Today is, hopefully, the Big Day, when the garden will be readied to plant. We need to run the tiller over it again, and then we're going to Uncle Jack's to borrow his hiller (or maybe it's called a "hipper"), which is a contraption that piles the dirt into raised rows. If it works well, we will probably buy our own hiller for next year, though it seems a bit wasteful to spend $500 on a thing you use one day a year to pile dirt into rows when you could do it with a hoe if you had the time and the energy.
It's 7 a.m., already, and The Husband is still in bed, and I'm anxious to get the show on the road. We REALLY need to run the tiller over the garden again to make it go deeper before we start with the hiller/hipper, for I worry that there's currently not enough loose dirt to make good rows. I tried to talk The Husband into cranking up the tractor yesterday after work, but he just gave me The (You've-Lost-Your-Mind) Look and made us a margarita, instead. After about 30 minutes, I was okay with not running the tiller, but now the tilling still has to be done before we can do the hipping. It will be another hour before The Husband gets up, and another hour after that before he drinks his coffee and wakes up enough to contemplate getting dressed. But I guess Nanny might shoot us in the driveway if we were to go down there now and crank up the tractor at this time of day.
But I am ready. Yesterday afternoon I dragged the big yard wagon from our back yard to the garden to have it handy when it's time to mulch the tomatoes we'll plant once we have proper rows. I won't have the mulch from the band fund-raiser until next week (assuming the mulch truck doesn't wreck again), but I have a buttload of pine needles that I gathered up a month or more ago and I can at least get started once the tomatoes are in the ground. I really would like to put down some landscape fabric under the pine needles. Yesterday I stopped at the dollar store up the road to buy some, but they were sold out. Sometime today, I'll have to go on a landscape-fabric-hunting mission.
On my way down Nanny's driveway yesterday, I spied another pile of pine needles that she'd raked up, and I stopped and put them in the wagon. Nanny saw/heard me as I passed by her living room window, and she came out on the porch and yelled, "Are you going to spread pine needles?" I thought this was a silly question, considering that she knew nothing had been planted in the garden yet. I stopped, and looked over my shoulder, and said, "Eventually," which she probably thought was a totally bitch-y response, and I guess it was, but I'm blaming it on the steroids making me meaner than usual. I shall have to be careful with my mouth today, because not only am I steroid mean, I have a headache from last night's margarita.
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The next-door neighbor and I are worried about the baby owls in the tree behind our houses. We're only seeing one baby in the nest. We think we've been hearing the other baby squawking in the distance while the remaining owl sits in the nest squawking its head off. I wonder what's going on. Is the mama owl flight-training just one baby at a time? Is the remaining owl too under-developed or weak to leave the nest? Has the mama owl abandoned it? These are questions that keep me up at night.
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| These narcissus don't usually bloom until Mother's Day. |
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| Wonder what critter will eat the plums before they're ripe enough for me to eat them? |
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| I dug these up out of the woods and call them "wild geraniums," though that may not be what they are. |
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| Polonia blossom |
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