Now It's My Turn To Say I Think I'll Go With Sloth

Plant cards!

Today began with the promised thunderstorms and even a tornado warning. Thanks to the seriously inclement weather, we were able to take the parents to brunch at Jack Allen's Kitchen and not have to wait. Score. I had a big day planned (i.e., I wasn't planning to nap when we got home) so I forewent the mimosas. By the time we got home the rain had cleared and it was a beautiful, sunny, if chilly, afternoon. I spent all of it indoors. Except for the part where I moved a tarantula off the corner of the front porch before Jessie saw it. Poor thing. I think it might have been dead. But I put it carefully out under a bush in a relatively dry spot.

The rest of the day we all sat around waiting to go to bed. It felt like an old folks home for all the ambition and energy we had. Jessie cleaned her room so she could (finally) show it to Gramma, and that was our combined effort for the day. We didn't even really stir ourselves for dinner. Brunch was so huge and filling we just put out some cheese, meat, fruit, dolmades, and crackers, and everyone helped themselves as they felt peckish.

The rest of the plants waiting to go into the ground.

In spite of my lack of physical activity, I did have a major accomplishment today: I made the first native plant information cards to use in planting the garden. They are 5-1/2 X 8-1/2 and are based on the data from the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center plant database, which is itself built from the US Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service plant database. In order to make the information more visually available (without having to read the card) I made a template with light requirements and size range on the top, blooming season on the right, and soil requirements on the bottom. After I printed them out, I used highlighter markers to color the appropriate selections on the template. Tomorrow I will be able to sort them first by soil (wet or dry) and by light to determine which bed they'll go in, then I can sort the plants selected for each bed by height and bloom season so the heights will be staggered and there will always be something blooming in every part of every bed.

Many packets of seeds.

I still have lots of packets of seeds and I'm not quite sure what to do about them. I guess it's still early enough to sow many of them directly into the ground, but I haven't done the info cards for them yet. I got them done for half of the 113 different plants I bought in containers--including all of the perennials. The shrubs and trees are usually only in ones or twos so I don't need to worry so much about where they are going to go--and they aren't going into beds. Maybe I'll have time to do the cards for the seeds tomorrow before the contractors come so I can plan on planting them tomorrow too.