Friendly bouquet

Yesterday I stopped over at my friend Judy Anderson's house to look over her pottery, which she had on display in her front yard in an art-in-the-garden sale. I enjoyed touring her garden as much as looking at all the beautiful pottery. You can see some of it for yourself at her Web site, Dragonfly Guild.

Craig selected a mug for his morning chai -- when we were up at the cabin a couple of weeks ago, he had complained that none of the mugs in the cupboard were quite right for his tea (they were all a little on the small side, I guess), so I had suggested we buy him a handmade mug to keep up there. We looked a little when we were in Bemidji, which is quite an arty town, but he didn't see anything that struck his fancy. (And we didn't get to the gallery that our friend had recommended because it was surrounded by torn-up streets. What was it called, Terry? Wild Cat, or something like that. I want to visit that one next time we go up north.)

So when Judy announced her sale, I said, let's go. Craig didn't have much trouble selecting a mug, but I had a time looking over all the beautiful vases. I settled on this one for it's medium size, and I thought the black glaze would set off a bouquet of colorful flowers nicely -- although then I went and put all-white hudrangeas in it!

Bird gardeners

Earlier this summer, I had reserved a spot in my garden for pole beans, and was waiting to plant them until I found some suitable poles. In the meantime, I saw sparrows pecking around in the bare soil, and I figured they were finding bugs or weed seeds or something to eat. Then, about a week or two later, sunflowers started sprouting in the garden! There are plenty of sunflower seeds in our bird feeder, and there are sunflowers sprouting under the feeder, which is usual, and not surprising, but I didn't expect the birds to actually carry the seeds the 15 feet or so to the garden and plant them there!

I thought about planting the beans anyway and letting them climb up the sunflower stems, but bean vines can get pretty heavy and I didn't want to topple the sunflowers, so I just resigned myself to growing sunflowers in this part of the garden instead. Beans are cheap at the farmers' market this time of year anyway, and the sunflowers are such a delight in the middle of the garden.

This is the first one to open, and as you can see, a fat bumblebee is enjoying the fruits (or pollen, more like) of the birds' efforts! And, of course, the bumblebee is returning the favor, since her foraging will pollinate the flowers and allow them to make seeds for the birds. I'm happy to just be the spectator to it all!

Good Vibrations

My potato plants have blossoms, and I was amazed at what pretty flowers they are. I don't remember potato blossoms in quite this color before. Then, when I went out to photograph them, I discovered a bumblebee busily flitting from blossom to blossom, doing her pollination thing.

I know that bumblebees like this one perform a special service for certain types of plants, called "buzz pollination," but I didn't understand quite what that was until recently, when I interviewed an entomologist for the fall issue of MOQ. I wanted to know more about bumblebees in the city, and specifically what we might look for when observing bees in the fall.

She (Elaine Evans) explained that certain flowers, like potato and tomato blossoms (closely related plants, by the way), have this cone-shaped center that contains the pollen. In order to get the pollen out, bumblebees grab hold of the cone with their mandibles and then vibrate their wing muscles without actually moving their wings, so that their whole body vibrates, and in so doing, manage to shake loose the pollen inside the cone. From the bees' point of view, they get the protein-rich pollen to eat, an important part of their diet. But it has the added benefit, from the plants' perspective, of getting that pollen out and onto parts of the bee's fuzzy body, which provides a way for that pollen to mix with the pollen from other potato blossoms, thus allowing seed formation to happen.

While we humans don't really need this to happen with potatoes, because we eat the roots, not the fruits, for other plants with these pollen cones -- tomatoes being the most notable example -- this is such a valuable service that commercial tomato growers actually purchase or "rent" hives of bumblebees to ensure that their plants get pollinated and they get a good crop as a result.

Honeybees don't perform this particular service -- buzz pollination -- so the peculiar shimmy of the busy bumblebee is especially important to growers of tomatoes and any other plants with their pollen trapped inside these floral cones.

It was fun watching this bumblebee grabbing hold of the cone at the center of the flowers and doing the shimmy, then moving on to the next blossom.

Garden multitasking

Yesterday I was rinsing out and refilling the birdbath in the backyard, and thought I should probably water my one-year-old cotoneaster hedge, which I planted as bareroot stock last summer. It also needed weeding, but I didn't think I had time to do that too. I don't have a sprinkler that will cover a long narrow strip like this hedge, so I started to just stand and water it with the hose, one little shrub at a time, thinking that would be better than nothing and I could do it fairly quickly.

Pretty soon I noticed that some of the leaves looked kind of chewed, so I examined them more closely with my left hand while holding the hose with my right. Not finding any obvious infestation, I started to use the hose, to which I had attached a spray nozzle, to rinse the leaves, paying special attention to any that were curled or chewed, rubbing my thumb over the undersides of leaves to scrape off any aphids that may have taken up residence there. I figured I could do this and water them at the same time.

Then I thought, well, as long as I'm doing this, and the ground is getting softened by the water, I may as well pull up the weeds too. After about a half an hour, I had watered, weeded, and debugged (more or less, as far as I could tell), the whole hedge. The weeding, in particular, I had been putting off for weeks, and it took just a half an hour -- while getting the watering and pest patrol taken care of at the same time.

I always seem to get the most done when I am trying to do less!

A Fond Farewell

Mom's all moved, and her new place is swell -- a nice roomy apartment with oak woodwork and loads of closet space (I'm jealous) and a sweet little patio with a southeastern exposure. I'll have to get her a nice patio tomato plant for Mother's day.

And I thought it was auspicious that the magnolia tree at the old house, the one we planted in the spring of 2003 in memory of my dad, was blooming so prettily on the day she moved out. It often blooms earlier, in April -- even as early as April 11, my dad's birthday, which is why I chose that particular tree. But here it was at its peak on May Day, as though it were bidding Mom a fond farewell and wishing her the best. And what a beautiful moving day we had -- sunny and mild, with a high of about 60 degrees.

Pansy time

Last weekend, we were at our local liquor story to stock up on wine, and we noticed that there were pansies and violets in the planter by the door. The sales clerk, a buxom, amiable woman who would look right at home serving pints in an old-fashioned pub, said she planted them and told us we could get some of our own at Wagner's, a Minneapolis greenhouse that grows their own flowers.

So on Monday, I headed over to 60th and Penn, just a few miles west of us, and bought two flats of pansies. Then my son, Martin, and I headed out to Mom's house to fill the two little planters in front before the Realtors' open house scheduled for Tuesday. Mom had finally got through the ordeal of painting and floor refinishing (a few weeks during which she barely had a place to sit) and her Realtor had listed the place at last on Monday.

The house has pinkish siding and a brick red door, so I selected pansies that picked up on these colors. Then I grabbed a bunch of dogwood twigs from my winter outdoor arrangement (I had long since tossed the evergreen bows from that onto the compost), and put them in the pots with the pansies to give the whole arrangement some height. It looked pretty good, and Mom liked it too, and then she said we have to go, someone's coming to look at the house in about ten minutes.

Mom called on Wednesday to tell me that she sold the house! In fact, she had two offers, and selected the one from the family with three children (the other couple had no kids), even though it meant a little less money for her because they requested help with closing costs. But she so liked the idea of providing a home to a family, and she told me that the oldest child was 8, the same age as my big sister (our oldest) when they moved into the house in 1960, and the younger two, twins, were 3, the same age that I was at that time (I'm the baby). So I guess it just felt to her that it was meant to be.

