Gardening grows community

I love gardening and growing food. Not just for the food production either, as my total haul from farming this year is limited to handfuls of sugar snap peas and a single salad. 

I love it because folks walking by comment on the garden. They admire plants and express shock at how many things we have growing. It's a fun way to interact with people you usually wouldn't talk to. 

Plants are an easy conversation starter, especially when standing outside on your porch with a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning. Our new neighbors popped over this morning, to discuss watering for each other when one was out of town. Then they showed me how to prune tomatoes, an educational session much more fun than youtube. Li May (sp?) and Chad just built a house two lots down, and said they decided on that lot last fall after walking down the street and seeing that I was growing tomatoes in the front yard. 

It makes me smile when my gardening welcomes people to the neighborhood, without saying a word. 

Guerrilla Gardening

We live in one of the many incomplete subdivisions across the US. Our house is on a street that is only about 50% filled in with residences, with the remaining lots unlandscaped in any way. The whole area was farm fields as little as eight years ago and putting in the infrastructure for the subdivision obviously turned up a ton of soil. The result last summer was entire crops of Canadian thistles in every vacant lot.

My plan for dealing with the weeds is twofold. First, I plan on spreading some low maintenance wildflower seeds as soon as the ground is warm enough to be worked. I picked up a packet of Xeriscaping seeds, as well as Rocky Mountain Wildflower seeds, and will spread them and hope for the best. Might as well turn Canadian thistles into wildflowers, right?

The second half of the deal-with-weeds plan is more aggressive. Gallatin County does have a weed ordinance, but as a government worker I felt too sheepish to call in a complaint last summer. Seemed like using my profession to tattle on the neighbor. This year I'm over it. The contractor who built our house owns the two lots to the west of us, and I'll let him know that the noxious weeds are a problem for me. If he doesn't address it, I will get over myself and call the County Weed Control.

I am the granddaughter of farmers. Canadian thistles are a scourge on the earth. If I had my druthers, we'd knock down all the thistles and plant a cover crop on these lots. Clover, barley, hay, natural grasses; just something that will eventually choke out the weeds and be low maintenance. Or we'd do what my parent's subdivision does and rent out the vacant lots to a sheep farmer to bring in his herd to eat down the weeds.

Monday Malaise

It was a kind of weird weekend. After Friday night’s dinner and retail therapy, Saturday dawned promising. I worked on wedding stuff (mainly the budget) all morning, DJ had coffee with friends. DJ came home, we chatted in the office, I went to the gym, showered and we went to Costco to price out wine and beer for the cocktail hour portion of our wedding.

Saturday night I had dinner with Kelly, Marisa and Joslyn (all AOII’s) at the Rib and Chop House in Livingston, before heading down the Paradise Valley to Chico Hot Springs. The four of us soaked for three hours, drinking margaritas, catching up, discussing everything from weddings to finances. My, how our conversations have evolved since the AOII Multi days! It was great to have girlfriend time though. I seriously needed it!

I spent Sunday at AOII from pretty much 10am until 4pm. Holy moly. Corporation Board meeting (uncomfortable news), ritual (secret squirrel stuff), Founder’s Day brunch (I was starving- apparently I didn' tget the memo that food wasn't until 1pm), and Alumnae Advisory Committee meeting. Yowzer. Good to give back, but I think was either hung over (from two margaritas and a glass of wine? Weak sauce Kramer!), or just plain exhausted. I came home and took a nap.

Which prevented me from falling asleep early, when we got in bed at 8:40 pm to read and sleep. And I about lost my shit at 11:10pm when our neighbor’s “friend”* came rolling in with a diesel pickup, which he idled in the driveway for two hours! I have a weird sound sensitivity. Seriously, I can’t handle needless noise. I like quiet. And I was irate last night; tossing and turning and watching them through the bedroom window and just generally being pissed. Yeah, 6:41 am seemed early today.

DJ spent Saturday night eating Papa Murphy’s, finishing off the whiskey and playing Play Station Baseball. Total dude time! Sunday was more hanging out. Suffice to say, we’re both pretty unimpressed and a little grumpy about our weekend, especially DJ. We’re too cheap right now to spend money for something to do on the weekends. We’re not broke, just waiting for a tax return to come in and generally hesitant to spend lumps of money we can put to better uses, like wedding stuff.

Speaking of, should I be worried that I still can’t get a hold of anyone at the restaurant where we are having our wedding reception? They’re closed for the winter for a major remodel… and I’m getting nervous. I just keep telling myself it’ll work out.

I met with the lady doing the design for our wedding invites this morning. Surprisingly “cheap”! (Meaning, I’m over it. I’m out of creative juice for them).

I guess the only upbeat thing I have to say (geeze! Pick it up Court!) is that Sunday always means new puppy pictures!

I've always teased my sister about being a golden retriever. Gretchen is big (tall), blonde, sheds a lot and falls asleep easily. I told Gretchen that while Harlow would be my puppy, she would always be my first golden retriever. Gretch laughed when I sent her this picture; when Gretch was a kid her observational face was to stare at something with her mouth slighly ajar and her tounge hanging out.

Look at all the wrinkles on her face!

Facial expressions from Zoolander? Model pose?

*We think our neighbors to the west are drug dealers are involved in illicit activities. This is after a friend of theirs tried to credit card his way into our house before Thanksgiving. They have cars coming and going at all times of the day, and people will park a block away and walk over to their house. It’s suspicious. Well, at least they have a source of income and their house won’t go into foreclosure, right?