Home Sweet Home

I leave town for a few days of R&R in downtown Minneapolis and come home to find all hell breaking loose on Ed Bruske's Slow Food blog. It seems some folks in Columbia Heights section of DC have a problem with his growing veggies in his front yard. To them, I say, "Watch and learn from Ed, my friends. The way our government and major corporations have been screwing us over in the past few decades the writing is on the wall and soon all of us will be growing our own edibles if we want to eat." Take a lesson from the resourceful Cubans and start collecting those seeds now.

Speaking of growing edibles, I came home to a gardener's nightmare on Monday night. No rain since the day I left. And that wouldn't have been so bad, if it hadn't been so freaking blazing hot and humid. It sucked the life right out of my watermelon vines and my tomato plant has lots of fruit, but the leaves had shriveled up to resemble a bunch of corn flakes glued on a brown stick. My herbs suffered, but they'll be okay. Upon my return we got a ferocious thunderstorm and another one today. Both of which I'm very grateful for as are my big Oaks and other wee green friends. It is my own fault really for not setting up a gardening-buddy-vacation-water-swap thing, but truthfully I barely got myself packed in time and out the door. I blame this on the fact that it'd been such a long time since my last real trip - and I used to be such a jet-setter too! I did such a horrible packing job in fact that I neglected to include any make-up, which was desperately needed as I attended 3 concerts and 2 parties on my trip and got photographed several times by friends plus the local media! I also shorted myself on undies by one day. Now I have put away my suitcase with a BIG note inside that lists my "must not forgets" before taking another multi-day trip.

Pictured above is a fantastic plant combination idea which I'm going to borrow -- pairing Echinacea with Monarda behind it. Currently mine are nowhere near each other and I need to remedy that. I snapped the photo this past weekend in MPLS while at the Walker Art Center's stellar sculpture garden. They really put the "garden" into it and didn't just plunk down a bunch of sculptures among blobs of liriope and daylilies. I've visited there twice before and plan on going many times again. Along with the Tate in London and the Cooper-Hewitt in NY, it is in my top 3 museums. Is that blasphemy to say that in DC - land of 156 museums?