These imports from California over by the track are going crazy this year. Big small plate sized flowers. They like the drier heat we have been having. Today the weather pattern is back to the gloomy overcast we usually get in June, but we had 2 days over 90 and yesterday was in the mid 80’s. Sufice it to say I have been down watering every day.
After not hearing from anyone for a week I got the nod to begin the process of setting up my first in person class since the day before lockdown all those years ago now. I need to renew my insurance 1st and do a site walk through and find out what they are looking for in terms of class length and content.
It is so interesting to think that I am doing this so close to my 71st birthday. We’ll see if it is a go. I am excited to think that I will be teaching a class that involves getting on the floor. Yes, I know groan, but there is so much useful movement that can improve the quality of our lives on the floor. It is like someone showed up with a bright new toolbox full of the best tools for the job.
All this is going on while the news is so profoundly disturbing. It isn’t as if we didn’t know this was coming. It is all so heartbreaking. The fear, the threat, the sheer cruelty and self-centered-ness of it all. The grift, the revenge, the mental instability and unhappiness. All out there on display while good people are uprooted and families torn apart.
How could this end well. It is hard to see.
I do take solace in the fact that in the end despots almost all have endings that are reflective of the lives they have led. And then we forget.
May we not forget this. My generation is dying out. I think for a lot of younger folks that can’t come too soon. And I know everyone is saying the violence “just” plays into “their” hands, but people are allowed to get mad when their lives and the lives of their loved ones are torn asunder by forces way beyond their control by corrupt and spiteful leaders that in any other context would be marginalized.
We were talking in class this morning about how the two poles were in tension all through the civil rights movement (nonviolent and violent) and what is this but backlash about that. All these things we thought we had settled.
In the meantime, life goes on. The house finches gather at the feeder and my precious new lupine has leaf miners. I asked Claude what I could do about that, and Claude said that I could use vegetable oil with a little dish soap mixed in. So, I get a baby food jar, I put in a little vegetable oil, a little dish soap and then when I go back and ask, do I just rub it on and do I take off the affected leaves, it tells me that I need to spray it on. I am supposed to mix it in water.
Umm. That would have been helpful to know.
I do have some OMRI listed Insect Killing Soap (with seaweed extract) I got back when I had leaf miners in my chard. Not that it helped then. I ended up netting the chard. I don’t want to net my lupine. The good news is that I can use the spray bottle for the vegetable oil if this doesn’t work.
Part of the joy of gardening is figuring stuff out.
The bees are loving the catmint and the Lithodora. The raspberries are going like gangbusters. We have them in a common area and I have been bringing some home every morning for the last few days. Yum. The blueberries are close… I have flowers on at least one of my tomato plants.
In the spirit of optimism I put in some more marigold seeds this morning. I did not know until this morning that you don’t want to start cosmos or marigold seeds until after the solstice. They like waning light. They force them at the nurseries.
You learn something every day.
I so hope we can make it through this crazy time without widespread violence. I know my hoping doesn’t do any good, and even if we do, we are sowing the seeds internationally that I fear will grow into a significantly less safe world.
Oh wait… children are already starving and sleeping in bomb shelters. Where on any plane does that make sense? Any sense at all.
Mrs. Sherlock sees her surgeon next Monday.
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