Back at Base (And Back to the Jungle)

Dateline: Cattaraugus County

Thank you, dear friends, for your patience. The blog is now back in Cattaraugus County, confronting the consequences of a few weeks of prime high speed weed growth. It will have its work cut out. But it's an interesting time too, checking what's growing and coming up. And was I surprised to see this fellow.

  Yes the allium which failed to make an appearance last year (I think it was the one I originally planted upside down) had popped up this and was looking very dapper, trying not to notice the untidiness around it. A less happy story for the dahlia I carefully replanted and surrounded with slog pellets. Someone had apparently driven a motorbike through my attempted flower bed at the entrance to the drive and the dahlia was gone. I later found a bit of it lying on the surface, forlorn and beyond help. Or maybe it was the squirrels again.
  It's the sort of situation where you just don't know where to start, so end up contemplating the enormity of the task and doing absolutely nothing. On the other hand you can always take a walk up the lane, where my friend the ginger cat at the top of the hill comes out to give me a lop-eared greeting and the forget-me-nots are flowering..

And the dame's rocket is in full swing

This seems to be a bumper year for dame's rocket

That pops up in batches of pink, purple and white only where it wants to. Digging it up and planting it in your garden, as hubby and I tried to do once, does not work.
But alas there was one sorry sight..

The banks of the stream that used to be a mass of forget-me-nots and other wildflowers have been scraped clean by the infernal town ditch- scraper whose one mission in life seems to be to make everything as ugly as possible. Too many are the times when he's ruined the roadside banks, covered in pretty burgeoning trees and bushes on his inexorable mission of destruction. No one's quite sure why he does it but unfortunately he seems to enjoy it.