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Weeds I’d Be Happy To Grow

As I’ve mentioned in my weekly diet updates, I like to take a half-hour to 45-minute walk every day during my lunch hour. There’s a short path through a small wooded area in the middle of the business park, and I’ve walked it almost every day for… gee, probably seven or eight months now. I feel like my day is incomplete without my walk through the woods.

Since this is the first year I’ve walked the path in the early spring, I’m seeing all kinds of new wildflowers and plants I never noticed before. They all just melded together into a fantastic wooded greenness. Now, though, after walking in the winter and seeing everything bare, the new growth is really catching my eye. Especially flowers and things with splashes of color or unusual shape.

Now, I figure that if these plants are growing in the woods with no help from Man, they must be native to the NW Ohio area and able to thrive on their own in a shady environment. That’s pretty much a definition of my back yard: shady and neglected. 🙂 If I could identify these plants, and could procure seeds or seedlings (I’d rather not remove them from the walking path), I could very likely grow quite the kick-ass wildflower bed along one of our hedge walls. Assuming Aaron wouldn’t nix the idea due to his allergies.

I wish I could do a reverse Google Image search: plug in an image and have it search for images like it, or a definition of what I photographed. But alas (and alack), the only thing I can do is take pictures of the pretties and post them for my good readers to help me identify.

For pretty pictures of weeds wildflowers, read on…
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gardening

Frost Tonight

Stan Stachak says there’s going to be frost tonight. I do have a few perennials coming up, and I’m not planning to go out and cover them all, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to give my rose over to the last frost.

I went out this evening before sunset and pruned the rose back just a little before wrapping it in an old pillowcase and weighting the pillowcase down with some terra-cotta pots. Must remember to remove the pillowcase in the morning before I leave for work.

Hopefully this saves my rose from losing any precious growth. Poor thing looks like crap, but I’m not giving up on it.

(I did feel a little absurd, protecting a rose in the middle of a patch of dirt and weeds. Maybe I *should* move the rose elsewhere, so Aaron and I can plant grass over that entire stretch.)

As for my other perennials… the tiger lilies survived cold snaps earlier in the season, and they’re still just big bushy leaves with no blooms, so I’m not concerned about them. Something’s coming up that I planted by my Morning Glories last year (hell if I can remember what it is), but I don’t really have an emotional investment in it, since it didn’t do much last year. My coreopsis has been heaving during the winter a bit, and is just now starting to grow new leaves, so I’m a little worried about it, but I think it should be fine.

Not a peep from the lavender that was growing next to the coreopsis. This was supposed to be the year it bloomed. I wish I would have known it might not have survived the winter; I had seeds I could have started. Oh, well. Maybe I’ll just let the coreopsis have the mailbox and replant lavender elsewhere.

gardening 4 Comments

A Little Help?

Welcome to my problem spot.

When we moved in, there was a giant, out-of-control forsythia bush bogarting this entire space. Or maybe it was two. Yeah, it was at least two. At any rate, we dug all the bushes up, due to their scraggly beyond-hope nature. This, unfortunately, left a giant dirt pit, devoid of grass. I tried growing herbs and a rosebush here, but they all failed miserably. The rose still lives here, although you can’t see its teeny bare twigs in this picture. (Draw an imaginary line down the edge of the house, and the rose lives about half an inch down from the foundation on that line. Yeah, that bushy thing that looks like just another weed.) I also planted some of Scott’s tiger lilies over on the left, by the fence, and I mulched them today. (You can see the line of red mulch by the fence, barely.)

But OMG, look at the rest!

*puts head in hands*

It looks sunny enough now, but a.) this is just before sunset, and b.) this is still spring. The leaves haven’t come in on that maple tree overhead quite yet.

I can’t dig or roto-till or anything here, really, because our TV coaxial cable runs dangerously close to the surface of the yard. We’d have to be really extra careful if we dug up the dirt, even just to plant grass. I discovered this while I was digging up the area to make it a weed herb garden two years ago.

So, questions. Andrea, if you read this, this is especially for you. Melody, too, but I don’t think you read my blog very much, if at all. (Prove me wrong!) 🙂 Anyone else who’s garden-savvy, go for it. Please.

1.) There are plants coming up that don’t look like standard broadleaf weeds. Should I try to identify these, or just say Fuck It? Some of them look kinda neat, but don’t flower. I wonder if some of my herbs came back (sage in particular)? I do know that some of these are the forsythia trying to make a comeback with its remaining root system. That fucking thing will NOT go away.

2.) WTF should I plant here? Bulbs? Grass? Or mulch it and pretend something should be growing? We don’t have very good luck with grass; we’ve tried growing it in various parts of the front and back yards, and only succeed in killing it with heat and drought in mid-August, while allowing weeds to sprout up mighty fine. And those were in sunny areas. This is very, very shady in summer.

3.) Should I transplant my hybrid tea rose? The foliage keeps coming back (but no buds or blooms), for two springs now, despite the fact that I continually forget to cover it in autumn. It’s shooting up tiny canes and leaves from the crown, and the rest of it is pretty much dead. But the crown is alive, so the rose is alive. Right? So, should I try to move it before it finishes dying, or try to nurse it back to health and strength before I move it, if at all? The place it’s currently living is between partial sun and partial shade, I’d say.

