Action Bob Markle: The Urban Garden After Two Days Of Rain

Clothes drying on a gorgeous late spring day.

Chronicling the day-to-day of a garden is difficult, some say as interesting as watching grass grow. But there really is always something going on. Remember when I planted the seedlings and I was worried about the heat and the water? Well, so far the late spring is proving to be gorgeous. Let's hope we can have a lot of what we've had for the past couple of days, which consisted of about 24 hours of heavy downpours, giving the garden a really good soaking and filling the rain barrels, and now a few days of mild, eighty-degree days with nice puffy clouds floating in the sky. The wash is drying out on the porch. We dry our wash outside as many days as we can, including the winter. We do it because it's cheaper; we wash in cool water and we're not paying for gas to dry the clothes. The sun is a lot easier on our clothes than the dryer that beats your clothes up, so you're extending the life of your clothes. And the sun and breezes give them that outdoor smell and kind of soft and at the same time scratchy feel. If you don't understand what the garden and doing laundry has in common, I'll explain it later in another post.

So, the garden seems established. The seedlings seem to have rooted nicely. Friday was our wedding anniversary, and if you read the blog that day you'll know I get Sue irises for our anniversary every year, so they needed planting. Some of the onions are flowering, and I'm interested to see what they'll be like. Onions are bi-annuals, which means they need two seasons to seed. Once they seed it's too late to use the bulb, but I've heard the flowers are good to eat, so I'm excited to watch these grow.

Last week I noticed a widow-maker up in a tree in our neighbor's yard. I kept an eye on it, not wanting to be anywhere near it when it came down. I told my neighbor, Tom, about it, and there wasn't much he could do short of calling an emergency tree service. Thursday night around 10:30 Sue got a call to go out on the hotline (Sue occasionally works the after-hours emergency hotline.) She had just left the apartment and I had come into the office at the front of the house and put on some headphones and started to watch a movie when I heard a rumble. I immediately called Sue and when she asked what I wanted I said I just wanted to hear her voice. It turns out the limb had fallen, and I actually heard it in front of the house with headphones on. It was just dumb luck that Tom or no one esle in his family were in the yard, because there wouldn't have been any warning. In a vacuum, this limb would have fallen at 186,000 miles per second. Here on earth, it would have been slower, but not much.