Monday morning matters?

Monday is off to a slow start.  TPP has a mid-morning appointment right across the street, so going for coffee or going to the office would just be a waste of time.  Better to waste time blogging.
Item 1: Graded exams.  Quite a bit of time was spent this weekend reading the first exam in my economic botany class.  These are upper class students who obviously find botany interesting, and economic botany does a good job of convincing people of that.  The results were pretty good in fact the best class TPP has had in years (10 of 24 aced the exam).  Had to work hard, almost to the point of quibbling, to deduct 1 point from one exam, in two half-point increments to demonstrate that a perfect paper is a theoretical construct.  You should know that TPP grades one question at a time and has no idea who wrote what and no idea how a particular student or exam is doing.  Two other students will be surprised to find they did not get the highest grade.
Item 2: International Blasphemy Rights Day - Sept. 30.  TPP has never had the urge to hurt anyone's feeling about their particular religious beliefs, but in places with blasphemy laws and a state-supported religion, sometimes just being an evolution-teaching biologist is enough to break such a law because science causes some religious people discomfort.  Boo-hoo.  Glad the people who want the USA to be a Christian nation remain a minority, although it would be a grand fight over which flavor would get top billing.
Item 3: Barely some rain event.  TPP was completely correct. The recent rain totaled a scant 1/4 inch.  Some bulbs needed planting and beneath the mulch is was just dry.  Terrible. 
Item 4: Garden work.  Planted some yellow-flowered trout lily in the woodland garden.  Transplanted some Japanese peony 2-year old plants from a seed bed to the woodland garden.  Decided where to plant the Persian ironwood (look back a blog - too lazy to link it).  Did some weeding. How do they grow so well when it's so dry?  Removed tropical floating fern from the lily pond to transport to the university glasshouse for the winter.  Harvested some very fine oak-leafed lettuce and had a dynamite BLT. 
Item 5:  Mrs. Phactor tried a new recipe, a tian.  A baked casserole of slices of tomato, zucchini, salami (rustic Italian), and mozzarella cheese, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with mixed herbs.  Wonderful.
Item 6: Shopping.  TPP needed some clothes so he went shopping which he does religiously, about twice a year. A more interesting sale was at the local garden shop, which  had an end of season, "under construction" sale, but there wasn't much that we needed.  Mrs. Phactor bought decorative gourds and a couple of colorful mums.  TPP was called on to be the resident expert.  They like me at this establishment.
Item 7: Summer continues.  Highs in the low 80s for the next few days!  It's the end of September and it's still summer.  Tropical plants get to extend their summer outdoor sojourn another few days. 

Uh oh! Honey dew weekend!

This is not a good sign.  Mrs. Phactor is on the patio and the table is covered with various bags and boxes of bulbs.  In the spring bulbs are great; in the fall they make my back ache because they need to be planted.  The first couple of hundred go OK, but then it gets to be work.  A 3-year plan to eradicate lily of the valley under a big burr oak and plant a sward of English bluebells is in it's final year.  This will be a tiny version of the planting in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden that inspired this action, fall out of Botanical Geek Tour #1.  So if TPP spends too long with this blog things will begin to get ugly.  Last weekend the monsterous elephant ears by the pond were dug, and now it looks funny because those huge leaves, over 6 foot tall, made such a presence, now some new perennials will be planted.  A bed of tall, purple leafed cannas must be dug so a couple of hundred tulip bulbs can be planted.  While the weather has been very much fallish for three weeks now, cool at night, flirting with frost but not quite getting there, so the cannas still stand tall, so that means some massive rhizomes are anchoring the whole bed.  At any rate somewhere there's a shovel with my name on it.  And come spring, today's work will look wonderful.  And mocking me from the adjacent kitchen chair, one of the kittygirls is looking quite smuggly comfortable. Unfortunately the weather is iffy and rain threatens to change our plans.  So if it rains Mrs. Phactor will probably want to go and buy more bulbs. 

Spring Cleaning

Spring cleaning is probably the Phactor's least favorite activity, all the debris, all the leaves, all the pruning, all the crap you have to get out of your garden to make way for the new growth. But this is also the season when field work starts. None of these garden cleanup jobs is much fun, but the worst, nastiest, job is pruning the damned roses. Why do such pretty flowers have to grow on such ugly, thorny crappy plants? So these past two days have been nearly non-stop pruning and cleaning up aerial parts of herbaceous perennials, and cleaning up all the leaves that escaped last fall. The big problem is simple, a garden's the size of ours are a big cleanup problem. How great are those woodland perennials that know how to deal with leaves. In this regard some newcomer's (wild ramp, jacob's ladder, and others) are showing up with vigor, maybe enough to offset loses (blue cohosh).