It’s been raining for three days. The forecast is for partial clearing tomorrow, and then rain through Wednesday. This never happens here. I remember years when we had our last rain as April showers and then no relief at all until early September, when the land began to cool and the warmer ocean water made for thunderstorms each afternoon. I took pictures while it poured today, shielding the camera under my coat, because the garden is much more Connecticut than Maine right now. It’s as if I had topsoil! Lovely, loamy stuff that held water and the finest root hairs and nurtured earthworms. I guess if it rains every day even this meagre, stony ground will make heaps of daylilies, dense banks of strawberry plants and tender redleaf. Maybe this is what would happen if I were the type of person who watered her garden, maybe.
Looking south
The picture below is the random assortment of plants growing in the warm permaculture of the dooryard, occasionally splashed with dishwater in true cottage garden fashion are: woad, lupine, columbine, lady’s mantle, autumn blooming clematis and the ever-present forget-me-nots.
The bean bunker is doing well, too. Those light spots are all the lovely brown eggshells in the top layer of compost.
This is the sign at the bottom of our road. RAT sells great clams, mussels and cherry stones (a small, dark clam) but his signage is maybe not as clear as it could be. We live half a mile up this road and RAT lives a little ways further on. Every summer we explain the sign, and the lack of rodents, to tourists who stop by the driveway while we’re out gardening. You were going to ask, right? No, you cannot buy rats here. No. Today I had TWO cars stop and ask about the rats. It’s going to be a long summer.
Also known as “Chinese Forget Me Not”, these are all over the garden (see below). Every time my mother comes by in the Spring she looks around and says, “They never spread like this at our house”. True, that. My mother and father gave me a tiny clump of this plant when my garden was brand new, 18 years ago now, and I have acres of it while their place in Vermont has a few well-behaved speciments: one pink, one blue and one white. It’s an interesting commentary on soil type and plant preference. I have to weed these out of the driveway, for heaven’s sake. And the strawberries. And the iris. Oy.
These are the blossoms of my specimen of Gunnera. They are about 2′ high, and 4″ across.
Tonight I painted woodenware: medium and small supers (I don’t have regular hive bodies – because I can’t lift 160 lbs), the telescoping cover with it’s steel top, a few Beemax styrene hive top feeders – they all got at least a second coat of acrylic primer finish tonight. It’s still raining, but they should be dry by tomorrow and ready to stack for the nuc I have on order.
Heather, rock cress, emerging day lilies and the bright note of Siberian draba in a shaft of sunlight making a promising beginning for the season. In August this garden is a mass of foliage, but right now each color and texture sits in a frame of wood chips and gravel. This is probably my most successful garden and I could spend all my time here, convincing all these plant forms to live together and share territory. Humans tend to see vegetation as benign, but Napoleon had nothing on a healthy stand of rock cress.