Gardening 2024

[cineater]

The lady wanted to know what that white flower that blooms so well in the moon garden is.  Okay, the whole fucking garden is white!  I'm going with Euphorbia, looks like Baby's Breath.  I tried using it in Marsha's roses but it didn't hold up that well.  Right now it's a big bush and really showy.  Could be the Angelonia but that's my first guess.

How did that happen?  Extension offered to pay for the Herb Garden renovation and now suddenly, they have me going before the counsel to ask for the money.  We weren't asking, you were offering!  I would have never asked for the money.  Now instead of thanking them for their gift, I'm begging them for money!

How many times can my team call me about the gardens while my mother is visiting?  My family doesn't really support my work at the gardens.  I don't know why they should care and if I field a few phone calls or make a few when we are just sitting around watching TV, what's the big deal?

[cineater]

It was not even a flower!  It was a foliage plant, Dusty Miller.  Cool thing about that plant is the white fuzz is collected by bees to pad their nests.

[cineater]

In the beginning I handled this bullshit better, now I just want to scream do you read the emails, listen to what's being said, can you get to the fucking point?    Leads meeting today, enough said.  Budget is going to return a little money.  All projects scheduled.  Nobody volunteered to take my place, I'm doing a good job.  

My daughter sent me a flier they have out for the Extension with people's pictures on it.  Asks me if I recognize anybody?  Yeah, that's my butt.     Apparently my daughter knows me from my backside.

[cineater]

First day of fall.     My kind of weather.  We got much needed rain last night and are getting more the next few days.  Many projects going on at the garden and I'm ready to get started.

[cineater]

Rainy day, soaking rain.  And wouldn't you know it when I round up people to fix the bridge we have a hurricane dumping on us.    Think that is going to cancel the cinder block party on Saturday too.

[cineater]

Oh I love this lead trying to dance her ass out of the shit she stirred up.  No less than 7 emails sent to me tonight.  Not answering them.  One of the other leads called me to say that is not what happen.  I know what she's doing, trying to creat a narrative based on including a bunch of people on the emails.  The troublesome lead is seeing me face to face tomorrow night.  We'll talk then.   

The gardens got their rain and they look great.  We're installing new plants so they can get settled before winter.

[cineater]

I think I better pull all the houseplants in on Sunday.  Our lows are starting to get down there.  I never got around to rearranging the house so all the places they normally sit during the winter are ready to receive them.

Checking with the parks about what plants they want me to grow next year.  I'm seed collecting, plan to grow them large quantities of Butterfly Weed.  They burned their wood pile, checking to see if they started a new one.  Our compost bin needs some repairs.

We are discussing tonight about having a scavenger hunt at the gardens next year.  No, wasn't my idea but I'm damn good at that.   

[cineater]

I figured that much after Friday night's email.  Apparently one guy over stepped and said they had money.  Laura said she knows of at least two no's for funding for the herb garden.  It's probably not getting approved.  I already contacted the parks department to see what they had in their wood pile.  We need long boards, 12 feet, and I don't think they have those.  Might be able to find some of the wood for the project.  I'm damn good at dumpster diving.   

Looks like the hurricane rain will only be light for my area.  South St Louis is getting dumped on.  Of course they can be wrong.

[cineater]

Holy shit, I'm having a nice chat with the troublesome lead over email that I think is going well, trying to explain all our problems, she resigns again and I tell her I don't blame her for walking away and she goes psycho on me.  Calls me a bitch and a bunch of other stuff that just isn't true.  I apologize for what wasn't my intent, I don't think I did that but whatever keeps the peace, and tell her I am forwarding her complaints about me to the people above me which includes the chain of emails, she can see that, lets be transparent.  The head person responds and tells me, not to respond any more to her and she is moving to have her removed from the other role she serves on the counsel.  Then the lead sends out an email to the group twisting what happen and reframing stuff to make her look good and explaining why she resigned.  I don't know how she thinks that is going to fly when those people were in on all that.

You know, I can think like a bitch to myself but these are volunteers and I never lose my patience with them.  I will take any help I can get and always work something out with people.  I'm freaked out about this because I know somethings about her.  I'd already alerted the people above me before this happen because it was going the wrong way and we've all been involved with her before when she's pulled this shit.  She went to vicious pretty quick and I'm her target.  She's going to be really pissed when they remove her from counsel.  I'm seeing signs of mental health issues.

[cineater]

You know, I'd had enough of this girl before it even got really going.  Emails are flying this morning.

I nominated Beka for Master Gardener of the year.  They announce it at the convention tomorrow.  We've won the last two years on the people I nominated so I'm hoping they aren't feeling like they can't give it to somebody from our group again.  Plus there's no reason to suck up to us any more since we turned down doing the convention.

