no, we haven't gone and "acquired" any new animal - there'll be none of that, please god, for a decade or so. but this teen-cat was born earlier this spring, at which time he was the darling of the neighborhood and everybody talked about catching him and making him their own. then he got a bit grown and gangly and i guess everybody decided not to. he seems to do very well for himself - we saw him across the street the other day, chasing pigeons in a way that looked like it might prove successful. he always comes to say hi, and this morning i facilitated an intense, nose-to-nose getting-to-know-you visit between him and ripley (she misses frank since he moved away and she really wants an outdoor cat-friend).
anybody familiar with the size of fig leaves knows this is a mighty big mantis. ben pissed him off by watering the garden and so he emigrated to pasquale's yard. he kept turning back to look at us and waving his arms in a damning fashion.
pardon me for bragging but i do love the composition of this photo. and it really reminds me of a sidney goodman painting.
and now, i dance for you!
we found the molt this morning, and within seconds, had found the somewhat glistening, perplexed source:
i have not posted here in weeks, not just because this blog now only has a single reader (hi dad,) but because in the summer all i can do is post about bugs, animals and plants, which makes me look unsocialized.
... shades of fall. when i'll probably get back into the groove.
i have however found a fanastic new album - mingus big band's "tonight at noon...three or four shades of love". what's sad is now when i hear jazz, i mentally am shopping at williams-sonoma.
all-seeing, all-knowing dog.
yesterday a couple little boys stopped to look at flan in the park. "is that a hundred dalmatians?" one asked. "no, it's one dalmatian," i said. he stared at me like i was an alien. "i heard those are good luck if you have one," said the other kid. then they both waited. "um... i guess i have pretty good luck," i said. and they walked away.
daylily "bela lugosi".
been kinda slow updating here lately. in little news, there was another butterfly in the yard.
in much, much bigger news, ripley got a small piece of my gelato cone.
in medium-sized news, we only leave the house if we have to, and we really only have to to shop for food and to exercise the dogs. (you can see by ben's expression here, what summertime is like for us.)
but the biggest news of all of course is the carnival that was directly (you can see, very directly) outside our front door for ten days. we took quite a few pictures of it. and we miss it now that it's gone! but it's kinda nice to have the field back. we are just waiting for the return of the saxaphone guy.
this confused moth/butterfly thing was in between the storm door and the screen door to the backyard this morning.
when i say "unparallelled bedlam"... i am not exaggerating. every single animal was jumping in a snarling, unreasoning frenzy at the back door, and the winged thing was very upset indeed. he was so large, and so close, that you could see from his body language how freaked out he was. the fact that we were playing beethoven's piano sonatas during all of this was somehow fitting - it was all very frenetic.
i left the house, figuring there was nothing to be done about it. i had to put the ottoman up against the tv cabinet so ripley couldn't get back there and dig through the glass.
the animals were all still so focused on it four hours later that i just went and took the door off the track to free the thing. it was very pretty.
this photo may look picturesque and violence-free, but i was threatening ripley's life in low tones the entire time. she did not get to eat this butterfly/moth. this time.
in other news, the hair alliums appear to have entered the sinister "phase two" of their development.
yes, it's that time again. a full three weeks earlier than when we did them in '04!
on top of all this i met kevin bacon yesterday. (ask if you are interested.)
but does it compare to baby mantids? certainly it does not.
we set a very casual table this year. so much stuff going on around the house on the weekends, we really didn't have time to sit still for holidays that neither of us really celebrate. (i like bunny plates though. and the nod to passover is over to the right with the haroset and horseradish, and the sephardic eggs, which i have been making at eastertime for longer than i have been wed to a jew.)
these are the first flowers we picked from the garden this year.
there was a time in my life when i was very adamant about not wanting to grow tulips, even though they are widely known as my favorite flower. but something about them growing up out of the ground just looks icky to me. this is an experiment, growing them, and i don't know how i feel yet. i think this cultivar is called "queen of the night" but i wish it were blacker.
as many of you have already heard, this easter was a lesson in one thing: anise extract and anise oil are NOT the same thing by a long shot. anise oil is MUCH stronger, and anise oil is what i used in the cookies, and yes, it was something of a problem. now i know. why didn't i know before? other people did.
my friend lisa in south carolina has sent me many unusual plants over the years, and pictures of even more. yesterday she sent photos of some of the very strange botany that she sees just in her own neighborhood.
this is the best i have to offer in return. these turnips, we just never got to eating them. we ate some of the others, but these two, we just never got to them. and so they started to sprout green tops, and we thought, eh, let's just go with it.
i suppose we'll put them out in the yard.
it was two springs ago that we had our first mantis extravaganza. we didn't do it last year as we anticipated the building of the garden planter and didn't want to see little mantids stuck in mortar. but this year, we are back in the business of mantids, and the egg sacs are here!
today i gave them a foster mother (also from my friend lisa in SC, these rubberized mantids...)
and a dad, and a little foster home, complete with sticks and a turkey wishbone. (i thought they might enjoy it.)
we'll see what happens over the next couple of months!
