Larisa
@thelolrus
Forest-dwelling book enjoyer. Also a gardener and small press editor. Based in NH. They/she Abolish and prosecute ICE.
Will return to this thread later; for now, a pause to appreciate my @queerliblib.bsky.social mug
And I love the depiction of language learning, which I've rarely seen discussed like that (for its own sake, that is, not in order to further a plot) in fiction. The way it feels like the world and your own mind are all rearranged, sparking, expanding...
I turned on the outdoor light to see how hard it was raining and there was a frog sitting in the walkway, happily being rained on. It went back under something now that the wind and rain have picked up.
But check it out: the path garden is finally getting real paths! My dad has been digging up the grass beneath the old weed cloth, smoothing out the soil, and laying down fresh weed cloth and gravel. It’s going to look positively official.
Well, that explains the creepy yellow light in the White Mountains (north-central NH) today. My weather app claims the AQI is only 56 currently, but I’m skeptical.
I just saw this post shortly before reading yours. It seems balsamic cucumbers are in the air…
iNaturalist says this is a fly agaric. I think of them as more red, but apparently they can also be orange? #fungiposting
Everyone knows Magritte, but when it comes to Belgian surrealist painters, may I suggest Jean-Michel Folon?
This is what the paths have looked like until now: a mess of weed cloth (spoiler alert: not effective at killing grass by itself! But no one listened to me, sigh) and 100% genuine Granite State rocks. Every time you dig around here, you hit rocks. At least they held the weed cloth down?
And last, we’re finally making progress on building real paths for the path garden. Step 1: a metal border to keep the soil and (future) gravel apart. I gotta admit, it looks a lot sharper than the border of random rocks I had there before.
My mom is deeply sick of day lilies and has been getting rid of them, but one escaped. It looks so funny to me, poking up from behind this wall of other plants like Kilroy.
I don’t know what this is! Some kind of funky poppy? It’s new this year and I didn’t plant it. But they’re very striking, whatever they are. They look desert-y to me, with those silvery leaves.
This is compass plant, a prairie plant with deep taproots that can apparently store a lot of carbon. They were relentlessly eaten for the first few years, but now they’re more established (or maybe just hidden by other unmowed plants) and the creatures are leaving them alone.
Two kinds of little yellow flowers: heliopsis and native rudbeckia. The rudbeckia is naturalizing well in the field.
Apparently the solution to sunflowers and sweet peas getting eaten and/or not growing very fast is to stick them in a fenced-off tank full of pure compost. We haven’t given extra compost to any of the existing gardens this year, and their sunflowers and bee balm are… not on this level.
I should have gotten the Azul lid out; she was displeased this one is too small for comfortable loafing. She tried anyway, of course.