I planted some of the remaining pansies in my pot on the front steps, pictured here, along with the corkscrew willow branches I've had for about a year now, and I added a dangly ornament (you can see the star at the bottom of it here, I'll try to get a better picture this afternoon when the sun is shining on it). I had selected the plants with the most open blossoms for Mom's pots, so these aren't as colorful just yet, but I'm sure they'll be blooming like crazy in no time. They're getting lots of sunshine, and I mixed some granulated organic fertilizer in with the soil when I planted them.

It felt so nice to get out in the garden and do a little cleaning up and planting yesterday. I am deliberately doing just a little at a time because I don't want to wake up with a painfully stiff knee and an aching back in the morning! But it's only the middle of April, so I have lots of time, right?

Mom's Stuff, Part 2: A Roving Rooster

At one of our visits to Mom's house to help with packing and sorting for her upcoming move from a four-bedroom suburban rambler to a two-bedroom apartment, we came home with a rooster.

Not a rooster like the one that patroled a friend's hobby farm where my daughter, Nora, sometimes used to farm-sit when the owners went out of town. That rooster was aggressive and downright scary -- and loud. Nora said that it only took him three days to figure out where she was sleeping and then position himself outside her window each morning to let her know loud and clear just exactly when the sun's rays first peeked over the horizon.

My mother's rooster is made of resin and had quietly occupied a corner of her dining room since 2003, when it had come home with her after one of her daily mall-walking escapades. It was shortly after Dad died (on December 13, 2002) and she had begun walking about three miles a day, indoors at Har Mar Mall in Roseville. She would walk past a garden store that had the rooster on display, and the colorful fellow had become a welcome and cheery sight on those daily walks.

Then one day it wasn't there, and she missed it. So when the store got another one in stock, she immediately bought it and brought it home. It's the sort of thing Dad would have gotten a kick out of, and probably on some level it made her feel a little connection to him.

And that may be why, when she said she was ready to part with the rooster, I claimed it. Neither of my brothers showed the slightest interest in it, and they may not have known how Mom came by it. To me, it's not only a colorful and whimsical garden ornament, something to jazz up our yard's feng shui with a shot of rooster energy, it's also a token of my parents' playful side; something that brought my mother a bit of cheer at a sad time, and a reminder of my father's mischievous nature.

It made me think of the time Dad bought my mother a stuffed animal, and soon after, she kept finding it in unexpected places around the house, posed in odd postures. Soon after the rooster came home with us, my husband started to notice that it showed up in different spots in the backyard each day when he came home from work.

Then I began to find it in new places when I would look out the kitchen window shortly after Hubby got on his bicycle and headed off to work. Our teenage son observed all this with his usual amused detachment. Or so it seemed. Then one day when my husband was still at work and I came back from a bike ride, I opened the garage door to find it inside the garage.

And so it continues to rove about the backyard, and seems to be enjoying its new habitat, spreading its animal energy wherever it goes; and maybe, just a little, channeling my father's playful spirit in the process.

Evidence that spring really is on its way

March has been dragging on, even threatening to spill over into April. So I was surprised and delighted yesterday when I was out walking my dog and noticed that my neighbor's crocuses had not only emerged, but were starting to bloom. These lovely pale blue buds look so sweet, don't they? This is on the south side of her house, which is on a corner, so she gets lots of sun exposure. When I toured my own yard to see if any of my crocuses or tulips were up, none of them had even emerged yet. But I did discover my chives a few inches high; those are on the south side of my house. I'm thinking now that in the fall I really must plant some bulbs along the south side so I'll get a little early color next spring.

Other signs of spring in Minneapolis I have noted lately:
• On March 15, my husband cleaned out the garage and got his bike out for the first time. He rode it to work the next day.
• On March 16, my favorite mailman started wearing shorts; although I didn't notice whether he returned to long trousers when the temperature dropped again. (I know, how could I not notice?)
• Also on March 16, I spotted ducks in the puddles around Lake Nokomis, even though the lake itself is still frozen.
• There are loads of robins everywhere. I really should get mealworms from the bird seed store for them, they say that there aren't many insects or worms about yet, and the robins and other birds need their protein.
• Yesterday, as I was biking around Lake Nokomis, I heard red-winged blackbirds trilling in the trees.
• The wild turkey in Minnehaha Park has become a more common site, and a couple of weeks ago we even saw four of them all clustered together. Then one day last week my husband witnessed a male turkey chasing a small red car! He said it ran pretty fast.

Today it's rainy and gray, but not too cold. The birdbath water remains unfrozen. But the Eloise Butler Wildflower garden, which usually opens on April 1, has delayed opening for a couple of days. It does feel like April today, though, so that's encouraging.

Mom's Stuff, Part 1: Dumpster Diving

My mom is planning to move on May 1, and she's been living in a big house in Roseville, a suburb of St. Paul, since 1960 (with a brief interruption in the 1980s). She's got a big Dumpster in the driveway, and my brother and I (with assistance from our spouses) have been throwing stuff in it as much as we can. There are also boxes and boxes labeled Goodwill, with stuff to be donated to that worthy cause, and then, of course, the boxes of stuff she wants to take with her -- enough of those to prompt Hubby to ask me more than once, "How big is this place she's moving to?"

This has been a good incentive for us to keep to our own downsizing agenda. Sunday, we came back from Mom's with my husband resolving to clean out the garage and the attic -- this weekend.

So on our way to Mom's on Sunday, as we pull up and eye the large Dumpster, I say "I promise I won't climb into the Dumpster and say 'Hey, this is cool!' and pull stuff out." He thanks me for that.

Then we park our '91 Honda (rather a piece of junk itself) next to the Dumpster, and the next thing I know, Hubby is saying, "Hey, that's one of those nice oak wall shelves your dad built, isn't it?" And he's climbing into the Dumpster to pull it out!

It's especially appropriate, I think, that we salvage those shelves, because I know that my dad made them from salvaged wood originally -- oak 2x4s that he reclaimed from some railyard or other. He thought that the wood was too nice to discard, and he was right. The shelves are narrow ("Perfect for paperbacks," says Hubby), but the grain is really quite lovely.

Then I spy the old avocado ceramic cups and saucers that were Grandma's, and insist that those don't belong in the Dumpster either -- at the very least they should go to the Goodwill because somebody could use them; and I know it's my unsentimental just-get-it-done project manager brother who threw those out. So I dig them all out and Hubby gamely assists me in putting them in the car to take home.

So now we are the proud owners of more stuff. But it's good stuff, and I am going to go through the buffet and remove something to make room for the avocado dishes. I have some other cups and saucers that once belonged to my other grandmother -- but I don't ever remember Grandma Parker actually using those dishes, whereas I do remember Grandma Clausen serving holiday meals on her avocado dishes; and since I have other mementoes of Grandma Parker, I tell myself I can let the other cups go.

Although . . ., I've always liked those teacups-on-a-stick you sometimes see in gardens, and I do have a couple of ideas about how to mount them for such outdoor display. Hmmm . . .

Who cares if it's gray? It's the end of winter!

"I dwell in possibility." -- Emily Dickinson

A friend of mine here in Minneapolis told me today that he finds this time of year rather depressing -- it's so gray, and muddy, and the melting snow reveals a winter's worth of litter, and so on like that.

I was dumbfounded. I mean, c'mon, it's the end of a Minnesota winter! What's not to like? Sure, I can understand if you live farther north and it feels like winter is just dragging on, but here in Minneapolis we have air temps in the 50s, the snow is rapidly melting, the sidewalks, which have been icy and treacherous for months, are nearly dry. I can ride my bike without feeling like my finger tips are going to fall off. I can walk the dog without risk of injury!

