Do birds eat broccoli?

Do squirrels like brussels sprouts?

Well, we’ve discovered that the fortress my husband built around the veggie garden is not impenetrable. Nothing has chewed through the chicken wire and lattice and nothing has dug under the fence. There are no footprints. So either a bird or an herbivore with a parachute raided our garden or a squirrel or a very lightweight woodchuck climbed over the fence to snack on the broccoli and brussels sprouts. But only those two delicacies. It must be saving the kale, cabbage, and assorted lettuces for tonight. Darn.

So this is what’s on my fridge. Exciting stuff. 6 years worth of magnets (we’re missing 2002) from Westside Hose Company’s annual car show and a few silly bird magnets that were stockings stuffers to hold up important papers like the invite to yesterday’s graduation party and the reminder card for tomorrow’s appointment with the bunny vet.

I wouldn’t call it art, but I’m going along with the invite from TaraDharma to post what’s on your refrigerator today. I hope other people have more interesting fridges than mine. Slightly more interesting might be a pic of what’s lurking inside my fridge, but let’s not go there!

Today was Westside’s car show and my husband as a volunteer fireman had to go and help out. I stopped by and we did the loop looking at all the cars that had come to show off. They had a really good turn out this year and beautiful weather, so I hope they made lots of money. I don’t know the first thing about cars, classic or otherwise, but enjoyed taking pictures of them, mostly because it made the owners feel good for me to show an interest in their car.

I loved the colors of some of these cars – bright orange and purple and this beautiful, almost violet, blue. They were all incredibly shiny and well-cared for. These guys spend so much money on these cars, just to take them out to shows like today’s. If they’re lucky, they’ll win a shiny trophy to go with their shiny car, but that’s it.

This bright orange Studebaker truck was my husband’s favorite. The whole inside of the hood was mirrored, to show off the engine, I guess. Very shiny! I liked this violet blue Edsel (I’d swear I’d heard my dad talk about Edsel’s) – the color was really gorgeous in the sun. There were over 300 cars in the competition, but our friend Jimmy (that’s his little red Ford in the photo above) didn’t win a trophy. But then, he didn’t even wax the truck up so that it would gleam in the sun like the others.

Sort of an odd day today. I met my brothers at the cemetary this morning to finally bury my father’s ashes. We’d put it off for too long, but my brother has just about finalized the estate, so I look at this as another step in that long process.

Two years ago at this time it was all just beginning. Figuring out how we would care for my dad in his illness, the day-to-day efforts to find some normalcy in the midst of his struggle with dialysis and cancer, his poor appetite, and all the medicine and doctors that he hated so much. All the while trying to get his house emptied and ready for sale. It is a wonder to me that it’s all worked out okay. My dad can rest well, I think. So today we said our prayers and put a velvet-covered box in the ground beside my mom and brothers who died so long ago. And then we stood around and made jokes, as we do.

My husband and I had a graduation party to attend at a nice waterfront restaurant overlooking the inlet and Sandy Hook Bay. On our way home we visited the county’s 9/11 memorial, pictured above, which honors the 147 residents of our county who died that day. Located at Mount Mitchill Scenic Overlook in Atlantic Highlands, the memorial is backed by views of Sandy Hook and the Bay, and the New York Skyline. According to the brochure, Mt. Mitchill, at 266 feet, is the highest elevation on the Atlantic coast from southern Maine to the Yucatan. More info on the memorial is available here. Today was my first visit to the memorial and park, but closeby is my dad’s favorite German restaurant which we visited often on special occasions, like his 70th birthday, pictured at left, with my brother and sweet red-haired niece. He loved the dark German beer there and the view.

“Mischief is your middle name, but your first is friend. You are quite the prankster that loves to make other people laugh.”

Click on the link above to take this quiz and while there be sure to check out This Garden Is Illegal – lots of neat gardening info, much of it specific to Ohio. Have fun, Susan 😉 and be sure to let me know if you’re a mischief-maker like me.

The moonflower (Ipomoea alba) is an annual vine closely related to the morning glory. The flowers open in the late afternoon and remain until early morning, sweetening the evening air with fragrance. They are pollinated by moths, but I’ve found the blossoms covered by dozens of bees on late summer evenings, buzzing from one flower to the next. The flowers are trumpet-shaped and the leaves like hearts.

Moonflowers like full sun and rich, moist, well-drained soil. Plant them in a spot where you can observe their silvery beauty by moonlight or near a window to enjoy the scent indoors. We grow ours in pots and along the fence surrounding the pond, where the vines twine in between the pickets and the blossoms unfurl just as the sun begins its descent.

