Wealth and fame she's ignored.

Today has been overcast, a good time to take garden pictures! Full sun is great for growing, not so good for showing.



( lots o' pics be here )

The dahlia trip was wonderful. The drive up the coast is breath-taking and the weather was perfect. The Mister laughs when I squeak in fear as I negotiate Highway 101. In places it clings to the side of a crumbling cliff twenty stories above the ocean. It's OK that he laughs because I only do it to make him laugh, but all that immense blue space IS scary, and you can tell that the road only exists because some very smart people with a lot of money have taken it as a personal engineering challenge. Our last real kid-free vacation was 12 years ago, and though we lived far away at the time, it just happened to also be a free-wheeling road trip down the same coastline. At the time, we knew that life was going to be changing. We were starting a family. We were also dissatisfied with where we were. We had good jobs, good health, but were greedy enough to want something different. Our 1999 trip was a vacation, a survey of cheap Oregon motels, and a last hurrah, but it was also to scout out towns on the coast for a new start. I started out this trip with nothing more in mind than playing hooky and seeing some beautiful flowers, but once we were on the road it felt like closing a circle of sorts and it was good.

( Onward for vacation pics )

I love to look at all the colors and forms, but all of you lurkers who are mysteriously fascinated with my taste in dahlias can share. I used some of my loot from the Craigslisting I've been doing to make another dahlia order, but this is the LAST ONE. This shows all the orders with the new ones towards the bottom.

( The New Final Order - 33 Varieties )

I'll just have to build some new garden beds, that's all. I need to work off all of this Thanksgiving feasting anyway. Gorgeous bouquets here I come! The tubers will start shipping in March next year, and in a mere 7-9 months from now I should be seeing some blooms. They all look the same size here, but the blooms will range from 4 inches to 10 inches across.

ETA: I guess the final order wasn't so final. With my early bird discount I had to add another dahlia to my order to still get free shipping. What a chore that was.

( The New Final Order - 22 Varieties )

The kiddos are gone camping with Grandma. The mister was off at a marksmanship course. (He tells me he was a hero with the ladies because he packed toilet paper to the remote shooting range.) So I used some of my quiet time to complete an outline for the remainder of Between Two Evils. Looks like 28 chapters. I would really like to actually finish a long fic. I'm hoping this outline will help. Tomorrow I plan to put some time in on actual writing.



It's that time of year. Dahlia time! How did I go so long without them?

( Read more... )

It's time to make the newsletter. OK it was time two days ago. Nevertheless, I'm almost done and have worked late-ish into the night, the morning to begin, bright and early, by escorting 7yo to the dentist. Woe. So, I'm rewarding myself by spamming you all with dahlia pictures. I scrutinized the offerings of many a dahlia merchant over the weekend and made many painful cuts to my wish list which originally contained twice as many plants.

A local garden columnist insisted that October marks the start of a new gardening year. Perhaps she's right because I suddenly clicked into the gardening groove again after neglecting it as soon as the rains started. After a month or so of feeling generally blocked and not knowing where to start with it, I mowed and edged the lawn (now you can barely see all the dandelions and it looks so lush and green!), generated a brimming pick-up truck load of trimmings, and redid 2/3 of my big flower bed, separating perennials, moving things to the back of the bed that should have been moved last season (like the Rose Campion), shifting things that I liked this season, and ruthlessly discarding things that annoyed me. Out: Interesting smelling plant that got too huge and didn't bloom enough, Summer Berries Yarrow which bloomed nicely, but always fell all over everything else, the wild blue aster (see the falling all over everything else). Going In: Artichokes/Cardoons, they have the most gorgeious toothed silver leaves, cool purple flowers the size of nerf balls, and manage to be large without falling over; and there will definitely be more Cosmos 'Pied Piper Red' which is still blooming. The petals actually are seamless tubes. Huh. I thought they were just curled over. How cool is that? Don't answer.

( Here be dahlias )