Crowder Peas

Just logging for the record that we planted black crowder peas and purple crowder peas today.  Also fertilized the tomatoes and squash.

The Husband got the tire back onto the tiller and put some fix-a-flat in it.  Maybe that'll hold it for a while.

The Grandson picked several green tomatoes when we weren't looking.  What the heck, we fried 'em up and munched on them while the burgers and hot dogs were on the grill.  But I did have a serious discussion with Mr. Three-Year-Old about not picking the tomatoes until they're big and red.

Memorial Day Weekend

It's been a busy weekend around here, both in and out of the garden.  My son and his family, who have been living over an hour away from here, moved back home this weekend.  While we were not to be directly involved with the move, we had committed ourselves to some babysitting, and so Saturday morning, we got busy with our errands before the young'uns arrived.  The first thing we had to do was retrieve the big red tiller and the push mower from the repair shop.  The minute we unloaded it, I gave the cord a yank, and it fired right off.  YES! 

Later in the afternoon, I took a grandson across the road to visit Nanny and Pop-Pop.  We found Pop-Pop on the tractor, disking the back section of the big garden, where the rain and the trenching and the grass had impeded our bean planting.  Seeing that he had the disk hooked up to the tractor, I asked The Husband if he would please run the disk across the un-planted, un-tilled area of the early garden so that I could plant some cucumbers.  He said he would, and this morning, after the grandsons went home, he kept his word.  While he did the disking, I picked the rest of the sweet peas and pulled up their support stakes, intending to till the vines into the soil and plant something else in their place. 

When the disking was finished, The Husband brought the big red tiller up to the early garden.  As it was high noon by this time, I suggested we wait until later in the day to to the tilling.  The Husband readily agreed.  Then, about 4 p.m., he vacated the premises, entirely, to go to a skeet shoot (the nerve of him, eh?).  I decided that I would surprise him by going ahead and tilling the early garden before he came home.

The tiller cranked up easily, but it kept quitting.  Remembering from last year that the tiller appreciated a full tank of gas, I hoofed it back to my house to get the gas can.  Naturally, the gas can was empty.  I tossed it in my Jeep and went to the store to fill it.  Topping off the gas made the tiller run without quitting, and I made pretty quick work of tilling the area that The Husband had disked.  I then steered the tiller over to the sweet pea rows.  I hadn't gone 10 feet before the left tire came off the rim. 

I pushed the tiller back to Pop-Pop's house.  With the tire half off the rim, the tiller kept wanting to go left when I wanted to go straight.  I probably ruined the tire trying to wrestle the tiller down the long driveway to the workshop.

I am so tired of ragged-assed, second-hand, piece-of-sh*t garden equipment that has to be worked on TWICE before any job is completed.

At least the cucumbers got planted.  Tomorrow, we plant green beans and black crowder peas, if we can get the tire back on the rim.

Pea Pickin'

I told you I was going to have sweet peas this year.  Feast your eyes on my first little harvest. 
They'll need picking again in a few days, and then they will probably have "done their do," as my mother says.

It'll be interesting to see how many shelled peas I get.  ;)

Nanny and I planted 18 more tomatoes today, replacing most of the ones that drowned in the rain a few weeks ago.  We have tennis-ball sized tomatoes on a few of the older vines, a couple of which are beginning to ripen.

The broccoli and cabbage are making heads.  I expect to harvest broccoli in a week.

Well, I tried....

True to yesterday's resolution (about tending the garden), as soon as breakfast was done, The Husband and I got busy trying to crank the big red tiller.  We huffed it full of starter fluid until the can was empty, and it would fire off, time after time, but would not continue to run once it had burned up the starter fluid.  When we ran out of starter fluid, we used gas, instead; same deal.  We finally gave up and pushed it down Pop-Pop's l-o-n-g driveway, thinking he might have some ideas.  He didn't.

