nawl: Garden report, May episode.

Generals have come and gone, weeks solid of mad scribbling, LaTeXing, the studying and annotating of books and papers, my reading list, the culmination in some sense of twenty years of schooling condensed into forty pages of notes in increasingly erratic handwriting, three hours of awkward grilling, and then it was over.

It took me days to become human again.

It's not really the sort of thing that's supposed to be left until the last minute, but if things always went the way we wanted, grad school would be easy.

That dispensed with, this is the time of year when everything suddenly explodes in green. My Californian nature finds it difficult to believe that you don't actually have to do anything to grow a plant. It's sunny and it rains all on its own, and the next thing you know the weeds are three feet tall, the bamboo has grown five feet, and the seeds we put in the ground are unfurling little green shoots with perfect little wrinkled seedling leaves out of their seed casings.

The Garden Project has taken on a life of its own, expanding into two and a half beds in the back, peas, beans, tomatoes, carrots, squash, watermelon, cucumbers, onions, all the herbs we could think of, pumpkins in the horrid-rocky-but-sunny weed beds in the front.

The garden had some surprises of its own. The leaf-buds of last month's garden post turned out to be a rather numerous collection of enormous hostas occupying all of the relevant planting beds. Pretty ground-cover has emerged atop the seas of ivy. A well-established wisteria vine bloomed dangling from the trees twenty feet overhead.

The sticks emerging from the ground turned out to be trees of some sort that are currently furiously producing a funny little spout of leaves at the very tip. I take it they want to be pruned.

In a couple of afternoons of stress-relief in the form of ivy ripping, I uncovered a sandbox full of seashells and several yards of stone paths around the garden.

A fire pit behind the shed is thoughtfully lined with sand and edged with igneous rock.

Two trees in the back corner turned out to be the perfect distance (no, really, the perfect distance) to string a hammock between. And such a hammock turned out to be quite a pleasant place to stretch out and pound out a solid day's work in the sun.

And growing across the impossible wishing-well, tiny baby grapes.

nawl

Garden report, May episode.

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