Wot happened to May?

The calendar says February is the shortest month, but where did May go?  It's a terribly busy month for gardeners, transitioning from spring to summer, and some things are growing very well because of the cool, wet weather although a half inch of rain would be nice.  Mrs. Phactor is battling with this year's champion, chickweed.  It's everywhere are growing like, well, a weed!  A decent layer of mulch would help, but the gorillas that spread mulch for a living don't seem able to recognize even a tomato plant when they see one, or don't see one, as is more likely the case.  The kitchen garden is transitioning to summer so the lettuces are beginning to bolt, squashes and beans will get going, and maybe finally the snap peas will flower and fruit; you're running out of climbing support.  New strawberries were planted and recently the tree rats helped by unplanting some of them.  Raspberries, particularly our wild black ones, are well fruited. The red raspberry bed is still in recovery, and new black berries look happy and fuitful as well.  
No apples on 2 yr old trees, and only a handful of pears.  TPP is looking for a pollinator pear, and room to plant it. A former colleague used to graft pollinator branches to his fruit trees, but TPP has never had much luck with grafts.  And now it's June.  Some tree removals are pending, and necessary, but an expensive and disruptive process.  Tree guys are in demand, especially really good ones, and generally it means they are terrible in terms of customer communication.  My current good ole boy is better than many, if you can get his attention.  And it's already June.  A project is planned to push back entropy and re-engineer the house's front steps to make them safer and easier for old people to use.  The plan is to return them to a state closer to the originals based on a really old picture, and to add an antique-looking hand rail of new manufacture.  This will also be disruptive and expensive.  Glad the stock market is being kind.

Too busy May and a Cinco de Mayo remembrance

It's Cinco de Mayo, and already the month is shot, and for a retired botanist, TPP is too busy.  The kitchen garden is coming along and lettuce is ready to eat.  Field work is a shambles of weather related disasters.  The rest of our gardens are in pretty good shape, mostly because Mrs. P has a bit more time to work around the estate. As TPP writes this she's digging out one of several large bush clematis, C. heracleifolia.  Who wants a hunk?  A yellow landscape rose waits to take its place. An overly aggressive, under performing fragrant sumac got the ax, so to speak, just a few days ago, and TPP survived a late pruning job on the knock-out roses. Late April and early May have been coldish and very wet, so your actions are limited.  Quite a few people have been by to wander our gardens, when weather permitted. Two late Magnolias remain to flower, the rarest one, an Ashe magnolia, will have just one flower, and it's only a meter tall in it's 2nd season. Hopefully it will appear in this spot soon (a coming attraction). 
Missed May the forth be with you completely. Couldn't get the Kentucky Colonel mint for tomorrow's mint julips and had to settle for mojito mint; counter girl could not under stand the context and importance. And so, behind in everything including blogging.
Here's a brief remembrance: Lastly, but not leastly, May 5th is etched in TPP's memory as the day in-armed anti-war protesters were fired upon by the National Guard at Kent State killing 4 students and wounding several others. So will T-rump tweet about that?  It happened 50 years ago, and that seems impossible, until TPP checks the birthdays.  Students across the nation went out on strike to protest the killings ending the semester and academic year early, and you could not help but be involved.  Our campus still had weeks until the end of the semester, and with graduation and graduate school in the offing, TPP has  to cross picket lines to attend a couple of classes run by holdout professors, it was a tense, difficult time and culminated with an evolution exam that took nine hours to write, a real learning experience when almost no one else had exams at all.