OB and the Lazy Day

It's raining.  That means I don't need to water the veggies I grow -- organically -- in my back yard.

It means I can't mow.  You don't mow wet grass and besides, my push mower wouldn't do it.  Yeah, I use a good old Scott push mower, even though I'm over 55 and asthmatic and arthritic and have a slight heart problem.  I've lost 5 pounds since I bought it and the exercise is good for all that stuff.

Plus the grass looks better, it doesn't have those white edges where the power mower scrapes them.

Plus I have the blade set high, and that limits how much ground ivy can grow.  It also defeats Japanese beetles from laying their eggs.  My neighbors have Japanese beetles and I've seen the starlings on their lawns gobbling the grubs down.

Plus I've been getting rid of the crabgrass with corn meal gluten.  Put it on spring and autumn and it suppresses crabgrass seed from sprouting.  Since the actual crabgrass plants die every year, keeping the seed from sprouting means you don't get new crabgrass.  Then your normal grass can spread out and take over.

I got all this from the garden guru who has a spot on Fridays on my local news/talk radio station.  He's into NOT poisoning your pets and kids and the wildlife while still having nice grass and other plants.  I plant my veggies in compost on his advice, and it avoids wrestling with my horrible Maryland piedmont clay as well as getting good growth. 

I put in old-fashioned self-seeding annuals for the bees and butterflies, and I also get hummingbirds at the hollyhock and Indian Blanket flowers.  The catbirds and cardinals and mockingbirds and robins have been all over the pokeweed that I let grow, eating the berries.  The magenta trumpets of the morning glories bloom from vines that rise from a green drape over the fence through which the tickseed pokes its orange flowers.  The goldfinches perch inside the wide meshes of the fence in the afternoon to pick at the ripe seeds of the cosmos.  Wrens are everywhere, rasping when they lose their tempers, which happens a lot.  The ageratum flowers blue, the okra creamy yellow, and the tomatoes are starting to fruit.

Life is good.

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