It's going to take a lot of beer...

Look what Karrita at My Mother's Garden cooked up for me!! I'm extremely pleased to be this couple's new mamma, even though they are going to have to tough it indoors for a few months as the craptastic weather is already here. They are ginormous, can you tell? How amazing they will look peeking out of my Hostas... wait, I don't grow Hostas...

Anyways, she'll be making more after the holidays so if you want some... Let her know!

I'm planning on buying a BUNCH!

Thanks Karrita! The check's in the mail!

Ahem...

The vermiculture holy grail!

Holycrap. Would you just look at this kick ass worm bin I just found on Etsy??? I can't even believe it's coolness! Everyone and anyone could have this cool way to compost, apartment dwellers, dorm roomers, office peeps... It's hella genius.
And it reminds me a little of the Cloud City, in the Bespin life zone ...

It even comes in different colors and prints.

$60 The Worm Inn @ Nomad Needles @ Etsy

I can't let this go on without talking about it ANY LONGER...

This is the second time I've seen this on Etsy. The first time I thought I was hallucinating.

Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce to you... The Chicken Bitch... I'm not making this up! "It will keep all the evil chicken bitches away" $65 SewFastSewEasy @ Etsy

Slug Fest

I've been entering "slug" into the search at Etsy for some months now... never has there been such BOUNTY of slug related items for me to spend my hard earned cash on! Some of it is mega weird. And that's the way (uh-huh uh-huh) I like it...

It's been many years since I felt the need for any obscene wording on my clothing.. but if I did- it'd be this fabulous shirt from Arcain on Etsy... because that's just funny! Who hasn't had that EXACT thought before??

Etsy Update: The Slug Pin & something else to buy

The slug pin came in the mail Saturay and it's wonderful. A tad orange but that suits me fine!

This week's Sluggy Etsy find is this RAD slug-in-a-hat watercolor painting that you get first crack at because this week is rent and I can't even afford the $12! UGH!

Poor Dog Farm @ Etsy

Slugs, the official Kiss my Aster mascot...

Aside from the cocktail making, gardening pin-up girl... of course...

Guest blogger: The Garden Monkey

From my first guest blogger, The Garden Monkey, blogger of both The Garden Monkey and The Garden Monkey's Book Flange- (I check in on both of those every day!)

Take it away Garden Monkey!



As gardeners we are, I hope, more attuned than most to the rhythms and cycles of life.

Nevertheless, a perhaps longer cycle than the turning of the seasons may creep up on us unawares.

As a child my grandfather's garden was a place of wonder and delight for my siblings and I.

It had many winding paths and all manner of little concrete ornaments dotted around the place .


When the old man passed away, the first thing my sister did was go round the garden collecting the frog, the blackbird, the brown bird etc., determined to have some tangible part from her childhood before that small, but constant, part of it was sold off to strangers.

As it turned out the garden is now mine and once again a source of wonder and delight for children. And despite my best efforts to hold them at bay some garden ornaments have crept back in, under a variety of excuses.


They include a resin toad, who is slightly lifelike and has fooled a few people with bad eyesight, a small amorphous cat, who is so ill-defined that he could easily be a slug, and not least of all Montezuma, a rather large and somewhat quizzical armadillo.

I do however draw a very thick line at gnomes and sometimes wonder whether my grandfather felt the same, and herein lies a tale.

Over time, I have re-jigged my grandfather’s garden somewhat - there is no room for sentimentally with that sort of thing - although his presence remains with me, in soil that after 35 years of soil improvement grows plants like magic.


As part of this reconfiguration, I had broken up some concrete and was throwing the pieces into a barrow. As it crashed on top of the others one lump broke still further, revealing a gnome entombed inside, like some Jurassic fossil.

I like to think that my grandfather shared my attitude to them, and took the opportunity to dispose of the gnome.

But there may be a more innocent explanation - that the gnome was broken and the old chap, being thrifty, just saw it as a piece of rubble that would make the concrete go further.

But my childhood self would probably have guessed that the little fellow had broken the omerta of the Gnome Mafia and had been given a concrete overcoat by the Cosa Gnomsta in retribution.

This maybe why some gnomes have fishing rods - to remind them that they may end up "Sleeping with the fishes."

Hummingbird moths in a butterfly garden

My camera isn't really made for this sort of this but there's 3 clearwing hummingbird moths (part hummingbird, part bumble bee- all moth) darting around in this video.

I think this garden is lovely, if I do say so myself...

voles vs. shrews

whatever. My Pendarvis (Welsh for he who bites toes in the night) has killed 2 of them. Is that talent or what? I'm all mammal friendly and stuff, don't get me wrong. I mean, I did post something evil about rabbits but I have also rescued a baby with a little white dollop on his head from the tractor earlier this summer... I'm not heartless.

But voles/shrews? Go Penny!

dude, this chart doesn't even help with the forensics of whatever it is that he's killing...

You know whats even grosser? bagworms!

So then there's bagworms on the evergreens. And they will give you nightmares. Seriously, I sent out a flyer at work and one customer called and said it gave her nightmares.

Mission accomplished!

They look a lot like pine cones- that's a perfect camouflage. That's their gross lil' nest. The they crawl out and do some real damage. I was at someones house where there were so many that you could actually hear them chomping away.... ewwwwwwwwww. They are doing some serious damage around here.

I hope they don't get in my ears.

For some reason, I love slugs...

I have a history of banana slug torture. I know, but it's true. They used to come in on plant shipments from warmer climates and we'd salt them, or diatomaceous earth them... or just race them... Anyway, now they are a bit of a mascot for me...
not like at UC Santa Cruz though...
that's just weird...





Anyway check out this gummy slug! The web site has some verrrrrrry interesting slug facts!

Pendarvis Parsnip

salamander sighting

My mom found this in her yard. Hm.

A spider I'd never seen before

and it turns out to be kinda common...
this photo was taken in a customer's yard. The ones on the website are better. Now my Mom has them in her yard...

slugs!

ok, so at my last gig we were way too into slugs, slug indentification, slug naming and slug torture. So when I saw a slug mentioned on my friend Veronica's blog I had to pipe up. We exchanged some slug stories... and then I found this website about slug reproduction. It's not funny if you don't garden, I think .

I am not sure where I picked this picture up from, but I adore it and would hang it in my living room.

long story- short & long story- LOOONG

So I'll save you the how and why of it and just tell you that a young (but huge) red tailed hawk took down a rabbit and ate it in the middle of the English Walled Garden in the middle of my volunteer shift on Sunday. It was cool, and a little gross.



extended version- Ok, I get to the Chicago Botanic Garden for my 3rd to last time and the sky opens up and it pours rain... but I can't go home because I have a limited amount of time in which I can fulfill my volunteer obligation. So I hide under a portico for a while, then decide to go and see if the pepper pot (a small structure on one side of the garden) is open. To my dismay, it is jam packed with these terrible people doing a photo shoot of these really bad screaming kids. Their mother was a plastic sugery victim with Yves St. Laurent jeans on. So I can't hang there, no way. So I decide to tromp around the lake with my fashionable umbrella. The cloudy day makes a good opportunity to snap some photos of things I'm writing articles about. So I walk the whole lake, maybe a 1/2 hour walk and when I round the corner back to the English Walled Garden I see the hawk. I spent my time watching him trying to get people to leave him alone because the rain has cleared and there's some sort of function for fertility in the pavillion. So behind me are 2 fighting hummingbirds, 30 sets of triplets and... I kid you not... a giant TinkyWinky from the Teletubbies, who is also watching the hawk. Now that's the long story.