Irish Mist my Asters

     It has been pouring for days so I fret about the pests having parties in my grass.   All irresponsible behaviour exhibited in my youth haunts me today.   Thinking of my father finally putting his foot down about his grown children's week-end dog visitors.   He sent us out with a garbage bag last thing before we thought we could jump the traffic on Rt. 93 back to Boston.   Dog owners w/wee plastic bags full of poo empathize everywhere.   So, my neighbors all have dogs and let them run free as I did when I was a dog owner in my whatever period.    I have to remove such or it will spray fan like when I or the Squire who occasionally will get behind the mower for publicity stills, cut the lawn.     Funny how I don't mind rabbit, deer, bunny, or kitty litter but let a dog go on my property, whoa!   This is always a good time to walk around my incredible land and say, "Don't pinch me, I know I don't deserve this!"    Breathe, chuckle and remember that this neighbor is an emergency surgery nurse and stressed out enough.     Also, all this pine is very calming.
     Out this morning cutting dead limbs off the 100 conifers surrounding our house.   Again this amazing woman (Sophie) and her husband planted them all since 1988.   My job is to identify what I thought were always pine trees.  Maybe I would say evergreens.   Hemlocks, junipers, spruces, white pine, cedar, firs, oh of course you say, but what seems obvious, sure that's a Balsam, right?.....So, I have started feeding an organic food that seems to work for all and includes the hollies, rhodadendrons all the evergreens and many flowers that grow under their lowest branches in that acidic mulch.    In the past four years we have cut enough branches away that hosta, snow on the mountain, lilies, iris, poppies and this year a new wonder, common cress have filled in the beds.
 Went out to cut this morning and noticed one of the pines (er?) has a fungus on a lower branch and there is alot of in grown so I cut until it started pouring again.   In hopes that this doesn't cause a rusty needle reaction.   I clean the blades with a bleach/water solution between all trees to be safe.   There is a caterpillar nest I still need to cut that is low enough on a ladder in the 2nd from road apple tree.    Sounds crazy but I don't want to kill them so I think I will drive them somewhere and release them into some other wild.   This is about the time the Squire tells me that he must be in the city overnight......