May 2025

May — It held a beautiful Persian/Hindu wedding in the Catskills; a workshop in Providence, RI with the incredible Sarah Winward; and weeds. So many weeds.

I have an absolute carpet of stilt grass seedlings everywhere. I am trying to make a dent in them this year instead of just throwing my hands in the air & giving the whole yard up to them. It's so hard to put in the effort on top of our other invasives like perennial sweet pea, cypress spurge, ground elder, and some kind of succulent that grows like it's been dipped in whatever toxic sludge made the Ninja Turtle shoot up from like 8 inches to 6 feet. (Side note, do we think the toxic sludge lobbyists are behind the Ninja Turtles and other cartoons from my 80s/90s youth? I feel like every other cartoon featured a good or bad guy who was turned super by sludge or radioactive waste. That's so much cooler than a cartoon where the toxic sludge just gives all the little turtles cancer and makes them sterile, which is undoubtable what happens in real life.) Anyway please wish me luck on the weeds. I really, really need it. But on to more fun things...

May 10th was our Persian/Hindu wedding! But the pretty pictures are for Instagram. You're here for the behind the scenes, right? Well here's all the things that went wrong :)

1) We strung ranunculus into flower chains for the mandap, and it took 1 person 7 hours to make about 10 of these. Obviously my strategy was not a winner. We used regular sewing thread because my previous attempt at using fishing line didn't fit through the needle and was hard to tie knots in. We had to space the flowers out because ranunculus are a lot more expensive than marigolds or carnations. And there was not the budget to do back-to-back ranunculus on every chain. So we tied a knot around each flower so we could hold it in place on the thread, but tying the knot usually got the string twisted hopelessly. It did eventually get done and looked beautiful, but woof! It was VERY time consuming. And if you're asking why I didn't just order carnations for this one thing because it would have made my life so much easier, the answer is that I am a bad capitalist. I am committed to using locally grown flowers for environmental and community reasons. And I do it even when it makes my life hell. (Or really Sonja's life hell because she built these chains. Thank you Sonja! I love you!) So what would I do next time? Probably try something thicker like cross stitch or embroidery thread. But I still wouldn't use imported carnations. No regrets there. If you have tips, though, send them my way! Just goes to show 8 years in, and I'm still figuring things out.

2) I also drastically underestimated the amount of time it would take us to hang all the smilax throughout the venue, and we were unexpectedly a person short, which made it all the worse. So I was there on Friday with my 2 amazing freelancers from 10am-10pm with almost no break. It really sucked. I am so lucky they didn't quit on me. The venue didn't want us to damage their ceiling or walls (totally understandable!), but also didn't want us to touch their lighting. So with fishing line, zip ties, the air ducts, and command hooks on windows, we managed to create an infrastructure to cover most of the ceiling with smilax. But here's a good lesson for future me. (You probably were smart enough to figure this lesson out before me.) If you need to create the entire infrastructure for the smilax to hang on, hanging smilax will take twice as long. It's not as easy as throwing it up on some barn rafters. I think it took 2 people about 5 hours.

We survived. The wedding was beautiful. The couple was so so happy. And I live to tell you another tale.

Me sweeping up the last of our detritus around 9:45pm.

The other big thing that I did this month was attend the Sarah Winward workshop hosted by the Floral Reserve. You may have seen the installation before & after on my instagram stories from this workshop. It was honestly sort of difficult to work on because there's 15 people doing things simultaneously. But it was really interesting just to see it come together and see how much product and many man hours it takes to make something that big. The workshop had an amazing professional photographer for the whole 2 days. So when I get those photos back, I will share more! But in the meantime, here's the before & after one more time...

MAY GARDEN CHECK IN

I'm going to keep the garden check in short this month because I have embarrassingly little to show for myself. I did plant out the last of the dahlias & put my very sad sweet pea seedlings in the ground, but that was basically it. And I nearly killed my other seedlings so many times from neglect. Most of what I did this month was weed and kill jumping worms. (A topic for another day.) Thankfully for me, I had the foresight to plant hardy and reliable bearded irises. They kept the garden looking good despite my lack of care.

JUNE GARDEN GOALS

A redo of all the May goal?: Still need to start that nigella and last succession of corncockle. The scabiosa have not been potted up yet. Still have not started the front hill terracing. Still have giant piles of compost and mulch that haven't moved... And we're already a week into June, so I honestly don't have high hopes for myself.

Raised bed construction: 2 of the old raised beds where I grow flowers have fallen apart past use. And the veggie garden is also now ready for its last 2 beds. So staining cedar planks is a high priority.

Weed weed weed: This one is self explanatory, but I have been really bad about it for the past few years because June is normally crazy busy with weddings. This year it's not, and I have to take advantage of this to hopefully make some dent in the awful stilt grass, sweet pea, spurge populations.

Thanks for reading!