Garden Goings On

Summer is waning, and the days are already getting much shorter, much to the chagrin of Ingrate the bird. He is not a fan of being left in the dark while awaiting my return from work. Perhaps faithful readers remember my blog entry last year regarding the difficult installation of the $5 Target light timer? Well, it was time to hook it up again.

Meanwhile, strange things are going on in the garden. I came out one weekend morning and saw THIS growing:

Now, I've had this damn cactus plant for about 15 years and never saw anything more promising than a damn spider web on it:

One hot spell later...this sprouts from it:

It appeared to be some sort of blossom. I kept watch on it, and 14 days later:

It started to bloom! It was not fragrant, but that suits me just fine. No need to attract any of those gangster type bees! Here it is about a week later:

Gee, like a cheap southern dame, it wilted fast once it started blooming:

By tonight, the last blooms were fading and falling to the ground. Will it be another 15 years before a bloom dares appear again?

In other parts of the garden, Killer Diller...the cat with no pity...was lazing around:

and in the front garden, a lavender bush is slowly and painfully (well, painful to look at) dying:

Before you all begin to judge my gardening abilities, let me make one thing clear. I did my Internet research! I tried everything they said, from not watering to watering to adding some kind of fertilizer to ignoring it:

I don't think this plant is long for this world. It's already lived some 22 years. I trimmed some of the branches back and the insides of the branch were DRY and DEAD. It's dying from the ground up, too. I blame the moles, which are rampant in this part of the garden, despite Killer Diller's efforts:

I am not sure what to do at this point...I want to b a good neighbor and only have pretty plants in the yard...ones that are ALIVE. But there is another part of me that wants to hack this thing down to the roots and see if it'll grow again:

Speaking of hacking, I was awakened one Saturday morning, AT EIGHT AM, to see one of the century old cypress trees in our neighborhood getting a well needed trim. I dragged my half asleep, bedraggled body to the front window to look outside and saw THIS going on:

Of course I had to grab the camera. Anytime you see guys wielding sharp knives, perched precariously on the roof of a truck IN MOTION, in foggy weather, trying to trim a tree branch some 30 feet up...it's time to grab the camera.

Fortunately, (I suppose)... no one fell off, stabbing themselves through the leg, falling through and breaking the windshield of the truck as it rolled down the hill. I have to admit, I was almost disappointed. The tree looked great after the 8 hours of trimming it took:

OK, I admit, that is not the same tree. But it's a great shot of the sun setting in the ocean!