A Moveable Garden

Weekly recap of my ritual of existence in this liminal space called life. (See here for more info.)

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• Weather

This week was mostly warm, with some rain. The average high temperature was 62.8°F, with a range from 71.2°F on Friday to 46.8°F on Sunday. Lows ranged from 30.2°F on Monday to 47.1°F on Thursday, averaging 39.3°F. I don’t see any temps at or below freezing on the two week forecast. We had rain on several days, totalling 2.18 inches (the lion’s share, 1.58″, fell on Saturday).

• Beginnings/Firsts

My husband moved his little sportscar out of its winter spot in the garage on Monday, one of the signs that Spring is underway. He also went on his first group/class birding outing (in Hancock, NH) this week, on Thursday morning.

On Wednesday, I planted shelling peas, two varieties, Laxton’s Progress #9 from High Mowing and Green Arrow from Seed Savers Exchange, and some arugula, which I believe was a Seed Savers Exchange Astro.

I saw a bluebird in the yard on Thursday. And I found the first tick on my beige pants (a dog tick) on Friday!

• Wild Things (Flora, Fauna, Fungi) in addition to others elsewhere in this post

• Wandering 

Walked in town on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday (lots of trout lilies budding and starting to bloom this week all over town), and picked up litter for over an hour on our route in town on Tuesday. Made plans on Thursday to travel to Maine next week for a few days on the seacoast.

in-town

• Curiosity & Discoveries

This was an odd artifact on my phone for a bit, on The Weather Channel app on Monday. The time was 4 hours off, the icon looks tornadic, and the temp was null.

• Creating

Now that it’s gardening time again, I’m creating all over the place — designing and planning in my mind, browsing plants in person and online while thinking about what might work where, and figuring out how to plant seeds, seedlings, and full-grown plants at the right times and in the places that will suit them best and work well within the vague conception of the garden (now and future) that I carry with me, keenly aware that drought, flooding, winds, winter storms, temperature extremes, browsing mammals and insects, poor plant genetics, ordinary mortality, and other things beyond my control will take no heed of my plans.

So far, I have decided not to buy a bunch more native perennials (yet), even though they were on sale from a favourite seller, and not to plant 96 very tempting looking vegetable, herb, and annual seeds (to create seedlings) at a seed-planting event this week. I remember from past years that what’s emerged from the ground so far, though it seems like a lot compared with snow cover three weeks ago, is much less than will emerge within the next month or even two, and if I buy and plant too much now, the returning perennials will overrun the newbies and I’ll either completely lose track of them (and lose them) or be forced to replant them someplace else in the yard that’s probably not so advantageous.

So I am mostly waiting now and working with what I have. I’ve planted the peas and arugula, I plan to plant green beans and scarlet runner beans from seed in a month or so, and maybe cilantro and maybe cosmos flowers from seed (I have the packets); and I do have some veg, herb, and annual seedlings ordered and coming my way Memorial Day weekend and God help me but I think I know where they are all going to be planted. I’ve also bought (locally) and got in the ground a few annual plants and one perennial plant so far, and next week, having thoroughly scouted out the seemingly open spots, I will probably buy some romaine lettuce starts, a few more annuals and maybe another perennial or two, the kind you can fit in almost anywhere (or so I think).

Fingers crossed! It’s always a bit of a challenge trying to contain within my puny imagination the current landscape, the summer landscape, the soil and sun conditions, the vagaries of plant growth, plants’ inevitable deaths, their surprising spreading (looking at you geraniums, echinops, and centaurea), what will eventually shade what, where the bulbs are buried, whether that tree that’s currently casting shade will last another year or two, and much more — and still find time or energy to consider planning or doing anything in other languishing areas of my life.

• Repairing and Maintaining (everything but the house & yard)

Body/Mind: I worked out four times (4 hours) this week and spent 5 or 6 hours in the garden. I walked more than 10,000 steps on six days, including four days over 12,000 steps and two over 14,000. Got my hair cut on Thursday morning (masked).

Vehicles: My husband replaced the battery in my car’s key fob on Sat., preemptively. He’s been working on getting his little car ready for driving.