On Sunday, my husband got his bike out for the first time since fall. He also cleaned the garage and scooped out all the ice that had accumulated there. Our garage is old and sits kind of low, so when there is a midwinter thaw, water seeps in and then freezes. Sometimes the door gets frozen shut. This is not a problem for anyone but me, since we keep our cars outside (it's a very small garage) and I am the only one who rides at all in the winter. Now it's all nice and clean and it's so easy to get my bike out.

I can be outside, I can ride my bike without freezing, the birds are singing -- and it's only going to get better. Who cares if it's gray? It's better than white! Maybe I'm odd, but I find this time of year exhilarating.

Our Friend in the Park

We first spotted it last fall: the wild turkey that had taken up residence in Minnehaha Falls Park. A stunningly large, long-legged fowl, it was usually walking along on the grass, head down, apparently grazing on the seeds, acorns, and insects scattered under the oak trees. Then, soon after we published Milissa Link’s essay in the winter edition of MOQ, about the coyote she spotted in the area, we stopped seeing it.

I speculated that it had likely become coyote dinner. My husband accused me of being pessimistic. “Not if you see it from the coyote’s point of view,” I had countered.

Despite my coyote sympathies, I was delighted when I spotted it again on a late February afternoon (naturally, I assumed it was the same turkey). It had strolled onto the parkway that runs east of Hiawatha, and there it stood, in the middle of the narrow road, calmly stopping what little traffic there was. It took a few steps to the left, and a northbound car crept past; then it stepped to the right, and a southbound car edged by. It turned and watched these vehicles with a mild and curious gaze.

But as I approached in the northbound lane, I had to bring my rust-speckled ’91 Honda to a complete halt as the turkey planted itself right in the center of the road. It eyed me, then turned to gaze at the southbound car that had also stopped in the opposite lane. It was a standoff. I could see that the other driver was talking on a cell phone and wondered if he was reporting this event to someone.

Convinced that the turkey, possessing all the time in the world, had no intention of going anywhere anytime soon, I slowly eased the Honda onto the sloped curb to my right to edge my way around the recalcitrant critter. As I passed, it turned its magnificent homely head on its long turkey neck to look me in the eye through the driver’s-side window. I felt a certain relief that it was winter and my window was closed. My, that’s a big bird, I thought.

Now we make a point of looking for it whenever we pass through the park, and succeed in spotting it a few times a week. Even though we haven’t gone so far as to give it a name, we do refer to it as “your friend” (“I saw your friend in the park today”). Like a regular at the coffee shop, it has become for us a fixture in this place, its absence as keenly felt as its presence. Long may it wander there.

(From the spring issue of MOQ, which will be available next week.)

A god's garden in a pot, or just some grass for a cat

For my garden column in Southside Pride in March, I'm writing about starting seeds indoors, which reminded me of Adonis gardens, which I first read about in Eleanor Perenyi's book Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden. She explained that women in ancient Greece and Rome would plant little pot gardens of wheat, barley, lettuce and fennel for the festival of Adonis, which I took to be in the spring, like Easter. The seeds would grow quickly, then became potbound and die, symbolizing the short life of the handsome young demigod and lover of Venus/Aphrodite. And then the women would toss them out into their gardens.

Except it turns out I was mistaken on several points. I thought it was a sort of fertility thing, and it even made sense in a way -- if you started a pot of seedlings and then tossed them into your compost pile while they were still green, they would add nitrogen to the pile. But when I started looking for more information about Adonis gardens, I learned that the festival most likely took place in the summer and was meant to symbolize the wasted and unfertile life of the young hunter -- for he died without fathering any children. Actually, I made up that last part (I'm pretty sure he had no children), but it makes sense to me. The original Adonis gardens were just tossed into a stream or something, they weren't turned into anything useful, symbolically or otherwise.

Then I got out the book and re-read the passage on Adonis gardens. Perenyi claims that the custom of growing these temporary gardens in pots on the rooftops is the origin of pot gardening. And she also claims that a Christianized version of the old Adonis cult continued in Sicily into the 20th century, when women would plant pot gardens to decorate the church on Easter. I guess that's where I got the idea that growing grass for our Easter baskets was a remnant of this old pagan practice. So I must have put these bits and pieces of information together with my own thoughts about turning the spent gardens into compost and made up my own version of the custom. I guess that's how rumors and misinformation get started!

I still like the idea of planting my Easter basket as a kind of Adonis garden, even if the precedent for such a practice is unclear.

This photo is of my young neutered male cat, Tres, doing his imitation of Adonis frolicking in his garden. No, there is no catnip in this pot -- just wheat grass and alfalfa.

I am such a wimp

It's sunny out for a change, after a week or more of cloudy weather, and the temperature is in the upper teens. Not bad for February in Minnesota. I was going to bike to the coffee shop with my computer to do some writing, but after standing outside for a few minutes adjusting the dog's leash, I was feeling the cold on my legs. Besides, I couldn't find my long underwear -- not that I looked all that hard. So I tell my husband that I'm going to drive to the coffee shop instead.

So here I am at my neighborhood coffee shop when in walks our friendly neighborhood bike shop guy, Jim Thill of Hiawatha Cyclery. He's with a friend. He says hello and tells me that they've been biking "all around."

Oh, I say, did you bike the grand rounds? That's the route that loops through the Minneapolis parkways, about 50 miles if you do the whole thing, but I was just imagining the portion that goes around the lakes, which is still maybe 30 miles round trip. No, he tells me, they've biked out to the eastern suburbs, White Bear Lake and the like. Well, White Bear Lake is about 30 miles by freeway each way. And they've not only biked there and back, but biked "around" to other places as well.

When they get up to go, I ask, are you done now? Are you going home? I know that Jim lives in the neighborhood. "Well, I am," says Jim. "But he [referring to his friend] has a ways to go yet. He lives in Robbinsdale." That's about another 12 miles. The friend acknowledges that his legs are a little tired, but he is undaunted by the trek that remains for him. It's about 4:15, he's probably got an hour before it starts to get dark.

And I couldn't bring myself to bike the 1.6 miles to the coffee shop! I feel like such a wimp!

Cutting the rug

A while back I bought a large woven rug for the dining room, and soon discovered that, being floppy and not very heavy, it gets sucked up by the vacuum cleaner, but being a bit large (about 5X7 or thereabouts), it doesn't fit in the washing machine. And being a nice solid red, it showed all the dog and cat fur within a few hours of laying it down.

So, what to do? Well, I folded it up and deposited it in the basement to deal with later. Then I got the idea that I should cut it down to fit the landing on the basement steps at the back door. The space is about 38 inches square, so the usual washable rugs are never quite the right size to cover the whole area. I had to think about this for quite awhile, of course, to figure out how I would finish the cut edges. I thought I might sew a binding around them, but I didn't think I was likely to match the red. Of course, red things usually bleed the first few times you wash them, so maybe it didn't matter what color binding I used.

In the meantime, Hubby decided to just fold it and put it down on the landing anyway. He put a couple of the smaller rugs on top of it, and that wasn't a bad temporary solution, but it bugged me to have it sit there with its too-thick folded edge hanging over the edge of the step threatening to become a tripping hazard.

So I just cut it today -- it made two area rugs the right size for the landing, with a couple of little strips left over. After some looking around for a sturdy red thread to overcast the edges, I realized that the warp thread (string, really) would serve very nicely.

So I pulled some from the remnants and was using this to bind the side where I had cut across the weft, but when I got around to the crosswise side, where the warp threads were exposed, I eventually realized that it made more sense to pull some more of the weft pieces out of the way and make a fringe. I then knotted the warp threads by taking three from the top and three from the bottom and tying them together. That worked quite well and only took about 20 minutes, and was kind of nice little meditative exercise.

