Garden report - 5/28/2018

This Memorial Day has been a pleasant day.  My brother invited my sister and me to his house for a barbeque lunch.  It was a fun visit.  He showed off his vegetable garden, which is WAY ahead of my garden.  His squash plants are blooming, and he has pretty good-sized green tomatoes on the vines. 

Nanny invited us to supper about an hour after we came home from my brother's house.  After we'd cleaned up the dishes, I went outside, fired up the tiller, and re-tilled the three rows I opened up yesterday morning.  We set up another hog-wire fence for the green beans to run on (I planted tomatoes along last year's green bean fence), and planted a row of green beans on either side of it.  We planted one long row of butterbeans, and several hills of cucumbers.  The ground is damp enough that the seeds ought to sprout right on up.

That new fence might be a surprise for the deer that move across Nanny's back yard at night.  :)

First planting - 5/26/08

The rows I tilled up last week sat empty until yesterday.  When I got home from work, I looked over to the flower bed where I had set the tray of 24 tomato plants and 6 jalapeno pepper plants that I'd brought home a week earlier.  They were wilted.  BAD wilted.  I came straight into the house, put on my gardening shoes, and went to the garden.  Though the rows were still too wet to till, I did it, anyway, and when I got that soil loosened up, I mashed the tomatoes down in the mud an headed home.  It was supposed to rain again that night; Mother Nature could water them in, I thought.

Well, it didn't rain, but I guess there was already enough moisture in the mud, because when I went to check on them this morning, they were perked up.  I opened up two more rows with the tiller, planted the 6 jalapeno peppers, and came back home, intending to re-group and go back to the garden this evening, once the sun had dried up the rows a little bit. 

But, instead, I played Zelda with The Grandson.  :)

Speaking of Zelda, I'd like to give a big high five to the creators of that game (and, no, I am not being paid for this).  Zelda came out in the '80's, I believe, but I never played it until a few years ago, when I bought Skyward Sword for the grandchildren to play.  It is a "hero's quest" story - a theme as old as time - and it is fabulous.  The Grandson was too little to read the captions, so I sat with him while he played and read the words for him.  As soon as he went home, I grabbed the controller and started a new game for myself.  I was hooked like a fish.

There are a lot of fun things for kids to do in the game:  whack things with a sword, ride birds, chunk pumpkins, catch butterflies....  But Link, the hero, has to earn his equipment through hard work, and he has to learn how to use his tools before he can get anywhere.  He never, never kills another human, only monsters and troublesome things.  He does good things for people in his community.  This is the kind of game I am happy for the kids to play.

The latest Zelda - "Breath of the Wild" - came out in March last year, when the Nintendo Switch came out.  I raced out, bought the game, and then spent months trying to locate a Switch.   Finally found one in September.  This Zelda has lots of logic puzzles and side quests.    Even though I've already beaten the big bad guy at the end, I'm still solving puzzles and looking for hidden things.  The monsters are funny.  They sniff the air when they sense Link is around, and laugh at him when they deflect his hit.  And, best of all, they rejuvenate when the moon is right, so he can beat them up over and over.  ;)

The Grandson idolizes Link.  Now that he's a good reader, I'm going to find him some hero books. 

A Sad Day :( 5/23/2019

This morning, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and I am very, very sad.

My "baby boy" and his family are moving away today, and my heart is breaking.

We've known for quite some time that this day was coming.  Last summer, my son learned that his job position would be eliminated in the not-so-distant future, and he began looking for other employment.  He found a good job working for the same employer, but it required him to move to east Tennessee.  In March of this year, he started his new job.  Since it was so close to the end of the school year, his wife and children stayed behind to finish school, sell the house, and prepare for the move.  The separation has been hard on them all, and part of me is glad that my son and family will be together again.

But Tennessee is a long state, and from our home in the lower left-hand corner to their new home in the upper right-hand corner is almost 500 miles. 

For months, I've been telling myself that lots of parents/grandparents live far away from their children/grandchildren, that it is a situation that can be survived. 

Still . . . .

Breaking Ground - 5/15/2018

Work on this year's vegetable garden commenced yesterday.  I might have started sooner, but we had a cold, wet spring, plus I've been waiting for the farmer to do his Rounding-Up in the bean field so that the drift doesn't kill my garden plants.  He sprayed the field late last week, so yesterday I dragged the tiller out of the shed and tilled up a few rows.  One day this week, if it doesn't rain, I'm going to put some tomatoes, squash seeds, and green beans in the ground.

