Brooke here.

There is no more ivy on the house.

(This is actually not entirely true; there’s a small patch of ivy just off of the front stairs that I keep carefully trimmed.  It is there as a warning to the rest of the ivy, saying, Once, I was many. Now, I am one. Stay away and save yourselves, bitches.)

There is also a front yard and about a quarter of a back yard because there are only so many hours in the day and we aren’t paid to pull ivy and the back yard isn’t going to shame us in front of the neighbors so it can darned well sit there and wait while it thinks about what it did.  And, along the edges of the house or sneaking into the thinner sections of the mulch beds, is the start of some actual landscaping.

I love plants but haven’t been able to start a garden because of the ivy. The previous owners left some sort of bare earth patch in the back yard that might have been a vegetable garden, I don’t know, but it was located directly under a crop of oak trees and the pH of the soil was brutally acidic. So, lime, lime, lime, more lime, and ivy removal instead of gardening.  Last fall, we finally dug a hole for the first plant we chose to grow, a flowering plum tree.

With the exception of the privacy shrubs (more on those in a later post; they are pretty neat), all perennials used in the landscaping have been/will be chosen because they are highly attractive to pollinators.  Three cheers for bees and all that.  Early this summer, I bought a few butterfly weed plants and planned to put them in one of the new beds. Then the trees started coming down and recreational gardening was sidelined. The only thing I’ve done with the butterfly weed has been to transplant them to larger pots.  They did not seem to mind, and have been gleefully tossing seeds.

I’ve been collecting these seeds. Not entirely sure what to do with them, except this. I’ll probably put them in some dry peat in the freezer for a few weeks, then start them in flats when it’s closer to spring.

And I hear from reliable sources that this fluff is delicious and should be dropped on the floor immediately.