Onions & Broccoli

Last week at the get-it-all store, I picked up a bag of Siberian iris roots, a bag of daylily roots, and a sack of onion bulbs.  I intended to plant the onion bulbs in the beetless end of the horse trough, but when I poked my finger in the dirt I discovered it was frozen solid about 1" below the surface.  I put the bulbs away until yesterday when the weather made me feel like I ought to be gardening.  I also set out the iris and the daylilies, and started a batch of broccoli seeds. 

That little bit of digging made my out-of-shape self a little bit sore in the get-along when I got out of bed this morning.  After breakfast, I decided the thing to do might be to work the soreness out.  So I put on my gloves and my hat and went outside to pick up limb debris from the ice storm, rake some leaves, etc.  The Husband came out with his chainsaw, and together we worked all day.

We are already regretting it.  Every significant movement is accompanied by an agonized groan.  We may not be able to get out of bed in the morning.

But the yard sure looks better.  The flower bed along the back of the house has been taken over by ivy, but I got in there and raked and ripped and pulled as much of it out as I could.  Now, that bed is down to bare, rich dirt.  If I can keep it that way until it's time to plant flowers, it'll be lovely. 

Crazy Weather

When I left off writing last week, I'd just spent a weekend doing outdoor gardening.  It was warm enough that I sweated without a coat.  About 4 p.m. Sunday, I looked out of my kitchen window to find ice forming on the trees.  By the next morning, the trees were so heavy with ice that they were bending and breaking. 

Monday afternoon, as I was in the kitchen, pondering what to do about supper, I heard a CRACK! like a pistol shot, and a WHOOSH! and a sound like a thousand martini glasses crashing off a shelf.  I ran to the window in time to see the last of the ice shards cascading to the ground, right on top of the crippled leaf sweeper I'd parked under the trees.  The leaf sweeper was flat as a pancake under a huge limb. 

It snowed Friday night, came down pretty fast for a while, but only piled up a couple of inches, altogether.  Today, the temperatures rose, the snow mostly disappeared, and we have been hearing ice raining out of the trees.

And I've just been piddling around the house, thinking about how all that good moisture is going to flatten the leaves I've piled up in the middles, and soak the straw and newspapers and alfalfa pellets I've put atop the rows, and make my garden a rich paradise by spring.  ;)

More Straw

It has been warm here for the past couple of days, but tomorrow the weather is supposed to get crazy (again).  I wanted to put more newspaper and straw on my planting rows before it starts raining.  My boss has been saving her newspapers for me, as has Nanny, and so yesterday when I got busy in the garden I had enough newspaper to finish using up the straw  I bought last weekend.  Those 10 bales of straw covered about 3-1/2 rows, probably 1/4 of the garden. 

Since The Husband was going to town this morning, I sweet-talked him into going to the farm store for more straw.  While he was gone, I hitched the lawn sweeper to my 4-wheeler and started gathering leaves from the yard to dump on the garden, thinking I'd rake it into the middles for weed control.  I made about 4 trips from the house to the garden before the sweeper quit working.  The Husband arrived back at home with a truck bed of straw about that time.  We took the sweeper apart and discovered that a plastic gear had cracked in two places, and some of the teeth were worn down, and it apparently doesn't have enough oomph to turn the brushes.  I searched online and called stores; evidently, replacement parts of this sort are not available.  Looks like we'll be shopping for a new lawn sweeper, and it needs to happen in time to let me get more leaves on the garden before spring arrives.

We unloaded our 10 new bales of straw and started distributing it down the rows.  Ran out of newspaper again, and quit.  The Sunday paper might finish up the straw bales.