We cleaned the half-gallon of saskatoon berries gleaned from the bushes along our driveway, and last night at 2 a.m. when unable to sleep I threw a handful into my granola. Whoa! Fantastico. So I want to dry the berries and substitute them for the raisins called for by the recipe.

(for which, organic, they are charging $6.99 for a cup and a half at the Co-op store and rinsing and draining isn't good enough, you have to pick through for actual sticks; goddamn raisins, dirtiest things on the planet; obviously i am due a trip to Steep Hill this weekend when we're in the city, for a better price)

I'm guessing here. I have no fruit dryer, but it is a cool day -- kathy starts to love cool days, i never thought i'd see it in my lifetime -- so the oven is an option. what, just lay them out and dry them at a very low heat, like say 150F? and i wonder how many hours, how dry they'd need to be. i can keep them in the deep freeze.

Never heard of dried strawberries. You?

I'm going planting flowers again today. Spent a couple hours at it yesterday aft 'neath a gray sky, lovely cool comfort. Wisely did not come home with more plants, as I have yet to decide where to make a bed for the hostas and the purple thing remaining from the last four trays Marilou gave me on Saturday.

It took till Tuesday to get most of them into the ground, but voila Scott came along and in 20 minutes did what takes me about an hour to do: put the edging into the ground along the crescent-moon shape of the flowerbed I made. Damn he's good.

It is late in the season for planting but M has so many perennials that must be saved, that I took pity on her and them and offered to help. I've spent two afternoons over there so far. We don't talk much, we just dig and place and pat.

Her yard is a splendiforous overflowing abundance of colour and there are so many flowers left to plant that it is mindboggling but oh what fun to stick flowers into the ground however you like and have such a variety to choose from. I am having a wonderful time, and so satisfied at the end of the day to look at the filled flowerbeds and imagine them less bedraggled and blossoming into glory.

There are so many leftover greenhouse flowers that we are forced to concentrate on the perennials and forget about the platoons of annuals for now.

I brought home brown-eyed susans, daylilies, lambs ear, blazing stars, speedwell and lilies and put them, all but the latter, together in the new bed. There were purple daisies and yellow dried-buttercup things to add to the potsful I already had sitting near the doorstep.