Butterfly Garden Update

My butterfly and bird garden has turned into more of a bee and chipmunk garden. It's all good, though. I'm just hoping the chipmunk doesn't get so used to me that she tries to move into the house with us. It's not exactly airtight, so it wouldn't be too hard. And I know it's a she because she's had lots of babies over the past couple of seasons.

This is great time to shop for plants. Some of the more unusual flora is gone but the remaining stock is half off or more. Gardening is such a crap shoot anyway, so why not try a couple of bargain plants? One of my favorite shrubs from a couple of years ago was reduced to 1/4 of the original price and is covered with butterflies and bees in late summer and early fall. I'll try to get some photos tomorrow. The sun is going down already and my camera battery is dead. The photo I'm using is of one of Mom's peonies.

My latest addition was something my mom insisted on buying me -- Sedum 'Angelina'. It's not something I would normally buy but she was really excited by it and it was only $4. The chipmunk seems to think digging in the middle of it is a grand idea, so we'll have to see if it makes it. The other plants from earlier this spring are doing pretty well. I didn't realize I was buying so many violet blue varieties. Next year I'll concentrate on some other colors like pink or yellow.

More HR Humor

This is a real ad from the local paper that ran sometime this Spring. A couple of us in the HR department dialed the number to try to figure out the company name. The guy answering the phone said it so fast we couldn't understand what he was saying and a reverse number look up only told us it was somewhere downtown. Shows we're not the only ones with hiring problems.

I Know, I Know...

... I haven't blogged in an eternity. So spank me. Here's a summary of things that have gone on since mid-June and some teasers for upcoming blogs.

I went to the SHRM conference in Chicago in late June. I'll post more about how folks couldn't make the connection when Doris Kearnes Goodwin spoke about Lincoln's leadership skills and the relevance to HR, Sidney Poitier, and human resources professionals being escorted out of a Lionel Richie concert. A great time.

I've been on a party bus to see Tom Petty at Deer Creek/Verizon/Whatever the Heck It's Called Music Center. More to come on the bus ride to the concert and the MASSIVE headache I got. And the three full minutes between the main set and the encore.

My father-in-law has had his second round of chemo and lots of ensuing problems. If my husband and I make it out of this with our marriage intact, I'll be shocked. Today was a bad day and I'm not sure I'll post about it. That's more of an over-dinner-with-friends kind of thing.

My oldest dog had a stroke last Saturday. It never occurred to me that dogs could have strokes. She's still with us but it was very touch-and-go for the first part of the week. We may be doing doggy-therapy in the near future, so stay tuned.

I'm Not Here

Walking into work earlier this week, I overheard one of the trainers from the fitness club in my building talking to another trainer on her cell phone. We were both walking through the parking garage to the basement and she was talking LOUDLY complaining about work. Typical vapid jock talk mostly until she said, "I'm not here yet. Are you here?" to the person on the other end of the phone. I don't know if she saw me smirking or not but I'm sure she didn't have a clue as to why if she did. Perhaps if she seemed a bit more intellectual, we could have had a rather existential conversation commiserating on our mutual unhappiness at work -- "I'm here but I'm not here..." Or maybe I should have turned around and said, "If you're not here, then where are you?" but I resisted.

The moral, Dear Reader, is that when you're feeling down -- don't despair. At least you know the difference between "here" and "there."

A Little More Gardening

I was putting in the rest of the plants I bought this weekend and discovered that one of the dianthus I bought was 'Neon Star' rather than 'Firewitch'. Oopsy. Into the ground it went anyway.

While I was working outside, I heard a very strange humming and chirruping from my neighbors' maple tree. I think we may have a pair of hummingbirds staking their territory. Either that or we're being invaded by some huge, vocal insects of some sort. It's hard to tell without my glasses. Maybe they'll discover some of my plants soon.

The Lazy Gardener

It was an unpleasant week at work, so I've spent the past three evenings doing two of my favorite things -- cooking and gardening.

In my ideal world, I would spend one day per week cooking meals for the entire week but that rarely happens. I've had my menu planned for three weeks before actually getting everything at the grocery. In any case, now we have curried chicken salad, a reduced-calorie (yet still delicious) version of red beans & rice, oven-roasted chicken, meatloaf, and terriaki salmon. I made the meatloaf with bison meat. There's so little fat that I'll have to up the binding agents next time, but it's still really good. The next task will be freezing the portions that I can't eat right away. Groceries are way too expensive to let anything go to waste. I always have lots of fun when I cook even though it's a lot of work.


This evening I spent some time playing in the butterfly garden I started two years ago. During the Fall of 2006, I mapped out the area for the garden and covered it with black plastic sheeting, the contents of my compost bin, leaves, and straw from my parents. In the Spring of 2007, I pulled up the plastic and used the rototiller to mix it all into the soil. Apparently this is a technique referred to as lasagna gardening (because of the layering of materials) although I was just being lazy since I didn't have to remove the sod layer before tilling. The bonus I didn't expect was how much healthier that part of the yard is now. In the past when I would work in that area, I'd find a lot of grubs but now I can't pull a weed without disturbing an earthworm. It's a shame I don't like to fish because I have access to a whole lot of bait.

I got a bit overzealous when I ordered the plants and didn't get them all planted. That plus the fact that the birdseed I used was apparently not sterile like it was supposed to be made the butterfly garden a bit of a bust. Some plants did survive though: 2 Caryopteris 'Dark Knight', and 3 Sedum septabile 'Brilliant'. One shrub, a dwarf "cranberry" Viburnum, that I bought on clearance in 2006 has played dead until this spring. I saw one tiny green shoot near the bottom (when I was getting ready to dig it up and inter it in the composter). I decided to give it one more summer and cut out all the dead stems. It certainly isn't flourishing but is showing some nice growth, so that's kind of a pleasant surprise. Hopefully by next year, it will actually look like a shrub.

Four plants that I ordered last year actually survived overwintering in their shipping containers in my garage, so I stuck them in the ground tonight. If they're that tough, they just might survive my low-maintenance gardening style. They didn't have their labels anymore, so I don't know what they're going to look like if they survive. Three of them are the same type of plant (possibly Tradescantia ohioensis) and the other looks like some type of clover (possibly Dalea purpurea).

I've added a number of new plants this season:

• Coreopsis 'Rising Sun'
• Salvia 'May Night'
• Dianthus gratianopolitanus 'Spangled Star'
• Dianthus 'Firewitch'
  
• Scabiosa 'Butterfly Blue'
• Campanula carpatica 'Blue Clips'
• Aguilegia 'Winky Mix'

Now to order the bulk compost...

A Little Something for Davo

I was reading an article in The New Yorker about studies of language cognition in African gray parrots (see "Birdbrain" by Margaret Talbot in the May 12 issue) when I came across a little something my dear friend Davo would appreciate.

The author was discussing the results of ape-language studies and how the apes could not form complicated combinations of words when communicating. To illustrate her point: "And, when [the apes] produced a longer utterance, it tended to be a string of repetitions of the sort rarely encountered outside a Gertrude Stein poem. (A quote from Nim Chimpsky: 'Give orange give me eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.')"

I'm not sure whose brain is harder to understand -- the chimp's or Stein's.