A decent rain and the plants are looking beautiful but too wet to get the mowers out.  The fall plants are starting to show.  Monarchs are few and far between.  Phebe thinks the wildfires in Canada had something to do with their reproduction this year.  May be another major hit to their numbers that they don't recover from for years.  Maureen hasn't had time to track them since they started massing at the great lakes to make their trip down here.  The hummingbirds are passing through.  I'd say a little less on them too.  I'm waiting on the fly by from the larger birds.  The St Louis Arch has it's lights off so it doesn't mess with their migration.  My area has developed the wetlands so I don't see as many of them passing through around here.  Hard to estimate their numbers.  The armadillos are here.  I haven't seen one yet but others have.  No idea what that's going to do or really anything about them except they are kind of freaky looking. 

[cineater]

No she didn't win.  I'm sure there are lots of deserving people and only one award.

Took the decking off the bridge.  It's a total redo.  Hope the guy I asked to do this is up for that much work.

The troublesome lead did respond last night to a group email, er you're not a lead any more.  You know, I don't want her back on the team but I do want to work this out with her.  She made a lot of assumptions without all the information.  We'll see how this plays out.

Saw a cool video on burning cottonwood fluff.  We don't have that much of it here.
https://www.google.com/search?q=burning+cottonwood+fluff+video&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS751US751&oq=burning+cotton+wood&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCQgDEAAYChiABDIGCAAQRRg5MgkIARAAGAoYgAQyCQgCEAAYChiABDIJCAMQABgKGIAEMgkIBBAAGAoYgAQyCQgFEAAYChiABDIJCAYQABgKGIAEMgkIBxAAGAoYgAQyCQgIEAAYChiABDIJCAkQABgKGIAE0gEJMTAxOTVqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:f83175e6,vid:5fgJfsc4UYo,st:0

[cineater]

Oh god, I'm leading little Beka into sin.     Normally she won't say a bad thing about a person.  I try to be more like her but tonight she says, not to say anything against someone but that's weird.  It's how it starts, just saying.

Beka called me tonight with an issues about the gardens.  She's my new co lead replacing Marsha.  We talked for 45 minutes.  Something very familiar and nice about that. 

[cineater]

Meeting with the head of Extension on how to deal with the troublesome lead and the fact she is a voting member of the counsel.  Notice I was nice and called her troublesome instead of what I'm holding in?    They aren't questioning my behavior, they want her gone but it's too much trouble to do it.  Everyone is being made aware of what happen and just hoping she goes away.  I pissed her off without evening trying and made her go away, so good course of action. 

My bigger problem is funding for the herb garden.  Apparently people are talking about how much money we have in the bank.  Nobodies bank account balance tells the story.  All that money in there is not to spend freely, and do you look at other people's bank account balances before funding their requests?  You just happen to know ours.  I don't think we are going to get the money but there's a chance so I'm going to try.  Don't get it, I'll just go about it another way.  If there's a will, there's away and I always get what I go after.

Damn, Phebe can net those monarchs.  They are showing now.  Can't really tell how many there are.  Phebe is so good at spotting them.  She's grabbing her net and running for them the whole time she is on property.  They show up when she's around and she's got them.

[cineater]

Met with Tilden and Jim, the bridge is a complete rebuild.  Jim will design something and Tilden, myself and whoever else I can get on it.  It won't be done by the 10th and I don't have the funding for it.  The entire creek bed needs to be dug out from the sediment that has collected there for the last 10-15 years.  The Native team will tackle that when their plants come down.  This project is moved to next spring.

I had to cut out before the Okra lunch was ready.  Dodged a bullet there?     Deadheaded the Prairie Dock.  It's a very good seeder.  It's everywhere.  The fruit trees are back under the control of the Arbor.  The new Treescaped lead doesn't want them.  They are allowed to share them with their staff except the Serviceberry that is going in the Bird Garden.  What's left comes to me for disposal according to our policies and procedures.  First choice is other garden leads, then our community partners, then membership and then the compost bin.  Really, what's left will go to our community partner, the parks.  The former tree lead told our honorary tree lady she was replacing her PawPaw Tree with a Buckeye.  Not on my watch.  That kind of tree is special to her and I already have the new tree coming in.   

Gardens were beautiful today and it was a beautiful day. 

[cineater]

Jumpy     The request for the funding for the Herb Garden is tonight.  The lady who offered up the money to begin with has discovered she has more coming out of her leftover budget than she thought she did.  They have to cut something to fund us.  But we're going to talk turkey.  Realistically, we can only build two of those raised beds before the end of the year and only need $1160.  I can go back to them after the first of the year and ask for more money.  I think they may go for the lower amount.

