May Coffee Cup and miscellaneous musings…
It took me much longer than I thought to find a cup that said “May. I’m the May cup. Over here.” I looked at a good number of cups until I found this one. The big leaves and bright orange flower just reminded me of May flowers — so, it’s now my May cup. While searching, I found a number of sunflower cups but sunflowers somehow seem fall-ish to me so I picked one up and declared it to be October’s cup and put it in the depths of a drawer until Fall. (Now if I can remember it’s there everything will be fine.)
It’s been raining the last few days. Not constantly but in those on again off again spurts that mean you can’t work in the garden because it’s just muddy glop. So, I’m happy to announce that the tomato plants I started have begun to sprout. One variety is already up with one set of leaves. The second variety just poked 3 sprouts out today. No leaves of course, just the first hint that the seeds are sprouting. I brought pots and trays in a few days ago fearing rain, so hopefully tomorrow I can start some more seeds.
We have a Meyer lemon tree. This is its third year. The first year we got one lemon. The second year we got two. This year there were tons of buds (at least 25). The entire house smelled wonderful as the blooms opened up. Some are now dropping the flowers and we hope to have a lot of fruit buds soon. We keep the tree in the house during the winter near the sliding glass doors on the deck so it can get sunshine. As soon as the temps stay up during the night, we’ll put it out on the deck. It seems to really like it there. I’m hoping for much more fruit this year.
A big limb fell off one of the trees in the driveway during the night last night. Luckily, it landed between the rose bush, the car port, and the azalea. So no damage. Once things dry out a bit, we’ll haul it over to the pile of downed limbs to be cut up and stacked for firewood. It seems that every time it rains limbs just drop off here and there. At least this time they didn’t land in the driveway or the road.
So, it’s still raining. I can hear it softly spattering on the windows, the deck, and the skylight. Think I’ll go cuddle up with a cuppa tea and a book.
Hyperion here: We did get a good sized limb down in the driveway. I went out first thing and hauled all the various fragments (it was probably 10′ long and 4 inches thick before it hit the ground) to the wood pile. The good news is that most of them are already small enough to fit in the wood stove, so in the minute or so it took to haul them to the racks I gained nearly a full days supply of firewood with no cutting, chopping, or splitting. It works for me.
On the other hand, all this rain is really getting in the way of getting the yard cleaned up. During our last dry spell, we managed to get all the leaves cleared out of the garden area and to get all the leaves beside the carport raked up into piles. Usually I get one of our really large tarps and rake all the leaves on to it. Then it’s just a matter of folding it up like a fajita and hauling it out into the woods and dumping it. Of course, now all those nice piles I had prepared are 75% water by weight. I need at least three dry days to turn them over a few times and dry them out before I’ll be able to do anything with them.
Such is life in the land where trees rule with an iron limb.