summer is BORING. nobody really wants to cook (although i did make an amazing korean chicken dish last night), nobody wants to work on any home improvements (although ben is repainting the basement steps and floor), and god KNOWS there is no point in posting pictures of our daily summer "adventures", which mostly consist of going to the gym, sitting in cosi drinking iced tea and eating that food of the gods, cosi crumb cake, or going out late at night for water ice. and watching a lot of forensic murder case solving on court tv. that's it! it's not pretty.
the writing, the printing... i mean, there's really nothing to see where those are concerned...
i just know the plant pictures are kind of getting out of hand.
we know. garden garden garden. dogs dogs dogs.
ben IS painting the steps to the basement, but really, is that better than pictures of dogs in a garden?
it's not and you know that.
therefore...
dogs dogs dogs
garden garden garden garden dogs.
it is either a marina di chiogga, or, more likely, a black futsu squash. edible either way, although we aren't sure it's really ready. it did just fall off the vine more or less, though. so... we shall see.
here we see ben, finally having had his fill of being overrun by vines (and this prescient decision to clear some out was made HOURS before he saw war of the worlds). we did a heavy-duty haircut on the garden this morning.
sadly, this little guy was on a diseased vine that we cut away. he had already started to go a bit wrinkly and spongy at the bottom. we will never forget him.
the BIG news is that, although the rabbit's foot fern that lisa mailed me is barely clinging to life where i "planted" it, the little "dead" bits of root that i merely tossed into the planter as compost are doing GREAT!!! who would have thought?!
again, we have a cricket! this is a big one. he was acting very natural but got very nervous as soon as we got quiet and started looking at him.
please note the higher resolution of our photos, due to a very nice gift of a new camera and photo printer from ben's work! you will see literally TWICE the detail of our lives now (and we can print those details out at FOURTEEN times the resolution we used to!)
ugh. we are going to need a u-haul to clear away all these vines in the fall -- it's true.
here's some container gardening that hasn't yet gotten out of control -- nandinia or "heavenly bamboo" from my friend lisa in south carolina, and a christmas fern. flannery inspects.
luckily, the vines haven't choked out the perennials we bought this year, like the scented sumac, and the cinquefoil (blooming again, to our surprise.)
the vines have, however, headed straight down the alley.
but it has not been unfruitful! there's this little guy...
and this, our prize.
ben made a pot with a variety of sedum in it, and suddenly some of them split open into flowers last week. they are TINY, and the picture does not illustrate this. each blossom is about the size of the nail on my pinky.
the flower that drilled is now also the flower that bloomed.
here's the largest female flower we have so far. how big is that unfertilized fruit? i'm so bad at these things. it's as big as two... and a half... marshmellows. two standing upright, the other sliced,and lying across the tops of the other two.
here's our littlest female, with my fingers for scale.
first of all -- we have a cricket!
second of all, how crazy is this. this squashmelonpumpkingourd blossom grew straight through a leaf!
i never saw anything like that happen before. this weather -- the heat, the humidity -- we are so screwed. everything's growing SO fast and so big.
here's the same flower from the underside.
i wish i had done indigo this year; i miss growing it. maybe next year.
here is a big female flower. it was so hard to tell -- was the flower just about to open, or had it opened already and was it just a bit wilted? i climbed up onto the planter and did a little fertility treatment just to be safe. there was a bug inside the flower already so maybe we will get lucky.
ripley has been listening to her friend pasquale talk about how delicious squash blossoms are, and she has been eating a lot of them. this one, in fact, is the one i had chosen to father the large round thing above. ripley stole it while i was photographing the cricket.
pasquale next door thinks they might be cantaloupes.
it is obvious we are going to be devoured alive by these melonpumpkingourdsquash vines. some we planted ourselves, on purpose. some seem to have come back from the previous year/previous owners. since pasquale has a similar vine in HIS garden, we are not worried about these mystery fruit. looks like maybe 8-ball zucchinis or something cute like that.
but the vines! the vines! i used to SIT on that slate surface and eat my breakfast!!
our neighbors on either side of us have grape arbors, fig trees, and other vegetables. we've got pumpkins, though, or we will in october. if we are still alive, that is.
i handwashed a hat of ben's and hung it out to dry. when ben went to retrieve it this morning, a tendril of vine had woven its way into the knitting.
we are doomed.
isn't this strange and beautiful? the "spokes" appear to unfold into full leaves -- they are partway to doing it. i have to go check again.
today ben tied long pieces of twine to train the massive squashgourdmelonpumpkin vines up toward the house, and make a little shade-umbrella of them. we have one large female flower on what i think is the rouge viv d'etamps but the flower itself has seemed to peter out before actually opening -- none of the males are doing that. hand-pollination is at the ready but the damned flower needs to open for that to happen.
there are females on a number of the other now-mystery plants. i am guessing that at least two are "tennessee spinning gourds". i wonder what else we've got.
ew. (although i like the way the shadow of my hair showed up in this picture but why does it have to also feature a slug)
we found four of these yesterday morning during breakfast in the backyard. i can touch them but cannot kill them; ben can dispatch them to death but cannot pick them up. teamwork prevailed.
after we went to the gym, we bought the slugs a sixpack of yuengling at the foodery. we haven't given it to them yet but maybe this evening.
