Meade shows you how to harvest garlic...

... and talks Meadhouse philosophy with me:



This video goes to the max of what YouTube lets you upload: 15 minutes. Why is it so long? To indulge anyone out there who would like to luxuriate in the ambiance of the Meadhouse garden. There's some advice about garlic, dieting, politics, pancakes, etc.

At the Rainbow Café...

... this is reality.

Frontyard, backyard.

In front, we've got a "fence" of alliums where the hedge used to be. Photo — enlarged — by me:



In back, after 25 years of my back-to-nature approach, it's been a lot of work getting to blank-slate level, and Meade has drawn a semi-circle on the slate. Meade took this picture too. (Enlarge.)

The shopping trip.

1. We went to a building supply showroom to look at some doors. All my doubts about fiberglass doors that are made to look like wood were shattered, but I was freaked out in the kitchen section by the fake waffles display:



2. We prowled the outdoor racks at Home Depot to get about 300 plants — a few extra odds and ends after the thousands of bulbs and seedlings Meade has mail-ordered. After 25 years of accepting whatever the heavens bestowed upon my patch of real estate, I'm amazed at the number of plants one buys to do the landscaping professionally.



3. Leaving the parking lot, we kept our distance from these people who were displaying the hilarious, age-old confidence in the ability of the human hand to secure a large item of furniture on the roof of the car. (And note the classic "baby on board" sign.)



It's like they're trying to act out old comedy routines:

1. Baby on Board:



2. The power of the hand:

Meade uses a Japanese digging knife — a hori hori — to plant a lot of allium bulbs really quickly.

He laughs at my "city girl" questions a couple times, and we discuss the results of a local election here in Madison, which demonstrated a Madisonian level of conservatism by picking the Democrat over the Green Party guy.



ADDED: All those tiny bulbs....



I only helped by looking admiringly and taking photographs...



As Meade planted 2,000+ bulbs....

At the Busted Puffball Café...

... you can talk about your broken dreams. I had a beautiful dream of a magic mushroom named Puff. Puff the puffball mushroom. I thought we were going to slice him up into a million little slivers and fry him in butter. But you saw fit to break up old rotten stumps and fling them away into the corner of the yard, without regard to the whereabouts of the puffball, whose magic proved limited to the power to attract hurled stump parts.



Ah, Puff! I wanted knife-sliced slivers, not cudgeled chunks. The puffball will therefore live out its days, uneaten, rotting and freezing in the salvaged iron birdbath, with the clay acorn, the iron bird, and — nearby — the unoccupied teapot birdhouse.

At the Water Garden Café...

... refresh yourself.

Bonus pic: Meade in the herb garden.

In the Purple Garden...

... you can exaggerate all you want.

Two.

(Enlarge.)

One.

Butterfly.

At the Green Glass Café..

(Enlarge.)

... a clay angel.

At the Glowing Grass Café...

... the morning light was so beautiful here in your garden.

"It is not unheard of for First Ladies to skip town unnoticed... But Michelle Obama's absence raised a critical question: Who is tending to the garden?"

WaPo drivel for mush-headed ladies reaches a new low.

At the end of the walk...

Guerrilla gardeners.

"They garden in public places with, and sometimes without, permission. Without permission, it could just be 'John,' the Williamson Street neighborhood’s 'guerrilla gardener,' planting sunflower seeds along the bicycle path or filling that tree-line gap with a plan-appropriate sapling. It could be Keedo Beebe, a shy, scarfed woman who has methodically established a tangled hosta and wildflower greenway, without official permission, along a hidden Yahara River path.... 'Why not? I like to go out and plant things, it’s what my mom and I liked to do.'"

Is this good?
	Yes! I love these impish citizens with their free thinking and free work.
	Yes! Gardens are good and more is more.
	No! There needs to be some knowledge and order to the installation of plants.
	No! Even people who believe they are good need to follow the rules.
pollcode.com free polls

At the Living Roof Café....

... you can come alive.

At the Rectilinear Café...

... surely you've got something planned.

What if hippies had money... and good taste?

A photo-walk around Madison's East Side got me thinking. There's a hippie aesthetic, but it's not well-developed enough, and there isn't enough money to run with it, which could be a disaster if there isn't good taste — and it's hard to have good taste and hippie taste at the same time.

But when it all comes together, it's really cool:





Wouldn't it be fabulous if, taking this house as the exemplar...



...the whole neighborhood could bloom with hippie aesthetic?

(I have no idea whether the people who did this to their house are actually hippies or how they would verbalize their aesthetic, but whoever they are, I salute them.)

Did you know it's a good idea to plant trees in the late fall?

A nursery delivery this morning at Meadhouse:



Nice work by Steve and Claudio of Johnson's Nursery.

First, big, lovely elm. It's a New Horizon elm, a disease-resistant cultivar developed here at the University of Wisconsin:



And over on the other side of that place Wisconsinites call the "terrace," a serviceberry:



The trees will settle in over the winter. We'll watch them through the windows. (Meade placed them to make the best views from particular windows where we sit inside. That's the right way to do it, you know.) We'll watch the snows come and go and look forward to the beauty of spring. But today, at Meadhouse, it already looks like spring.

At the garden ...

... I'm there, sunning on the gravel "beach"...



... under the blue sky ...



... by the deactivated fountain....



... snapping my pictures of you, which I can't display here, so I'll just show what the garden looked like, still pretty, a little bare — except for the kale — on the first day of November.