A tiny 'pocket park'

Welcome to the Officer Arthur English Memorial Garden. Hardly large enough to warrant a second glance on my daily commute to and from work. However, it is large enough to occasionally lure me to it's benches for a bite to eat or some writing or reading time. My previous post was written here in this tiny floral pocket park above the green line tracks where I enjoyed the sunshine and snapdragons. To be exact it was written on this bench, which is one of two in the garden:

Journey Downtown

Warning: This is a very old post. I wrote it on August 21st outside on my lunch break at work and when I tried to impute it into the computer I had tons and tons of problems. Blogger and I don't get along. Now that the wedding is over, David (my new in-home computer tutor) is showing me a little Html so i can avoid the pre-wedding blogger frustration that began my month absence. On with the show!

So, yesterday David and I both played hooky with the aim of 'getting some things done.' In fact, our first mission was to purchase rings for our extremely quickly approaching wedding. Thankfully, for both our budget and sanity, we followed the advice of friends and headed downtown Boston to check out the plethora of jewelers located in the area.

Once successful at mission number one, mission number two was to take a little rest and relaxation, and enjoy the day. This weather we have right now is wonderful - the best all summer, I'd say! You can feel autumn's pull in the crisp night air and bright blue skies.

Being thrifty and able-bodied, we took the journey from Downtown Crossing to Trident Booksellers and Cafe (yum, yum, yum.) What a delight! All manner of people were out enjoying this brilliant day.

Please bear with me, I'm still learning how to format well on Blogger, but take a look at some highlights of our journey:

Entering the Public Gardens...

Wandering down Comm Ave...

Community Garden Update: Pretty Weeds (and Bees!)

weed (PLANT)
noun
1 [C] any wild plant which grows in an unwanted place, especially in a garden or field where it prevents the cultivated plants from growing freely

(Thank you, Cambridge Dictionaries Online!)

Now, here's the thing with weeds. I don't even know what all these photographed 'weeds' are, and some of them may be evil killers of all things native, but obviously I enjoy them enough to try to take nice pictures of them with our new camera (thanks!). I even wish that the sunflowers were in my community garden plot and not in the field next to the gardens!

The pictures are of the following:

1. Sunflowers

2. Golden Rod

3. Queen Anne's Lace (coming in my garden fence!)

4. Pink Morning Glory like weed (climbing my garden fence and very familiar, but what is it?)

5. Sunflowers

6. Pink Morning Glory like weed

7. Butter and Eggs

8. Not a clue, but an awesome bee picture

9. Jewelweed (also known as touch-me-nots... a personal favorite)

Rain, rain, go away...

You don't have to be terribly observant to have noticed that it's been raining like crazy in New England this summer. With rain comes more mosquitoes, less pleasant time to spend outside, cancelled outdoor events, not getting to see the Perseids, and rampant tomato fungus.

But not all fungus is created equal. David reported seeing lots of different species on his camping trip this weekend including a variety that was apparently very purple (wish I had a picture.) Likewise, I saw a ton of different species on my little walk at Hemlock Gorge Reservation. I have no idea if this is really 'good' fungus, but it's certainly pretty. Here's a couple samples:

Park Profile: Hemlock Gorge Reservation

Just south of Route 9 in Newton and Needham, Hemlock Gorge Reservation is a green gem. It is less than a mile from the Eliot T stop, but having never been there before I drove my car from work on yesterday to have as much time there as possible.

I have only two complaints: First, it's a little loud. The convenient location gives it a lot of car noise - mostly from Route 9. There's more natural sound coming from the man-made falls at the old mill as well. This is not a good place to listen to the birds!

Second, the poison ivy was insane. It covered the ground in huge patches. I took some pictures, but my new camera needs another disk to expand its capacity. You know what it looks like anyway, right? (More on that at a later date.)

The people I met along my walk were remarkably friendly. Often the shy one, I'm not very vocal with my 'hellos' and 'beautiful day, huhs?' with strangers. This was not the case with the folks I ran into today. Not a single one failed to at least give a warm smile and hello and some even tried to strike up a bit more of a conversation. Was it the beautiful day after all the rain or the place itself?

