
April 19, 2024: Mexican Sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia) sprouts in a Burpee 72-Cell Seed Watering System.
Another Week: Number 69
It’s that time of year when gardening decisions get finalized. Foggy notions that drifted across your mind for five months get nailed down over two or three weeks and you’ll live with them this summer.
Timing is crucial. If you move too early, frost will kill your young plants and your money will be wasted. If you wait too long, your neighbors will clear out the greenhouses, leaving you with the dregs of the gardening barrel.
My gardening has always promoted air traffic. If my plants can be attractive and also attract birds and butterflies, that’s entertainment.
Butterflies are fickle and highly dependent upon the weather and their own mysterious rhythms. We have a butterfly bush and purple coneflowers and black-eyed Susans, but the butterfly action varies. If the weather gets dry, they disappear. Milkweed brings some Monarchs — but also Milkweed Bugs.
Of the birds, we get the usual sparrows and robins — and we attract cardinals and goldfinches with sunflower and Nyjer seed.
The real prize, though, is the Ruby-throated Hummingbird. The first visitor of each season used to make Amy gasp. She would stare, hypnotized, as the tiny bird sipped from our feeder.
It took a while to learn how to lure them, but we finally found the best hummingbird feeder and one specific plant that works like a hummingbird magnet, the “Wendy’s Wish” salvia.
In previous years, plenty of effort was put into sprouting plants from seed and growing crops of tomatoes and kale. Those days were fun — but for the amount of work involved, I think I’m better off buying plants from greenhouses, and tomatoes and kale from farmer’s markets or supermarkets.
This year, I want to put a Wendy’s Wish in the center of each former tomato bed, then cover the soil with some other hummingbird bait — most likely Jazzberry petunias or Shock Wave Denim petunias.
The only plants from seed will be the ones shown sprouting above — Mexican sunflower, or Tithonia rotundifolia. Local greenhouses only stock the shorter varieties, but I want the six-foot shrubs to hide a six-foot fence, so I have been sprouting them myself for several years. It’s an attractive, zero-maintenance plant that hummingbirds and butterflies do visit.
This week I mowed my lawn for the first time this season. Other than that, I walked zero miles.
WTF with Marc Maron: Alejandro Escovedo
Most of my podcast listening coincides with shoveling snow or mowing the lawn. The podcast I listen to most often is WTF with Marc Maron. That’s been a pretty regular thing since the New York Times profiled Maron in January 2011.
I’ve been listening to Alejandro Escovedo longer than that. Our friend Sharon, who knows all the clubs and all the underappreciated artists in several cities, turned us onto him in the early 2000s, and we first saw him at Summerfest in 2008. Sharon also took Amy to see Marc Maron for her first time in 2014.
So I made sure to listen to this interview while I mowed on Sunday. Escovedo has been through some hard things. I did not realize he lost a wife to suicide. I did hear that he had hepatitis C, but didn’t understand how close he came to losing his own life.
Also, it’s interesting that Maron homes in on “The Last to Know” – one of two Escovedo songs I regularly play on guitar, and one of the few songs that Amy would join me in singing. It’s funny to hear the fairly random story of its genesis.
Bruce Springsteen night on my TV
On Tuesday night, my sister Karen came over and treated me to carryout from Chit Chaat again. No movies had been discussed, so I threw The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts on the TV and it kind of stayed on. No Nukes was the movie that led to Karen’s best friend Amy becoming my girlfriend Amy.
Watching 30-year-old Bruce go through his James Brown collapse schtick made me dig out some more Springsteen chestnuts — his “Twist & Shout / La Bamba” medley from 1988 in Buenos Aires, both “Light of Day” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” from the Live in New York City concerts, and “O Mary Don’t You Weep” from the 2006 New Orleans Jazz Fest show. Somehow, Karen had never seen any of these.
My sister and I are both looking for some reinvention these days. In the past, we found inspiration for that sort of thing in Bruce Springsteen’s sermons and passion plays, and it felt good to recollect some of those sparks — even while Springsteen himself is still out there proving it night after night after night.
For a chaser, we finished with Conan O’Brien’s Springsteen-like performance on the season finale of Hot Ones.
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