Clouds above the Ancient One on yesterday’s walk to the rim.

This morning, as usual, I started rounds without my gloves. I did go inside to get them but got distracted by a sudden urge to play Mozart on the piano (“the ballroom’s gap-toothed keyboard”), and when I’d finished that I left the house without them.

I went to set a sprinkler on the wild plum, but found myself instead at the wand end of the hose by the onions, beets, carrots, and hot peppers in their red walls of water. A few annuals spice up each end of that bed with orange marigolds, pink and white cosmos, yellow pansies; at the northeast end as well grow two self-sown gorgeous perennials, a Salvia May Night and a Mirabilis, left in place when we redesigned the pathway early this spring.

Penstemon fruticocus is in bud, spread to three shrubs in its specially amended end of a penstemon berm. P. virens and coloradoensis are in bloom behind the buddha. Weeding this bed I discovered lots of chocolate flower seedlings and ~ oh! ~ this may be a good time to mention my theory about bindweed mimicry:

Bindweed grows in the same bed near three different plants, assuming aspects of each. Here it chokes the tip of a sumac sprout with light green lanceolate leaves…

… a foot away, it sprawls with oval leaves (lower right) beside a chocolate flower seedling, upper left.

Here, it grows with dark green pointed leaves beside the similarly colored, equally pointy leaved, shrubby penstemon…

… and here, weeks later, it continues its upright growth as does the penstemon.

10 a.m. like clockwork the predicted winds kicked up. Last night I heard with dismay the weatherman say “more of the same from ten a.m. til nine p.m.” So I dragged the potted tomatoes and herbs up against the house as wind howled and clouds streaked across the full moon. I’ll leave them til tomorrow, and hope these March winds that started in February will quit soon.

The trick with catmint is to trim it the instant the bees lose interest, and before it’s sowed much seed. Its progressive growth pattern gives it a fertile time span of weeks or longer, with just a small window at the front to clip it at the optimal time, before too many seeds are ripe and after almost all the flowers have wilted. I hadn’t thought I’d meant to water everything on this hose line when I started, just the vegetables, but clearly that’s what I’d intended. Yucca is in full bloom for the first time ever, since it started from seed some years ago.

Biko strolls by the yucca.

Time to go inside. First sweet cherries of the season, weeks early, from Palisade via Delicious Orchards. Yum.