This morning I walked the dog in light rain rather than sit down to write, then I trimmed grass around the flower beds.
This afternoon I worked in the yard transplanting clippings from Tradescantia pallida, better known as Purple Heart and Never Die plants more often known as Sedum.
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| Varieties of Never Die. |
I usually complete this task in the fall, but NO today since it rained us out of golf I decided to fidget and piddle rather than write. My dad called me Tizzy when I acted like this and couldn't sit still or focus.
Then I topped off the afternoon by exercising rather vigorously for 20 minutes.
All of this because I could not think of a way to express my emotions about the golf tournament I played in last week. The irony is that I played absolutely great golf for me. Perhaps I am still wrung out from four days of Tulsa heat and humidity.
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| WOGA Fundraiser at Cedar Ridge CC. |
I may not have found my writing heart, but I did find a funny project that is probably a piece of lost history or simply hysterically strange.
As a youngster, I admired my grandmother's skills at gardening. She filled her backyard, not in landscaping, but in straight lined rows of annual flowers, irises, and row after row of roses. In the front of the house she built rock gardens and planted several variations of what we now call Sedum. She called her plants "Never Die."
Seeing my Never Die and Irises
growing throughout my gardens, I smiled and realized that I have those plants because she introduced me to plants that survive in the dark rich prairie soil and in poor rocky soil like she remembered from Arkansas.
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| Never Die as it begins to bloom. |
She also taught me a treasured childhood trick of turning a Never Die leaf into a Frog's Tongue. A full blown Frog's Tongue. Read on and learn how to surprise your children and grandchildren.
* Pluck several healthy big leaves from the lower half of a stem. Wash them gently or wipe them off for health purposes.
Notice the two leaves on the far right have a different sheen to them. The silver or light color is the underside and it will be the skin that wrinkles and moves. (Creepy isn't.)
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| Notice the darker row of thumbprints. |
*Now select a leaf and carefully begin to squeeze
the front and back together. It makes no difference which side is up or down.
*Continue squeezing until the entire leaf is a
darker color. Then tear off the base, carefully
so as not to tear the skin.
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| Thumb prints on the leaf. |
*This next step is the trick. Gently, using your thumbs on the silver side of the leaf, wiggle or wriggle the skin back and forth, like you roll and wriggle the tomato skin when it is peeled. You can actually see the wrinkles.
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| Wrinkles on the leaf. |
*Now the fun part. Blow it up like a balloon. Almost, like a balloon. Only one side, with loose skin side will blow up. Slowly, put your lips over the open base and begin to blow. It may be that one side blows up and not the other. In that case squeeze places that are blocking the air flow. Once the tongue is inflated, press the opening together. The juice inside acts as a temporary glue to close it long enough to stick it in your mouth and pretend to have a fat green Frog's Tongue.
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| The ancient Frog's Tongue from the leaf of a Never Die plant. |