And it lays nice and flat on the landing, and is just the right size. Happy ending.

Artists' books at the Walker

Hubby and I went to the Walker to see Text/Messages: Books by Artists last Thursday and I thought it was fabulous. The exhibitions in the galleries that you pass through on the way to the artists' books were not my sort of thing so much -- severed body parts and phallic objects; you know, the usual Walker stuff -- so although I'd like to go back and have another look at the books, I'll be taking the elevator directly to gallery 7. Or maybe have lunch in Gallery 8 and then walk down to 7.

Text/messages is great, though, and even worth wading through the trashy "fine" art to get to. I found some of it quite inspirational, making me want to try something new when playing around with altering or constructing books, and some of it downright awe-inspiring, like the one with the intricately laser-cut notepad that had paper staircases and landings extending down from what was really just a regular legal pad attached to the wall. Wow. Sorry I can't tell you who made that one, I didn't take notes and I didn't see an exhibition catalog or anything like that. They did have some notecards featuring a few of the items, with information about events that go with the show, like panel discussions and a "Multiples Mall" sale of small DIY-press stuff.

You can get all the details on this page at the Walker Web site.

It's showing through April 19. Admission is free on Thursdays after 5 p.m. and on the first Saturday of the month.

Putting down roots

Last year we gave up some of our more ambitious ideas about quickly saving a sizeable downpayment and moving from being renters to homeowners in, say, three years, to a more content-to-stay-put-awhile mindset. And that influences the way I think about gardening.

It's not unusual for me to start thinking about and planning my garden in the middle of January, even though spring doesn't come to Minnesota for about three months. It's the combination of having the busy-ness of the holidays behind us, the increasing sunlight, and the arrival of seed catalogs that turns my thoughts this way. Besides, on a day like today, when the air temperature isn't expected to even get up to zero, garden planning serves as a kind of balm for my spirits. It reminds me that winter is ephemeral, and immersing myself in catalogs and maps of my yard makes this finger-numbing time pass more quickly.

When we first moved in, I was sure we would be moving out again soon, and so didn't look at this yard as truly my own, nor did I take a long-term view to gardening. I did some landscaping and planting that, though it pleased me, was designed to be more generically pleasing as well as low-maintenance, because I wanted to leave behind an asset, not a burden. I was reluctant to plant anything that wasn't going to look good right away. That was OK for awhile, because I dug up and moved a few shrubs from my old yard, and those were already a few years old. Taking some of our shrubs with me also made me feel better about leaving my garden behind. But buying trees and shrubs that are big enough to look like an instant landscape is prohibitively expensive -- I couldn't spend that kind of money, and I knew our landlords couldn't afford it either.

But now that I realize we are going to be here awhile, I feel less urgent and more patient in shaping my surroundings. Last summer I planted a hedge in back, for which I ordered scrappy little bareroot stock that will take more than three years to amount to something, and thus didn't try to talk our landlords into spending a few hundred dollars on plant materials -- the total cost was less than $100, an easy sell.

I have some more ideas about what I'd like to plant this spring, and I'm really enjoying thinking about it in both short and long-term ways. What shrubs and small trees would be fun to grow and an asset to the house, and where can I fit in more vegetables, herbs and annuals for this year's harvest? I'm thinking more in terms of edible landscaping and less about a separate kitchen garden. Not only could a neglected kitchen garden quickly become an eyesore once abandoned, but in a city yard it doesn't make much sense anyway -- there isn't really one sizeable spot where the sunlight is just right for such a garden, but there are several small places where sun-loving vegetables and herbs could grow well.

Mixing culinary plants in with ornamental ones can actually make for some very aesthetically pleasing vignettes, and it serves an additional practical purpose -- the flowering plants attract pollinators and other beneficial insects and serve as buffers between like plants to keep diseases from spreading, as diseases will do when you plant a single species all in a row.

Of course, the old-fashioned term for edible landscaping is cottage gardening, and that's more the image I have in my mind as I begin making my plans for the greening season to come. Just thinking about all this makes me feel warmer already.

A victory garden at the White House?

My latest garden column in the Southside Pride mixes a little history and politics with gardening. At my editor Ed Felien's suggestion, I wrote about calls to plant a victory garden on the White House lawn; and, being the history buff that I am, I had to provide a little background on victory gardens in the process.

I shouldn't point this out, but you might find something unusual about my flag, if you were to, say, count the stripes. I got a little muddled in all the folds and flapping-in-the-wind. My husband says my extra stripes represent the "lost" colonies.

Winter Garden Cuttings

(Here's my latest garden column in the Southside Pride.)

A small item in the fall newsletter of the Minnesota Native Plant Society caught my eye recently; it impugns the popularity of filling our outdoor containers with black spruce tips for the holidays. Even though the gathering of spruce tips is regulated and licensed by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, the writer is concerned that the popularity of the ubiquitous mini trees could eventually put undue pressure on the peat bogs where they grow.

“I would rather imagine black spruce growing in a native peat bog than being managed as a crop, and, as I see it, every acre of cut spruce tips is an acre that could be left in a natural state,” writes Elizabeth Nixon, chair of the society’s conservation committee.

It appears that the practice poses no imminent ecological problems, thanks to the DNR’s oversight, so if you really adore them, by all means buy spruce tips from your local garden center. On the other hand, if you see a guy selling bundles of them off the back of a pickup, don’t do it.

I have used spruce tips in past years, but somehow the combination of their omnipresence this time of year, which makes me just a little bored with them, and the way they so readily let fall a shower of little needles, which makes me a lot annoyed with them, has led me to seek alternatives.

Besides, this is a gardening column, and, unless you have a peat bog in your yard, you can’t grow them yourself.

On the other hand, several of the the more unique and, to me, more attractive seasonal displays feature plants you can grow in your yard — hardy shrubs that not only offer cuttings for decorating, but food and shelter for wildlife, and a more attractive landscape to enjoy all winter long. The following are just a few that you’ll find at garden centers now as cuttings, and again in the spring as landscape plants.

Winter greenery
You may already have white cedar (a.k.a. arborvitae) or juniper or other small evergreens growing next to your house — these common foundation plantings may even strike you as nothing special, but their branches are attractive and fragrant, and a few discreet cuttings won’t hurt this time of year. They won’t look so good if you just stick them straight up in a pot as you would spruce tips, though. Think of them as you would foliage in a bouquet, surrounding and visually supporting the more colorful upright elements.

In fact, it helps to compose your winter pots using the same three design components as you would a pot garden in summer: something tall and spiky, something bushy and colorful for the middle, and something spreading or trailing. Evergreen branches, whether cut from your foundation plants or gathered from the ground at the Christmas tree lot, may serve best in that third capacity, as a trailing or spreading feature.

Tall twigs
It’s the bundles of red dogwood twigs that first got me thinking about growing my own winter decorations. You can really put out the money for a sizeable mass of these, and they look so stunning standing up through the snow, why wouldn’t you want them in your winter garden anyway?

Native to our wetlands, this tall shrub known by the species name Cornus sericea (or sometimes called Cornus stolinifera) will thrive in any garden soil. There are several cultivated varieties, some of which have been developed at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum.

Red-twigged dogwood will grow in full to part sun, prefers a neutral to acidic pH but will tolerate slightly alkaline soil, and grows 6 to 8 feet tall with a spread as wide or wider, but there are some smaller cultivars. It can form a bit of a thicket, though the cultivated varieties are likely to be less aggressive than the native plant. If you want to take a lot of cuttings in the winter anyway, that shouldn’t be a problem. To keep the brightest red stems coming, prune out the oldest (dullest) ones in the spring to stimulate new growth (it’s the new stems that have the brightest color). The small, somewhat discreet flowers are white, followed by white berries that the birds will happily devour.

