Of cabbages and Kings…
Well, not really cabbages and kings, but close enough. First a whine: today is day 2 of a migraine — I’m done now, but my head seems not to care. Anyway, it has been awhile since I posted and I thought I should catch up a bit. First, we’ve been pushing back on the leaf raking or rather…gaining ground. Here’s a photo of the garden area now that the leaves have been off for a week or so.
You can see there’s more green on the ground. The Hostas are pushing up on the upper level nearer the house. The herbs are greening up in the circle. We’ve still got to pull up the old square foot gardens and replace with the new ones that are of plastic wood-look boards that won’t rot after a couple of years like the current one. We getting ready to put in the potatoes and strawberry plants. I’ve still got to start seeds or if not soon, we’ll need to buy vegetable plants.
I’ve complained about how far the house is from the mailboxes (about 1/4 mile) so here’s a photo of the house (you can see it through the trees. This is from about slightly less than 1/4 of the way back to the house.
Spring is definitely here in spite of the temperatures being between the low 40s and the high 80s at a day’s notice. Here’s two photos of our Peony Trees — one has pink flowers and the other white. Yesterday morning they had buds just starting to look like they were thinking about opening. Last evening they were partially open. Today this is what I saw.
Meanwhile, we have four azalea bushes. One has bloomed and is nearly all gone. One is in bud and about ready to open up. The other two are way behind and I hope will bloom later.
One of the joys of getting all the leaves raked up is the wild flowers that show up. This is a closeup of a violet looking flower that is now covering a lot of the lawn area of the yard. Makes for some smiles when you look down at the ground.
We’ve recently been adopted by a cat. I’m highly allergic to cats so Emmy is going to be an outdoor cat though it is obvious that Emmy feels that indoors would be much better. We’ve build a “feral cat house” for her/him (we don’t know what gender Emmy is yet — but from now on I’ll default to her). She’s actually sleeping in the house so it is being used.
Emmy showed up during the last snow storm in Maryland back in March. She was one of several cats that got dumped out on the main road. At first there were two cats that came to beg food at our house — Emmy and another cat with similar marking but smaller. Emmy stuck around but the other one seems to have made other arrangements. Emmy is affectionate, quiet (she occasionally squeaks, not meows, but she can purr). We can’t help but give her the appropriate scritches and pats when she strops herself about our legs. She’s comes trotting out when I go out to rake and watches from under a bush or by laying nearby. Of course after I get a big pile she needs to attack it to see that it is animal free.
Last week she brought me a dead something — mouse or vole. I gave praises and such but she hasn’t brought another one to me yet. We’re hoping she’ll help with the mole/vole problem we have in our yard. The ground is all spongy from their burrows.
Anyway, she’s a lovely cat. Calm. Loving. Sweet tempered. How anyone could dump such a lovely thing is beyond me. I’d heard stories of people dumping their animals out in rural area but this is my first run in with that. It’s as if they think the animals they have as pets are just disposable items not worth thinking about. Get tired of them and dump them off to fend or themselves or die. If the animal is really lucky they might get taken in by someone but there are only so many animals that rural areas can take in. Dumping animals is wrong no matter how you look at it — but then I wouldn’t wish Emmy to have to live with the sort of people who would dump an animal out on a country road.
Of course, our next problem is that Emmy, for all her good characteristics, is very leary of getting too close to us and skitters away if we move too fast or startle her. At some point we need to trap and neuter — guess that’s when we’ll learn the actual gender of this lovely cat. Meanwhile, we try to socialize her to having people around.