Funky Sheets, an Old Jar and Hogweed

It's raining this morning, and I have the back door open so I can listen to the quiet patter. What a wonderful sound! Obviously, as a gardener, I find rain very comforting, but I think it goes deeper than that -- as animals we innately know that rain means life. Every living thing with ears and a modicum of brainpower finds the sound of rain reassuring, I suspect.

We had rain yesterday too, so the garden is happy.

The avocado is putting out new clumps of leaves (above). I love the reddish tinge they develop in the sunlight. I don't think the avocado has ever looked so happy, even though we haven't repotted it in years -- we're basically creating an overgrown bonsai, keeping its growth restricted in a pot and trimming it as needed. Yes, that's a shadow of a fly sitting atop one of the leaves.

I put "clean" sheets on the bed on Friday, and I was not at all happy with the way they smelled. I'd taken them to the neighborhood laundry, and they came back with a distinct funk. Not dirty -- just not fresh. They smelled like someone forgot to put soap in the machine.

Keep in mind that Olga sleeps in our bed, so I'm used to earthy smells. This was still funkier.

So yesterday morning I pulled the sheets off the bed again and put them through our own washer and dryer. It took half a day -- the dryer cycle is about three and a half hours long -- and I don't want to think about the carbon footprint. If I'd waited for a sunny day I could have dried them outside. But anyway, at least the bed now smells clean.

Maybe I should go back to washing our sheets myself.

I took care of all the indoor plants and did some cleaning, and then in the afternoon -- after the rain stopped -- I took Olga to the cemetery. I saw this little jewel of a beetle on a knapweed blossom. Doesn't it look like something you'd buy at Tiffany? (That photo is not sideways, by the way.)

For weeks I've been walking past a spot in the cemetery path where a bit of the bottom of a glass vessel was poking above the ground. There's a lot of trash in the cemetery so I assumed it was an old discarded bottle, but I wanted to see it whole in case it was interesting enough to keep, and the ground has been so hard I was unable to dig it out. Until yesterday! After our recent rains I was finally able to wrench it free of the earth -- and it turned out to be a completely uninteresting (and not at all antique) jar. Into the trash it went. Mystery solved.

Yesterday a commenter questioned the hogweed in our garden and whether it might in fact be cow parsley. Here's a shot of the leaf, showing that it is definitely hogweed. Cow parsley has a much more feathery leaf, almost like a fern. (Or, in fact, like parsley.) It's a daintier plant overall. Hogweed is sturdier and more robust. Here is a page that discusses the invasive pest giant hogweed and how to tell it apart from common hogweed (like ours) and cow parsley, with photos, if you're interested.

It's a shame giant hogweed is such a problem. It's an amazing plant. I'd grow it in a heartbeat if it weren't an invasive.

To confuse matters even more, some people call hogweed "cow parsnip," especially the North American variety (which is a different species from the European one). And then there are other look-alike plants like hemlock, which also has white umbels of flowers and feathery leaves but is famously toxic. (Just ask Socrates!)

Anyway, that's probably more than you wanted to know about hogweed and cow parsley.

OK, this post is freaking me out. I'm a 56-year-old man who digs old jars out of the ground, sleeps next to a dog and gets obsessed with botanical differentiation. HELP!