• Mood: happy
• Music: Dirt To Mud--Paul Westerberg--Stereo

Three cool, one kinda icky

When I got home from work this morning, I went out to do my watering routine. I started with the hostas transplanted from the south side of the house, hit the rest of the hosta party that is currently in containers on the deck and headed out to the compost pile. As my compost material is primarily woody and it's been pretty dry of late, I've taken to watering it more often to promote the decay of the wood (as well as the rest of the pile). It gave off the lovely active compost smell when I added water. Cool.

I continued on across the driveway to water the rather sad looking Woodland Garden. The ferns transplanted here with 90_percent_sure's help have let it be known that they do not like being touched, much less uprooted and moved to new surroundings. I keep them moist in hopes that they'll come out of it and spring back next year. After their morning drink, I hit the Pre-Cambrian Garden on the north side of the garage and then put up the back hose to do the front plantings.

As I got the hose out, I noticed a school bus pulling up to the corner. It's that time of year again. I adjusted the spray and started watering the new plants below our picture window. After a short time I noticed that one of my plants looked a bit odd. Then I recognized the huge green dragonfly I'd seen trying to land on the plants hanging inside the window a couple of days ago. It was perched, sunning itself on one of the plants not appearing to mind the spray of water. I moved to another part of the bed, thinking it would fly off but it stayed there through the entire process of watering and weeding. Even through the dog wandering through the plants. Cool.

While watering I also noticed that a few mushrooms have popped up through my mulch. I take this as a good sign that there's plenty of organic material in the bed and that it's doing well. While weeding, I got reinforcement of this idea in the being of a nice big earthworm crawling its way from where I'd disturbed it within the mulch. Cool.

Also while weeding I came upon the partially decomposed body of a bird that obviously had its neck broken. Most likely by running into our big picture window, poor thing. As it was at the base of one of the plants and was already beginning to decompose, I covered it in mulch and figure it'll make it's own contribution to the soil. Kinda icky.