Planting days continue. Yesterday we got the Red Shiso seeds into the ground. Each year we wait until the beginning of June when the danger of frost is past. The Red Shiso is very frost sensitive. Since its the one crop we absolutely must have for the Essences, we can’t risk putting it in in May only to have it get a late frost. We hope we have waited long enough this year. Tonight’s forecast is for lows in the high thirties!

Riley is tired of planting and his work ethic took a nose dive. He mostly wanted to flop on Sophie wherever she was in the gardens. Finally, he had to be banished back to his supervisory role in the office.

Today we’ll put in the last of the vegetables and also plant a patch of buckwheat for the bees who love buckwheat blossoms. Onwards!

Yesterday the planting continued. Emily and I took advantage of an overcast cool morning to begin planting the main vegetable garden.

Mishka came to inspect our progress.

So did Sophie, who joined us in the afternoon to plant the broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts as well as more annual Flowers.

Just as we were nearly done with what we had hoped to plant, a tractor trailer truck with 52,000 bottles, as in three palettes of 1/2 ounce cobalt blue bottles weighing a total of 4,000 pounds, arrived for us to unload into the barn.

That left us feeling like we really had used every muscle we had!

Today, Sophie and Emily are off, but Mishka and I will keep planting. Maybe I will put in some catnip to thank her for her very uncatlike willingness to see yesterday’s plantings through from start to finish.

May is bliss and not just for cats who can hide in the Flowers.

May is bliss for bees.

And Tree Peonies.

May is bliss for Emily who graduated from high school this weekend.

May is bliss for first year teacher, Ben just about to dive summer vacation.

May is bliss for cousins William and Taylor. Taylor tries on the cap for size and finds it a good fit. Will notes that of the next four family graduations, he is the graduate at three of them; his eighth grade graduation, his high school graduation, and his college graduation. Only Emily sandwiches in there with her college graduation.

May, or at least the tail end of it, is frost free bliss for all the baby plants in the greenhouse and cold frames that can finally get planted and out of their cramped quarters into the good earth.

May is bliss for Sophie and Emily, outside at last, planting the Cherokee Trail of Tears Garden.

May is bliss in the Venus Garden. Its planted, weeded, watered, and feeling the morning sun come up from behind the barn to shine on all the new sprouting plants.

Have you noticed that I always have either a bee ON my bonnet or a bee IN my bonnet about something?

This week, I am obsessing about rocks. This leaves William glad I am not obsessing about weeds.

Or mulch.

No, this week’s garden obsession is rocks.

I’m working to fix the stone walls in our entrance courtyard. These walls were built with rocks found in our hedgerow. On most farmland around here, this would mean plenty of rock to chose from. However, years before we moved here, our neighbor Teddy got permission to harvest rocks from our hedgerow from the previous owner for a beautiful wall at her house.

Our stonewall courtyard was built from leftover rocks after her harvest. I can remember the man who built her wall driving a truck up and down our field (well before I knew it would be our field). He dragged a sledge behind the truck heaped with perfect, thin, flat, big rocks.

His wall is a wonder. I enjoy looking at it every time I go to Teddy’s house. However, his work meant small chippy sorts of rocks were all that were left for us to use. That and boulders.

Ben did a great job building the wall with what he could find, but whenever dogs or anyone else leaps on the wall, it crumbles and slides. This is because big flat rocks to set across its width to anchor it together were unavailable when he was building.

Ben went on to build other walls with better rock. He built a long wall at Lynn’s, for example. She reports that nary a rock has moved. Snowplows, dogs, donkeys, and grandchildren have done no damage.

Tired of periodic collapses as well as the cluttered look of small stones on the top of wall, I asked a neighbor with literally miles and miles of rock walls, if we could harvest some perfect, thin, flat, big rocks from his walls to fix our wall. The golden words that fell from his lips were, “Take whatever you want.” This was, of course, music to my ears.

Here we are harvesting.

Here’s one stretch of the wall in question.

In the foreground is one of the parts of the wall that I have rebuilt with bigger rocks. About halfway down begins the part of the ring left for me to rework.

As I replace the little rocks with bigger rocks, there are lots of leftover little rocks. I am leaving them there for now because sometimes they are needed as chocks for the bigger rocks. I will probably try to finish this section today, leaving the inner ring around the pool to rebuild next.

Last night, a rock goddess inspected the first part of my rebuild. It seems to have passed muster.

It’s thundering outside with a steady downpour accompanying the booms. This means I am not out in the garden with the black flies. Instead, I am brewing up the week’s Red Shiso.

As I make the Red Shiso, the view’s not bad. The Lilacs encircling the office are just beginning their May fireworks and they grow so close to the office they almost fall into the room when I open the windows.

Here’s a gorgeous Lilac called Pocahontas.

This pink one is called Marie Frances.

Here’s the Lilac that started it all, the one called “common”. Behind it you can see the two new bee hives.

I sat down with the bee to see if we could name each hive. The one on the left is Ben-Wa. The one on the right is Menemsha. The older hives tucked out of sight to the right of these two hives are Andromeda and Lyra. I would like to paint the hives some color other than white, maybe blue because I have read that bees like blue hives. I would also like to paint their names on each hive. This project is obviously not a top priority in the busy month of May, but it will be fun to do when I get to it.

Here’s a photo of the Plum tree we pulled back into place after it fell down in the 60 mile an hour winds that blew through several weeks ago.

In the foreground on the left is a Montmorency Sour Cherry tree encircled in a cloud of happy bees. In the middle, with the rope and stake that’s keeping the tree upright, is the blooming Plum tree with a smaller Plum in front of it. There is nothing like that yellow green of early spring, is there?

Anyways, so far, so good with the rescue of this fallen Plum. It too has been a mass of blossoms and bees. So far, so good with the new honeybees settling into their new quarters. The bees have a seven acre meadow of Dandelions right out from their hives as well as all the blooming fruit trees. So far, so good with William and Jim navigating their new school days of vigilance.

So far, so good. I happily settle for that.