[cineater]

Oh that didn't go well.  The guy running the meeting was almost screaming at us, pointing his finger and shaking.  Said according to our memo of understanding, we are responsible for the gardens and that means we pay for it.  Okay, didn't know that.  I'm thinking, why were we invited to apply for this money and even make a presentation.  Then he went off on some rant about how our organization had disconnected ourselves from them when we made ourselves a 501 C3.  Er, that was because we were cheating when we used your 501 C3 and we should have paid taxes on our plant sale.  Money which we gave you and you refused to turn over to the tax people.  The University advised us to do it this way.  Then he went off on how much money we had in the bank and that we needed to learn to budget better.     Okay, you have no idea how we spend our money.

I wasn't going to argue all this out in a meeting just accepted verbally we couldn't ask for the money.  Once he said can't do it because of the memo, it should have been over.  The head lady was nice about pointing out all we do and that we had given them $5000 for a project.  A couple of other people chimed in and said why couldn't the memo be changed so it reflected a partnership for future endeavors.  When he finally started directing his rant at our president, I leaned over to the head lady and asked if we could go back to our seats.   

So we were up again after that where I asked permission to install the kiosk they were giving us and stated we were taking care of the installation costs even though they thought the kiosk was donated and they could use it.  Followed that with permission to plant a tree on their property, no expense again to them.   

I won't let one hothead ruin my feels towards things.  I'm not getting pissed off, collecting my toys and going home over this incident.

And the troublesome lead didn't show up to the meeting.  She zoomed in.  Didn't start any shit.

[cineater]

So someone had a conversation with him about his demeanor at the meeting.  I just keeping thinking if Marsha had been there, it would have been on.     Probably not during the meeting but she would have tracked his ass down.  Guess he won't be coming to the Christmas party this year.

The kiosk went in.  Not as professionally installed as I wanted but it's up.  And some of the corkboard needs glued back on.  We'll have it together by the Expo on Thursday.

I'm calling for a meeting on the Herb Garden renovation.  We're rushing this and it's not well planned out.  We can build something cheaper and will last longer.  I try to stay out of other people's gardens.  I learned that with Marsha.  I wasn't a support of all the money she poured into it but it really came out looking great and brought us up to a whole other level.

[cineater]

Emails are flying this morning about what to pick to honor Marsha at the gardens, bench or plaque?  I declined to participate in making choices but offered to pitch in on the cost.  Can't do it.  Those are cold and sad.  That was not my friend.  She was happy and known for her laughter.  I know what I'm doing.  I'm planning to get a little sign and mount it on one of the posts for the grapes, Marsha's Vineyard.  A play on Martha's Vineyard.  People who run across that little sign and knew her will laugh out loud.  Laughter in the gardens, that's how my friend should be remembered.

Cleaned up the growing room last night.  It's just so nice being in there.  Not much light so I had the grow lights on.  Radio too.  I have a bunch of seeds to collect out of their pods and should go through all that paperwork.  The longer paperwork sits in a pile, the easier it is to throw out.   

[cineater]

We got the greenhouse cleaned out this morning.  All that rock comes on Friday to do the floor.  The goal is to have it finished sometime Sunday.  Pole beans are going gang busters.  A little cold weather and they speed up production.

Tomorrow is the Expo.  The two people who went off on me will be there.  Talked to the lady who told me she could take the Herb Garden money out of her budget.  She now acts like she never offered it up.  But we've decided to take that project back to the drawing board.  I didn't like the price and I think we can make it cheaper out of something else.  I do love to dumpster dive.  Leslie thought we could just repair the bridge by using longer screws into the rotten wood so I let her.  It's a little soft in some places but it will hold.  She wants to paint it red.  Fine, I'm too tired to argue and she did do the work.

Extension has decided to brick the 3 walkways in the Perennial garden.  It's our best looking walkway.  They sell engraved bricks as a fundraiser.  I'm going to have a bunch of stepping stones to put somewhere else.  I know, won't help with the crumbling brick structure and want to tear up our best looking stuff.  Needless to say I don't have the funds to buy one of their bricks and that's the truth but they won't see it that way.  Landlords, what can you do?

Anyway, beautiful day in the garden.  Just what I needed. 

[cineater]

No drama.  The guy didn't show up and the girl stayed in her booth.  Caught her looking at me once but I was all over the place so we didn't run into each other.  The event was nice.  Found a vendor who makes plant markers and can put our name on them.  We could pass these out at the farmers markets.  My person who donated money for the fruit tress came to see them.  Three people from my garden club came and one of them signed up for master gardener classes.  We have the same first name.   With her that will make 5 of us.  That's a handful.   

Tomorrow begins wheelbarrows of rock into the greenhouse.