Taking Pictures With One Arm In A Sling

I was hit by an opening car door while I was riding my bicycle and I injured my shoulder. For a few weeks, I had to wear a sling when I went out. It limited what I could carry.

I could not even carry my little point and shoot camera. The only pictures I have taken with it were on this one afternoon when the light was pretty in the garden.

Instead I used my camera phone as I wandered around the city, staring forlornly at the cyclists reveling in the mellow autumn weather.

All of my pictures were a little tilted, thank heavens for Photoshop.

When I was photographing this post Halloween confetti of party fliers, a car drove up on the sidewalk just to my right. It made me feel as if the city was trying to kill me. Indeed, 13 pedestrians have been killed by cars since Halloween. According to the Gothamist, 4 of them were on the sidewalk when they were struck.

This is what Bike Snob NYC calls a hipster high lock.

I have been out of the sling for two weeks. This is actually from a week ago. I was about to post it when I heard about the attacks in Paris. The blog post didn't feel important so I left it a few days. Violence continues, even today, in Mali. I could wait forever.

Garden In Flower

Sunflower about to bloom

Pollinator Flowers

Hydrangea flouncing around

Butterfly bush

Everything is overgrown

Milkweed on the left

This spot used to be shady before the neighbor cut down the tree. Now I may need to move the ferns.

Catnip also attracts pollinators

Plants on the patio

Gardening

After a dry spell that lasted for most of May, we finally had a week of cool rainy weather. It started with a long deluge. The trees seemed to dance under the rain. All of the greens became more verdant.

I have not been trimming the little patches of grass that I haven't pulled up. They are growing very high. The wisteria has climbed the fence and begun to battle the neighbor's ivy for supremacy.

I am in a strange place with my work. I finished a virtual street art piece that I spent a few months on. I used the Domino Sugar factory to represent a building from a dream. The problem is that the factory is being slowly demolished. I am worried that if I put my piece up while the factory is still intact, it might distract from the point of my piece. I need to wait until more of the building is destroyed.

I am going in a new direction with my Urban Demeter project. I want to plant seeds in empty tree pits rather than put plants out. The picture above is the beginning of a Three Sisters Planting. The problem with growin from seed is that it takes a while and in the meantime there is nothing but dirt, and maybe some small green sprouts. The corn has come up on this spot but it is not growing very quickly. I may need to feed it. Many tree pits have compacted soil which is very hard to work with.

I am in a bit of a holding pattern so I have thrown myself into the garden.

We put some bamboo fencing on the walls of the patio to hide the ugly stucco.

It makes the light warmer.

I love lobelia, even though it rarely survives the July heat.

The milkweed I planted last year has come back. The plants are growing every day, one really tall, the other three smaller.

This is one of the beds where I planted flowers to attract pollenators.

Light, the Garden, a Gift

Some light coming through the window

 I was planning on putting some plants out. This summer, I wanted the plants to be more sculptural, grouping more of them on one bicycle. I had found a really cool bicycle, red with a red basket, no more front wheel. I had a vision in my mind of it with the plants. But when I checked on the bicycle before putting them out, it was gone. I guess I had waited too long to put them out. I am still resolving some details on how to display the plants. Now I need another cool bicycle.

The garden is recovering from winter, I am pleased with the spring colors that I have.

My current favorite is the allium. I think they are somewhat comic. 

They do not last very long though. Just over a week and they are losing their flowers. I am curious to see how they look with the green nubby stems.

The beloved brought me home a rosebush for Mother's day. 

These bulbs have never sent up flowers, only leaves. I was really getting tired of them and thinking I would dig them up, when they sent up one stalk of flowers.

Someone abandoned a bouquet of roses in the flower box out front.

Checking in on the Garden

I did not do a lot of work on the garden this year. We painted the fence white and laid some slate tiles in a spiral. The rose bush did not do well, victim of the cats leaping around and breaking its canes in the early spring.

Luckily, the neighbor's morning glories climbed over the fence.

I trained a few vines from our side up the fence to meet the others.

We put a bin on the patio to gather leaves for mulch and weeds grew out of it.

A morning glory climbed up the bars on our window.

Out of the base of the crate sprouted the usual suspects that grow literally everywhere.

I love this little blue flowered weed and I am delighted that it sprang up. I had seen them out front last year and was tempted to transplant them. But I decided that transplanting weeds is like playing with fire. If I find some next year I may change my mind. The flowers remind me of lobelia, without all the fragility.

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This castor plant self seeded and came back from last year.

It was so pretty with its purple stems and veins. Unfortunately, I accidentally cut its delicate stem while trimming the grass and it withered on the vine.

I felt really bad, but then the scarlet runner beans, which had been a little depressed, suddenly got it together and bloomed.

Some things I planted this year are still settling in like the wisteria and the forsythia. The light is shifting and the plants seem to know that the season is winding down.

Tulips

 I planted tulips back in the fall. I didn't know that they were tulips until they bloomed.
 

My friend Aurelia, who runs the compost at the market, gave me the bulbs. She did not tell me what they were, except that some were blue. It was somewhat haphazard.

 It was a pleasant surprise, they are very pretty tulips.

I have some more mystery bulbs that have sent green shoots but no flowers yet, also from Aurelia. They are definitely not tulips. Perhaps they are the blue flowers.