Musical interlude

I'm in a very musical mood today, so here is a nice little track superficially about gardening: Hem's Things Are Not Perfect in Our Yard. Which is, you know, an accurate description of my life.

Also here they are in a live performance of "The Seed." They do quite a few botanical songs, actually, that fit nicely into a playlist I have called "Soil." The most shocking of which is The Sparrows' cover of "The Gardener" (it's about murder. I own a surprising number of songs about murder).

Tomorrow you get purple sweet potatoes, but that's all for today.

Spoonbread and cornfields

Today's post will be mostly incoherent flailing because I drove a lot today and I have a headache, but I just want to say how much I really love my fellow Master Gardeners and the Extension staff who support them, and how fun it's been to go to Grow It Eat It statewide meeting for the last 5 years. I was in on the program from the beginning, November 2008, when some ridiculously huge number of us stuffed ourselves into a meeting room at the 4H center in College Park, and the enthusiasm for the goal of educating people about growing their own food was... well, good enough to taste.

Today was our second annual potluck meeting (somehow it took us a while to think of doing that) and since our Eastern Shore friends in Queen Anne County volunteered to host, that's where we went, at least those of us willing to drive that far. It was a bit short of two hours for me, in rush hour traffic (just in the first half, since hardly anyone commutes Washington to Annapolis let alone over the Bay Bridge. The same on the way back, of course, but not quite as slow). There was a whole nice spread for breakfast, and then after we did reports and took a hay ride around the Wye Education Center's research fields (there was a lot of corn), we had what everyone had brought for lunch.  Which was all great, though there were far more desserts than I could eat.  I brought leek and corn spoonbread.

Also I brought pickled mouse melons, and yacon roots for everyone to slice up and munch on, and roselle hibiscus stems with edible leaves and flowers to make tea out of. I am resigned to being the weird one, okay? Though I guess spoonbread is pretty normal, at least if you're vaguely Southern. I'd never made it before last week; now I think I'm really into it.

But yeah. All those people are so nice. And you can have meaningful conversations about fig trees and harlequin bugs and the things people say when they visit your demo gardens, and everyone goes home infectiously ready to take on new projects, and hopefully a few of them actually come to fruition, which is the kind of horticultural metaphor I could make work if I weren't so tired.

I promise I'll have photos again someday. Maybe tomorrow.

A garden of bright images

Here are some photos my husband took Sunday while we were wandering through the last night of Brookside Gardens' Garden of Lights exhibition.  (If you're local... well, sorry, you missed it.  So did I, almost, if that's any consolation.)

Have a sunflower (at least I assume that's what it was.  A tall one):

Have a dragon.  And a baby dragon!  Or a sea-serpent and a baby sea-serpent, whatever.

This is a great thing to do with park/garden space in the winter (I wish it went on longer.  Again, the lights = Christmas association; doesn't have to work that way), and I think a nice fundraiser for them.

Budbursting

I really have to stop the thing where I get an email about something I've neglected to follow through on, have an "O guilt!" moment, and delete it unread.  (Mass emails, I mean; I don't do that to individuals.  Often.)

Project Budburst is one of those guilt-inducers; I mean, not only did I stop acting as a citizen science recorder after one year, I cut down the tree I was noting phenophases for.  (It was a box elder, growing in an inconvenient place.)  I doubt I'll participate this year either, but it's really a worthwhile project, so I am pointing it out to anyone who'd like to get involved.  All you have to do is pick a plant from their list, note when it buds and leafs and so forth, and send them the data.  Enough data collected from enough places, and trends start to emerge.  (Really weird trends this year, I'll bet.)

*dusts hands with satisfaction at having done a small part of civic duty*

My cat! on the Internet!

All right, I know this is not a unique circumstance.  But come on, a whole blog about cats in gardens?  You know you want to.

Gobi is here - and Kathy would love your cat photos if you got 'em.