Notes From Zone 4

Finally, a day when it’s not actually raining. Well, not very hard, anyway. There was light drizzle on and off and the sun didn’t actually come out, but we got quite a bit done out there today. The town had their annual plant swap in the morning. I took down some obedient plant, a couple

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We had just a bit of a break in the rain yesterday mid-day, so we went out there for a little while despite it being so buggy. The window boxes are to the point where all of the black pansies are out in full force and needing dead-heading, actually. And we have the first of

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I upgraded bunter to Redhat 9 last week. This was probably not a good idea. I hoped I’d really be getting 8.1 with a fancy upgrade inducing name. Instead it seems that they did make some real changes as well. One of them was to the vsftpd.conf file. They turned on anonymous logins and

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After work today, we went out (finally!) to start to dig up those trillium. I still haven’t quite figured out how we are going to ship them, but we found many, many plants. I filled up all the random pots I had in the basement, sometimes putting two or three small plants per pot. They

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We went outside straight away after work tonight, when it had stopped raining for about twenty minutes. We’d wanted to start digging up the trillium that I found takers for on gardenweb. We fed the fish. I don’t think they yet understand that what we are throwing in the pond is fish food. The

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After striking out at two hardware stores close to us, we made a flying visit to Concord yesterday to go to Home Depot, where a nice guy scratched his head for a while and finally stuck together three pieces to make the adapter we needed for the pump. While we were there, I picked up

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Despite the gray and wet day out there today, it wasn’t actually raining for the first time in days, so we were determined to get in as much work in the garden as we could. We’ve been wanting to get started on the clearing and such for the land that will someday be the

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It rained most of the day, but I got out for an hour or so in the middle of the afternoon. The compost pile we turned has sprouted some sort of mushrooms. Meanwhile, the temperature is holding steady at 110. (This was a mostly done pile that Valerie had dumped a bunch of new weeds

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Really just a quick run through the garden with the camera. Lisa’s away, and the blackflies are horrid. I can only go out without a bugsuit between 10 and 2. They’ve also found their way up to the balcony which they usually don’t do. The new pond pump is here. Of course it has a one inch outflow instead of two. And so far two hardware stores don’t have 2 inch black poly crap. The lamer landscapers shop at Home Depot, it seems, as I now have to match the pump output to what Skip put into the pond. So if Hamshaw’s doesn’t have it, it’s a trip to Concord. I know it’s unfashionable to say so, but Home Depot is a pretty darn good store. We continue to have tulips galore. The Queen of Night tulips are blooming, and seem darker in the photos than they are in person, where they have much more of a purple tint.

Lisa had to take the train down to DC today, but the train has been rescheduled to leave at three, so we were able to get in little more gardening before she left. While we were up in Claremont to get the fish on Friday, we stopped in at Wal-mart to pick up some potting

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