the situation in the garden, if it can be called that when everything pretty much grows wild and occasionally i rip out the most invasive weeds or provide some nourishment, is such that nothing i have sown has grown. or rather, everything is very small. my miniature chervil is in bloom, the sage is a towering two inches tall with four leaves each, my white-blossomed borage has produced a rosette of coarse leaves but no stalks, the radishes went straight to blossom as usual and now i have plenty of new seeds, again. japanese greens were all a no-show as well as red basil and roman chamomile.
but then again, what i haven't sown has grown. most remarkably the lemon catnip, which appears year after year, here and there, usually where something else was expected... in may i sowed some foxglove in an old pot with tiny seedlings already emerging, marking them with '?' and lemon catnip it was, despite having never grown in that particular pot before. no foxgloves this year. i sowed them all over the place. no calendula, even. that one perplexes me.
everything else flourishes, though. blackcurrants are like grapes, gooseberries on the small side but juicy and sweet and the echinacea that was planted last fall seems to thrive and is a butterfly favourite (needless to say, the seeds sowed in the same flowerbed, for white ones, never grew). rhubarb is still pushing out new stalks and the siberian blackberry has begun to ripen. it's a handsome berry, but rather bland. could be due to a shady position. raspberries need urgent picking but it's such a jungle out there... i keep expecting to run across machete-wielding explorers while making my way through the bushes.
every time i look at a dragonfly up close, i think "evinrude!"
clover has taken over the yard while my dad has been away. today i found a four-leaved one, lucky me...
