Love Is All Around

You may notice that these two rather large beetles appear to be walking in hurriedly opposite directions and ask yourself what this might mean. Or maybe you're not the kind of person whose curiosity is aroused by earth's smaller creatures? I caught these two in the act of love. I was weeding in an effort to uncover my choked dahlias and suddenly there they were, not naked exactly, but seriously going at it.

The second they perceived my prying glance, they separated and headed in opposite directions as though to fool me into thinking they were merely having a water cooler chat instead of lighting up a casual cigarette and asking me what the hell I thought I was doing interrupting their tryst, which would have been so insouciant and unexpected I might have dropped my eyeballs from my head.

I present to you the medicinal herb garden site before being planted out.

And here it is after being filled up with mostly beneficial flowers and just a few herbs. As it turns out, I have herbs all over my yard. Sage is everywhere, thyme, and mint. But I have lemon verbena, stevia, and echinacea in this medicinal garden. The flowers I planted are: valerian, black eyed susan (rudebekia), rocket (snap dragons), coreopsis, shasta daisies, zinnias, cosmos, artichokes (green globe-I don't know if artichokes produce well here but even if they don't artichokes are wonderful for the enormous purple thistle flowers they produce), nicotania, and bread seed poppies.

Here's Dominique with her beautiful baby boy: Truitt. Two and a half days old in this picture.

New people are so soft.

I want to show you how much my potatoes have grown in so short a time. This was about a week and a half ago.

And now look at them! Veritable bushes! I wonder if I should have been mulching these potatoes with compost and not straw. I have read that if you mulch the potatoes as they grow you will get more potatoes because they will begin to grow along the stems. This has never happened with straw mulch for me. So should I pile on some extra dirt for good measure? I am greedy for potatoes.

I now have a list of medicinal herbs you should always plant. I've consulted with my mom and we've come up with a basic medicinal garden for growing the easy to use essentials, and then a second list of herbs which are very useful but may be harder to find and take more processing to use. I will do a post for that next.


Note: it is clear that my spell check has a very limited plant knowledge, I have little time this morning to check the spelling of my plant names, so if any of them are incorrect...please forgive me.