A gorgeous lunch-hour it was. The sun shone magnificently in a bright blue sky with puffy white clouds. The view from the top of the Echo Bridge brings you to the level of the tree canopies, allowing you to view the sky to its fullest advantage. I am not a talented enough photographer to even begin to capture its full beauty as I saw it today.

Could this be a good place to watch the upcoming meteor shower? I guess it's possible, but I would definitely find it too creepy. Oh, well.

I'm definitely looking forward to going back during the day. Maybe I'll try out the Echo Bridge's echo next time!

Community Garden Update: Not the biggest zucchini I've ever seen...

... but getting there.

The Story of (one of) the Biggest Zucchini I've Ever Seen

Once upon a time, in a garden not-so-far away, there was a happy, overcrowded squash patch.

Almost every day, the young couple that tended the garden would come visit.

Almost every day the young lady would look all over the overcrowded squash patch for juicy 6-inch zucchini. There were some every once in a while, but she kept wanting more. "Zucchini plants are supposed to go crazy with fruit, why aren't mine?" she thought.

"Maybe, they're too crowded. The delicata plants are really taking over," said the young man. He tried to thin them out a bit, but it didn't help.

This continued. Every few days the happy, overcrowded squash plant would have a new zucchini or two, but it still was not enough. It seemed that the happy, overcrowded squash patch was destined to only have zucchini every once in a while, but have lots of delicatas.

Then it happened.

One day, the young couple didn't visit the happy, overcrowded squash patch. The day before they had visited and had found three tiny zucchini that looked they might be ready in a few days... and it was raining... and they wanted to go out to dinner.

The next morning, the young lady was very excited. She wanted to pick those three tiny zucchini and eat them for dinner! She was very excited and dragged her beau out very early in the morning to check on them.

First, she bent down to look at the oldest delicata squash to see if it was ripe enough yet. Not yet, but what's that? A beautiful medium-size zucchini lay right next to the delicata!

"Hmm," she thought. "I don't remember that being there at all!" As she began to cut the beautiful zucchini from the vine she turned her head toward the rest of the patch. "AAAAA!" she shrieked.

Oh no! They young man was sure there must be a monster or maybe a dead hedgehog in the squash patch. "What is it?" he exclaimed anxiously.

"Look!!" she said.

And there it was. He couldn't believe his eyes. In less than two days, one of the cute baby zucchini had turned into a big, beautiful monster, and another zucchini almost as big was right next to it! There were lots of zucchini that day, but none would compare to the biggest of them all.

So, he took it home, took a picture of his arm next too it, to show it's giant size, and then shredded it up for zucchini bread. Everyone lived happily ever after. And so it begins...

Want some zucchini?

Coming Soon to a Dark-Outdoor-Space Near You: The Perseids

Early next Tuesday morning should be the best time to view the Perseid meteor shower (weather-permitting, of course). Dust from the tail of the Comet Swift-Tuttle will hit the earth's atmosphere at well over 100,000 mph to display bright streaks in the night sky. If you are a serious stargazer, you may consider camping out all night beginning at 9:00 p.m. For those of us who enjoy sleeping or have previous commitments (yay, Monday night trivia!), the best viewing will begin once the moon has set at 2:00 a.m. the morning of August 12th.

So, where to view, where to view...

We need an open space, not to far from the apartment hopefully without too much light. It's hard to know what has a lot of light and what doesn't. When I was a kid, we had an awesome view of a meteor shower on the high school soccer field, so something like that'd be a possibility.

Or the park on Eastern Ave. in Arlington apparently called Robbins Farm. It's an awesome place for viewing man's fireworks over Boston, maybe you could catch a glimpse of nature's as well. Except it might be too bright.

How about Danehy Park in Cambridge? Should be nice if it's not too well lit at night. There's a very clear hill you can stand on top of and try to find the stars in the city, but could easily be too bright. Also, they've had some mugging problems.

The clear choice for me I think will be the reservation where we tend our community garden -- Rock Meadow -- the place that hasn't made it onto google maps at all yet. No green blob. No name. Just empty space that only reveals the paths and garden plots in satellite view. There are no lights to speak of and with a little flashlight, hopefully we'll be able to see the path well enough to get to the middle of the meadow on the path and away from the city lights.

Note to self: Must remember the bugspray.