Help in the Garden

The rains are back today and forecast to last all week, but (with apologies to Finch and Dance-Nik) there was enough time to get flowers in the ground, bulbs planted, trees and roses pruned, seeds started, sugar snaps stuck in pots, lemons picked and put into a three week brine to make Moroccan preserved lemons, and the herb pot rejuvenated.

Ducknik had Avanna and Monty from next door to help her yesterday, until they got bored and insisted on rolling the exercise ball up and down the stairs, which after that was prohibited, led to "let's have an adventure, Monty!" which meant taking the white rocks (that Plotnik keeps in a bag at the side of the house to use as drainage in flower pots) and throwing them through the fence into the neighbor's yard. Then it was "I think it's time to go home" time for Avanna and Monty.

Plot managed to knock Demon Oxalis back for the year. The Demon starts out with a tiny pseudobulb (that you can't see at the hairy tip of that root below), which grows into the large bulb in Plotnik's hand.



The bulb sprouts a thick root, which turns into...



...which turns into...



If they breed a cockroach that eats oxalis that is it for human kind. Plottie filled up at least half a dozen large green compost carts with oxalis this Spring. (OK, he left some because you can't get it all, and anyway it makes a very pretty yellow flower if you leave it alone.)

The insidious part is his garden is a lot worse this year with oxalis. What was the difference? He spread compost all over the yard, that he got from the recycling center. He saw and ran his hands through the compost as he spread it -- wonderful, loamy black dirt, not a bulb in sight. But was it filled with invisible pseudobulbs? Could it be that even the fifty million degree heat produced to make that compost doesn't harm oxalis?

Or equally likely -- the compost enriched the garden so much that everything has taken on new life, including the tiny oxalis bulbs that are now Supernova Oxalis Bulbs. What the hell. Here comes the rain.