Cutting Down the Ramblers

I took that photo of the lawn yesterday just as five pigeons took flight from beneath our bird feeder. It looks like one of those time-lapse photos showing a single bird in flight -- but it's really multiple birds. I'm not that photographically sophisticated!

I always like to show off the tidied garden -- not that it ever gets very tidy. Especially at this time of year when everything is growing and blooming it even feels a little claustrophobic out there. Greenery encroaching from all sides!

I mowed the lawn and cut back the rambling roses, which had stopped blooming.

That's one of them on the right -- the one that fell against the house a couple of years ago. You may remember I bought special cables and braces to tie it upright, still visible around its trunk. It gets huge, sending out gigantic arching branches that catch the wind. So, gotta keep it trimmed.

Here's another shot of the newly mowed lawn -- except for my little "No-Mow May" patch behind the teasel, which I'm keeping for now.

Anyway, I filled three yard waste bags with rose clippings, and I'm glad to have that job done!

It is indeed the "Iron in the Fire" dahlia that survived the winter -- not the purple one.

This shows the planter where Nicole Nicotiana lives. She's still in there, but she's been overshadowed by two magenta spreen lambsquarts* and a good-sized sunflower (tied up at right). I'm hoping Nicole keeps growing because eventually she'll win the battle for that space, but she may give up the ghost if she doesn't get enough sun. I'm astonished she's still alive, truth be told. I never expected her to live beyond one summer, and this is her third year.

Other than garden stuff, I read more about Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin, and I sorted some more slides. I've moved on now to the slide projector cartridges, which are stored in boxes and filled with slides:

I have 25 of these boxes. I don't want the cartridges, which take up too much room, but I also didn't want to just pull the slides out and mix them all up -- as you can see, they are somewhat organized by topic and in some cases labeled with the year they were taken. The context and labeling need to be preserved.

So I'm keeping the end piece of each box, with the labeling, and putting it into individual Ziploc™ sandwich bags along with the slides from that box. That keeps everything sorted and labeled but allows me to save a ton of storage space.

I'm pretty proud of that system, I must say.

*Yes, I realize this is not really the plants' name. My plant identifier app called them that, apparently because it ran out of characters, and I just think it's funny. In reality they're known as lambsquarters, magenta spreen, or tree spinach.