Moonflowers are easily confused with Brugmansias and Daturas. Some of the seedlings we bought this spring were mislabeled as Angel’s Trumpet’s (Brugmansia), but once these started growing, it was clear they were Moonflowers and not Angel’s Trumpets. The others haven’t begun to bloom yet, but I’m wondering if they’re not Daturas, again mislabeled. Moonflowers can be planted with other evening-blooming flowers to extend your enjoyment of the garden into the twilight hours.

This looks rather promising, doesn’t it? Yes, it’s only lettuce and anybody can grow it, but still I’m encouraged! The new *fortress* my husband built around the garden seems to be working at keeping the critters out. Last night I picked some lettuce, kale, basil, parsley and salad burnet for the bunnies. We’ve also planted tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers, but they’re not worth photographing yet. Those plants just sit and look at you in NJ gardens until mid-July at the earliest. The zucchini grows at least a foot overnight it seems. The gourds are finely starting to sprout along the bottom of the trellis. The broccoli plants have tiny little broccoli thingies (florettes?) There is much weeding to be done since this photo was taken a week ago and the shed snow of locust flowers have blown away. I guess we’ll need to fertilize soon, although I think the winter’s worth of bunny poop turned into the garden should give the plants a healthy start. Free fertilizer is another *benefit* I can add to my list of reasons to keep a houseful of bunnies.

If you’d like to see a humorous account of a previous foray into veggie gardening, read Scorched earth: our first attempt at a vegetable garden. Please do wish us luck this time. We’ve learned; we’re laying off the mulch!

Today’s my b-day. There was ice-cream cake, and gifts, and flowers, and people (including my adorable little niece) singing at me on the phone. Life is good!

Aren’t all skippers a mystery? The one skipper I can easily identify is the silver-spotted. This one (anyone out there have an idea?) I found feeding the other day on the catmint (Nepeta sp.) which was something of a surprise because most often this plant is loaded with bumblebees, but no butterflies. Catmints are very easy to grow (that’s why I love them), so long as they have full sun. It can be a bit aggressive, but is easily divided and spread around the garden or among neighbors.

I don’t know that I would recommend planting it in a place that is easily accessible to dogs – as the bees it attracts drive my dog just bonkers and one day soon he’s going to get himself stung good!

*Butterflying* has become near as popular as birding during the summer months after migration has ended. There are many butterfly id books on the market, the most popular probably being the Butterflies Through Binoculars series by Jeffrey Glassberg. Great, technical book if you like that. I notice he’s recently published A Field Guide to Caterpillars which I’ll have to be on the lookout for! As a beginner to butterflies, I prefer something with big, glossy photos like the Stokes Beginner’s Guide to Butterflies – I don’t own it yet, but do have their guide to dragonflies and it is excellent.

I’m sitting outside in my screenhouse, it’s still raining a bit, music is drifting over from the Red Bank Jazz and Blues Festival – somehow this reminds me of camping. Maybe it’s the tacky lights. I love to sit out here; especially now that I have a laptop with a wireless connection. Once the weather warms, I really hate to be stuck inside. It rained all day today, so we didn’t get to pot up any of the new plants we bought – that will have to wait until tomorrow when hopefully the weather will be better.

I finished up the book I’ve been reading this week. What a disappointment that was! Stephen King was my favorite as a teenager – I first read “Pet Sematary” as a freshman in high school and was hooked! I didn’t read other horror writers, just King. Something about his sense of storytelling and character development always appealed to me. The last 10 years or so all I’ve read by him are his Dark Tower books – sad to see them be done. His other books haven’t appealed to me at all, but I bought “Cell” on a whim, to see if maybe he’d gotten back to the writer he used to be before churning out a new book every six months. The story was good enough, but the ending! I feel totally cheated – it’s as if he got tired of writing half-way through the story and just wrapped it up as best he could in a few short pages. What a waste of my time! The reviews were good, though, so maybe my criticism is unfounded.

My students this past semester had a similar reaction to the ending of “The Kite Runner” which I’ve been using the past year in the course I teach. They were annoyed that the ending leaves the reader *hanging* somewhat, and doesn’t answer all the questions a reader might have. I like that kind of ending to a book; one that lets you imagine how things may have turned out for the characters. The technique was well used in that book, not so well used in the King book. I suppose King is just setting us up for a sequel – one I will not be wasting my time with!