I feel like such a damn failure sometimes. As long as I can Set It And Forget It™, I’m good to go. If forgetting to water for a week will kill a particular plant in a particular spot, well, yeah. That’s how I roll. Although I am thinking about trying a new ghetto irrigation system I read about in You Grow Girl that might work for whatever I try to plant under the overhang this year. We’ll see…

randomness 2 Comments

My Birthday

So, many of you may be wondering, what was my birthday surprise? And what did I do before said 4:00 birthday surprise?

The day started like most Saturdays: with a trip to the Happy Rose Buffet. Aaron and I then went hunting for garage sales, being that it was sunny and gorgeous outside and sales should have been in full swing — but, alas, the few we found were barely worth getting out of the car for.

I did open my present(s) from Aaron, too. He got me the Dune special edition DVD and Logan’s Run on DVD, and also got me a Lane Bryant gift card. Squee!

Around 4:00, there was a knock on the door — and it was Sheryl! @whee! She brought me a birthday card (complete with her own Grim Reaper artwork), Hello Kitty stickers, a gift card to Home Depot (yay, plants!), and the You Grow Girl book I had listed on my Amazon wishlist. We hung out for a couple hours, just talking and shooting the shit, before she had to go get some food and head back to Columbus. That was an awesome surprise. Thank you, Sheryls! (Oh, and your Mom’s seventies golf clubs? Quite the swanky set.)

After Sheryl left, Aaron and I headed out to Wildwood to walk around and enjoy the weather. As we walked down the bike path (we weren’t wearing our walking shoes, and had to stick to the paved areas), we saw about six deer crossing the railroad tracks. That was cool.

Then came dinner. As usual, we waffled on where to go. We’re so indecisive about restaurants. We ended up deciding on Outback Steakhouse, and having the Bloomin’ Onion and the Outback-Style Prime Rib. Mmm. Then we came home and ate some Twinkie-misu for dessert.

Overall, I had a very low-key but pleasant 30th birthday.

I wish I had written in my diary/journal back when I turned 12, though, because I really felt a connection to how I felt back then — kind of like Life was moving faster than I was prepared to go. I distinctly remember making a comment about not wanting to grow up, and I remember my Aunt Sammie finding that preposterous. I was scared, though; in a few months, I’d be going to Junior High, graduating to a new Sunday School class, maybe having my “womanhood” rear its ugly head, and all I wanted to do was watch Dance Party USA and read Star Trek books and hang out with my Mom and her boyfriend.

The irrational fears that are in the back of my mind are a little different now. I’m close to half-done with my life — how fucked up is that?! I haven’t done half the things I wanted to by now, really. And being an agnostic/atheist isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, I’ll tell you what. It would make my occasional fear of mortality a little easier to swallow if I thought I’d be seeing my stepdad Tom and my Memaw and my Granny and meeting Aaron’s Mom and all that shit when I die. As it is, death scares the living fuck out of me. Nonexistence is a tough pill to swallow.

Yes, I know, I’m only 30. But when I’m PMSing and being all funky before bed, weird shit goes through my head sometimes. And poor Aaron didn’t know what to make of the fact that I was all weepy on my birthday, when he was trying to be all Happy Birthday for me. And then he got all sweet and said that we were going to grow old together and use the next generation of Viagra so he can “knock my cobwebs out,” which was sweet in its own Aaron-ish way, and made me weepy all over again. (Poor boy just can’t win.)

I’m feeling much better now, though. It really was just PMS, I think. That, and remembering some crazy dream I had a few months ago where I thought that Aaron and I were going to die. That freaked my shit out. But maybe I’ll share that one later.

weight loss 4 Comments

Diet & Fitness Update, Week #14

Well, I forgot to weight myself before going ballistic on Chinese buffet and Outback for my birthday. When I weighed myself this morning, though, it showed that I’d gained two one and a half pounds since my last weigh-in. I’m OK with that; I’m guessing that everything will average itself back out in a couple of days.

I only managed to do one day of my PUSH workout this week, although I did enjoy the one time I did it. DVD #2 has me working with the resistance bands, finally, and I was definitely feeling it two days later. I feel like this is where I should have started to begin with, fitness-level-wise, but doing a month of more basic exercises to get me used to exercising was a good idea.

I’ve been continuing to eat whole wheat English muffins with natural PB (or sugar-free honey) for breakfast, although my snackies have been more sporadic. I get all into what I’m doing at work, and before I know it, it’s almost time for lunch. Oops. Oh, well. Lunch has been salad greens with canned chicken or turkey, sugar-free sweet relish, and salad dressing. OMG, I’d forgotten how much zing relish can add to stuff. Mmm. I’ve been being bad for dinner lately, though, and been making pasta salads — again, with the yummy relish and canned meats. I’ll turn my shit around for this coming week, though.

I’ve also been continuing my daily lunchtime walks, of course. Today I bought some special-for-work sneakers for walking, so I won’t wear out my nice work shoes (and so I can wear some of my cuter but more fragile shoes to work).

Oh, and I’m officially a “real” size 18 now, I think. I bought some new clothes at Lane Bryant today (thanks, Aaron, for the gift card!), and the size 20 dress pants I tried on were way bigger than I needed. I swapped them out for 18’s and didn’t try them on until I got home. They’re actually a little smaller than I’d like, but maybe I’m used to having some breathing room in my pants these days. At any rate, yay for smaller cute clothes.

(BTW, Sheryl? I feel SO LOST in Lane Bryant without you there to guide me to teh cuteness. Aaron’s a good sport, and wanders around behind me like I usually wander around behind you. Except I don’t know where I’m going, either.)

Still haven’t measured myself. I really need to do that. Blah.