Accessible Gardening: Laughing For Joy #8, 1 by Amargia

Amargia wrote:
It is a rainy afternoon. I’ve had to find indoor mischief to get into. (I had a week in the hospital with people seeing to it I behaved. It was boring and expensive! Since I was behaved perfectly for 7 days, I should be able just to rest on my laurels for awhile. Don’t you think?
Today’s mad scheme is to make plant labels out of beads strung in patterns like the Braille code. Round beads standing for dots in the Braille code, tubular beads for blank spots and spacer beads to mark each six-bead cell. The dots in a Braille cell have corresponding numbers 1 thru 6. Like, the letter “A” is dot 1. The 2-3-4-5 and 6 spaces are blank. So, in my system, “A” would be one round bead followed by 5 tubular beads and a spacer bead to mark off the 6 bead cell It may sound complicated, but, I would rather string beads than work with super glue. I have a super glue horror story. (I suspect most people do whether they ~fess up about it or not.) Super glue is what it takes to get Braille tape labels to stick to plant markers in our humid conditions. My bead “labels” have the advantage that the dogs don’t pull them up for chew toys the way they do wood and plastic labels. Jim foresees a problem, however. He thinks swaying strands of beads strung on fishing line tied to the end of a bamboo stake is the equivalent of fishing for cats. Lol.
We’ve been working on the sitting area of the CanDo Container Garden. Jim thought having mondo grass mark the edge of beds, in addition to their being marked by the concrete of patio and walkways, was “like wearing a belt in addition to suspenders.” lol. We are moving the mondo to beside the irrigation trench to reduce weeding under the shrubs there. I think I’m going to like the neater, minimized look of the sitting area and will love not having to weed so much along the irrigation trench. We put our whole iris collection in one large bed. The jury is still out on whether or not that was a good idea.
The hydrangea bloomed very pink this year. Rare in this area where soil tends to be acidic. Jim, of course, thinks there was a soil pH altering conspiracy. The swamp lilies (native crinum) have started blooming also. Combined with gardenia and some late blooming mags in the woods, the scent-scape is heavenly. The wild orange daylilies are putting on their show. Even with all the named cultivars we have now, I still look forward to the “ditch lilies” doing their thing. The best thing about the cultivars is that they extend daylily season in both directions. k*