Because I know many of you will appreciate this

Some for the fencing, some for the lightsaber, some for both....

Fall gardening, or lack thereof

Oh right. I keep forgetting that the reason I don't get anything done outside after mid-August isn't because I'm lazy (though I am), it's because of the damn ragweed. Last weekend I tried to break it up some -- half hour here, 45 minutes there, maybe an hour and a half when I got all distracted by deciding to dig out the lily of the valley. Then I spent the next three days mostly unable to breathe despite the allergy meds. Stupid ragweed.

Speaking of lily of the valley, if I could go back in time and deliver one message to myself, it would be, "Don't change the grade of your yard with the dirt from someone's basement, and don't think that piling inches of dead, mostly clay soil on top of lily of the valley will kill it. It won't. It will only make it stronger." I still love lily of the valley, and I'm delighted with it in the shade garden on the northeast corner of the house. But this had been planted on the south side, where all the sun just gives it entirely too much encouragement. Lily of the valley does not need to be encouraged. This year I noticed how much it was encroaching on my iris and lilies, so I figured I'd pull some out and try to restrain it a bit. HA! Silly me, I went in with a little hand cultivator. Isn't that adorably naive? Twenty minutes and a good sharp shovel later, I was pulling up clumps of lily of the valley roots ten inches deep and so dense there was very little room for soil around them. I know I didn't get it all, but I think I've at least slowed it a little.

Nothing to see here

Nope, still nothing interesting happening in my life.

I'm looking forward to Open Forge at the end of the month. After changing my mind several times, I'm now planning on making tomato cages that don't suck. That is, big and sturdy enough to actually support tomato plants. I love the way the spirals look, but I would like to let the plants just grow next year instead of pinching them back to a single stem. Of course, I don't actually know how I'm going to make said cages, what design I'll be using, etc. I do want to be able to store them without taking up half the garage. Any suggestions?

And hey, three-day weekend coming up and a remarkably open calendar for the foreseeable future. Does this mean I'll actually get some of my fall garden chores done? The ones I talk about every year but never seem to manage? Let's not hold our breath.