Random selection challenge

The 4th of the 4th challenge was fun, but how does one take the next step? What is the next step? Random selection. Open any photo folder and without using thumbnails, without reading titles, randomly select a picture and write about it.

Okay, here goes. Hm, more of a challenge than I anticipated. The first selection was data (can't imagine how it got there). The second was a picture sent to me that I cannot use here (no, it's not one of those). The one on the right is the third attempt and may prove more of a challenge than I wanted.

Ruth and I bought a house in Mount Holly, New Jersey in the 1990s. It had a small backyard, no front yard and one ten foot wide side yard. The house was post Victorian and had, during the mid-20th century, been used as a general store, toy store and candy store. Not necessarily in that order.

I grew up in a New York suburb with more lawn than any preteen or teenage boy might want to tend from spring to autumn. Some years I felt certain that I spent more time mowing, raking, edging and clipping tall grass around trees and garden borders (we didn't have power tools for these chores) than I spent enjoying summer vacation in ways I thought were fun.

When we moved into our Mount Holly home, I told Ruth that although we had a patch of lawn about fifty by fifty, that was fifty by fifty too much for me. Thankfully, she agreed, and we removed every useless blade of grass out there and replace the lawn with a garden.

The garden would've been difficult to tend without some kind of walkway, so we purchased the stones you see in the picture and divided the yard into quarters. In the top right hand corner you can see the fish pond we dug and installed for a finishing touch, stocked with Koa and some plants and one other species of fish, the name of which, I don't recall (truth be told, I hate using Latin designations for anything. A rose is a rose by any other name unless it's in Latin, and then who know what it is).

Perhaps the gardens required more effort than mowing a lawn weekly, but once planted with roses and other flowering plants, it looked and smelled great. The fish thrived and had young several times.

I do have one warning to share. Never never plant Oregano without borders and I mean the type of borders that will block roots from spreading outside the designated area. The second year after I planted a small herb garden, with a tiny patch of Oregano, it invaded and took over the entire yard. I was pulling it up for months and found out that no one wanted fresh Oregano. Guess they had herb gardens of their own.