Berry delights
Winterberry is really a form of holly that is native to Minnesota. Unlike the spiky-leaved hollies you find at a florist shop, this one, Ilex verticillata, is deciduous — it drops its leaves in the fall, leaving behind dark branches sporting bright red berries. It’s another wetland plant that doesn’t require a bog to thrive — in fact, it can spread somewhat aggressively in wetlands, but tends to stay put more in regular garden soil. It’ll grow in sun or partial shade, but you’ll need both male and female plants to set fruit.

Common winterberry, the native shrub, will grow 6 to 10 feet tall and as wide, but there are many cultivars, some of which are quite compact. The leaves are not terribly attractive, but most varieties turn a nice dark red color in fall and tend to drop early, revealing the colorful berries. Some varieties may have orange or yellow fruit.

Roses are not usually selected for their fruit, but some do develop brightly colored hips, as they’re called, that can be as showy as holly berries. Since we usually buy roses in spring or summer when they are blooming, we won’t see what the hips look like at that time, so if you want that added winter interest, select a variety that is known to have showy hips.

Fortunately, the roses with the most colorful hips are also among the hardiest and most disease resistant. The University Extension service has an excellent pamphlet on hardy roses for Minnesota with a chart listing many varieties and their various characteristics, noting any that have particularly showy hips.

Of course it’s not practical for most of us to grow all of these shrubs in our city gardens, but if you can find room for one or a few of them and plant them together to form a winter vignette that you’ll see from your window, it’s sure to brighten those bleak days after the holiday décor has been put away.

Barn buddies

My daughter has a horse, a sweet mare named Tempest, which she stables in the suburb of Lino Lakes, about a 35-minute drive from our house. Today I drove her there so that I could take some pictures of her and her horse for our Christmas correspondence. As usual, the pictures aren't all that great because I didn't plan ahead so I would have a spare battery charged up, and the battery runs low quickly because of low light conditions, which is especially a problem when you are trying to photograph a moving target. And it doesn't help that I get distracted and photograph other things like this barn cat on a vintage Massey-fergusen tractor, thus using up precious battery life.

There are three barn cats at this stable, two that are still kitties and this adult cat, Tiger, who walked up to me and meowed demandingly while I was waiting for Nora to finish warming up her horse before bringing her outside, even as the natural light was quickly waning.

The kitties, named Snickers and Tommy, are orange and white. Tommy came outside to greet us as we arrived, then immediately started pouncing on bits of straw. Nora scooped him up and carried him into the stable with her, and as she paused to greet the various horses who stuck their muzzles out of their stalls as we walked by, some of them would stretch their necks enough to put their big horsey noses into the cat's soft fur. The cat didn't seem to mind this at all.

When we got to Tempest's stall, Nora handed the kitty to me, and he immediately snuggled into my arms contentedly and watched as Nora led Tempest out of her stall and prepared to groom her before riding. After a while the cat got a little restless, but didn't seem to want to jump down, so I moved closer to the horse and the cat climbed up onto the horse's back. Tempest still had her blanket on and the cat just settled right down.

In order to remove the blanket, Nora picked up Tommy and placed him on the horse's head, where he proceeded to play with Tempest's ears, which she didn't seem to mind. I only have blurry photos of that, the light was just too low inside the stable and I didn't want to use a flash and startle the horses.

After Nora put Tommy down and he scampered off and disappeared, I asked where he had gone.

"Probably in one of the stalls," she said.

"Don't the horses ever step on the cats?" I asked.

"They're very careful. They can feel the cat around their legs," she said. But then, after a moment or two, she added. "I have seen barn cats with kinks in their tails, though."

Halloween Phenology

I came across my notes from last Halloween, a rare experience -- the finding of the notes, not the taking of them. I try to keep track of how many kids show up at our doorstep demanding sugar so I know how much to buy the next year. Then it occured to me that weather may play a role in those numbers (we didn't have a lot of trick-or-treaters in 1991, for example, when a monster blizzard dumped more than two feet of snow on the kiddies), so I made a few notes about that as well. I love that sort of trivia, so I'm sharing it here (plus it gives me a way to find it again if I lose my handwritten notes!) -- my report from last Halloween in bucolic South Minneapolis (the photo is of a yard in my neighborhood that I found especially charming).

The weather was windy and dry, with temperatures in the 40s by evening. The high that day had been 62 degrees, the low 44 -- very similar to today's forecast for the Twin Cities, except we don't seem to be getting any wind today.

I lit the candles in our pumpkins at about 6 p.m., when it was just starting to get dark, placing votives inside glass holders to keep the wind from blowing them out; in one pumpkin I placed a partially burnt down pillar candle, so the sides of the candle protected the flame from the wind. Thanks to the pushing back of the return to Standard time (finally! I've always wondered why they had us setting the clocks back on the Sunday before Halloween!), we didn't get any early trick-or-treaters interrupting our dinner. At least, I'd always thought that the early onset of nightfall was the reason the smaller children headed out at such an inconvenient time.

The first kids showed up at 6:45 p.m. By 7 p.m., if I read my hatch-marks and notes right, we had had about 20 kids, 4 of them teens (who showed up at 7 p.m. -- always worth noting when the first teens show up, signaling the phase when the candy supplies will dwindle rapidly!) Another 20 came after 7 p.m., with the last one showing up about 8:45 or 9 p.m.

I had handed out both balloons and candy and made a note that the balloons were very popular. I should have read that sooner! I may go out and buy some balloons yet today (I think I had some halloween-themed balloons, which I imagine I can find again at the local Walgreens.)

My final note was that there were no dominant character themes among the small kids.

I wonder if we'll see any politically themed masks this year? I can think of a few scary ones, depending on your particular leanings! But that's another topic, and one that I'm pretty darn tired of, so I won't go there now.

Happy Halloween, whoever may read this!

City Serenade

Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night — likely a lingering sleep pattern from when my children were babies — and I just lie there, listening to the city night slowly roll over into morning. We live in a quiet neighborhood, fortunate that our Nokomis bungalow does not lie under a flight path. On the first open-window nights in spring, I’m aware of the low hum of traffic on the crosstown, the faint whine of airplanes taking off. But by midsummer, the crickets’ cheerful all-night chorus drowns out these machine-made sounds. And for a time after the last bus has rumbled down 54th Street, I could almost be in some quiet rural enclave — just the crickets and me.

A car passes now and then. Our neighbor opens the door to let her dog answer his nocturnal calling. A friendly muppet of a standard poodle, he’s usually very quiet, but sometimes something excites him and his exuberant barking pierces the night. A rabbit?, I wonder. A prowling cat? A racoon? The door opens, a muffled voice hisses, “Bogie! Get in here!”

I know dawn is approaching by the rustling of my window shades — the air has begun to move. Then the first bird announces itself. In the spring and early summer, this is usually the distinctive whistle of a cardinal, but by September they have run out of things to say. Soon a cacophony of bird song begins a crescendo; I pick out a robin, a finch, a chickadee.

The birds are interrupted more and more frequently by car doors opening and closing, engines starting, as the earliest workers are whisked away to useful industry. Then the familiar rumble of the bus tells me the day has begun in earnest.

Bogie makes another foray out into his yard, and now my dog is tap dancing outside the bedroom door, impatient to do the same.

The day brings its own set of sounds, both human and animal. When I walk the dog I am constantly stopping to peer up into the branches of a tree because I hear the soft tapping of a downy woodpecker, the nasal nih-nih of a nuthatch. I hear the scuffle of sneakered feet; a jogger passes, her ears plugged into an I-Pod. The cicadas are boisterously warmed up by afternoon.

