along with shredded leaves and grass that we add later in the summer.  Right now all grass is mowed with a mulching blade and returned to the lawn.  Yes, it makes for messy walking and grass clippings in the house, but it is much healthier for the lawn.  Beyond that is a pile of weedy roots that we hope to cook through out the summer.  And then in the far end is the weeds that need to be burned and cannot go into the compost pile.  I learned from this recent yard visit that timing for burning weeds has to be carefully done.  If the pile has been sitting a while and it is spring you should avoid a burn because you will kill a lot of insects!  (And of course you have to check for those silly wrens.)  The photo above the compost pile is a holding bed where I dump the extra iris (an other stuff) until I can find them a home.  We also hang on to most of the wood that falls into the yard for winter fires.

Now to the ugly.

I do plant about 6 to 8 roses in my garden.  But these are really the bad children of the garden.  They require too much fertilizer that can run off onto the storm water, they require applications for fungus and pests, which can kill important pollinators and insects and they require lots of water.  Master Gardeners do grow roses (one in my group just bought 30 new plants to replace his winter kill.)   But we have to be aware that they are not the most environmental part of your yard.  I am using a systemic fertilizer/pesticide applied three times a year at the base of each plant to avoid sprays that are soooo dangerous to everything and to keep the toxins as local as possible.  Fungicides (and pesticides) are killing our honeybees and many other pollinators and larva...PLEASE BE CAREFUL with them.  Hubby is going to a colloidal spray (clay) for our fruit trees this year to avoid toxic applications.

We were evaluated on how we watered our plants, how we treated our lawn, whether we had native plants, whether we planned for wildlife, our use of chemicals and how we controlled stormwater runoff.  We were not evaluated on flowers and landscaping.  And we passed!!  I got a "Demonstration" sign which is one level up from a Bay Wise sign.  No, it will not stay in this bed as it looks odd, but this is where we took the photo.  The sign cannot go out to the end of our long driveway as I understand some idiots steal them!  So I will move it to the beginning of the beds and hope people notice and ask about it!  (And yes I am a bit anal as all the pottery is color coordinated with the house.)

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

My loyal readers know that I have been drowning in responsibilities these past weeks.

First we finished the Green Exposition by staffing (and expanding) the children's garden.  Children help us during this one Saturday to plant vegetables for later harvest for an ecumenical food pantry.  Fresh produce, while provided by farmers, is welcomed from our garden with more variety.

We worked with over 100 children during the day.  They are so fun, because they really like planting a plant!

We have expanded the raised beds from four last year to eight this year.  OMG!!

Please note that I try to hide children's faces out of respect for parents who do not want their children's faces spread out over the Internet.

And within two weeks we have salad!!

The museum donated this strawberry planter which we are using for herbs such as thyme and oregano.

The big push for this project is now done, although we have much ongoing work through out the summer.  Two short classes each week, regular watering and weeding, and delivery of produce!  We do have other volunteers to help, so that makes us sigh just a little.  Next post I will talk about the yard review by Master Gardeners.  Another big project done!

Still Hangin In There

Slowing down and finishing the big lists.  But. I will return like a bad penny, a nasty mosquito, an enduring allergy...soon.