• After weeding, adding top soil, sowing morning glory, moonflower, sunflower and zinnia seeds and then cutting back rose bushes and adding mulch, I staggered into the house, took a shower, ate some lunch, and waved my white flag. Most everything is done now, except for some bramble pruning and routine maintenance (aka weed pulling.)

I’ve worked for hours every day when it wasn’t raining, lugging bags of mulch and top soil and potting soil, bending over thousands of times, and yanking on brambles and weeds, and my back was aching and I was just plain exhausted. I think this was probably intensified by the fact that I knew I had reached my goal and my body was screaming at me to “Let go and STOP!”

This wild patch of ground needs taming, as I said yesterday, and every year it needs to be re-tamed. The work has always been tiring, but 13 years ago when I started gardening here, I was 53. Now I’m 66. That’s a big difference. Anyway, I told Don that I was exhausted and ready to cry and he held me and comforted me and ordered me to do nothing today.

Before someone writes to me and asks why Don doesn’t do more of the work (as someone did last year in a passive-aggressive email), let me assure you, he would if I asked. I very seldom ask. I’m pig-headed and I know what to do and how to do it and I like to be in control. None of that is Don’s issue. It’s mine. I’m going to have to learn to delegate the heavy lifting. But everything else, I really do have to do myself. And besides, Don has bad knees which cause him a lot of pain, so why would I want to cause him more pain? He does a lot of the mowing and a heck of a lot besides that and I’m grateful to him.

Normally, I would pace myself a bit more but with all the rain we’ve had. I’ve had to increase my work load on those rare days when it’s dry out there. And I had to get those seeds in the ground – it’s well over a week past my usual sowing time.

I’m also battling allergies which doesn’t help.

Anyway, this isn’t meant to be a complaining post. After all, I decide what to do every day. I’m just sharing how I felt at the end of the day yesterday. I’m taking it easy today and tomorrow. I’ll water the plants – although it’s supposed to storm, so I may not have to – but that’s it. I need to rest my back and my hands. I rescheduled my oil change until Monday.

But, it sure looks good out there.

• By the way, that tulip has the most incredible scent! I’m used to store-bought tulips with no scent and never thought to lean in and smell this particular tulip until this year. Heavenly!

Moody porch – yesterday was quite cool with gray skies all day long.

• The garden bed on the other side of the house is becoming quite the woodland shade bed. Besides the day lilies, liatris, catmint, coneflowers, and butterfly bush that are already established, ferns are appearing, and the Solomon’s Seal that I planted last year has tripled in size.

I want to plant more of it in the newer bed that I started last year. That’s the one under the kitchen sink window and it’s all shade. Since Solomon’s Seal spreads like a ground cover, I think it would fill that area rather nicely.

You can see some of the ferns in the background. I’ll take more photos soon.

Also self-seeding into the bed from the edges of the lawn are some lovely white wild violets.

They’re scattered around the bed and I love them there. Funny how a garden can evolve with unexpected additions, isn’t it?

• I’m reading Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. It’s been around for several years but I’m just now getting to it. I love books about books and reading and her essays are delightful. I ordered it from our library system.

• You know that Don and I do this silly thing now, right? We sit down to dinner anywhere between 6:30 and 7:00 and that means that there is already a TCM movie in progress that started at 6:00 pm. We watch the movie from that point on, trying to figure out the plot and what happened before we tuned in, and sometimes the movies are bad and sometimes what we see is so intriguing that we make plans to watch the whole thing.

Last night, we saw a movie that was so dreadful, so bad, that we kept laughing through the whole thing. It was called The Fastest Guitar Alive and it starred several people I had never heard of, and…get this…Roy Orbison. While I am in awe of Orbison’s singing voice and am a huge fan, he could not act his way out of a paper bag. To be fair to Roy, the other members of the cast weren’t so great, either. Terrible script. Terrible direction. I won’t even begin to try to describe the plot, except to mention that Roy carried a guitar that had a gun in its interior that would emerge when needed.

When Beach Blanket Bingo  looks like an art house movie in comparison, you know it’s bad.

We were stunned. It was so horrible, so unbelievably ill-advised, that it was fascinating.

In one fight scene, we could clearly make out the face of the stuntman – no attempt was made to disguise him. The camera would flip back and forth from the actor’s face to the stuntman’s face and it couldn’t have been more obvious.

Hilarious.

Okay. I’ve rambled on enough.

Happy Friday.

I had to remove a nearly completed bird’s nest from the hanging plant that is straight ahead in this photo. I heard some chirping yesterday morning and the day before which, when I finally put two and two together, sent me outside to check those plants. Sure enough, there was a nest in one of them. (I’ve only had them for about 5 days!) But I had to remove it because these plants need a lot of watering, which would endanger little babies. I’ll check it again this morning. Sorry, mama and papa bird!

We did a lot outside yesterday, including mowing the entire front lawn, the corral and the area near the shed. We wanted to get it done before the predicted thunderstorms arrived later in the day. Happily, those storms never came. I yanked a lot of weeds and repositioned the stones that make up the borders of all the garden beds. I cut down a sapling that was not in a good place. All this on four hours of sleep! (Patting myself on the back just a bit.) But, when mid-afternoon hit, yours truly collapsed into her blogging chair.

Today, a rarity of late, will be mostly sunny. So I’m going to the nursery to get some top soil, more potting soil, a few more plants, and some more seeds. I’ll soak the morning glory and moonflower seeds overnight, and tomorrow I will sow them.

Forget-me-nots are tenacious little things. They’ve self-seeded all over the place including here, smack dab in the middle of some gravel.

The hostas are growing by leaps and bounds. This is that time of year when a single day makes a difference, when I look at the plants and wonder how they could have grown so much in twenty-four hours. It’s truly amazing.

I’m reading a lovely book by British author Penelope Lively called Life in the Garden. It’s just plain delicious reading. From the book jacket: “reflections on gardening, art, literature, and life.” It’s less than 200 pages long and I recommend it for all you garden and plant lovers.

We watched It Happened One Night last night. It’s truly one of our favorite movies and we never tire of it. Gable and Colbert at their best, a cast of wonderful supporting actors, and Frank Capra guiding the whole thing. I love Capra. I want to live in that world; a world where character matters, where having a strong moral compass is required, and where the bad guys get their comeuppance.

I have yet to answer yesterday’s comments. By mid-afternoon I was so tired and sleep deprived that I just couldn’t do it. But I will now. Thanks for your patience.

Happy Wednesday.