Soon it will be too cold to leave the windows open anymore, but so also will the cold silence the insects and subdue the birds. The pleasures of listening to the city at night will diminish, so I won’t mind shutting the window. And, really, I should get some sleep.

I wrote this essay for my quarterly magazine, MOQ -- Minneapolis Observer Quarterly. If you'd like to know more about MOQ, such as what else is in the current issue and how to obtain a copy or maybe even subscribe, please go here.

My garden column

I've been writing a garden column in the Southside Pride, a south Minneapolis community newspaper, in exchange for which I get a little ad promoting my quarterly mag., MOQ (Minneapolis Observer Quarterly). I was up at the aforementioned cabin/lake home when the September column was due, so I wrote about the garden behind a coffee shop in Longville, Minn., near the cabin. I did this drawing while sitting on the coffee shop's patio. Here's a link to read this month's installment of the column.

Over and Under the Rocks

We went "up North" last week, which means we went to the family vacation home on Woman Lake, Minnesota. I used to go up there all the time when I was a kid, but we only get up about once a year or so now (which is plenty; I don't know how my parents did it, going nearly every weekend with four kids).

I used to like to play in the shallow water as a kid, and with the water level a bit low this summer, we had a nice little bit of shoreline, so I enjoyed selecting rocks and stacking them into cairns. I wasn't content with just the very small rocks, or with the ones lying on the surface of the sand and easily picked up; when I spied a partially submerged one that looked like just the sort of thing I was looking for -- kind of flat and oval, good for stacking -- I pulled it out of the lake bottom, releasing a cloud of dirt and bubbles in the process.

I also used to get leeches on my feet when I was little -- we called them bloodsuckers. I remember my mother and aunt patiently picking them off (and maybe it was only once, but I sure remember being freaked out about it). So it didn't really surprise me when I was stepping out of the water and my 20-year-old daughter pointed to my right foot and announced, "You have a leech."

It was about an inch and a half long, and although I acted calm, I was a bit squeamish about it, so I asked my husband to pull it off and he kindly obliged. Then I noticed a few tiny little gray leeches, about a quarter-inch long, on the same foot. These weren't as intimidating, so I tried to pull them off myself, but they were too tiny to grip. "We need to use a tweezers," I told my husband.

We went up to the house and he patiently picked all the tiny leeches off my foot -- we counted 14 of them! All of these were on the same foot, and nobody else got any, even though we had all been walking around in the shallow water among the rocks. So I wondered if that submerged rock I disturbed had been some sort of leech "nest."

I found a NOVA Web site based on a program they did about the medical use of leeches, and from there linked to a fact sheet that explained that leeches do attach their eggs to rocks, so I must have stepped into a newly hatched brood or something. I guess I got my comeuppance for disturbing the lake bottom -- from now on, I'll only select rocks that are lying on the shore!

A polite conversation?

When visiting Boulder, Colorado, while my husband was attending a conference, I walked down Pearl Street to a little convenience store called Lolita’s to buy sunscreen and some bottled spring water. There were two tables outside the store, and there were two men sitting at one of them, so I sat at the other to apply my sunscreen and drink my water.

The two men looked to be maybe in their mid-30s or early 40s. Soon two younger men, maybe in their early 20s, came along; they greeted the seated men as though they had met before but did not really know each other well. There was some talk about “last night” as though they had all perhaps been out at the same local bar. Then one of the 20-somethings said to one of the seated men, “By the way, you know, it’s really bad etiquette to use your speaker phone in the bar.”

The seated man said, in a quiet, calm voice, “Oh, really? Well, you know, I don’t really give a f**k what you think.”

The other one continued in an equally calm, polite-sounding tone, “I just thought I should let you know, man, that it’s not good etiquette.”

“Well, I’m sorry if I offended you man, but I really don’t give a f**k.”

This continued for a few minutes, with neither man raising his voice or betraying any anger in his tone, and with the seated man repeatedly using the f-word. Finally, the younger man departed, saying “God bless you, man,” as he walked away.

The seated man talked to his friend for some time after this, saying that he thought the younger man must be very priviledged and accustomed to telling other people what to do and how to behave -- with frequent use of the f-word -- and then said that he was known to be a nice person, that he knew several influential and wealthy people in town, that he was 42-f-ing years old and therefore deserving of respect. He also said that he grew up in the Bronx, had attended UCLA, and that he bet the younger man had never been in a knife fight or pulled a gun on anyone. He said that he knew people who would respond violently to the younger man’s correction, and that such a response would serve as a valuable lesson to the young man -- all the while repeating that he did’t give a f**k what the guy thought. But at no point did he raise his voice or betray through his tone the extent that he was, by his words, obviously offended.

Although I found the ironic diatribe somewhat entertaining, I decided to leave while he was still talking about it because I figured he might eventually say to me, “What the f**k are you looking at?” and I didn’t think I wanted to engage in that conversation.

But he never raised his voice.

Visiting Boulder, Colorado

My husband was going to Boulder, Colorado, for a LOHAS conference, and I said, how about if I tag along? So here we are in Boulder. It's a lovely town nestled just next to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, population about 100,000 -- just enough to make it a vibrant city, it seems. There's a pedestrian way through the middle of downtown, called the Pearl Street Mall. It goes for several blocks and you can't so much as ride a bicycle down it -- it's all for walking.

We went out Thursday evening to look for a place to eat dinner and discovered that there's a lively night life on the mall. We noticed a crowd gathered on the corner of Pearl St. and 13th, where a street performer was regaling them with some lively antics. He had recruited a few assistants -- two men who stood facing each other with their arms folded across their chests, and a woman to whom he handed various instruments, including a hatchet and, a little later, a lit torch. He then climbed up and stood on the men's crossed arms and it appeared that he was going to have the woman toss the items at him to juggle, which was a little hard to fathom! But then he instructed her to step a little closer, then closer still, then he had her hand him the hatchet, torch, etc. He said, "You didn't think I was going to have her throw those things, did you?" She looked relieved. But it was probably the guys he was standing on at that time who were the most relieved. Anyway, he proceeded to juggle the hatchet and lit torch and other object (I didn't notice what it was) quite artfully. We moved on after that.

Eventually, we went to a wine bar called The Kitchen, which was recommended to us by a fellow operating a small winery where we had stopped for a glass earlier in the afternoon. It was crowded and lively, definitely a hot spot in town, and Craig noticed that it was full of young people -- much younger than us, certainly. It was too loud for conversation, so we we mostly took to people watching, and Craig commented that there were mating rituals going on all around us. True enough. We enjoyed our stroll back to the hotel Bolderado in the cool of the night, played cards, and went to sleep, old fogeys that we are.

There are more photos on my Flickr page.

Grapevine lilacs

Here it is the last day of May (and our 28th wedding anniversary today) and we still have lilacs and even some late tulips blooming around here. It's unusual to have lilacs this late in Minneapolis, so this is kind of a treat.

Last year, I transplanted a wild gravevine to the base of our lilac tree and it's already taking off up the tree, of course. So much of the lilac is bare wood that I thought the vine would be nice way to get more green on it, especially in summer when it's done blooming. Of course, I didn't bother to find out if our landlords liked his idea! Oh, well, they're not too fussy when it comes to the landscape, as long as we keep things reasonably tidy and stay out of trouble.

But I thought it looked kinda cool when one little bunch of lilac blossoms formed low on the tree, next to the grapevine, looking like a bunch of grapes!

Lovely long-lasting lilacs

We are surrounded by lilac hedges, courtesy of two of our neighbors -- retired single men who don't seem to notice or care about their lovely bushes. So I knew I could gather a bouquet and nobody would mind!

