Garden in the sky

After more than two weeks of too many tech hassles, I'm finally catching up. Several of you have blogs I like to visit and I've been delinquent: I will start to visit them again now.

I don't want to bore those of you who are not really interested in gardens with the details of my itching-to-be-green thumb life, and yet and I like writing about life in the dirt lane. I'm starting a weekly garden blog, called "Garden in the sky," at GenevaLunch. The first one goes up in about an hour so check it out and revisit, please, if you like looking at bugs and wilted and chomped-on leaves.

I'll continue to put pretty flowers here, such as this [Blogger is not accepting photos right now, so I will add it later] bourache from the mountain garden. They love the sun and do a good job of growing so thickly the weeds don't get past them, so I sow them around the edge of the vegetable garden. After two years they've starting resowing themselves, which is useful of them.
I might continue to post the occasional interesting creature, like this one:

The dreaded potato bug!

Which reminds me that Christopher in Hawaii wrote a comment about learning to resize photos, and how he doesn't have a camera with a lens that does close-ups like this. You can still do wonderful photos without this level of macro photography, and for training the eye to "see" photos a normal lens is still the best. I love being able to zoom in on nature like this (I once tried my own eye and wouldn't recommend that to anyone over about age 8). It's turned out to be a useful if expensive tool, rather than just a toy, because I have learned a lot about bugs this way. I missed most of biology class at age 15 due to distractions, and now I am astonished to see that there is a whole miniature universe buzzing away, with its own set of wars and bullies, beauty queens and so on. It's oddly comforting.

Christopher, your camera says it has a certain number of MP rather than MB because it is referring to megapixels rather than megabytes. I like about.com for all kinds of explanations, and I think this one is good if you are trying to understand what you have or are trying to decide on the number you need if you're buying a camera.

I've been busy developing GenevaLunch, the Lake Geneva region news and information site, and it's starting to take off. For the week that ended today we had nearly 500 new visitors and they visited nearly 1,600 pages, which is very exciting.

Today I also caught up on my posts for the Tribune de Geneve, Geneva's largest newspaper, where I write the only English-language blog. I posted something about chocolate because it's in the news here in Switzerland. I have something there tomorrow about the perfect (Iowa) burger, a tribute to American holiday food and growing up in Iowa. And that reminded me that it's been too long since I visited Don in Iowa, a gardener who lives in Iowa City, not far from the towns where I grew up. He has one of the most beautiful gardens I've seen, if his daily flower shots are anything to judge by. He also has extremely cute cats who make guest appearances now and again.

Don grows day lilies, or hemerocallis, which I'm just learning how to grow. I was excited to read that if he had a large sunny spot that's what he would plant. They are beautiful: I have a few but they won't bloom for another three weeks at my altitude in the Alps. And I do have a large sunny slope, where poppies and cornflower and daisies are starting to lose their color.