Greens and golds

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poke

I did not put my finger in this tunnel.

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© Debrarian and Practicing Noticing 2015

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note to self in spring

Note to self: check bouquet more rigorously before bringing into house.

Successful bee transfer from bouquet back to garden:

It seemed glad to have a nice flower to latch on to again. On the stick it kept waving its front legs in the air like person with closed eyes feeling for the wall.

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September scavenger hunt

Little sun & green bee:

Late harvest:

Important supplies:

Evening promenade:

Good morning!

Here come the colors!

Summer, saved up:

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raspberries herald summer

the first raspberry

the renters next door moved out just in time

for me to have my way with their garden

canning raspberries the Miles G way

dragon hoard

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© Debrarian and Practicing Noticing, 2012.

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Winterlude

Winterlude: That glorious week of sunshine in February!

Eager daffs marching up:

Lilac leads the way:

Narcissus:

Muppet-head crocus:

A nubbin of light:

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© Debrarian and Practicing Noticing, 2012.

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spectacles fossil

After lunch I sit down to read. Good grief, how do glasses get so dirty so quickly? I hold them up to the light from the window to locate the worst smudges. Argh, are those scratches in my expensive new lenses!? Three, no, four parallel lines glimmer almost invisibly against the light, like the claw marks of a teensy tiger. But claw marks that bend at an angle, and then bend again… Wait, not scratches. Spiderweb. I was out in the garden early, picking raspberries for breakfast. Evidently I walked right through this web, and the fine strands clung to my glasses. All morning I’ve been looking out through a slice of its delicate pattern, secretly preserved.

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© Debrarian and Practicing Noticing, 2011.

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how fuzzy they are

Hello again.

It’s been a while, I know.

You know that thing where someone is talking to you but you can’t make out what they are saying until you put your glasses on? This summer has been kind of like that for me. I hurt my feet, and it turns out that when I can’t walk — when I can’t move around outside — I’m unable to write. I can’t seem to hear myself clearly.

That’s still going on, actually.

But I got a walker recently. It’s cherry-red and belonged to Helen, who was 96. So now I can make hobbling forays into the backyard to see how the kind watering fairies kept everything greenly alive all summer.

It is ridiculously exciting to visit my own backyard; to see for myself the small lives thriving together, hummingbirds and bees and cat’s-ear dandelions.

It was a chilly summer, so the tomatoes have stopped at green. But I like how fuzzy they are.

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© Debrarian and Practicing Noticing, 2010.

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postcards from the garden

Tom Thumb sugar snap peas hunkered down cozily against the cold in a cloche my sister made me.

Salmonberry: new addition under the pin-oak.

Go baby beets!

This bug had been lost in the compost for several years:

Pea-blossom in sunshine:

A volunteer:

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© Debrarian and Practicing Noticing, 2010.

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the alacrity of radishlings (& other backyard surprises)

radishlings in rows

sprightly on day 10

Surprise # 1: The alacrity of radishlings.  I have a hopeful habit of checking on my seeds every day to see what they’re up to.  (Val has been known to actually dig some up to see if they’ve sprouted.)  I planted radishes Monday night and was completely tickled to find them poking up itty-bitty leaves by Thursday afternoon. (They are slightly more burly in these photos from Day 10.)

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Backyard Surprise # 2: A squadron of mystery bugs enacted some sort of rite on this maple leaf in my backyard.  I think they are crowding back into their transport pods to return to their home planet.

And most surprising of all was #3: I was futzing around in the backyard, doting on the tomatoes and occasionally weeding, when I was startled to hear a most un-backyard-like sound: “Meh-eh-eh.”  Like a dog smelling bacon my head went up, questing, and I waited for the sound to repeat: “Meh-eh-eh.”  Slowly I stalked it to my back fence where, hunkering down and peering through the photinia hedge I saw:

Yep, we’ve got backyard sheep.  Or rather, the trampoline neighbors have got backyard sheep.  Just these two.  Knee-high.  It is perplexing.  We might expect short sheep of the chicken neighbors.  But the trampoline neighbors?  Whose backyard for the last six years has featured nothing at all save prickly yellow grass and the surly teenager’s trampoline?  It is an inexplicable development.

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© Debrarian and Practicing Noticing, 2009.

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