Cat: I wrote up catsitter instructions on Sunday for next week’s trip.

• Gardening/Yard 

As mentioned, I worked in the garden for 5 or 6 hours this week, starting slowly, planting peas and arugula on Wed., watering them, the new annuals, and the perennial primrose almost every day, as well as an hour on Thursday spent pruning the rhododendrons, mostly removing dead branches and those blocking the view of the front door, and cutting out vines from them. I also did some pruning of the leucothoe and elderberries. I cut back some plants (esp. tall grasses), weeded, and raked a bit, since I don’t do a fall clean-up, but I left some leaf cover on all the beds. I cleaned out the birdbath completely and refilled it on Monday. My husband pruned the lower (dead) limbs of one of the blue spruce trees one day, continued pruning the apple tree, and he repaired the pea trellis and the rose trellis on Monday. He also at some point reluctantly cut down a (lovely) maple tree that was starting to grow up into the power lines.

Some things blooming this week in the garden include bloodroot (which has moved itself to the house foundation), violets, daphne, hazelnut, daffodils, hellebore (the purple and the white kinds). Some parsley overwintered, yay!

• Nesting

Cleaning/Maintenance: I went on a tear on Sunday, vacuuming floors, wall-to-wall carpets, and area rugs for two hours in the kitchen, family room, both hallways, both bathrooms, the bedroom, and the laundry room, including using the attachments to get the cobwebs near the ceilings and the dirt where the carpet meets the wall. I ended up having to take the vacuum apart (more than usual) to clean it out.

I also tried to clean 16-years’ of dirt out of the pleated shade on the lamp next to my desk and found that the entire shade was apparently now just made of dirt — it basically disintegrated as I vacuumed. It’s been replaced.

I did clothes laundry on Monday and Sunday, plus towel laundry on Friday and sheets laundry on Saturday. I watered the houseplants on Thursday, including using some Imidacloprid (a neonic, unfortunately) in the ficus to get rid of whatever is making its leaves sticky and then dropping. My husband made the dump run on Tuesday.

Supplies: My standing order of Well Before KN95 masks arrived on Wed. I ordered four teas from Palais de Thes on Wed. and they arrived on Thursday! I picked up two bags of Coast of Maine Quoddy mix compost on Monday at the local hardware store.

Admin/Financial: My husband had to call his credit union (where he has a small IRA CD) on Tuesday to work out an issue there (still unresolved). I got the official notice in the mail on Wed. of my social security amount, and I notified our financial advisor so he can add it to our plan data. On Sat., I spent an hour gathering new figures to update our investments/assets totals.

Food: We had leftover Italian swordfish stew, homemade buttermilk biscuits, and steamed asparagus on Monday and my husband also ate it for dinner on Tuesday, while I made and enjoyed cacio e pepe with shrimp and artichoke hearts. We both had the cacio e pepe on Wed., and Thursday I made the penne with roasted asparagus, pine nuts, and (our) chives, which we had for dinner that night and Friday. We got takeout pizza (spinach, olive, artichoke heart) from a local place on Saturday, along with their garden salad which I augmented significantly with veggies and beans, and we had that again on Sunday. We finished the crêpes Suzette this week at breakfasts.

• Sleeping & Dreaming

Sleeping was not stellar this week. I wrote down a number of dreams. I got an average of 7 hours 10 mins of sleep this week, less than usual, ranging nightly from 7 hours 48 mins to 6 hours 14 mins. My Fitbit sleep score of 83.7 reflects the lack of sleep. I managed almost 11 hours of REM sleep and a paltry 8 hours 10 mins of deep.

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One of the dreams, which I’m calling The South American Fever Dream Wedding: My old friend (KH, now KvW) is getting married and has created a whole play around the wedding, which includes many outdoor props and a sort of energetic tropical dance she will perform — I watch her rehearse it. Her escort, instead of a maid of honour, is a 10-yr-old boy she’s known forever. I’m with her now after our having been apart for many years with little contact, so I don’t really know her husband-to-be or others here. She asks my advice about what veil, train, or tiara to wear. I ask her what she’d worn at her first wedding to John and she can’t recall.

