Liberating the Yucca

This is our one dahlia that hasn't bloomed yet -- the one that was nibbled down to bare stems in June and thus got a very late start. Now it has multiple buds, a couple of them pretty far along, so it looks like we'll get some flowers after all. Fingers crossed!

I walked Olga up to the corner yesterday morning, where my campaign against neighborhood trash continued. This time it was more discarded cabinetry, a vent hood and a refrigerator. I reported it to the council and within an hour or two they carried it all away. There was also a spray of broken glass from a fluorescent tube that had been thrown out in an earlier junk pile, and I went up there with a broom and swept it up. Lest you think this was a charitable act, let me just say it was purely selfish -- Olga walks in that area every morning and I don't want her getting glass in her paws.

After that I sat in the garden reading The New Yorker. I am six issues behind and my magazine stack is big enough to make me feel guilty, so I've gotta work through some of it. I read a chilling article about the leader of a religious cult in Kenya whose extreme (and insane) interpretation of evangelical Christianity has led to the murder or starvation of hundreds of his parishioners. It's all very Jim Jones, and as someone who just doesn't have the capacity for that kind of religious belief, I find the blind devotion a huge mystery.

I also embarked on what turned out to be a very ambitious repotting project. I took our huge yucca tree out of its smallish pot (in the photo above, it's the empty clay one on the right, by the chair) and put it in a bigger one, and then moved Manny Two into the smaller one.

I'm making it sound easy, but it was not. The yucca was so root-bound that Dave and I together couldn't pull it out of the pot. At one point Dave pulled the trunk and I held the edges of the pot, and he was dragging me along the ground behind the tree. I went around the edges of the root ball with a long bread knife, and that didn't help. I was afraid we'd have to break the pot, but I wanted it for Manny. Finally we soaked the whole thing in water, and that helped loosen the yucca enough to free it. The root ball was rock-solid.

It now has more room to grow -- which is good and bad, since it's already near ceiling height -- and Manny is happier in fresh soil. In its new pot, freshly watered, the yucca was so heavy that getting it back inside was very difficult. I'm still sore from the exertion. It's not going outside again!

As you can see, Olga was a big help.

I found this shiny, polished blue pebble in Manny's old pot. It was like a little piece of treasure, buried in that dusty, dry, exhausted potting soil.

(And how do you like my high-tech labeling method for my AirPods? That's so kids at school don't try to claim them as lost property when they're sitting on my desk. Which has happened.)

This morning, it's pouring rain outside. A glorious sound!