Mucking about in the yard

Today we visited our local cooperative extension office. This is part of a national system of agricultural public education offices related to universities, in our case Cornell. Among other things they build demonstration gardens (in fact there's one at our kids' school) and they are a great source of information on all things horticultural. Once a year ours holds a plant sale, and today was the day.

It was not unlike the annual plant sale in Linton - bargain plants a-plenty - though here each one came with a very informative label telling you exactly how and where to plant it. As at the Linton sale, early birds nabbed all the best stuff, but I still came away with a box of good seedlings for our front borders, and the Girl rated the refreshments highly: the cooperative extension hotdog goes straight in at number two on her top ten chart.

In the afternoon we dug some dirt in preparation for a small vegetable patch. We found a small hairy creature in the yard, but she turned out to be quite handy with a trowel, so that was good.

By the way, we skyped with Royal Rockfish and her boys this morning and according to her our kids sound so American they are almost unrecognizable. We don't hear it (well, only a bit) because we are surrounded by much stronger accents, so I was quite surprised. Are we really turning American? You gotta be kidding me!