A Lovely Thursday
Thursday was wonderful. I started my day with my friend Altu. We sat together for an hour or two, outside in the rare sunshine (it lasted only a few hours but we had great timing), at a table at the Beaners Cafe’ in Okemos. We talked and laughed and listened and sipped and talked again. We have not had nearly enough time together since we got back from Africa. It was wonderful to have that time together again.
After that, I delivered some patterns and samples to Rae’s Yarn Boutique near Frandor. This is the first she has carried my patterns, and I’m delighted. I have scheduled a few day classes at her shop this summer and we are hoping they will go well. It is literally a bicycle ride away from my house… not all of 4 miles from home and only about 6 blocks from Foster Center, where I spend two afternoons a week. I owned a house in that neighborhood for 5 years. It’s my home territory. (As Brian would say, it is my stomping grounds.)
I also had CityKidz Knit!, followed by a computer lab. Such fun. The kids are getting creative. One boy started a pouch for his game boy. A girl started a set of wristwarmers yesterday and since she has super bulky yarn and size 15 needles, she is making good progress with not much time invested. One of my regular girls figured out that a cotton garter-stitch swatch that came in some yarn donated yesterday by the famous and generous Sarah Peasley, would make a wonderful washcloth (if small). She worked the ends in and took it home knitted as is! She’s got the fanciest, nicest, handmade washcloth I’ve ever seen.
Between Altu and Foster Center, I ran to Lansing Gardens and bought a whole lot of lovely flowers for my gardens. I do not enjoy digging in dirt at all, but I absolutely love having flowers in my yard. I water plants happily, and I don’t mind picking off the wilted flower blossoms, but I just don’t like the feel of any stuff stuck to my hands. Especially gritty stuff!
Once a year I dive in, and then I get all that dirt stuff over with in one fell swoop. Then I enjoy the watering ritual for a few months. Later in the year, the sun goes down before I get home (this would be around August) and the gardens had better be full of well-established plants by then, plants that can take a little ignoring. I get home after 9pm at least 3 times a week, and so just as the weather gets hotter, I am less able to do my watering routine.
I have found that geraniums do well in full sun on the west side, even with my personal style of “water early in the season, then ignore later.” I also found last year that petunias worked well in that environment. On the shady east side of the house, I have done very well with impatiens and I always give a try for some tiny dark purple flowers whose names escape me right now. They don’t like being ignored but in the shade they do well through the end of July anyway.
Every year I try at least one new thing in the garden. Last year I tried carrots, and they did not do well at all. I also tried leaf lettuce and one bush tomato which I kept in a decorative pot by our back door, and it was wonderful. This year I bought some multicolored coleus that are supposed to get bushy and tall, and I’ll try them in the back of my hosta garden where a few of the hosta plants didn’t make it from last year.
I love adding color to my yard. Last year I waited to buy my plants, and ended up with orange flowers. This year I found my flamingo-salmon-pink geraniums and three related colors of impatiens. I found some gorgeous velvety-purple petunias, too. I’m very happy with what I found.
Oh, and I got a few seeds. I love dill, and it grows well in my garden by the garage. I can’t seem to find plants anymore so I got seeds and we’ll see how I do there. I also got several packets of leaf lettuce seeds to put in containers on the north side. Last year I wished I’d planted ten times as much lettuce as I’d planted. Well, this year it will be 3 times more.
Last year Ulyana gave me small seedlings of morning glories and they were wonderful by the door, I hope they re-seeded themselves so I can have them again this year.
It is such fun to plan for the beauty of my tiny piece of land. Our lot is about 30 to 35 feet wide (a city bus is 40 ft long), which is just about right for how much time we want to spend on keeping it nice. I spend hours in the spring pulling tree seedlings out of the grass, and Brian is big on digging out the dandelions (we do not use chemicals on the lawn). But we like doing other things with spare time in the summer (like play music on the porch, or nap in the hammock, or get out the spinning wheel on the porch on a nice day).
We both are geeky so we also spend a lot of time indoors (although Brian rides his bike to work on non-rainy days when it’s warm enough). We do not intend to be, as my friends Sue says, slaves to the goddes Flora. This yard is just right, as Goldilocks would say.
Photos: 1)The flowers I got for this year’s garden project. 2)Lansing Gardens, a Lansing institution started in 1920 when Jolly Rd. and Pennsylvania Ave. were waaaay out in the remote edges of the city. Now there is a 7-11 not far away, and a car stereo place, and all sorts of other city things, surrounding their farmland. The place is up for sale so I never know which year will be my last time, buying there. Notice the sky… this is a typical Lansing/Mid-Michigan sky… clouds as far as the eye can see. When sun peeks through even for a few seconds, we really appreciate it.