Standing in his workshop, I looked around at the various lawnmowers, tillers, and weedeaters that he'd taken apart, and thought to myself, He'll never get all this stuff fixed.  I talked The Husband into going back to our house for the truck, and, using Pop-Pop's hydraulic lifting thing (a come-along?), we loaded the big tiller and our push mower (which Pop-Pop has been tinkering on for two weeks) into the truck and hauled them to a repair shop. 

While waiting for the truck, I noticed the four unfinished cabinets that I'd bought last year and stored in Pop-Pop's shed until I could get time to paint them.  They've been sitting there, collecting dust and spare parts, taking up precious floor space in the shed.  When we came back from the repair shop, we loaded the cabinets into the truck and brought them to our patio.  "What are you going to do if it rains?" The Husband asked me.  I looked at him as if he'd lost his mind.  The sun was shining, the sky was blue.  "It's not going to rain!" I told him. 

We finished up a little yardwork - some weed-eating and sawing off some low tree limbs - and started to work on the cabinets.  Before I'd finished sanding the first one, it rained.  We grabbed the cabinets and rushed into the kitchen with them.  By the time we'd gotten them all indoors, the rain stopped.  We hauled them back out again, finished the sanding, and slapped two coats of paint on them.  Two down, two to go.  I have some plywood to use for the tops.  It'll need to be cut to size, but Pop-Pop has a saw for that.   Tomorrow, we'll go to the home repair store, buy some tile to lay atop the plywood, and (hopefully) find a book or internet instructions on how to lay tile.

Mid-Season Resolution

I feel so bad. 

Last night, Nanny popped in for a minute, and in the course of the conversation, she mentioned that she had tilled the big garden, the terribly grassy one, the one that had been too wet to till only two days ago. 

I feel bad, because Nanny has no business running the tiller.  She's a little Smurf of a woman (except that she's not blue).  She had major surgery this time last year.  She does not need to be dragged and shaken. 

So I'm going to have to do a better job at tending the garden, to beat her to the tiller. 

While I was out and about yesterday, I picked up 18 more tomato plants for the big garden.  Today, I need to find some green bean seeds so that we can re-plant, as our first planting was under-water too long and did not come up.  Also, there are black crowder pea seeds coming; we'll need to fix rows for those, as soon as Pop-Pop gets through with his earthwork.  We still haven't planted any butterbeans.  And I have a package of "dinosaur gourd" seeds to plant.

I'd best get busy.

Mid-May Maintenance

We've been away on a trip for a few days, and the first thing I did yesterday afternoon when we got home was to walk across the road and check on the early garden.  During the few days that I was gone, everything grew like crazy, including the grass in the middles.  Some of the tomatoes plants have small green tomatoes on them.  AND - [sound the fanfare] - the sweet peas that were blooming when I left now have fat pods on them.  Wahoooooo!  Sweet peas!  But the worms are after my cabbages, broccoli, and brussels sprouts. 

I decided that I'd better drag out the little black plow and do some weeding today.  Thinking that I ought to assess both gardens to see how much work was in store, I went down to Nanny's to check out the big garden before I left for work.

The squash is doing fine, and the flowers we planted in the front row are growing nicely.  But we've lost all but about a dozen of the tomato plants to the rain, and the purple hull peas are thinking they've had about all the water they want for a while.  The grass is loving it, though; the middles are solid green and desperately need weeding, but it's too wet to work the soil.  I'm not even going to show a picture of this garden until it looks a little better.

In my absence, Pop-Pop put a blade on the tractor and dug a ditch from the center of the big garden to the edge of the woods to create a drain for the water.  (I bet Nanny about had a fit when he dug that trench across their back yard.)  He also pushed some dirt around from the high spots to the low ones.  Thank goodness we hadn't planted anything in that part of the garden, yet. 

After work today, I fired up the tiller and did the weeding, then I put cages around the 9 tomato plants in the early garden.  I smashed some worms on the cruciferous veggies, and planted a couple of hills of yellow squash and one hill of cantaloupes.  The squash and cantaloupe seeds I found are about 10 years old; let's see if a gardening miracle will happen.  If not, I'll be looking for fresh seeds in about a week.

