A different sort of progress: yesterday afternoon, after I got done grading a set of exams, I went home and started ripping out the weeds and invading grass and everything from my back garden.

I got all of the area where I grow beans and tomatoes, the herb garden, and most of the little side garden (Note to self: never, ever buy any kind of Artemesia again, no matter how much it's promoted as "good for shade." I'm still picking the darn "babies" of the original plant out of my garden (and, surreptitiously, out of my neighbor's lawn adjacent - they might not like me interfering but I feel kind of responsible for introducing something so invasive). Yes, it was pretty, with its variegated leaves and all, but it spread like a monster.)

Still remaining is the little patch right under my bedroom window (auxiliary tomato garden) and the front flowerbeds.

It took 3 hours of hard work - including time spent trimming suckers off of the redbud tree and trimming back the lone crepe myrtle in my backyard. (I didn't even know you were SUPPOSED to prune those things until one day when, having gotten off on a Tuesday without bringing knitting with me, I was forced to read an old "Southern Living" while waiting for my allergy shot, and I read an article on the "right" way and the "wrong" way to do it. And apparently not pruning at all falls under the "wrong" way).

I'm not a big fan of crepe myrtle anyway. I'd rather have something like hollies that are evergreen, or, even better yaupons (another type of hollies) that actually attract birds with their edible berries. Crepe myrtle is kind of like a pageant winner; it sits there and looks pretty but doesn't really DO anything else.

Or - someday - a grape arbor. I tend to prefer plants that make things you can eat.

So this morning, I went out to the garden center and got some topsoil to add to the garden (I don't think I'll need to do any hoeing this year; the soil still seemed very loose). And I bought some fingerling bean seeds (it's time to plant them, maybe even a bit late now). And some tomatoes.

Yes, tomato plants. It feels way too early to me to be putting those in the ground but the woman running the cash register assured me that they'd been flying off the shelves (perhaps that's why, in the past, I only wind up finding crummy bedraggled plants when I go out in early May).

So, I'm going to give it a try. My success in the past few years has been poor enough that I'm willing to try something different in the hopes of getting more than one or two tomatoes per plant.

(And yes. It is probably cheaper in the long run to buy tomatoes at the Farmer's Market, and it saves the strain on my back. But you can also buy sweaters and quilts at the wal-mart, and I still make my own of those).

I also picked up a couple of herb plants - two lavender to replace plants that didn't make it (either through the wet summer or through the cold winter; I'm not sure which) and a Greek oregano. They didn't have much of a choice so I'm going to try another place here in town to see if they have more different kinds of herbs.

I'd really like to go down to Twin Oaks Nursery in Denison but I'm not QUITE sure I can justify a trip with gas costing what it does.

I do still need to cut out a number of elm seedlings from the side garden (either the wind patterns fetched up a larger number of seeds there than elsewhere, or, more likely, I wasn't as diligent as pulling them out as I was other places last year). And I need to clear out the front gardens and think about what I want to plant there - it's too late for pansies, it's gotten too hot, and I'm not sure I want more marigolds there. (I bought a bunch of marigolds to plant around the tomatoes, in order to confound the nematodes.)

I always get very enthusiastic about the garden first thing in the spring. But once it gets into the 100s, it's harder for me to work up the energy to go out and weed and stuff.

I also mowed the (front, the back didn't need it yet and besides, no one can see the back yard) lawn this morning. I had to. My neighbor to the north of me did his (or rather, had his done - it looks like the blighter has gone and hired a lawn service). So by the rules of Neighborhood Peer Pressure, I had to do my lawn today. (Which means if my neighbor to the south follows the same rules, he should mow his lawn either today or tomorrow.)

I don't like that more and more people are succumbing to using the lawn services - I don't want to, I'd prefer to use my little old-fashioned reel mower (which has the added plus that you can use it at 8 am on a Saturday without waking anyone up) and not put chemicals on my lawn. But I also don't want to have the "worst" lawn in the neighborhood because that brings up all my "I'm only pretending to be a grown-up" issues. So I don't know. I feel like the reel mower is one way I can save a little gas and prevent a little pollution (and anyway, I hate breathing smoke and listening to the noise of a gas powered mower).

I had a dream last night - I guess I was thinking about having to mow the lawn - that I had gone to the garden center and they had little automatic lawn-mowing robots - they were solar-powered, they were shaped kind of like those Roomba vacuums, but they were painted to look like little sheep. (They were very cute). The idea was you bought several of them and you put up a "guide wire" at the edges of your lawn (so they wouldn't go wandering off into the neighborhood). Then you turned them loose and they kept the lawn mowed, using solar power.

The last thing I remember of the dream before I woke up was wondering if I had time to install the guide wires before I had to go to work...

It would be nice to have an automatic solar-powered robot to mow the lawn (I think I've seen such a thing but they're VERY expensive.) Also, with the way things go, I wouldn't be able to leave it out - I'd have to run it while I was at home and check on it periodically - because unfortunately, with my neighborhood as easy as it is to drive through, if you leave potentially valuable stuff out on your lawn, it can get stolen pretty easily. So no cute sheep solar-powered lawnbots for me, even if such a thing existed.

(Unless they came with some kind of "recognition" function where they sent out an electric shock if someone other than their owner picked them up...)