Butterflies and gardening
Jun. 16th, 2004 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeMarta's butterfly book arrived today, and now that it's going to be 85 and beautifully sunny every day, perhaps I'll get to spend more time outdoors and can start observing butterflies more carefully than I have in the past! Mostly around our house it's just the very common "cabbage white." More properly, the book is Butterflies of Lane County: A Pocket Guide to 78 Species of Lane County, Oregon by Marta Makarushka. She's a data analyst at ORI; we worked together a bit a few years ago.
Neither the bachelor's buttons nor the lobelias that I planted seeds for this spring have sprouted at all, but my strawberry plants and new tomato plants are flourishing. I just don't have time to dig out all the grass from the flowerbeds (and if I did have the time, there are many things that would probably rank higher on my list).
I certainly don't see myself as a very domestic person, but I really like the idea of practicing the skills that others have taken the trouble to teach me, especially when it's a generational continuity thing. That's why it's important to me to grow my own tomatoes (although doing so is utterly trivial when compared with my grandma's efforts -- she grew corn, green beans, tomatoes, squashes, at least four types of apples, pears, three types of cherries, plums, peach-plums, peaches, strawberries, raspberries, blackcaps, loganberries, boysenberries, gooseberries, crabapples, walnuts, filberts, and other things I can't remember, and preserved dozens and dozens of jars of produce and jams and jellies).
Neither the bachelor's buttons nor the lobelias that I planted seeds for this spring have sprouted at all, but my strawberry plants and new tomato plants are flourishing. I just don't have time to dig out all the grass from the flowerbeds (and if I did have the time, there are many things that would probably rank higher on my list).
I certainly don't see myself as a very domestic person, but I really like the idea of practicing the skills that others have taken the trouble to teach me, especially when it's a generational continuity thing. That's why it's important to me to grow my own tomatoes (although doing so is utterly trivial when compared with my grandma's efforts -- she grew corn, green beans, tomatoes, squashes, at least four types of apples, pears, three types of cherries, plums, peach-plums, peaches, strawberries, raspberries, blackcaps, loganberries, boysenberries, gooseberries, crabapples, walnuts, filberts, and other things I can't remember, and preserved dozens and dozens of jars of produce and jams and jellies).