Plant Mystery, continued.

I've tried comparing my little sample against the list of weeds offered by the Illinois Council on Food and Agricultural Research, but I haven't found a match. I've done a less comprehensive search on the British site Find Me Plants and the Ladybird Johnson native plant database (Oh, how I miss the wonderful Wildflower Center in Austin!)

I'm inclined to think that it is some kind of herb that I did plant last year, though I still have not a clue which. In part, because it doesn't appear anywhere besides the one spot where it is. It seems very healthy and robust, but it is definitively situated where it is, unlike most weeds that have a tendency to spread all over the damned place, like Creeping Charlie (which covers most of my garden plot, sadly), and Purslane (which likes to hide everywhere else).
Above: Creeping Charlie and Purslane, two of my most pernicious weeds here in Livingston County, Michigan; photos from the Illinois Council on Food and Agricultural Research.

So . . . tonight I planted both my Blue Lake beans and my Japanese eggplants, despite the fact that I was being dive-bombed by mosquitoes, and was half-drunk on beer from my growler from Grizzly Peak. Now I just have a few more veggies to put in the ground. I wish the bugs would go away for long enough. . .

Another beautiful sunset.

Mmm, simple pleasures.

Garden mysteries on early lakeside morning

An early-morning shot of my new herb garden. More to come in evening, in brighter light, with a virtual tour of the varieties of herbs.

The benefits of waking up early are so numerous. Here it is, 10:40, and I've listened to BBC world service streaming for two hours, having already finished planting the mint borders in my garden, transplanted the oregano/marjoram (I still can't tell the difference) and thyme, prepared more than a quart of yogurt (which will incubate and be ready this afternoon), and put another big loaf of quick rye bread into the oven.

Yogurt, so very easy. Just heat the milk, cool it a bit, add a hint of yogurt culture, and cultivate it in containers.

The bread is also a breeze.


Here, a couple shots of the mint I've been planting as a border to the path to the cottage. I've been irritated by the ugly black PVC dividing the sod from the path since I moved in, so my concept is finally to cover it with mint. I hope the walkway will be a lot more attractive as it inevitably fills in.

. . . So now I am puzzling over one plant in my garden. It looks like it could be a variety of thyme, because the placement of the leaves, the color, and the stem formation look very much like thyme. But it doesn't taste like thyme, from the tiny bit I tasted, and the tiny, thin needles don't look much like the leaves of most thyme plants I know.

It also grows in a pattern that is unlike other types of thyme I know -- it grows a bit like a groundcover, very close to the ground, and spreading outward from its central root.

Anyone familiar with it? I'm wondering if it might be summer savory. Or, it may just be a big, hardy weed.

Dawn on the lake

There was a time when I thought there could hardly be anything more beautiful than sunset on my lake. But lately, I have been thinking that dawn is far more magical.

Summer on the lake. . .

A strange summer thus far. I'm trying to settle into it a bit more, now that my GSIship in Slavic has ended for the spring term. And, so, I'm madly looking for work, because I won't get another paycheck from U of M until the end of September. Rent still has to be paid, food still has to be purchased . . . It's a little scary, really. If I'd gone abroad this summer, I would have been able to get some funding from the university to support the research. But nobody ever wants you to include your expenses in Michigan in your budget, so where the money for rent ($850/month), cable internet/TV/phone ($70/month), car insurance ($40) and inevitable small utility bills, are supposed to come from remains mysterious.

I'm opting instead to stay in town to rest and work on some old papers, since I have some incomplete work leftover from past semesters when I felt pressured into taking on 5-7 classes at a time, knowing that it would be unworkable. But the financial situation isn't really any saner being in town.

Entertainment has to be the free or nearly free kind. And I'm trying to limit my trips back and forth from Ann Arbor, too, since the cost of gas has gotten so bloody high. I've been hanging out a lot with a friend in town, baking quite a bit, and watching lots of streaming internet TV (Bones is my new obsession, thanks to Ms Scrumptious.) Now that the water has warmed up, I'm about ready to start swimming the lake. Umlud was also kind enough to pump up my bike tires, and I'm also ready to take it out for a spin now and see if the rust on the gears is bad enough to need professional work, or if I can ride it as-is, so I can hit the road on the nice easy bike trails around here. And, hoping to generate some produce at the end of the summer and enjoy some flowers and herbs in the meantime, I am finally planting the lovely selection of perennials and herbs I got at the farm stand the other day. Gardening should be a fun diversion in the evenings, if I can find a way to keep the mosquitos at bay.

(A bit later. . .) My muscles are comfortably sore from hours of hard work today. I have effectively planted all the flowers and herbs; now it's just time to find space for the vegetables tomorrow. I opted to move my herb garden to the space right in front of the cottage instead of the plot across the way, since the hose isn't really long enough to comfortably water over there, and I get to enjoy the plants more when they're right outside my windows. Also, after my previous "gardener" debacle, I feel protective of my plants, and I feel irrationally that having them closer to the house will make them more likely to be preserved by the folks who come to work on the lawn.

