The Goods in the Garden

Happy Thursday, my friends. We got some rain overnight, which was completely unexpected. I noticed raindrops on the windows when I woke up this morning. When I looked outside, everything had received a good wetting down. Except for one warm day, the past week has been on the coolish side.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I was girding up my loins to do some serious weeding in the garden. Nevertheless, I gave myself time to do some slow stitching before I donned my gardening apparel. I stitched far enough to decide to move my hoop higher.

After that, no more excuses about the weeding. Ordinarily, I use a hula hoe to hoe the weeds off at ground level. But such a tool is far too heavy-handed when there are fresh sprouting seeds present. Most often, I can just wait until the seedlings are large enough to be identifiable, and then I can hoe things down as usual. This year, I've planted carrots for the first time, and I'm having a hard time distinguishing them from the weeds. The rows were finally too weedy for me to tolerate, and so I sat on the ground and picked weeds by hand. It was actually far less tedious than expected, and the rows are looking much better now. But what do you guys think? Are these carrots or weeds?

Gazing out at the bee garden, I noticed another clump of the None So Pretty or Catchfly Seeds. They're bringing the most color right now.

But look at this! It's a Shasta daisy! I expect I'll see a lot of these in the next few days since there are buds everywhere.

Checking the greenhouse, you can see the tomatoes have grown taller than the shelf support beams.

And I spied the first tomato. There are probably more, but they are hard to see at this stage.

Before I started on the weeding, I filled the birdfeeders for my birdie friends. Most of the visitors were little red-headed house finches.

As I was heading back into the house, I noticed this hairy woodpecker pecking at the metal pole that holds the birdfeeders. He spent quite a bit of time here, making zero progress. There was a full suet feeder just to his left. Maybe he was sharpening his beak in anticipation.

When it was time to start sewing, Sadie made up all kinds of excuses why she couldn't help. She had a doctor's appointment...or maybe it was a zoom meeting...or maybe she was late for a class.

With no kitty help at all, I managed to sew the Books and Roses blocks into a finished quilt top.

It ended up at 30 x 37 inches. There wasn't enough of that border fabric left for the back, and so I selected one of the oldest fabrics in my stash. It seemed as good as any. When it's ready for binding, I'll give it a yellow binding.

And that was all the sewing I did for the day. When I went upstairs, I found this slacker lying in the corner suite of the catio.

Getting back to the garden, I've run the experiment of putting out sparkly pinwheels to scare birds and squirrels away from the flowers. I was pretty well convinced they worked, but I've had a reason to move things around recently, removing pinwheels from certain flowers that seemed immune to squirrel activity. Right away, every flower was eaten. So, I'm convinced they work. And that brings me to the newest garden additions, the dahlias. The pots are all covered in fencing, but I've still seen squirrel digging in the pot on the right. And, I don't know how this is possible, but they've done it several days in a row. So...I fixed their little red wagons by adding pinwheels there. I'm hopeful that will stop the digging.

And while I was out, we spied this Northern Flicker sitting on the patio. She appeared stunned, and we're not sure what happened. Sometimes birds will fly into the windows or into the railing on our deck. This one was nowhere near anything that she might have flown into. 

I worried about a squirrel attacking her...and I have seen that happen. In any case, we looked out later, and she was gone. She must have pulled herself together and flown away.

And Sadie would like to close out this post by telling you she's having a terrible life again. Please call the ASPCA immediately.

So today, I'll get back to my list of WIPs, starting with the next block for "When Quilter's Gather." Here are the two blocks I have so far.

The next block is a quilter using a rotary cutter. It's unlikely that I can finish it in a single day, but sometimes I surprise myself. There isn't much on the day's agenda. With the rain, I can put off watering the annuals until another day. It's probably a day to spend in the sewing room...always a happy thing.

So, I'll leave you to your day, and I'll get on with mine.