When the kids used to gather lilac bouquets at Grandma's house, they always wilted only an hour or so after being placed in a vase. So when I read somewhere that you're supposed to pound the stems with a hammer to get them to take up water, I tried that and it seemed to help. But later I learned that doing violence to the stems in that way was not good for the cuttings, and indeed it only seemed to extend the life of the cut lilacs by a few more hours.

These lilacs were cut yesterday and I photographed them today. You can see that even the leaves still look fine.

I wish I could remember where I read this, but here is the technique: Bring a pitcher of very warm water with you out to the lilac bush, make clean cuts with a bypass pruning shear (which doesn't crush the stem), strip off the lower leaves and plunge the cutting into the warm water, immersing as much of the stem as possible (right up to the blossoms if you can). Ideally you leave them in the warm water overnight, but since the water doesn't stay warm that long anyway, I don't think it matters if you transfer them to a vase, also filled with warm water, which is what I did. When I transferred them I made sure to strip off any leaves that would be under water so they wouldn't rot and spoil the water.

I know that some bouquets do fine with only enough water in the vase to cover the bottom inch or so of the stems, and maybe after a day or so of curing, these lilacs would be fine that way too, but as long as there are no leaves under water, I am keeping the vase as full as I can so the whole stems remain immersed.

Lilacs last such a short time even on the shrub, so I like to keep them as long as possible indoors!

(Note added on Thursday, 5/22: the lilacs are just starting to wilt this evening, so they lasted about 5 days.)

Biking to Mom's

Last week I told my husband that I wanted to go see my mom on Mothers Day, to have lunch or maybe just coffee. Since I've been riding my bike so much lately, he said, "Are you going to bike there?" She lives in the suburb of Roseville, which is a pretty good distance north and east of our South Minneapolis home, so I laughed at the suggestion -- of course I wasn't going to be that ambitious!

But then on Sunday morning when I was walking the dog, I considered what a very lovely day it was -- sunny and mild, although a bit windy -- and I thought why not bike to Mom's? I have all day. And as soon as I had that thought, I remembered that when my mother used to work at the VA hospital, which is only a few blocks from where I live, she often rode her bike to work. Wouldn't it be swell to retrace my mother's bike route to visit her on Mother's Day?

So I checked the distance on Google maps and found that it's 13.5 miles. I figure that I bike at about 7-8 miles per hour, so it could take me close to 2 hours. No problem, I have time today. But just in case I'm too tired to bike home again, I asked my husband if he would come and pick me up to take me home after. Of course he said he would.

I called my mother to let her know my plans, then I asked her how long it used to take her to bike to work at the VA. "Oh, I think about an hour," she said.

An hour! You may think that sons compete with their fathers, but I found myself determined to get as close to my mother's time on that trek as I could. So I pedaled hard and fast east across the Mississippi River, up the River Blvd. (north), turned onto picturesque Summit Ave.(east again), which has a dedicated bike lane, and proceeded to Lexington Ave., which would take me north through Como Park, a large park in St. Paul on the way to Roseville.

As I was peddling along on Summit Ave., a pair of bicyclists in Spandex whisked past me. (I think of bicyclists who wear Spandex, and those funny shoes, as serious cyclists.) I picked up my pace to match theirs and followed them as far as Lexington, where they continued on Summit and I turned left, heading north.

On this day there was a wind from the north at 30 mph. After I left Como Park, Lexington Ave. veered to the west, and since I still needed to go east as well as north, and didn't want to add more distance to my route, I continued north and headed up through a residential neighborhood.

Just before you enter the suburb of Roseville, you cross a major east-west thoroughfare called Larpenteur Ave. For a long way, the north side of Larpenteur is occupied by a large cemetery, so I kept going east until I came to Dale St., which crosses Larpenteur and heads north into Roseville; this would bring me quite close to my destination.

Now I knew that Dale St. had a pretty-good-sized hill right before I planned to turn off of it, about 2 miles from Larpenteur. But I hadn't remembered that it had an even bigger hill right after you cross Larpenteur. In fact, I am certain it was the biggest hill I ever encountered on a bike! And it was followed by a second hill only slightly smaller than the first, and finally that third hill before the turn.

Well, with the cemetery on one side and a large park on the other, there was no detouring around the big hill, so I put my head down and pumped away. I had a nice long downhill run before heading up the monster, but the 30 mph head wind (did I mention that the wind was from the north?) actually prevented me from getting much momentum. So I had to shift down to my lowest gear almost as soon as I began the ascent, and when I was about halfway up, huffing and puffing with every revolution of the pedals, a bicyclist in Spandex passed me easily. By the time I reached the summit and could look down the other side for a long distance (and at the next hill), she was nowhere to be seen.

I coasted on the downhill side and then puffed my way up the next hill, not quite as big as the first, and then a third time (all into the wind) before reaching County Rd. C and turning to the east, where I encountered only a slight climb to get to my mother's street, and then a relaxing descent down Virginia Ave. to her house.

It took me an hour and a half. I asked my mother, did it really only take you an hour to bike that distance? She pondered a bit, then said it was probably more like an hour and 15 minutes. And she never went by way of Dale street, but rather took a route that was mostly level. She also reminded me that I was biking into that north wind most of the way. So I guess I didn't do too bad!

My mother drove us to a pleasant little cafe where we enjoyed lunch and coffee, and then learned that they were giving a free piece of cake to each mother. It was a delicous multilayered torte with strawberries and bananas and cream and a little dark chocolate. We should have shared one! When we got done, we were stuffed. So I decided to bike home as well, but I didn't take Dale St. this time.

I made it home in an hour and 15 minutes -- with the wind at my back.

Eagles in the city

We have a nesting pair of bald eagles in South Minneapolis, right near Hwy 62, and today I spotted this one perched in a tree on the banks of Lake Nokomis, in a residential neighborhood about 6 miles from downtown Minneapolis.

I was riding my bike around the lake when I looked up at this tree because I sometimes see cormorants perched in it, and they are so big and funny looking that I just get a kick out of them. When I first saw the eagle its head was down and its back was to me (as it is here), and so it didn't register at first what I was really seeing, I just thought, wow, that is a really big bird in that tree. Then it lifted its head and I was just awe struck -- an eagle! Right here in my neighborhood!

The crow in this picture was first perched on a nearby tree, and it cawed constantly at the eagle. Then it flew over and took a couple of dives at it, then perched where you see it here, and continued to caw. Finally it flew again, took one last dive at the eagle, then flew away. The eagle was preening itself the whole time, ignoring the crow.

Other people walking around the lake stopped to look at it, including a woman who lives very nearby and who comes to look at it often -- she says it likes to perch in that tree because there are dead branches, thus fewer leaves to block its view of the lake and the fish. All of our city lakes are stocked for fishing, so I'm sure there's plenty there for it to eat -- probably walleye and northern and tasty fish like that.

A couple that came walking by said they had just been over by the nest (about a mile or less away from this site) and that there was another eagle sitting on the nest. That one is larger than this one, they said, so it's probably the female. Sitting on the nest? Sounds like we'll have more eagles soon!

Sacrificial tomato plant

Actually, this poor hapless tomato plant survived its ordeal and is thiving in its pot once again, with dirt covering its roots. I had purchased it for the purpose of drawing it for a new gardening column I am writing for the Minneapolis community newspaper the Southside Pride.

So you may be surprised to learn that I did not write about tomatoes for my first column, slated to appear in the May editions (they publish three neighborhood editions each month). Rather, I wrote about dirt. That is, I wanted to address the fundamental "elements" of gardening, wishing to also recall the traditional four elements: earth, air, water, fire. So, for the first column I wrote about earth/dirt in the context of organic gardening -- for example, that you feed the soil, not the plant, by making compost and adding it to the garden.

