More Watering - July 16, 2020

I spent nearly 4 hours watering the garden over the previous two days., and now it is raining its ass off.

The Husband picked a 2-gallon bucket full of cucumbers Tuesday night, and they've been in the refrigerator, waiting on me to do something with them.  I tried to get The Husband to take them to work and give them away, but he said, "Nawwww, make more relish!"  So I came home from work today and set to grinding cucumbers, onions, and peppers to soak in salt overnight.  Looks like I'll be spending my Friday evening cooking and canning relish.  I'm in a bit of a pickle, though (no pun intended); the remaining jars we brought down from the attic are regular-mouth jars, and the remaining lids are wide-mouth.  I'll either have to go to the store for lids or to the attic for jars before I can can the relish.

Hah.  ". . . can can . . . ."

In the process of cleaning up the kitchen - there are tiny cucumber bits on everything - I managed to stop up the sink.  I stopped it up last week, too, when I made the first batch of relish.  The Husband managed to un-clog it last week with vinegar and baking soda, but that didn't work this time.  Neither did the plunger.  Neither did two big doses of Drain-O.  To be fair, the Drain-O might have worked, eventually, but The Husband got a plumber's snake and jabbed it around.  The sink is running fine now.  And I learned my lesson about washing up after cucumber relish.  I have mesh strainers in both sides of my sink, and they catch enough stuff for soup every day.  I don't know how all those cucumber bits got past them.  But tonight, when I was finally able to clean up the kitchen, I washed everything in a big roasting pan and dumped the wash-water into the flower bed instead of the sink.

I also had a gallon of cucumber innards and pepper seeds to dispose of.  In my heart, I knew I should walk them out to the compost tumbler, but it had been raining cats and dogs, and my back yard was soup.  PLUS, I'm about half scared of the compost tumbler.  Every year, I get stung by wasps when I first use it.  They build nests in the recesses of the legs.  And spiders live in and around it.   One time when I was dumping the compost, the biggest spider I ever saw ran out of the tumbler.  Scared the tee-total sh*t out of me.  Third, the english ivy has tethered it to the ground and has rendered it stationary.  I'm going to have to hack it out before I can use it.  That's when the wasps will get me, the bastards.

So, instead of doing what my heart said to do, I walked the bucket to the edge of the woods and pitched all that stuff over the hill.  One or more critters will have some good eatin' tonight.