Garden Friends

If the Olympic organizers had any sense among them, they would create a grocery shopping event. I'm telling you, Mike and I would win the gold medal. Mike mans the cart and I run from item to item, and we can knock off a list of 40 items in about 20 minutes time. It probably takes longer to check out than it does to collect the things on the list. We might do it faster except, you know...people. Sometimes you just have to knock them out of the way. Sometimes they fall down in front of my feet, and so I have to jump over them to avoid tripping. This slows me down a little, and you know how every split second counts in the Olympics. I've heard the next Olympics have been postponed, and so we still have time to get in shape. In the meantime, I'll lobby the organizers to include this new event. There will need to be rules about face masks and social distancing, and we don't have all of that quite worked out yet.

On the home front, we set free the cats and then took a little walk around. Our friends were all present and accounted for. This one is looking pretty well fed, isn't he?

And what do you suppose this one is eating? It better not be a sunflower seed.

Speaking of the sunflowers, I believe sprinkling the medicated body powder on them has deterred the squirrels. They'd eaten quite a few down to bloody stumps, but I haven't noticed any more damaged on the ones that remain. On the other hand, they somehow got into the greenhouse yesterday and ate the tops off the smallest of the sunflowers in there. I've walked around the entirety of the greenhouse looking for where they might have gotten in, and I can't see any sign of new digging. It's quite a mystery. Perhaps they are parachuting in through the vents in the ceiling somehow. This will require further exploration and investigative reporting.

And then there's this: the peony. By the time it blooms, I won't care any more. It could be decades from now at the rate it's going.

Here's another bud on the same plant. They are both tantalizingly close.

We're expecting warmer weather this week, and maybe that will get them to pop out of their protective greenery.

The next image is from the greenhouse whiskey barrel. These are the poppies I was hoping would be purple. After talking it over with my daughter-in-law, I'm now thinking they'll be red when they open. After seeing the ones in her garden, they come up purple, and with different foliage in their first year. Then, they change to red in subsequent years. Probably it's some kind of cross-pollination going on. On the other hand, the bud below seems a different, more elongated shape from the red poppies. It's probably just wishful thinking, but I'm holding out hope for purple ones.

Just now I consulted my friend The Google about poppies and color change. Apparently, color change isn't uncommon. I'll be interested to see what happens with this one.

Mike succeeded in removing the second of the butterfly bushes. It's so nice to see that big mess gone. There's still some work to do here, removing raspberry and blackberry vines, to make way for the blueberries. For now, I've given the blueberries larger pots, and they're waiting their turn in the greenhouse while Mike finishes up. Just looking at this picture, I'm thinking there might be room for more bird houses on this wall.

Smitty wasted no time catching a nice fat gopher for his lunch yesterday. He ate the whole thing himself, and didn't share it with any of the rest of us. (No pictures...sorry.) Then he settled in for a long afternoon nap.

It was a little like a Thanksgiving dinner for him, and so he slept the afternoon away.

Later, we watched a parade of birds at the bird bath. Ours has a little spray nozzle, and the birds love it. When we first put up our bird bath, it didn't get much notice. We were told that birds have difficulty seeing still water. When we added the nozzle, they thronged to it. The pigeons, like the one in the image below, are fairly large birds. They land on the edge with a big splash.

The smaller birds, often sit on the tubing below. Water runs down the tubing, and they can get a little drink without getting completely wet. Garden cat seems excited about this.

In the sewing room, I finished off the fourth of four 49-patch blocks for Jenny's Flower Garden.

To complete the row, I also needed three "blanks."

With three rows finished, I have 21 of 49 blocks complete. When I laid them out, they looked like this:

This will end up a large quilt. It's supposed to have a pieced border, but I'll probably just make the blocks and bind them without a border. I like how it's looking so far.

Today I'm going to spend some time in the kitchen. Tonight's dinner can be prepared ahead, and so I will. We're hoping the weather will warm up and we can sit outside tonight. Sewing goals for today include finishing up the last two blocks for the Charm Stars quilt. This is the most recent picture I have with the blocks all laid out together.

Since then, I added two more purple blocks. This was one of my projects for the 2019 Rainbow Scrap Challenge. I'm making up my own colors to finish it off, and the two blocks I'll make today will be brown. I haven't decided how to finish this off yet. It's supposed to have a pieced border, but I might finish it off with just a binding.

So that will be a good day's work. Fingers crossed the peony will bloom today. What's your plan for the weekend?