spring cleaning of a different kind, Minnie progress report, last of the spring flowers

Two weeks of house cleaning, company and recovery and the inbox on my email account was astronomical. I get a lot of daily emails from news accounts and individuals who write about what’s happening in the country and some other interesting stuff. This morning I read two and then just deleted the rest unread. One can only tolerate so much.

Friday night we finally got some real rain, about an inch and a half, and of course it came after I spent the day watering all the beds in the big backyard. It also brought in some cooler and dryer weather and since I had finally brought over the unused 3’ x 6’ folding table in my sister’s shed for the party I spent the day Saturday hauling all the pots and buckets and other gardening miscellanea and the small table I’d been using out of the barn. First I raked out all the leaves that had accumulated, then I put up a little shelf, put the new table in, hung some stuff on nails, busted up all the broken pots into shards and put them into a planter I’ll never use, reorganized all my pots and hosed off everything, and a bunch of other stuff. Looks great. Did I take a before picture? Of course not, have you met me? But this is how it looks now.

I should have gone to the feed store and bought bags of dirt and compost and mulch since I’m out of all that but that will have to wait. Sunday I started weeding the east flower bed, the one that is the most neglected. It’s where the two plumerias go in the summer and where the orange cosmos and the rock rose dominate; the cosmos in the fall, the rock rose all summer. It’s also the one that gets full sun first and so I didn’t get much done even though the rain brought in some cooler and less humid days before it was time to move in the shade. So I switched over to the west flower bed that has all the day lilies and other bulbs and dug out all the dewberry vines, a never ending task because it’s impossible to get all the roots out.

I haven’t reported on Minnie’s recovery but she got the cast/splint off two weeks ago. She is gradually using that leg more and more. Today she stands on it, scratches with it, goes up and down stairs, will jump up on the couch but nothing higher though she’ll jump down off higher, she’ll slow walk on it but anything faster and she lifts it up. That dog is fearless and took off after a bigger dog in the yard two days ago and she can go pretty fast on three legs when she wants to. Took her in today for a new X-ray to check on the healing and that joint has developed some arthritis which the vet said is a response to the injury and healing. He thinks that given time she’ll use it more and more but may have a bit of a limp. He gave me more pain/anti-inflammation meds and an antibiotic because he thought it felt a little warm. Might help and won’t hurt in any case.

Here are some things that bloomed that I never got around to posting pictures of and some things blooming now. I’ll post food garden picture next time. So in order: penstemon done and going to seed, purple iris over at Pam’s I intended to dig up last year and move to my yard also done, german verbena, rock rose, day lillies first of many varieties, byzantine gladiolus, purple coneflower. Very pink and purple. Zinnias are starting up but I’ll save them for another post.

Tomorrow I have to arrive at the hospital for cataract surgery at 7 AM.