It's A Garden Party - Late Summer Odds & Ends

This feature, originally known as Saturday Farmer's Market, was created by Heather at Capricious Reader, and then hosted by Chris at Stuff as Dreams are Made on.

I know the Farmer's Market has been rained out the past few weeks. You know the old adage "when it rains, it pours?" Well . . .

This, however is a place I strive to keep positive, so without further ado:

We have a new 'face' in the garden.

I found him while preparing to weed eat around the Herb bed, and he got a bit miffed at me when I moved him out of the way.

Not as cranky as the Praying Mantis, but close.

I was sick when It was time to tie up the Tomatoes, so as a result the Romas are running all over the bed.

It is more difficult to pick the fruit, but I've never had such an incredible harvest.

My freezer is filling up and I imagine I'll be picking tomatoes up until frost.

Banana leaves make for beautiful artwork.

I don't know if I'll ever get any fruit, but the plants are quite happy with the same reduced amount of water the rest of the garden is getting. If the frost holds off long enough we'll have bananas.

The Crepe Myrtle seems to have such an ethereal air about it.

This year, like last, instead of blooming all at once the blooms seemed to roll across the canopy with large swaths of the tree budding, blooming,  and spent all at once.

That makes for a strange looking tree. The neighbors' trees have all done the same and so far I haven't found a reason why.

Oranges!

I hope, any way.

The neighbors have stopped watering their lawn, which means they are also no longer watering my Orange tree.

Now I can control the water - which means can't blame anyone else if I lose the oranges this year.

A Girl’s Garden
- Robert Frost
                         from: Mountain Interval

A neighbor of mine in the village
    Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
    A childlike thing.

One day she asked her father
    To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
    And he said, “Why not?”

In casting about for a corner
    He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
    And he said, “Just it.”

And he said, “That ought to make you
    An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength
    On your slim-jim arm.”

It was not enough of a garden,
    Her father said, to plough;
So she had to work it all by hand,
    But she don’t mind now.

She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow
    Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
    Her not-nice load.

And hid from anyone passing.
    And then she begged the seed.
She says she thinks she planted one
    Of all things but weed.

A hill each of potatoes,
    Radishes, lettuce, peas,
Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
    And even fruit trees

And yes, she has long mistrusted
    That a cider apple tree
In bearing there to-day is hers,
    Or at least may be.

Her crop was a miscellany
    When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,
    A great deal of none.

Now when she sees in the village
    How village things go,
Just when it seems to come in right,
    She says, “I know!

It’s as when I was a farmer——”
    Oh, never by way of advice!
And she never sins by telling the tale
    To the same person twice.

Saturday Farmer's Market - A Little Indoor Gardening

Created by Heather at Capricious Reader, and now hosted by Chris at Stuff as Dreams are Made on.

The top of the Terrarium is Benny's (Benicio del Ghatto) favorite place to nap.

He's up high. He's in a warm place. And he is able to watch the wildlife playing outside the front window.

His hair also finds its way through the two small vent holes in the top in large enough quantities to decorate the inside.

I've never been able to get good pictures of the inside, but it is filling in.

I only have Ficus and Peace Lilies so far, but they're doing okay.

In fact, the Peace Lilies are doing better than okay. 

This one is getting ready to bloom!

This is a shot of the 'Conservatory.' Again, It's not a very good picture, but you can just see on the right where we have expanded the space.

The expansion is really just a door jamb about eight inches deep, but it gives me a much better working space.

. . . And here is another one of my little friends.

The Oven Bird
- Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

In the Mood for a Repost . . .

Nothing Gold Can Stay
- Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

from: The Poetry of Robert Frost. Copyright 1942.

An Old Man's Winter Night

      - Robert Frost

All out-of-doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him—at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off;—and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon—such as she was,
So late-arising—to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man—one man—can't keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night.

So They Say . . .

Nothing Gold Can Stay
by Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

THIS POEM Transports Me Back To A Middle School Classroom, Watching Students First Realize That Poetry Can, Indeed, Inform Life.

Nothing Gold Can Stay
- by Robert Frost 

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

THE OUTSIDERS, S.E.Hinton.

Official Website. imdb. Supplemental.

EVER THE ASTUTE OBSERVER, FROST WAS

Christmas Trees
by Robert Frost

(A Christmas Circular Letter)


THE CITY had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.
He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas.
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment
To sell them off their feet to go in cars
And leave the slope behind the house all bare,
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.
I’d hate to have them know it if I was.
Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except
As others hold theirs or refuse for them,
Beyond the time of profitable growth,
The trial by market everything must come to.
I dallied so much with the thought of selling.
Then whether from mistaken courtesy
And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether
From hope of hearing good of what was mine,
I said, “There aren’t enough to be worth while.”
“I could soon tell how many they would cut,
You let me look them over.”

“You could look.
But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”
Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close
That lop each other of boughs, but not a few
Quite solitary and having equal boughs
All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,
Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,
With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”
I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.
We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,
And came down on the north.
He said, “A thousand.”

“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”

He felt some need of softening that to me:
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”

Then I was certain I had never meant
To let him have them. Never show surprise!
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents
(For that was all they figured out apiece),
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends
I should be writing to within the hour
Would pay in cities for good trees like those,
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

After Apple-Picking

        by Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

A QUIET CONTEMPLATION OF TIME PASSING

© 2007 Jennifer Woodworth

October
- Robert Frost

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.

The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.

Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;

At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.

Slow, slow!
For the grapes' sake, if the were all,
Whose elaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost--
For the grapes' sake along the all.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

While I was looking for a picture to place with this poem I came across the most incredible artwork. The artist's name is Glenda Santiago and her website is www.glendasantiago.com. This amazing painting shares it's name with Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken. In all her paintings, her colors are vibrant and her arrangements fairly quiver with life. Can you tell I like her?

"The Road not Taken"
Pastel on Wallis Paper

© Glenda Santiago

The Road not Taken
- Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

SO WHAT IS FREEDOM, REALLY?

Bond and Free
- Robert Frost

Love has earth to which she clings
With hills and circling arms about—
Wall within wall to shut fear out.
But Thought has need of no such things,
For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings.

On snow and sand and turf, I see
Where Love has left a printed trace
With straining in the world’s embrace.
And such is Love and glad to be.
But Thought has shaken his ankles free.

Thought cleaves the interstellar gloom
And sits in Sirius’ disc all night,
Till day makes him retrace his flight,
With smell of burning on every plume,
Back past the sun to an earthly room.

His gains in heaven are what they are.
Yet some say Love by being thrall
And simply staying possesses all
In several beauty that Thought fares far
To find fused in another star.