Gardening Fool

I have been gardening all morning. I’m going to finish my Diet Dr Pepper and go garden all afternoon. Here’s what I have done.

1. Put leaves around the roses as mulch because I am tired of trying to weed them and getting poked.

2. Put leaves around the lilacs, not so much anti-poke purposes, but just to kill off some of the grass that’s growing up too close to them.

3. Put pine needles around the nandina.

4. Put pine needles over where the gladiolus bulbs got planted last week.

5. Chased Mrs. Wigglebottom around our neighbors’.

6. Moved leaves off the perennials so that they could get some sun.

7. Observed one peony tip, only one, above ground.

8. Planted some more morning glory seeds around the bottle tree. Yes, I know they self-seed, but I only had blue ones last year and it made me sad. So, I threw some red seeds down. I’m not too worried about them coming up too early. I didn’t soak them or anything, so it’ll take them a couple of weeks just to get to the point where they can decide when to come up.

9. Dug around in my compost pile, which is hot inside! Just like it should be. I mean, you hope it will start to cook the stuff in there, but you never know until you are reaching in there and feel that it’s generating its own heat.

10. Dug up the stunted iris trying to grow in the darkest spot in the yard (or it will be once the leaves come in) and the other iris I found when digging the first iris up and moved them to the bed of mysteriously half-naked irises. The irises in that bed still have the layer of dirt I put on them. I’m not sure how that will go. Possibly, I should have waited until this fall to move them, but, eh, I thought, they might appreciate some sun.

11. Started phase one of “Address the shittiest part of my yard.” I’ve decided this is just going to be a wildflower garden, something we can enjoy, not fight the mud to weed, and then mow down when everything dies back and the grown firms up.  I put down a thin layer of garden soil mix, without tilling or working to incorporate the dirt under it. These are hearty plants and the idea is to just give the seedlings something good to start in and then they can work their way into the mud beneath.

I divided this bed into four sections. In the shittiest section, where it always gets the muddiest, I planted joe-pye weed seeds. Everything I’ve read about this plant leads me to believe that this is the perfect plant for this area. It loves sunny, muddy spots and there is no place in my yard that gets sunnier or muddier. So, I expect we may get full height out of it, which would be cool.

Next to the joe-pye weed, I planted a mix of coneflowers, black-eyed susans, and daisies. And next to them, I planted catnip. All of these things claim to want to be planted in early spring, so we’ll see. I haven’t done anything with the fourth part yet. I’ve kind of reserved it as a spot for the things I have left over once I get everything else planted in April.

I need to check, though. I think I’ve got one other kind of seed that wants to be started while it’s still cold. I might put some of that in that bed.

12. Oh, and I planted some peas. Just the ones I had left over from last year. If they come up, great. If not, no loss.

Edited to add:

13. Which I forgot to mention before lunch, dig out the stepping stones in the perennial bed and re-set them

14. After lunch, planted some columbine in the new bed.

15. Weeded the herb garden

16. Planted some mint in the herb garden

17. Tried to weed the front flower bed along the house. It kicked my butt.

18. Drinking a huge glass of water.

In Which I Shake My Fist at the Patriarchy

I thought this thought–“If Luke and Patience weren’t married until they got to Michigan, how did Patience get to Michigan?” A young man could, conceivably, take off by himself to live in the wilderness. A young white woman is not going to. She’s going to come with someone.

So, I look through all the Simmonses. None are the right age to have a daughter Patience’s age. But I’m looking at the census record for Cyrenius Simmons and who do I see not two lines above him? Abigail Semmons, says Ancestry.com. But it’s clearly Simmons. And she’s the right age to have kids Patience’s age. And there are two girls living in her household roughly the right age to be Patience.

I even found that Cyrenius had to petition the Michigan state government to give control of Abigail’s land to Abigail so that she could distribute it to her children. And so I reckoned that she was a widow. And what did I find? That her husband, Gamaliel Simmons, died in 1828, probably shortly after they got to Michigan and got their land settled.

I even found them back in New York, in Bristol, on the Phelps (& other dude) settlement. They went to church with a Luther Phillips, but I don’t know if that’s just a coincidence.

After Abigail got her land problems settled, she remarried, this time to Uriah Hungerford.

She HAS to be Patience’s mom. I am just almost so damn sure. But I’d like to see a better record of how her land got split up. If we found Luke and Patience living on part of it, there’d be no question.

I’m just not quite sure how to figure that out. I’ll have to dig some more.

But, Patriarchy, I shake my fist at you because, due to your nonsense, it’s very difficult to follow and figure out female ancestors. It shouldn’t be that hard to draw a line between Abigail and Patience, if there is one to draw, but there’s just a leap a tad too far for me to make.

Also, I haven’t heard back from the Oakland county folks, which annoys me.

On the other hand, talking some smack about these two seems to have shaken a few nuts loose.