Gardens and Cats

 My gout has gone, but the memory stays! Now my neck is bothering me with arthritis. I am sure digging has nothing to do with it. I seem to be in a race to finish my upper garden. Only two bags of mulch remain. 

I spread one today and planted two Crepe Myrtle bushes and another cone flower. This one is orange. I already have white and purple. It is safe to say that there is no particular color scheme. Just lots of color. Yesterday I bought 6 shepherd's hooks that I saw on Marketplace. One is already in place on my little deck with a hummingbird feeder that is visible from the window next to my sewing machine. It is on the high end and hopefully out of reach from the cat population.

The cat population continues to grow. A new cat showed up last week. A fluffy grayish one. I am pretty sure it is female. She is not as skinny as Mousy Tongue and I fear she will be adding some babies soon. Hard to tell with all that fur, but her belly is certainly bigger than the other two females.

Garfield is turning into a rather striking cat. He does not have real stripes, but swirls of yellow and orange. It annoys me that my husband will describe him as the "red cat". He is NOT red. The kitten that resembles him, the one that attacked me while I was only trying to help him escape from my dogs, finally has a name. Lucifer. 

He is the brother of Ethyl and Lucy. I haven't seen Ethyl in about a week. I hope she didn't hear me say that I preferred Lucy's little face, finding hers rather ugly. Son of Mousy Tongue and I am sure Garfield was the sire. Mousy Tongue earned her name yesterday when I saw a mouse tail hanging out of her mouth.

Then there is Marble and her mini me look alike. Another black cat smaller than my Mousy Tongue has appeared. There are more that do not show themselves until the man with the food appears at dusk. They come up the path that I am sure the bears use to enter our yard.

The raccoons have moved down to my neighbor's house to spread her garbage. The big one that looked me in the eye is the mother of the smaller one and my neighbor seems to think another litter will be here soon, as the big raccoon is getting bigger around her mid-section. Time will tell.

Finally got some green beans in my little garden. This year I picked a grand total of 4 tomatoes. I had 6 plants and 4 of them died. Most of the green bean plants withered and turned brown. Just too much rain. 

I spent yesterday afternoon building an arbor out of limbs and twigs. I had a sapling I actually pulled up and the roots were still intact. It looked pretty wicked. I used it for one side with the roots in the air. I used zip ties from the dollar tree to pull it all together. After I constructed the sides, I pounded some long sturdy limbs into the ground and secured the two sides next to my grape vine. Using the roots that were very pliable, I added more twigs and long skinny limbs to reach over to the vine and then got some pieces of vine to stretch over. It turned out better than even I thought it would. My grape vine has grown so much that the vines were trying to make roots when the touched the ground. This will make it easy to get the grapes, since I can walk under the arbor.