I am going to do what I did last year:  till up the rows, and mow the grass in the middles.  Last year, I got some of my rows too close to run the lawnmower between them.  Yesterday, I parked the lawnmower at the end of a row, parked the tiller beside it, sighted a tree at the other end of the garden, and aimed the tiller at it.  Hopefully, I got the distance right this time.  (My row is a little crooked, but Pop-Pop used to say, "You c'n plant more on a crooked row.")  I sprinkled some 6-12-12 down the rows and tilled it in. 

Before I plant anything, I want to put down some compost.  My sister gave me one of those tumbling things, and I have been working on compost since last fall.  I've made a big batch or two and have hemmed it up with four bales of hay placed in a square.  It's mostly kitchen waste, shredded cardboard boxes and paper, and dry leaves.  But it looks black and rich.  Getting it from my yard to the garden will be a job.  I'll have to wheelbarrow it across the road and down a long, bumpy gravel  driveway and will probably dump it before making it to the garden.   

On second thought, a wagon would work better for this, wouldn't it?  I may go shopping tomorrow.

Tomorrow may be a tough day.  We just got home from seeing the band Chicago perform live.  It's after midnight, and we both have to work tomorrow.  We arrived downtown early and had time to eat dinner and have a few drinks.  I had a couple more at the concert and butt-danced in my seat the whole time.  It was wonderful.  So I'm worn out and half loopy and ought to be in the bed instead of writing this, but I'm still sort of "juiced" in more ways than one.  :) 

From the back porch - 5/2/2018

I got my act together a little early this morning, and so there's time for a little porch-sitting before work.  Morning porch-sitting is the best.  Everything - even the wildlife - is fresh and rested, damp, fragrant.  Squirrels and birds and chipmunks dig and poke and scratch.

The birdhouse on the living room window is silent this morning; the babies have flown the nest.  As I was sitting on the porch Sunday evening, I heard a thump as one of the parent birds landed on the birdhouse roof with a bit of food in its beak.  Over the weekend, the bird parents had begun to feed their four babies from above, from the slanted roof of the birdhouse, instead of from the landing peg at the front of the box.  I guess it was coaxing the babies to poke their heads farther out of the nest.  In any case, one of the babies got over-eager and fell plumb out.  It caught itself on the window screen and clung there, chirping and fluttering, for a good five minutes as its parents flew back and forth, seemingly hysterical.

I watched this drama, trying to decide if the parents had wanted the baby to fall out of the nest and were praising it for a job well done and were calling out the rest of the siblings, or if they were well and truly panicked that one had left the nest prematurely.  The former seemed unlikely, as it was getting dark and, to me, a bad time to begin flight training.  All of the other babies were hunkered down in the box, chirping softly, as if they were saying to one another, "Gah!  Can you believe what Frankie did?  He's gonna get it when Mom gets home."  The parents continued to fly to the top of the birdhouse and chirp.  I could not tell what they were saying.  After a while they resumed feeding the remaining babies in the nest.  Meanwhile, the renegade baby continued to cling to the window screen, panting, exhausted.

Intervention seemed necessary.  I put on some gloves with the intention of gently capturing the baby and putting him back in the nest, but as I reached out, the baby squealed and fluttered to the ground ten feet away.  He hopped into a patch of daylilies at the back of the house and went silent.

The Husband had been watching all this from his recliner, and he came out, put on the gloves, and started scratching around in the daylilies, looking for the prodigal child.  The baby squawked and flapped and tumbled and finally grabbed hold of the vents on the A/C unit, and The Husband gently caught him and eased him back in the hole in the front of the box.  When he turned the bird loose, one of its little toothpick legs was left hanging limply out of the hole.  I gently pushed it in with my forefinger.  The bird did not move.

After a few seconds, I began to worry.  Was the baby bird in shock?  Had it passed out cold from fear?  Was it dead?  If so, would it smother one or more of its siblings?  I watched as the parents flew back and forth with food.  First, two heads poked out from beneath the stunned/dead bird, then three.  But little number 4 remained still, piled atop his siblings.

I worried about this all day yesterday.  Should we not have intervened?

When I got home from work, the nest was empty, as far as I could tell (the hole in the house is a little too high off the ground for me to see into it).  I didn't see a bird carcass on the ground, so I assumed that either the baby had eventually "come to" and was happily flying with its family, or it had not survived and had been eaten by a scavenger (or, worse, was decomposing in the nest). 

I am happy to report that, by the end of the evening, we learned that all four babies had survived.  About dusk, I heard a thump as mama bird landed atop the birdhouse.  Soon, four fluffy little babies came careening in, like tiny kamikaze planes.  They all missed the landing peg and briefly velcroed themselves to the porch- and window-screens until they could re-orient and flutter back into their home.  I guessed they hadn't quite perfected their navigation skills.  I don't know if they spent the night in there or not, but they're not at home this morning.

And, with that, I find that I am no longer running early for work.