No-Mow May, by Accident

Remember how I said we weren't going to do "No-Mow May" this year? Well, I was wrong.

This wasn't by design so much as circumstance -- I just haven't gotten around to mowing -- but since we're already halfway through the month I plan to just let it happen. The daisies are thanking me!

I did, however, weed more of the flowerbeds yesterday, which seems perhaps antithetical to the no-mow philosophy. I simply cleared areas around some plants so we could see them better and they could get more light.

I also planted almost all the rest of my seeds, including zinnias, sunflowers and Nigella. I'm really not trying very hard with these seeds. I'm just sticking them in the ground and if they grow, so be it.

Speaking of which, I planted some a couple of weeks ago, and look at this:

There are seven seedlings within that copper slug ring (meant, as the name suggests, to keep the slugs away). I have no idea how that happened. I normally don't plant seeds that closely. I'll have to thin them, which I hate doing -- especially since many of the others I planted in that first round either didn't come up or got eaten.

In the afternoon Olga and I went to the cemetery. I'd read that one of the graves there is for children's book illustrator Kate Greenaway, and I wanted to try to find her headstone. This involved wading into a brushy area where Olga declined to follow (above). I did find it, but it's covered in brambles at this time of year so I didn't get a very good picture.

I thought maybe it would be one of the stones mysteriously decorated with children's toys, but no.

She's such a goofball.

The cemetery, by the way, does its own version of No-Mow May, clearing around headstones with a weed-whacker (known as a "strimmer" here) on a rotating basis, which allows grass and flowers to grow up and blossom in the intervening time. The rear section (where Greenaway's grave is located) is much wilder than the front section.