We are in a huge event center/hotel. In the morning, we approach several counters staffed by people she knows and she buys some parcels from them. I notice Hugh Laurie (the actor) interacting with other people in this hotel and buying things. He has some bandaging (gauze) on his face but is in good spirits and I am about to approach him to tell him he is my favourite actor but suddenly I don’t.

The play production is in rehearsal outside, using all the big props, on this same morning. We haven’t eaten anything, and the rehearsal, which we’re meant to watch and perhaps take some part in, just continues with no break, which is sort of annoying to me. I get the feeling that the people she is paying to produce her wedding find her “fever dream” theme unusual, but it does seem very Karen to me. I am watching a lot of the scenes, sipping ginger ale, and a man with silver hair (he seems older than me), someone I don’t know and who has some authority at this place, asks me as we’re watching one scene if I am thirsty and I tell him no. Then I rethink it and say that if he is going for a drink for himself, I’ll take another ginger ale. But he never goes to get the drink and eventually he just disappears. Near the end of the dream, the ground is covered in snow. The props and costumes have been taken in for their final check before the big event, and I and others are riding on snowmobiles transporting us back to the hotel proper. I am playing with a stretchy cord on my snowmobile and am told not to.

• Reading / Words & Ideas / Listening / Watching  

Reading

BOOKS

I finished Kills Well With Others (2025) by Deanna Raybourn this week and enjoyed it, as I did her first in the series. Here’s why these women in their 60s are still working as contracted assassins — besides of course the adventure, the travel, that they’re good at it, and many aspects of the lifestyle including not being tempted to put down roots:

I also finished Clarice Lispector’s Covert Joy: Selected Stories (2025) this week. I thought it would be my thing but it was not my thing. Two of the stories were tolerable, “The Imitation of the Rose,” in which a woman goes round and round in her head about every little action she might take (which might describe most of these stories, more or less); and “The Foreign Legion,” partially about a woman’s interactions with an unusual neighbour child who comes to visit often, against her mother’s wishes, and on this day is interested in the live chick in the woman’s kitchen. But mostly they were very forgettable stories.

I did like this paragraph from the first story in the book, “Love” (“Amor”):

“And as if it were a butterfly, Ana caught the instant between her fingers before it was never hers again.”

I’m now back into Samantha Harvey’s delicious novel Orbital (2023).

OTHER

This article from Axios (and many like it): Retail wipeout: Trump tariffs stoke fears of shortages and price hikes (26 April 2025)

Watching

We watched more “Vera” on BritBox mostly.

Listening

Shazam’d this week:

• Connections &  Community

Local Support: I shopped at the farmstand, which is now open every day, a few times this week, buying produce (potatoes, carrots, spinach, watermelon radish, limes and lemons) as well as another drumstick primrose and some annuals (pansies, nemesia) for a container and in the ground. We got takeout pizza/salad from the local pizza place on Saturday. I bought Coast of Maine compost from the local hardware store on Monday. We ate lunches outside at a local bakery/café on Thursday and Sunday. We picked up litter again in town on our route on Tuesday.

the farmstand

litter collection

Relationships: Texted and sent card and gifts for my friend’s (RVN) birthday on Tuesday. Texted one of my sisters about some issues going on in their household on Tuesday. Sent a catchup email to a friend (CW) and heard back from her, and sent a few other shorter catch-up emails to other friends as well. Chatted with another sister for 45 mins on Tuesday night. We chatted with a neighbour/friend (LD) on Tuesday for 5-10 mins. while he was in his car and we were walking. Chatted with my hair stylist/friend (GV) on Thursday about travel, gardening, animals. Chatted with a friend (LL) working at the farmstand about my houseplant issues on Thursday for a bit. Salon met on Friday in person with six of us.

Salon host’s cat Chelsea on Friday

Donations: Made a donation of a Florida wildlife rescue on Monday. Renewed our New England Aquarium membership on Tuesday.

• Endings / Harvests

I harvested chives on Thursday for our dinner meal.

• All This Useless Beauty

Also, go back and look at that hazelnut flower. Look at that ground beetle. Look. Why are they so beautiful?