Birds and Flowers

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you've seen my rose tangle, a climbing rose bush that I let grow into an untidy mound because the birds that came to my feeder always loved it.

Chickadees, cardinals, and blue jays would eat their sunflower seeds in it. Chipping sparrows and brown thrashers nested in it. Towhees and juncoes loved to scratch under it.

It's been mysteriously ailing the last couple of years. My secret fear is that we caught a little Round-Up (glyphosate) or other herbicide overspray from one or another of the nearby farm fields. Most of these things say to spray in still conditions, but farmers generally spray when they can, and if they waited for still conditions this close to the lakeshore, they'd get about ten minutes a day. So. They spray anyhow.

Whatever got it, this spring the rose tangle wasn't leafing out at all, anywhere. Last weekend I finally admitted to myself that it wasn't going to, dragged a tarp out there, and went to work with my ratchet loppers. I cut all the dead canes down, raked up the short thorny pieces, and dragged them off into the underbrush where stray thorns won't slash me.
It looks so bare out there.

I transplanted a little forsythia bush my mom gave me into the spot. Forsythias are sprawly. Eventually it should get big enough to fill in this space.

The towhees and the song sparrows have been scratching in the bare spot. But the brown thrashers came and gave me the stink eye for taking out their nesting spot.

Every time I tried to mow around there I cussed that thing out. I didn't think about how much I would miss it if it ever died.

Tiny green sprouts are coming up from the base. So we'll see.

In other news, the columbines are in bloom.
We've been spending a lot of time outside and at the library. The weather has gone all over the map, from frost/freeze warnings to 79 degrees F (26 C) to yet another inch of rain.

I ran strings for the hops vines to climb and trenched my garden (Maingay trench-paths), but haven't planted a thing yet. For the first time in many years, I didn't start tomato plants.

I'm still knitting on Christel, with about three pattern rows to go. I finally knitted Christel onto my Inox circular needle when the stitches got scarily close to the ends of the dpns.

Anyway. I'm alive. Hi!