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I’ve got more pictures of smiles to show you. Like the pictures I posted yesterday, these are from the Scarecrow Factory at Elk Grove Village’s Pioneer Days. Smiles brought to you compliments of the Elk Grove Garden Club. One more set of pictures to follow later this week.
There were a lot of smiles at the Elk Grove Garden Club’s Scarecrow Factory last weekend. That’s because our scarecrows came with smiles, lots of smiles. Start counting with one smile per scarecrow, which makes our initial smile count 95. Add 1 smile per Garden Club member who helped that day and you’ve got another 20 smiles. It was infectious – all of the families making scarecrows had smiles, as did everyone passing by as they visited other Pioneer Day events. That’s a lot of smiles. Smiles are what I like best about our annual Scarecrow Factory. Sure, the scarecrows are incredibly cute. But they pale in comparison to the smiles. Here are some of the pictures to prove it. If you are wondering what other pictures were posted from this event, check out Part 2, and My Favorite Scarecrow Of The Day Is…
The Scarecrow Factory at Pioneer Days has become quite a tradition in Elk Grove Village. This family event is held every September. The Garden Club has sooooo much fun watching and helping everyone with their scarecrows. Creativity abounds! Here I present to you my absolute favorite scarecrow of the day.
If you are wondering what other pictures were posted from this event, check out Part 1, and Part 2. More to come soon. Invasive only begins to describe goldenrod. An accurate description would need some adjectives; highly invasive, completely invasive, utterly invasive. Think of the kind of invasive that Attila the Hun was. That is the kind of invasive that Goldenrod is. Drive by a local forest preserve and you’ll know what I mean. Goldenrod will not share the late summer expanse of field, it will usurp it. Goldenrod stands tall and wide. Of its territory, Goldenrod says ‘I WILL have it all.’. Not all goldenrod has such bad manners. Mine wasn’t invasive at first, and some of it still isn’t. I had Solidago Fireworks planted in two places. One has stayed in a nice clump and gets about 3’ tall. The other, well, something went awry. Its 6’ tall and everywhere. Trustworthy is apparently not a goldenrod quality. At first it was rather impressive as a companion for the Sneezeweed.
Then it was done and flopped all over the place. Not so impressive. I’m not going to show you that embarrassing picture. Mike said it should go. I said no. I was wrong. (He likes to hear that so I’ll say it again.) I was wrong. After much effort on a humid day, I had three garbage cans full of Goldenrod and an empty canvas where overgrown had been. Oh, so empty. So empty that when I was done moving Karl Foerster grass from nearby and planting three new Vanilla Strawberry hydrangeas that I even used a mirror on the back fence to make it look more full.
Brilliant! At $12.50 from a garage sale, the mirror reflected nicely on my ability to have an impactful new vignette at a very reasonable price.
I really really like my garden, Mike’s dahlias, our koi. But I’ve got to tell ya, none of it comes anywhere close to loving grandkids. So sure this is a garden blog, but today I have to show you what John & Heather and the kids did. Its a cardboard castle! Pretty cool huh?
The castle and those 2 cuties below are in California. We’re not. He is Cameron, age 2. She is Allie, starting Kindergarten tomorrow, and yes, that is a front tooth missing.
We’ll see the castle a bit closer tomorrow thanks to Skype. I’ve never Skyped with anyone who was in a castle before. And we get a fashion show too so we can see the new school clothes. Maybe Allie will even show us the missing tooth area by hanging over the top of the computer again. You haven’t lived till a 5 year old gets that up close and personal and upside down to smile at you. Want to really live? Get some super-sized boxes, a couple of grandkids, an overactive imagination, and love the moment. We’ve all heard that plants appreciate being talked to. You may not believe it, but you’ve heard it. Now I’m taking that to a new level. After a huge time investment I have been successful in teaching one of my plants to read. You don’t believe that either? Well, read on… This poor rose was languishing. I taught it to read and look what happened! Oh, I also trimmed back the phlox that was totally blocking it from the sun. Still, I’m sure it was the sign that did it. Garlic is fun. Who would have guessed? Its fun because its curly. Yes, curly. Perhaps curly isn’t the first word that comes to mind when you think of garlic. I think that’s because the curliness is a well kept secret. So well kept that its rare when someone even guesses that my garlic is, well, garlic.
