If thy bean offend thee....

It's been hotter than blue blazes around here for the past few days.  What with the heat and all the corn-putting-up and the wallpaper-taking-down, the vegetable garden has been neglected these past few days.  (By me, at least; the varmints apparently have been visiting regularly.)  Yesterday when I came home from work, I pulled into Nanny's driveway instead of mine and went to see what needed doing. 

Grassy, grassy garden.  Some tomato plants drooping from last week's double drowning, others firing up with late blight.  Discarded nibbled tomato fruit all around.  Squash as big as baseball bats.  New green beans and new purple hull peas growing like crazy.  Old green beans and old purple hull peas still just sitting there, taking up space, not earning their keep.

I fired up the big black tiller and chomped them up with it.  The butterbeans survived the slaughter only because they are blooming better than they've bloomed so far.  They apparently liked all the water.

Anyway, there are four empty rows just itching to have something planted in them.  It's supposed to cool off later in the week.  Maybe I'll have decided what to plant by then.

The Writing on the Wall

When our younger son was about 3 or 4 years old, he had a burning desire to write on walls.  At first, it was just scribbles, then, when he learned to write his name, it started appearing in place of the scribbles.  He used to write the letter "L" backwards.  I went in his room one day and caught him, red-handed, writing his name on the wall, backwards "L" and all, with blue magic marker.  When I saw it, I asked him, "Who did that?"  He put the magic marker behind his back right quick, and said, "Josh" (his older brother). 

Yesterday, in preparation for a painter who is supposed to come this week, I began removing wallpaper from the hallway outside his room.  Under the very first strip I removed, I found this about waist high on the wall:

He'd learned to write his "L" properly by then.

I texted him:

 



Seconds later came his reply:

I didn't believe it 28 years ago, either.  ;)

* * * * *

I was still peeling wallpaper when The Husband came home from work.  He came in bearing a tub of about 60 ears of corn that my aunt had sent to me. 

Jeez!  I'd had my weekend all planned!  I was going to visit Mother (it's her birthday).  I was going to peel off the wallpaper in the entry hall.  I was going to digitize and sew some embroidery designs for a baby quilt that needs to be done in a month.  I was going to walk down to the garden, see how it's doing, maybe pluck a tomato worm or two.

But when somebody hits you with 60 ears of good corn, if you're smart you'll give it high priority.

And so I rolled out of bed at 6 a.m., did some digitizing, went to see Mother, went to the grocery store for canning supplies, and came home ready to battle the corn.  Thankfully, The Husband had already shucked it and was silking it when I got here.  While he did that, I went to work chopping peppers, onions, and celery for corn relish.  Those 60 ears produced 16 pints of relish and 4 quarts of creamed corn, which I cooked and froze. 

As I was doing the corn, The Husband started peeling the entry hall wallpaper.  Like the other wallpaper, it's been there 25 years, and it showed no signs of letting go any time soon.  It took me close to 5 hours to get the paper off the hallway walls yesterday, and The Husband and I spent close to 9 hours removing the entry hall paper.  Our feet hurt.  Our necks and shoulders hurt.  We have bits of paper stuck to us.

Of all the ideas I have had today, going to bed right this minute sounds like the best.  Check you later.

Squirrel Season 2015

Nanny called yesterday and said, "The squirrels are getting more tomatoes than you and me put together.  I saw one run out of the garden with a tomato in his mouth."

It just so happens that The Nephew is home from the boat, so I said to Nanny, "You tell The Nephew his assignment for tomorrow is to go squirrel hunting!"

Later that afternoon, I went down to start the sprinkler in the garden.  The grass and morning glories are thriving; the vegetables, not so much.  The July heat is atrocious.  Some of the vegetables are digging it, but not the green beans and butterbeans.  They don't seem to be dying, exactly, but they do seem unwilling to work in this heat.  I'm going to try to keep them from getting lost in the grass long enough to see if they perk up and go to town when the weather cools off. 

I don't much like these Mascotte beans.  This is the second year I've tried them.  Last year's TGF (Total Garden Failure) didn't give them a fair shake, so I planted them again this spring.  I like the idea of the beans growing in the top of the plant, where they're not such a pain to pick.  The first planting sprouted sparsely, and I had to re-plant a couple of times to get a decent stand.  Then the monsoons came, and drowned one whole corner the garden.  I replanted that corner AGAIN when the ground dried.  They came up fairly well, but now they are gone.  I don't know where they went.  The original beans that didn't get too wet grew nicely for a while, then became sort of stunted-looking, but I started seeing tiny green beans hanging up in the tops of the plants and thought they were about to crank up.  I like to pick my beans when they're about as big around as a drinking straw, so I waited and watched for them to get bigger.  And I never saw many eating-sized beans.  I picked everything worth picking last night, and ended up with a cereal bowl of green beans.   A rabbit may be helping me harvest them.

I went back to the garden this afternoon to do more watering.  As I went down Nanny's driveway, I heard a gunshot, and looked around, and spotted The Nephew shooting up into the trees at the edge of the hay field in front of Nanny's house.  Don't expect me to feel even a twinge of guilt for pronouncing sentence on those squirrels. 

Flora-cide

If plants could vocalize, I would be hearing weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth all around me, for we wreaked havoc in our yard this weekend.

