In the garden

Above you see one of the many delights and attractions of summer break that has lured me away from blogging. My compost box demands nothing other than steady feeding from the top. I don't stir it or add a magic potion to make it work. Layers of pulled weeds and other green garden and kitchen waste alternate with decaying straw, leaves, and pine needles. When it rains, I take the top off so it gets watered every now and then. But mostly the sun beats down upon it, heating it up and transforming it into gorgeous black compost.

What you see above is what accumulated and transformed over the winter. I opened the compost box up at planting time, which is when I took this photo. Then I misplaced the camera, which made me mad because I took the photo to accompany my next blog post. And since I couldn't find the camera, I couldn't blog -- or so I told myself.

Today, I found the camera in the linen closet! Good thing, because the garden has never looked so good. I spent today filling in a few gaps here and there. It's a good time to pick up bargains at the local nurseries. Dunkler's Farm has flats on sale for $7 and all individual plants and hanging pots are greatly reduced.

The skies started to get dark late afternoon. I ran inside to check the forecast only to find that Summit County was in the middle of a tornado warning, with the storm cell forming in Barberton and heading straight to Akron! Yikes! After running around closing windows and putting away loose tools into the garage, I fooled around with the TV remote trying to find useful weather coverage. Channel 3 was the only station that interrupted programming to show us the Doppler tracking the storm.

I had the cat carrier ready to stuff Ophelia into should we need to head down to the basement. Fortunately for the cat and for our neighborhood, the storm tracked north of us and we didn't see as much as a hail stone. Just short bursts of heavy rain, which was just what the new transplants into the garden needed.

Here's a shot taken today of a clump of rescued tiger lilies. I found them on sale at a grocery store a couple of years ago, all dry and root bound in their plastic pots -- 99 cents each. What a deal and now look at them: