Late June Gardening

After work yesterday I stopped by the garden to check on the tomatoes, squash, peppers, and beans that I planted a couple of weeks ago.  Nanny - bless her! - had chopped out the rows, and they were clean for 6" on both sides of the plants, but the middles (which I'd made wide enough for a pushmower ) were calf-high with grass.  I dragged out the mower and mowed the middles for the first time.  My plowing and planting and Nanny's chopping had left ridges of dirt on both sides of the rows that hindered my progress like speed bumps in a parking lot.  The mower blades raised up a veritable dust storm around me as they sheared off the humps.  Thank goodness for the nice breeze that blew the dust away enough for me to see what I was doing.

In my last post, I think I mentioned the furrow attachment I'd put on the big tiller on planting day.  When I used it for the first time, I didn't know whether to plant in the furrow or in the dirt that piled up along the trench.  Ultimately, I raked most of the dirt back into the trenches and planted in the furrow.  Now that the dirt has settled a bit, the rows are slightly sunken, but the dirt is still loose enough to pull up the grass and morning glories by the roots.

After I mowed, I watered the rows with the garden hose, aiming the stream directly into the trenches, avoiding the middles.  The water soaked right into the soil instead of running off  the way it used to do.  And, look here, BONUS: the mown-grass middles acted as sidewalks, and I didn't mar up ankle deep in mud as happens when I use the tiller to weed the middles.  This "mown middles" thing may actually work if we can keep the grass out of the rows.

In a couple of weeks, I am going to plant some green beans, and maybe a few more tomatoes.

The raised beds in the back yard . . . . . . .  Although the dirt with which we filled them was labeled "garden soil," it seems to be about half mulch, and it dries up an hour after it's watered, and it seems to contain no nutrients at all.  Even the zinnias and cosmos I planted in one of the beds are spindly and pale, and they'll just about grow on asphalt!  Last week, whatever bug/worm that eats cruciferous vegetables hatched out and have eaten my kale and brussels sprouts down to their spines.  I am going to leave them there and see if they put out again once the bugs go away.  Meanwhile, I've scattered more zinnia seeds and some basil seeds between the plant skeletons, to see if I can raise SOMETHING in those beds.  Very late in the summer, I'll try planting greens again.

June 2016 - Checking In

I said I wasn't going to plant a garden this year, as my efforts in the previous few years were miserable failures.  But you know how it goes: the spring bulbs bloom, you get that first whiff of spring in your nose, and the dirt starts callin' your name.  At least, it calls mine.

Anyway....

A couple of months ago, I set some raised beds just outside the porch in the only sunny spot in my yard and the grandchildren and I planted salad fixings in them.  I think I told you about that.  And I think I told you about the critter that ate it all up.

The critter eventually left the veggies alone.  He probably found better wild things to eat once the weather warmed up.  The salads regenerated a little, but they were all stunted, and they all bolted. The spinach looks like little tufted green matchsticks.  We did get to eat a little kale.  I also tried slicing up the brussels sprouts leaves and sauteing them along with the kale, but, though they were small, they were old and tough, and it was like eating rubber bands.

The one success is the green onions.  I have been planting the root ends of store-bought green onions, and I'm danged if they haven't grown.  I also planted the root end of celery, and it came up and grew nicely until the critter came back and dug it up, the sh*thead.  In any case, I haven't bought green onions in AGES, because every time I pull one up to use it, I put that root end back in the ground, and it grows again.  It's magic, I tell you.

Anyway....  So I wasn't going to plant a real garden this year.  I had too much else to do.  The grandchildren had ballgames almost every evening from March until early June, and I wanted to watch them play instead of working a garden.  I braved-up and rented a tiny corner in an antique mall where I plan to try to sell some of the junk I craft, and when I wasn't at the ball field I was busy manufacturing some inventory for the booth.  And to top it all off, it rained at my house every time the soil *almost* got dry enough to plant.  

But at one of the girls' final games, Uncle Jack (who was there to see his own granddaughters play) told me about the garden he'd just planted and shamed me into thinking about planting one.  I pondered it for a while before I bought any plants or seeds, but I eventually gave in and set out 6 tomato plants, four or five squash, some peppers, three rows of purple hull peas, and two rows of butterbeans.  If I weren't so tired tonight, I'd tell you about planting day, and the furrow attachment I bought for the big black tiller, and how it doesn't work so well if you put it on backwards....  Or I'd tell you about the wide middles, and how I intend to MOW them instead of weed them.  Maybe we'll save that discussion for when I've seen how that's going to work.

Today has been crazy.  It's gone from extremely pissy to absolutely marvelous.  At least it ended on a wondrous note.  I have a couple of days off from work, and I planned to spend them embroidering things to sell in my booth - pillows and towels and such.  I started early with a firm plan, a do-able list.  First up was a set of pillow cases on which I intended to embroider a design I downloaded off the internet.  My sewing machine ate up the first pillow case.  I thought it was the fault of the design, so I loaded up one of my own designs which I'd sewn before and KNEW would sew well, and ate up three pillow covers before I finally realized the sewing machine, itself, was the culprit.  It had been acting funny for some time, but I'd been limping along with it.  The last thing I wanted today, of all days, was to put the machine in the repair shop, but it had to happen.  I stopped what I was doing, showered, loaded up the sewing machine, and set out for the repair shop, which is about 35 miles away.

Halfway there, I went through a drive-in window to get a biscuit, and my Jeep over-heated while I waited in line.  Once it got moving again, the temp went back to normal, but I began to think about my usual route, which is riddled with stop lights, and decided that I should perhaps take the longer highway route so my Jeep wouldn't overheat again.  I'd never driven that route, but, hey, I had my cell phone lady to direct me, She took me down a two-lane highway that must've threadedplumb into Mississippi, a road with which I was unfamiliar.  (I flat ran one 4-way stop sign, and got some interesting sign language from some of the other drivers.)  It ended up being a 50-mile trip instead of a 35 mile trip.

I spent the drive time thinking about my sewing machine - probably that's why I didn't see the stop sign.  The last time I had it serviced, it didn't get fixed all the way.  The feed dogs are simply worn out, and a replacement part would have cost $800, not counting labor, to fix them.  The technician showed me a way to kind of "jimmy" them, but I feared I had jimmied them to their limit. I decided I was not going to spend more than $250 on that poor worn-out machine this go-round.

Did I mention the repair shop also SELLS machines?

I left the old machine to be fixed, but came home with a brand new kickass machine.  I could not WAIT to get home and put it to work.

As soon as I got home and set up the machine, Nanny called and asked if I was going to the program.

What program????

Vacation Bible School.  All three of the granddaughters were going to be in it.  Tonight.  At 6:30, but the girls had to be home by 4:30 to change clothes.  And Nanny was supposed to man the cookie/Kool-Aid tables.  She was sure she had told me.  (She had NOT told me, but who would expect her to be in her right mind after having had a house full of little kids for over 24 hours.)

She didn't ask for my help, but I knew she needed it, so I turned off the machine and went to help her herd children to Vacation Bible School.

Bless her heart.

A storm blew in about the time VBS was over with and we were taking the kids back to their parents. Nasty-looking clouds, lightning streaking across the sky, but there was a shaft of bright sun shining beneath the clouds, and, behold, a double rainbow appeared in the sky.  It was awesome.

I came home and fired up the machine just a little bit.
This.
Thing.
Is.
Bad.
Ass.