🌻 Planting up a storm

♫ We got the plants, we got the plants we got the plants, yeah ♫

Apr 12, 2021

Greetings, prairie people. It’s been a weird week full of highs and lows and a lot of rainy days. But we’ve finally gotten a ton of our plants out of their starter trays and into the ground.

BUT FIRST!

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Thanks very very much.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming!

This week I discovered redbuds. If I sit on the porch in the earlyish morning with my coffee, the sun hits them just right and…

Andy and I moved a LOT of soil this week. And there’s still more beds to fill!

Surprise! Frost warning! Good thing we didn’t clean out our collection of old sheets when we moved (we thought about it)!

It’s cool, y’all can come inside for the night. Just this once.

***BEFORE*** A little bed in the front yard. The previous owners of the house were VERY into “rocks as mulch.” I am not so much into this. They were also very into this particular ornamental grass (it’s ALL over the yard) and leaving stumps around (decoration? trash? unclear).

***AFTER*** Ah, much better. Looks like daylilies, a bleeding heart, and a burning bush will stay for now. I planted some marigolds, cosmos, blazing star, and some other prairie plants (that were probably too small to transplant and I don’t really expect to live, but, whatever). The tree is a little ornamental cherry of some sort (Prunus sp.).

***BEFORE*** side yard, facing southwest-ish. (More ornamental grass!)

***DURING*** Good thing there are so many rocks everywhere! This took many, many wheelbarrow trips from the pile in the driveway.

***AFTER*** It doesn’t look like much, but soon it’ll be sunflowers, cucumbers, and eggplants. We’re not sure how much sun this spot will get as summer progresses, and so didn’t want to plant anything too important here (like hot peppers). All this straw was already here, so we figured we’d give it a try as mulch.

On deck:

Keep moving soil from the driveway into our beds, and getting everything planted!

In other news, you can now buy me a coffee if you’d like to show your appreciation of this newsletter or just want to send a pick-me-up.
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If we’re being honest I’ll probably spend the money on plants. Next Saturday. On my birthday. Hint, hint.

We’re watching:

Thunder Force on Netflix. This genre of silly comedy movie is not usually our scene, but the trailer sucked us in. It was a delight. Especially Jason Bateman as The Crab. I’ll just leave this here:

Also, Waterworld (1995), which I had not seen before. As Andy pointed out, it’s like Mad Max but on the ocean. It was kind of bad, but in a still-very-enjoyable way. A major highlight was the little kid, mostly because she’d go on to change all our lives 9 years later when she blessed us with “your Mom goes to college.” (She was Deb in Napoleon Dynamite.)

I’m writing:

Why Is It so Hard to Find a Cure for Cancer? (for Discover)

I saw this researcher give a talk at the Broad Institute a few years ago. I didn’t realize how much I didn’t understand how cancer works and why it’s so tricky until he explained it. When I took on this assignment, I knew he was the guy to talk to.

Colgate Physicist Patents New Tool for Communication Tech (for Colgate University News)

Physics was always my least favorite subject in school. I always felt like even though I could memorize the equations, I didn’t really “get” any of it. I’ve mostly avoided it ever since, but am feeling emboldened to revisit it after this story. Since it’s a university news piece, the researcher got to read it over for a fact check himself — and didn’t find anything wrong. #Proud