I never even harvested my garlic till this year. It came back so reliably that I didn’t want to take the chance of disturbing and losing it. Duh, city folk. This year I basically ripped it out because it was in the way of our new pond, and I tossed it haphazardly in a pot behind some ditch daylilies with just a little bit of soil. I then proceeded to ignore it. I did see a teeny tiny garlic clove lying on top of the soil about a week ago when we finally ripped out the ditch daylilies. Wasn’t I surprised to find that the plant didn’t care about being ignored. It did what garlic does – it made more garlic. In order to prove its worth, fearful that I was going to let it die there, it even made really tasty garlic. Yesterday I felt sorry for the plant, all withered and dehydrated. I decided to plant what was left of it. I reached into the pot and came up with handfuls of teeny tiny tasty garlic. That too must have been part of its survival tactic, especially after it saw the fate of the ditch daylilies. It subscribed to ‘produce or you’re out’ without me even telling it. I planted some of the bulbs and brought the rest inside for cooking. I’ve got lots more than what you see here.
I looked around the internet and found that there are some 600 types of garlic. Yowsa. I think mine must be one of the softneck kinds. Softnecks are so called because the whole green plant dies down to pliancy, which mine does. It leaves nothing but the bulb and flexible stems that would have been easy to braid for drying. I also learned that you plant garlic here in the Midwest in the fall. If you get garlic, expect it to be curly next spring, then the leaves will dry out and be ugly, and you’ll have tasty cloves in August. I don’t travel in circles where we use words like Phi in a conversation. If you asked me a week ago what Phi was, the closest I could guess is: Fee-fi-fo-fum, And that wouldn’t be quite right. Actually, it wouldn’t even be close. Yet we are surrounded by Phi. It’s part of the big design. Technically, Phi is the golden ratio, or 1.61803399. There, that clears it up right? No? How about this? Lets try this: You know you like it, but why? One of the reasons is Phi. Steve Puttrich, the artist, knows what Renaissance artists of the 1500’s to graphic artists of today know. They know that Phi gives a sense of aesthetic appeal in balance and harmony of design. Oh, that Phi! It goes back way further, but we aren’t going there. We are going to art and life. Art and life and what I learned about Phi from Steve while our Willow Creative Affinity Group was at Chicago Botanic Gardens last weekend. For us simple folk, its kind of like the 2/3 rule when I take a photo like this one. The tree isn’t centered. That is on purpose, and it’s appealing. The overexposure that makes the poppies so pretty just kinda happened.
Phi is everywhere. Its in my hand where the ratio of my palm to fingers is Phi. Its in the universe, where the dimensions of the earth and moon are in Phi relationship, forming a triangle based on 1.618. Its in the human spiral of DNA. Its in leaves. Here is Steve’s Phi tool showing the up and down of a leaf as one aspect of phi, and the left to right being the other.
How have I gone this far in life without knowing this? I bet I’m not alone. Just another one of those reasons I know God is in charge. Stuff like this just doesn’t happen by itself. Our world is amazing by design!
I didn’t have to go far when I wanted to take a picture of one of Mike’s buckets just a few minutes ago. I didn’t even make it as far as the garage when I found this bucket in the mudroom. If Dr. Seuss was here, I think he would say: Buckets here. They’re in the yard. I took a rough count. 5 in the garage, I have 3, the 25 you see here, and oh yes, the 28 that we are going to talk about today. But then who’s counting? We also have a landscape trailer. As in so ugly that Mike thought he’d have to sleep in it when he dared to bring it home. I haven’t wallpapered it yet. I threaten, but I haven’t. I love our landscape trailer. I didn’t say that on day one. On day one I said “What were you thinking?”. Now we always seem to be using it to move something. Especially on days like today when I am planning to mulch. Our yard is big, and I don’t like to weed. So I mulch. Actually, Billy and George mulch, but I digress. The whole idea of someone dumping 10 yards of mulch on my driveway for me (or Billy and George, but I again digress) to then shovel into a wheelbarrow, move it far from the driveway, then take it out of the wheelbarrow is way too much work. Plus I’d have to look at the constant reminder of all that mulch haunting me as it sat on the driveway for all too long. Whether it was a day, a week, or a month, it would be too long. Granted, I instead get to look at the landscape trailer, but we aren’t going to go talk about that. Here is where the brilliance part comes in. Mike lines the trailer with buckets before he goes to Bertholds for mulch. They use a front loader to dump enough mulch in to cover the buckets. Not so much as to fill the trailer; enough to cover the buckets. Sure it overflows the buckets some, but I can live with that. And Mike can drive the trailer right to where I need the mulch. Then I (or Billy and George, but I yet again digress) can take the buckets out easily and do the mulching. When I’m ready for more, Mike can go get it. Whether its a day, a week, or a month till I need more, I don’t have to look at leftover mulch.
Speaking of brilliance, I get some credit here too. Getting a landscape trailer was all Mike’s idea. Believe me, ALL his idea. Lining it with buckets was all his idea too. Having 2 strong neighborhood teenagers do the mulching (Billy and George, I want to digress), that one is mine. The birds are singing, they don’t care,
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