The builder was supposed to start working on our house today.  The exterior improvements include a new roof and a new deck built on top of an existing concrete patio.  The patio is at least 25 years old, and for most of that 25 years I have been planting perennials around it - daylilies, phlox, roses, daffodils, monkey grass, four-o-clocks.  As of yesterday morning, our patio beds were riots of color.  By noon, it was all gone, cut down in its prime so that the builder can actually get to the patio.  My granddaughter cheerfully helped with the plant slaughtering.  (I do not know why she felt the bicycle helmet was necessary to the task.) 

Two crape myrtles had to go, too.  One grew near the corner of the patio, and the other grew along the back wall of the house.  In both cases, the limbs over-hung places where the builder will need to work.  We committed "crape murder" and sawed off the limbs with a chain saw.  Those limbs were so straight and sturdy that I saved several of them.  No idea what we'll use them for, possibly tomato stakes, if nothing else.

The back yard looks shockingly bare, except for the heaps of wilting flowers and limbs piled around it.  Hopefully, most of it will be back next year.  I dug up my favorite rose bush and moved it, but I fear that I vandalized the roots so badly that it may not survive. 

And after all that worked, the builder called to report that he had hurt his back and would be going to the doctor today.  He called this afternoon and said that he would be here as soon as he is able. 

All the plants may grow back before he shows up to work!

In the vegetable garden, the peas and beans we planted last week shot out of the ground like they were on steroids, a much healthier-looking stand than the first planting, which may be ready to pick by the end of the week.

We are steadily picking cucumbers, squash, and zucchini.  Hopefully, by the time Nanny's church does the food pantry again, we will have some produce to contribute to it.

Tomato worms are out.  I saw their poop around one of the plants and found two of the little nasties nibbling away.  One other plant has clearly been eaten, but I could not find the culprit.  He may be the size of a hot dog before I find him.

We had some rain late last week.  We had run the tiller over most of the garden a few days earlier, and the rain soaked right in.  When the above-pictured granddaughter and her older sister came to visit on Saturday, they followed me out to the garden.  I saw the older granddaughter eyeing the mud, and before I could warn her, she stepped onto the dirt and promptly sank in past her ankles.  After a momentary panic, she yelled for her sister to join her, and together they tracked up the garden something awful.  I don't think the garden cared, though, and neither did I. 

On Married Men Left Home Alone

We are about to do a little refurbishing around here, part of which includes new floor covering in some of the rooms.  Unlike many of the projects we've undertaken, this one is being done by a professional.  He said that he would move the furniture out of the rooms, but that we should clean out closets and put away breakable things.  I tackled the closets a few weeks ago, and since the start date is approaching, I thought I'd better get busy on the breakables.

I started in the kitchen, where a hutch sits full of breakable things, things like my mother-in-law's tea cups, which she got as a wedding present 50-some-odd years ago.  As I was emptying the hutch, I found this:

 



 

That, my friend, is part of a wooden duck.  Or goose, maybe.  He used to hang on my kitchen wall, near the stove.  He used to have two wooden feet on two wooden dowels, pegged into those two empty holes that you see in the picture.  They stuck straight out at right angles to him and to the wall.  The space between that duck's body and his feet was the perfect size for holding my big hickory rolling pin that was too big to keep anywhere else.  That duck hung there for years, safely cradling my rolling pin.

When I found the above-mentioned duck fragment, I took his picture and texted it to The Husband.  Didn't say nothin', just sent him the picture.  Here's why:

One day last year, as I was cleaning up the kitchen, I tried to slide the cutting board into it's usual slot in the jelly cabinet, and the cutting board hung on something and wouldn't go in.  I bent over to see what the problem was, and encountered this beneath the shelf (it had my rolling pin in it at the time):



Yes, those would be the feet that belong to the duck.

I was positively aghast.  In disbelief, I glanced over at the wall where the duck once hung, and sure enough it was gone.  I said, "What the - ?"

The Husband was sitting in his chair in the living room.  He was smirking.  He'd been off work a few days earlier, while I had gone to work.  Home alone, piddling around.  Washed his truck.  Mowed the lawn.  And at some point during the day, he thought it would be a good idea to drill a couple of holes in the side of the jelly cabinet (note that his first attempt was too high), saw my duck's feet off, and re-mount them in the cabinet.

This is what happens when you leave a man home alone without a to-do list.

He said it had been like that for days.

I did not know whether to laugh or choke him. 

I have begged him many times not to move stuff in the kitchen unless he intends to take over the cooking.  This one took the cake.  Not only did he move something that had been *right there* for 30 years, he destroyed my heirloom duck, as well!

Okay, okay...it wasn't an heirloom.  It's a cheap piece of crap wooden duck, an 80s left-over, and it's beyond tacky.  And it sometimes fell of the wall when we opened the nearest cabinet door. 

And it was kind of funny.

But I pretended to be miffed and sad at the loss of my old duck.  So don't tell him.

I asked him where the REST of the duck was.  He would not tell me.  To this day, he has never told me.  I have not looked for it, beyond a glance around the kitchen the day of the duck murder. 

When I found it today, I took a picture of it with my cell phone and texted it to The Husband.  Didn't say a word.  Just sent the picture. 

A few minutes later, I get: 





 After I cleaned out the jelly cabinet and saw those goofy duck feet sticking out, all by their lonesome, I took a picture of the feet and sent that to The Husband as well.  Didn't say nothin'.  Just sent the picture.  He said:

I'm not exactly sure what that smurky face means.  He could be commiserating with my mourning of the heirloom duck.  Or he could be smirking at remembering the dismembering. 

Either way, I'm laughing.  ;)