From the back porch - February 25, 2021

 

A couple more degrees on the thermometer would be nice, but porch-sittin' is still perfectly pleasant with a light sweater.

The Boss turned me loose a little early yesterday, and I used the time to visit with my new granddaughter.  Bless her heart, until yesterday, she'd never seen me without a face mask, and I could tell from her expression that she was a little confused about who I was.  But we talked for a while, and after a few minutes she blessed me with a smile for the first time.  :)

Today, I've been thinking about gardening, thanks to some seed ads that showed up on my social media feed.  Now that The Husband has a tractor, we should be able to get the vegetable garden in shape a little earlier than usual.  He has promised to buy a tiller to pull behind the tractor; he'd better hop to it, for I am making plans.  Yes, I already have a tiller - "Big Black," if you remember - and I don't mind running it.  But tilling the whole garden with it for the first time every year is a big job, one I'll gladly give up.

This afternoon I delivered Nanny a casserole dish that I've been riding in my car since the new granddaughter was born, and while I was down there, I peeked at the garden plot for the first time since cold weather drove me in the house.  Before the first freeze, I cut the three cabbages that remained in the garden, but did not pull up the plants.  I'd piled pine needles around them before the first frost, and today I saw big tufts of green sticking up out of the pine needles.  They're making heads again and look remarkably healthy considering that they were encased in snow last week.  I left a brussels sprout out there, too - one that had pea-sized sprouts growing on the stem - hoping that the sprouts would have time to mature.  We piled pine needles around it, too, but I didn't see any sign of it today.

Last fall, we dumped numerous tractor-bucket-loads of pine needles on the low end of the garden.  At the time I was thinking we'd plow them in this spring, but now I'm thinking I might rake them up before we start plowing and use them for mulch around the tomatoes.

I also want to move the pea patch out of the "regular" garden.  Nanny likes to have more purple hull peas than I can grow if I want to grow anything else.  There's a whole big field in front of her house that isn't used for anything.  All we do is mow it.  I don't see why we couldn't give the peas their own space.