the first (cut!) peony of the year; the lavender we decided to uproot and replant at ten o'clock monday night; the ever-encroaching but not completely identified pumpkin/gourd/squash/melon vines.
the south carolina posse sent us some rabbit's foot fern via priority mail. luckily i was across the street with the dogs when the guy was leaving the sticky note on the door -- i would hate for this to have sat in a box for a few more days! it's beautiful, but it's having its troubles...
ripley likes to unplant these fuzzy rhizomes, pretty much daily. so they haven't had much time to acclimate (to a zone about four zones north of where they generally want to live, anyway.) this may be a no-go. but look! a little something has started to grow!
after much ado and planning, the planter is finished. it goes in an "L" shape and is impossible to get one full photo of.
here are some close-ups of some of the individual set-in tiles:
like we said we would, we stuck my dumb little drawings all over the thing, then matched the tiles to them. our neighbor ed did all the hard work. 
now all we have to do is concentrate on this. yay! 
to prepare for the final embellishment of the planter, we have to decide where to put the tiles. ben had an idea that the best way to do this was to tape up paper representations of each tile, so we could move them around and make up our minds. ben is so smart and cute! he's a way better husband than the one britney spears got. (i'm just saying.)
i will tolerate NO LAUGHTER at my drawings of our "canterbury tales" tiles. these are PERFECTLY SERVICEABLE for our needs.
saturday it all goes down!
i love the crepe-y look of those trumpet flowers. and the cinquefoil is a new favorite -- white blooms are one of my favorite things in a garden.
what an amazingly beautiful place! we went with hopes of coming home with a witch hazel but they were all sold already. we got a christmas fern, a scented sumac, some honeysuckle vine and some other stuff i can't remember the names of.
it's amazing to think that this place is ten minutes from our home, and we had never been. so many lovely specimens. we walked around for awhile, after securing our purchases. everyone who works there is so nice. even the bathrooms are nice -- they reminded me of the bathrooms at fallingwater.
and you can see the philadelphia skyline!
they do a christmas cutting sale too at bartram's -- we will definitely be there for that. all the plants we bought today at this once-a-year event were included in john bartram's original eighteenth century census of the garden.
a new favorite place, for sure!
i was surprised to see that while our juniper had many mature berries on it -- and has, since october -- that there was a proliferation of new immature berries as well.
i read up on this to find that it takes two to three years for juniper berries to mature! wow. well, mature and immature, we've got them, and the blue ones do smell lovely.
when the soft pink petals fall from the blooms on jimmy and joe's tree, the dogs eat them -- and this is what is left over.
neighbor ed comes by this weekend to build our brick and mercer tile planter in the yard. here are the brick samples along with a few tiles.
here is a close-up of one of the five canterbury tales tiles.
we are going to start thinking he is ours. that's what we need; a fifth animal in the house.
there are lots of things to look at in the backyard. like jimmy and joe's pretty pink kleenex tree...
or the peonies that lyn and eric gave us, which will bloom any week now...
...but of course, if you are rip and flan, you are looking at something else.
frank.
frank is the next-door neighbor's cat. he comes and sits at our back door, asking for ripley and flan to come out -- or at least, for hillel and gib to come to the back door, so they can all talk. (and probably share business cards, of which hillel has quite a collection.)
frank's owner is amazed at how well frankie gets along with the dogs, and how well they get on with him. sometimes, the three of them are just sitting outside together, in the sun.
frank is stepping on my squash plants a little too much, but, he's still welcome.
notsoswift.com visitors may notice that the "from seeds" blog no longer exists. i felt that any plant and gardening blogging i did from now on would be more at home on the "album" page, right here. and, in the battle of my duel personalities of documentarist/slash-and-burn artist, guess which won out? suffice it to say, all the "from seeds" posts no longer exist (although many pictures of last year's mantids, and previous years' gardening, still do exist in the home category of this page.)
ripley was her usual helpful self while ben replanted seedlings yesterday. ripley LOVES being in the yard, and can even spend a little time out there on her own, which is nice for everyone.
we are not doing mantis egg sacs this year since we are having our backyard planter rebuild by a mason -- a neighbor who is currently shuttling back and forth between his home on our block, and a restoration project at the library of congress. and the thought of wet mortar coinciding with the birth and frolicksome childhood of some six hundred mantid babies was not a pretty thought. but we did do some sowing; ben's valentine's day gift from me was a bouquet of rare heirloom variety seeds, including "green zebra" tomatoes and about fifteen varieties of pumpkin, squash and gourd, including "thai large pumpkin", "kukuza", "yugoslavian finger fruit", "tennessee spinning gourd" and others.
we also sowed wisteria seeds, from a pod i snatched last fall at maple acres on our annual pumpkin buying trip. i remember this day as the day we went to visit lyn and eric, and so i feel extra strongly that the wisteria should do well. in fact, there are two pink peony plants from lyn and eric somewhere in our planter right now, and i am really hoping they make an appearance this year.
more gardening posts will follow soon -- as well as comprehensive coverage of this years home improvements including "backyard and planter" as well as "grotto" and "out front".