But I didn't really want to draw an image of dirt or compost to go with the column. So since I started by telling about my first gardening experience, in which I grew a couple of tomato plants, I decided that a drawing of a tomato plant would be just the thing. And I wanted to draw it roots and all not only because I like those sorts of botanical drawings, but also to convey the sense of reaching into the earth.

And the only way, it seemed, to prop up my model so that I could do the sort of drawing I wanted, was to shake out the roots and then suspend the plant from a ceiling light in the dining room. So there it hung, slowly twisting in the air until I found a way to stop it (by placing a clear plastic ruler on a lamp and setting that next to the plant; hard to explain, but it worked).

I didn't think to take a picture of the drawing before I brought it over to the newspaper, so I'll try to fetch it back when they're done with it and upload an image of it then.

April flowers

One of my favorite harbingers of spring in Minnesota is the cheery yellow forsythia that I planted in my front yard. The little bush is only four years old, having been planted as bare root stock in the summer of 2004 -- it looked like a lifeless twig when it arrived. I then dug it up and moved it when we moved in September 2006, so I'm pleased it's not only still with me, but establishing itself nicely in its new home.

It just started blooming a few days ago, around April 20. In most years it has bloomed by early April, usually on my grandmother's birthday, April 9. But spring seems to be a little reluctant this year; not only has it been cold so far this spring, but we once again have a threat of snow in the forecast. However, in 2005, when the forsythia was blooming on April 9, it snowed on May Day! So who knows what can happen in a Minnesota spring!

I took this photo today when the rain was just a light mist. Too wet for bike riding, but OK for a quick stroll around the yard to see how the gardens are coming along.

Help! My Car Fell Down and Can't Get Up!

Our 1991 Honda, with 172,000 miles on it and decorative accents of rust complimenting its light blue skin tones, was dubbed the Crapmobile by our very unimpressed 17-year-old son on the day we bought it. For more than a year now, our initial $1,000 investment has gotten us where we need to go, including as far as Ely in northern Minnesota and back again, with only a modest infusion of additional cash.

My husband, Craig, used it to commute to the Life Time Fitness offices in the far-flung suburb of Eden Prairie, where he worked as managing editor of Experience Life magazine, until the magazine offices were moved to the much closer Highland Park neighborhood in St. Paul, just 2.67 miles from home (now he usually walks). On those occasions when Craig has apologetically offered a ride to his boss, who owns a shiny new Prius, she has assured him that she “loves” the Crapmobile and its distinctive character.

But the tired old car had been complaining for some time whenever we turned the wheel. It would creak and groan loudly, and even though we found its loud protestations amusing, we did know that they were also worrysome. Since it would soon be time to get another oil change, I told my husband that I would ask our mechanic to investigate the cause of the complaints then. We suspected it had something to do with the wheel bearings, since the sound was coming from the left front wheel, and we had recently had the bearings on the other front wheel replaced.

But I really wasn’t prepared for the sound I heard when driving through the Life Time Fitness parking ramp for an appointment with Ashley, a personal trainer there.

I had been putting off making use of the free membership we enjoyed (a benefit of my husband’s job), mostly because I’m not fond of gyms. I’d rather get my cardio outdoors on a bicycle; indoor spaces full of sweaty bodies hold no allure for me. But despite having ridden my bike throughout the winter, and walking the dog a mile or more at least five times a week, my weight hasn’t budged from the all-time high it has been stuck at for the last several years, and I knew I needed to be more strategic in my efforts.

So I was truly ready to get to work on some seriously productive sweating as I entered the parking ramp (I would have biked the 2.67 miles to the gym, but Mother Nature was in the process of gleefully dumping six inches of snow on the city), when I heard a loud CLUNK! and the sound of something dragging.

Denial immediately set in as I imagined a large branch and wondered how I could have run over something like that inside a parking ramp. I got out and peered under the car. Nothing there. I got back behind the wheel and started to move it forward again, only to hear more of the loud dragging noise. I tried backing up to dislodge the invisible thing. Then, finally admitting to myself that there was nothing under the car but definitely something seriously wrong within it, I turned the wheel to move it to one side so other cars could get around mine -- and heard another CLUNK! followed this time by a sudden listing to the left. The left front wheel was now skewed at an unhelpful angle; the Crapmobile would be going nowhere on its own wheels anymore today.

When you drive a car like mine, you keep your mechanic’s phone number handy; he diagnosed the problem over the phone as a broken ball joint and soon I was in the queue for the tow-truck guy, who had had nothing to do all day until right before I called him, and now must complete another tow before he could come to my aid.

It took more than an hour. I spent most of the time hovering somewhere near the car, explaining, apologizing, and politely declining kind offers of assistance from people toting gym bags, including one gallant fellow who wondered if changing the tire would do the trick.

Much to my relief, other vehicles, including The Boss’s Prius as well as some rather hulky SUVs, did manage to steer around my wounded car, so parking lot traffic proceeded reasonably well. The Boss expressed kind concern for my inconvenience, and tactfully suggested that it might be time to abandon the Crapmobile for something with fewer miles -- and car payments. I thanked her for her concern.

Then a woman with an air of authority and a Lifetime Fitness nametag identifying her as Denise came out with a young man who must have reported the disabled vehicle in the parking ramp. I did not recognize him as one of the people who had offered me assistance.

Denise sized up the situation and then announced that she would recruit a couple of PTs (personal trainers) to move the car. To where I didn’t know, since it didn’t appear to me that there was any better place for it at the moment. I also didn’t know how you would move a car with a busted wheel, but she seemed confident it could be done and back she went into the building.

A few minutes later several guys came out, most of them slender young men in black Life Time Fitness T-shirts, and two bulky fellows who were obviously weight-lifters. They eyed the car with its skewed front wheel and said, “What is she thinking? We could push it if the wheel wasn’t busted, but we’re not going to pick up a car!” I couldn’t tell if they were mostly amused or flattered that Denise thought their weight-lifting abilities extended to automobiles. One of the bulky guys returned to the building, presumably to lift more appropriate objects, but the other lingered, having just completed his workout.

He and the black-T-shirted PTs stood around for several minutes discussing parking lot etiquette, or the lack thereof, as several vehicles steered around the Crapmobile, and around the 180-degree turns of the parking ramp, at speeds which they clearly disapproved. “It serves people right to have to drive around your car,” one of them said, “They drive too fast in here anyway.”

After one especially impatient driver passed, garnering disapproving comments from all of the guys, one of the PTs said, “That will be one of my yoga-class people; they’re the worst.” I mused that perhaps that was because they needed the yoga class to help them calm down, but he disagreed. “They’re just as bad after class,” he said.

Having exhausted the conversational possibilities that my car offered, and having been informed by me that the tow-truck guy just called and would be here in 10 minutes, the PTs and the weight-lifter returned to the building.

The Crapmobile now sports a new ball joint and axle and despite the $470 price tag (including the tow, which cost extra for the pain of manipulating through a parking ramp), I still figure we’ve spent far less than we would in car payments on anything likely to be an actual improvement over a car that, despite this little mishap, has proven to be quite reliable.

And now that it doesn’t creak and groan so much, we’re becoming more aware of another sound coming from under the hood whenever we’re in the process of slowing down to a stop, a kind of wahka-wahka-wahka. The brakes work fine, so we’re not worried about our safety, and since the car is due for an oil change soon, I think I’ll just ask our mechanic to take a look at it when I next bring it in.