dead things, mikey, dead things

Not the kind of dead things that these guys found:

(The Goonies)

But instead, the kind that are all around my yard.  While I have been enjoying myself on the beach on Fire Island, or at least sitting in the office studying for the GRE, summer has arrived.  With summer, comes heat, and with heat, comes dead flowers.  All those pretty spring blooms on my flowering shrubs have been replaced by this stuff:

As a result, just as it heats up into the eighties, I have to dead head and make a date with the hedge trimmers.  I tried to ignore this chore, until I was reminded by A Way to Garden that if you wait too long to prune, you risk ruining next years blooms, as the buds will already have formed.

As you may know, I like to think of the garden as kind of a metaphor for life.  So I'm taking in this lesson, and reflecting on my decision to leave my job when I did -- cutting away the dead, no-longer-useful parts of the plant, so they don't continue to suck nutrients -- in order to give next year's blooms and leaves a little room to breathe, and keeping things nice and neat-looking in the meantime.

By the way, it's also TOMATO TIME in my neck of the woods, so (in keeping with my garden-as-metaphor) I get to do some fun planting as well -- although I have run out of room in the sunny zones of my yard and think I'll need to put the summer tomatoes and peppers in pots on the deck this year.