As I was tilling, I noticed that one of the tines was not rotating.  I shut off the engine and tipped it over to un-wind the grass from around it, and discovered that the pin is missing from the tine.  I looked around for it, but didn't find it, so after I finished my gardening chores, I took the tiller to Pop-Pop.  He said that he has a pin, and will get around to fixing the tine in a day or two.  Maybe by then the big garden will be dry enough to work.

While I was shooting the bull with Pop-Pop, Nanny came out of the house and joined us in the shed.  She asked if there was any gas for the lawn-mower.  Pop-Pop said he was just about to fill the tank and start mowing. 

"Oh, not TODAY," she said.  "It'll be all grown up again by Saturday."

"What's Saturday?" he asked.

"Just Saturday," she said, meaning there was no special event, no reason why the yard needed to look particularly nice that day.  "But it'll be all grown up again by then."

"Well, if I wait until Saturday to mow, the grass will be knee deep."  He climbed onto the lawn-mower and reached down to crank it.  I decided it was time for me to make my exit.

"Don't you want to hang around for the rest of the argument?" Nanny asked me as I started toward the driveway.

"No, ma'am, I know how it'll end."

About that time, the lawn-mower engine fired up.  Just as I had expected.  ;)

My Garden Needs Waders

After supper last night, I rode my bike down to the garden to see how it was faring. 

Ugh.  It's not pretty.

Most of the tomatoes are yellow and limp, victims of the standing water in the garden.  I don't know whether I should yank them out and re-plant or wait to see what these will do when the ground dries.  One or two of the poor, sickly things even have small tomatoes on them.

The squash, okra, and purple-hull peas are up.  Two of the squash hills may need replanting.  It's odd to me that I planted all of the hills on the same day, with the same package of seeds, five seeds to a hill, and some of the hills have four to five plants in them, and some have none at all.  Maybe it's Mother Nature's way of telling me, "Dont plant everything at once, dingbat."  I had thought about transplanting from the crowded hills to the empty ones, but, on second thought, it might be interesting to plant new seeds and see whether they make a later crop or catch up with the old ones planted several weeks ago.

On the front row of the garden, we planted sunflowers (both giant and dwarf), zinnas, and marigolds.  Those seeds have sprouted well all the way down the row and should be very pretty this summer, if we can keep the grass out.

In the early garden, some of the broad beans are acting weird (the leaves are turning a funny color, and the tops look withered); others are fine, so far.  The sweet peas are beginning to bloom. 

Oh, and I found some larkspur seedlings yesterday!  There might have been more had I not given up on them and trampled that row.

I finally got around to setting out the pale, leggy stevia plant that spent a week in my car then a week on my kitchen counter.  My sister thinks we should use it to invent a sugar-free margarita.  I think any idea with the word "margarita" in it is worthy of investigation.  ;)

Rain and more rain

Boy, howdy, has it ever rained!

The rain started some time after I went to bed last night.  When I looked out of my kitchen window this morning, water was streaming across my patio.  A little while later, my brother-in-law stopped by and reported that the creek between our two houses was out of its banks and had swept away things in his yard, including a 4-wheeler.  (As I am uphill of the creek and had not been outside, I had not seen the flood.)  Before long, other family members were calling to warn us about flooded roads, and friends were sending pictures of flooded neighborhoods.  Tonight, the local news reported that we'd received about 10" of rain since yesterday, and that many homes in the area had been evacuated because of flooding.  There have been several flood-related deaths across the state.  More rain is predicted for tomorrow.  My heart goes out to those families who are grieving and displaced.  I pray that no more damage occurs.

About 5 p.m., during a break in the rain, I went to the early garden to pull up a few green onions and some parsley for a salad.  Since the early garden is on a hill, it was not terribly muddy, and nothing looked drowned.  I managed to get to the onions and parsley without losing my shoes in the mud.  The big garden, however, is on a flat spot, and I am worried that it is standing in water.  When I checked it a couple of days ago, the squash seeds were beginning to sprout.  I am keeping my fingers crossed that we will not lose them to the rain, as we did last year.