in progress

I missed May. How did I do that? The confounding thing is that I didn't even know I had done that. Skipping a month or two — or, er, seven — isn't an unusual thing around here, certainly, but usually I manage to keep track of exactly how bad a blogger I actually am. But to be worse than I thought? That's just demoralizing.

Anyway, this gardening-and-working-and-baby-and-blogging thing is turning out to be a bit more difficult than I anticipated. Time, of course, is at a bit of a premium (always). At least I used to be able to garden when the baby was asleep. The problem now is juggling the other things: I've taken photographs, but then neglected to upload them to somewhere accessible, and there's no time to blog. And then I find the time, but then the photographs are out of date ... and it's June now, a warm June (following a warm May), which means that the garden is changing fast; anything older than a week or so is out of date. So then I wait until I can take photographs, and the cycle begins anew.

So I've just thrown up my hands and given up. These photographs are from May 24 and 25. The garden doesn't look like this any more — the irises have stopped blooming, for example, and the weigela is just about done — but it did look like this, not too long ago, and for now I'm going to say that that's good enough.


The weigela bloomed, as it does, and it made me happy — as it does. I didn't get a chance to prune it this year, though it desperately needs it, so it's a bit more scraggly looking. Still lovely, though.


And ...strawberries! Although these are, metaphorically speaking, the eggs, not the chicks, and we shall not count them. We've had bad luck with our strawberries; last year we managed to harvest one, and this year looks to be about the same, despite the apparently early abundance. The thing is that we check them, and they are not quite ripe so we leave them alone, and then we check them the next day and they are just ... gone. Eaten by slugs, raccoons, destroyed by rain ... kidnapped by aliens? We don't know. But they're not there. It's disappointing, to be sure, but then again, they are cultivated strawberries and rather bland — the farmer's market ones are better at this time of year — so it's not a great loss. I think next year I will work on finding alpine strawberries, and plant those, and perhaps it will be better.