Stupid Earth and its Stupid Axis

The best way to describe my backyard is a very small prison yard. There are fences on two sides and buildings around the rest. Throw in a drainage issue and you've got Prison Break written all over it.

Now is where I have to admit that I like this space a lot. It has four trees and lots of shade so it is cool when the rest of Florida is hot. It also has great sandy soil that makes for easy digging and eventual drainage. And it's easy to stuff a bunch of plants in here and go for an all out Tarzan jungle look, which is my favorite kind of look.

But life in the jungle is not always easy. There are the obvious: mosquitos and slugs and the occasional deluge when the prison warden forgets about her sprinkler running for about 3 hours and causes the waters to rise way above flood stage.

Then there are the super-obvious, which is the most likely to be overlooked. Namely the earth spinning on its axis.

I spent yesterday replanting the already planted. I hate transplanting. I'm always impatient to get the digging over with and usually leave some portion of very necessary roots behind. Usually I like to dig, but an established plant is so different from a plant from the garden center.

The latter is all trimmed up and fit ad ready to go. The established plant has beautiful foliage that is draping right over the area where I need to stick the shovel. I don't want to trim it, but it's getting in the way, dammit... well, you can see how this goes.

Yesterday was no different, so it was really burning me that the reason for all work was the earth's axis. I kind of forgot last November that the sun's patterns occasionally change. A lot. Usually every year or so. It's not so obvious in the front yard, which is about 101 degrees and in full sun 9 months out of the year.

But the backyard is all walls and fences and trees. The light shifts. Suddenly a corner becomes full sun for 6 hours a day. And there I am, in the only shaft of light in the backyard, rescuing my ginger before it bursts into flames and cursing up a storm.

Stupid seasons. Stupid planet.