The more demanding work, more than planting the new plants, was transplanting some of the old ones. I uprooted a sage plant and two hardy tarragon plants (straggly though they may look from being weedwacked by the supposedly more competent gardener) and brought them over to the other side. The hardest part, though, was my work to bring over the mint. I'm planting it all along the border of the path to the cottage, so that it will grow to fill in and mask the ugly black plastic piping along the sod line, as well as the artificial fibers of the fabric beneath the path itself. I'll finish up the job and show photos tomorrow! I plan to move my marjoram and thyme also, so I'll have the raised beds exclusively for veggies.

I'm going to do some internet research to find out if there are any deer- and rabbit-resistant plants I could plant around my herb garden, especially the parsley and cilantro, so I can keep them for my own harvesting. :)

Today turned out to be a beautiful day, with morning meditation after a bit of coffee, hours of gardening, and a successful job interview for a tutoring gig in Ann Arbor. I talked to my Mom on the phone, saw a stunning sunset over the lake, and had a coffee date with Umlud. Tomorrow I have two more job interviews, for another tutoring job and a full-time baker position. And more fun in the garden!

Punchy anti-racist retorts in television

Bones just keeps getting better and better. Cheekier, punchier. Like today, in episode 2.5:

Angela: What you thought were teethmarks, Dr. Sorion, turned out to be Chinese characters, engraved along the side.
Hodgins: What do they say?
Angela: (sigh) They say, "What make foolish man, think I speak Chinese?"
Hodgins: I thought you were half-Chinese.
Angela: And I think you're half-Swedish. Let's hear some Swedish!

Canadian Goslings on Huron River Drive

There's a family of Canadian geese who've made their home beside Huron River Drive in Ann Arbor, and I get all giddy every time I drive by the little goslings, in all their cuteness. This drive-by cell phone camera photo doesn't really do them justice, but you get the idea.

Umlud initiated me into the delights of Sunday brunch at the Aut bar today. An outdoor patio space so peaceful and lovely with the dappled sunlight under green trees and the sounds of Billie Holiday crooning, I was reminded of lazy Sundays in Budapest. Lots of really darling kids out with their families, in honor of Father's Day. I was grinning despite my intense dislike of the holiday.

Ms Scrumptious has gone home after a delightful almost-week-long visit to Michigan. I always like the quiet self-collected feeling I have after time with a dear old friend. And though it's been rather a rough couple weeks, I mostly have great memories of the time, with my guardian angels K & J keeping me company out at the cottage last weekend, and Alice woven in here and there amidst her prelim craziness.

A lingering legacy of L's visit is a minor obsession with Bones, even despite its terrible science, and a delight in seeing an anthropologist depicted on TV. I wish season 2 were on Hulu, because the low quality of Surf the Channel and the Chinese subtitles there interfere with my viewing pleasure, and they only have the first season on DVD at the video store here. No hope for the library on this one, and it's not worth it to me to start up Netflix again just for this.

I bought lovely herbs, veggies, and perennials this afternoon at the Alexander Farm Market on Whitmore Lake Road, which I'll plant tomorrow after I finish this round of grading for the Central European cinema course. I'll take more photos and identify everything when I do. Below, though, you can spy some salvia, beans, and German chamomile.


It's positively beautiful weather out here, 80 degrees and no humidity, and the intermittent thunderstorms have been keeping the dust down. Stunning. I hope it's like this all summer. It's just about time to start swimming in the lake again, finally.


As I was getting back home today, the son of the older couple next door was clearing some dead needles out of the pine tree in their yard and the ladder broke a foot underneath him. The whole family was out there around him, and several other neighbors were out. We saw him fall almost as if in slow motion. Luckily it wasn't so far, and it was onto a relatively soft patch of grass. Nonetheless I'm concerned . . . They've been visiting all afternoon, though, so I guess he must be all right.

I feel a sense of accomplishment from having finally taken care of a little personal business and, especially, for having tackled the puzzling task of setting up my computer to sync with my Palm Treo 650. Vista doesn't seem to like the device very much, but I managed to get it to work with Bluetooth. Hooray! Now, if only Virgin Mobile or Tracfone would allow the SIM cards for their prepaid service to be used with an unlocked GSM device, I could start using it as a smartphone again, instead of as a Palm pilot and camera.

The fresh hope of spring is finally yielding to the lushness of summer. Not a moment too soon, I think.

Summertime, and the living is easy . . .

Hmm, nothing like reading the small town papers for the hippest events to attend. Laura Moehrle of The Courant raves about the "touch of Germany" you can enjoy at end-of-the-month Saturday summer picnics at German Park in Ann Arbor. Mmm, spaetzle and lederhosen? I think I'm there.

Other local summer fun includes, of course, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, with the frustratingly out-of-reach ticket prices (no student rates) for main events and the Top of the Park, with free concerts and movies in front of the Rackham Graduate School building on East Washington St.

Naturally, even though it's more than a month away, those of us living in the area can all undoubtedly feel Art Fair coming, like a runaway train.