Mother Nature blessed us with a much-needed rain, a good "soaker," last Sunday night. It brought up the squash seeds I'd planted earlier in the week, along with a gazillion morning glories and a right smart stand of grass. The ground is still too wet to work. Yesterday, Nanny said she went to the garden to chop the grass away from the volunteer tomatoes, lost both of her shoes in the mud, and nearly fell on her butt trying to heave them out. I guess I forgot to show her the secret "paths" that I'd purposefully left un-tilled just to prevent such occurrences.
Speaking of the volunteer tomatoes, watching them is amazing. They sprang up from last year's crop of mostly heirloom tomatoes - Bradley, Roma, Arkansas Traveler, and maybe Juliette, which I believe is a hybrid. They've been dug amongst and dislodged - that is, we've given away plants and pulled up plants to thin the row. They took a hit from a light frost in March and got blasted with tiller exhaust last week. They haven't been fertilized. Yet, they sit there amongst the spring weeds, a little discolored and stunted, their stems thick and already bearing fruit, while the store-bought tomatoes on the other side of the garden spend their time primping their foliage instead of thinking about blooming. More are coming up every day. So far, I can tell only that they will be round tomatoes and oval tomatoes. In a perfect world, the big, meaty Bradley will have made its way over to a cute little Roma to give us big, tasty, oval offspring. ;)
Likewise, the volunteer butterpeas and cucumbers are established and tough. The butterpeas are growing on a row of clumpy ground that was plowed and disked but was never finely tilled. The crop is at least as thick as it would have been if I had done the planting, maybe even thicker. Only one or two cucumbers sprang up, and they may turn out to be squash-cumbers since their former neighbors were zucchini, but I bet they will eat just fine.
The red lettuce that came up last fall and survived the winter is now beginning to bolt. The plants sit among low-growing weeds on ground that was neither plowed nor tilled this year. I'm going to let them go to seed again and see what next year brings.
It seems like every summer our refrigerator wants to cause trouble. It has already started this year. Last Saturday, water squirted out of the ice dispenser, which led to the discovery that the refrigerator wasn't cooling. The Husband called the Sears repair hotline right away (the first available appointment was Tuesday, "between the hours of 8 and 5" Here we go again...), and then we began the process of emptying the contents of the refrigerator into coolers (which, naturally, necessitated a trip to a store to get ice). Later that afternoon, the refrigerator decided to start working again and was still working fine come Tuesday. At 4:45, we received a recorded phone call saying that the refrigerator repairman might be late (no kidding?). About an hour after that, we got a call from the repairman, himself, saying he was on his way. I asked him, "Can you fix it if it ain't broke? 'Cause for now, it's working just fine." He seemed relieved not to have to make the call, but - get this, for this is the best part - he gave me his name and his cell phone number so that I can call him directly if the refrigerator wimps out again. Mwa-ha-ha-ha-haaaaaa....this may prove more valuable than gold.
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