From the back porch - May 23, 2021

 

I am pooped.  And my wrist hurts.  And I'm hungry.

Not long after breakfast this morning, I went to the garden to plant a cherry tomato plant I bought yesterday.  

It was a pleasant morning, and so I grabbed a hoe and did some weeding, mostly in the middles.  The tomato and pepper rows are in good shape, as far as weeds go.  The pine needles that we used for mulch around the peppers during the cold snap have compacted and are doing a pretty good job of keeping the weeds down.  The tomato rows have landscape fabric under the pine needles, and they're not grassy at all.  

A few days ago, I put pine needles around a few squash plants - I only had enough at hand to do a few.  At first, I put it right around the roots, but then I thought maybe it would be a good place for bugs and fungus to live, so I re-considered and raked it into the middles.   Not that a bug can't walk that far.  But, you know . . . <shrug>.  

This morning I decided to rake up more pine needles and do more mulching.  I'd already raked up the "easy" stuff around the outer edges of the pine trees along Nanny's driveway.  The trees grow on a bit of a bank, and the pine cones drop off and roll down the hill, into the yard.  The soil is all root-y around the trees, not safe for a lawnmower.   So what the folks who tend Nanny's yard (that would be Nanny, us, and The Nephew, on occasion) have been doing for several years is to pitch back under the trees all the pine cones and branches that roll into the path of the lawnmower.  What's under the trees now - or rather, what WAS under the trees - is a compact mass of years worth of needles, cones, and sticks, dewberries, poison ivy, and saplings from every tree in the neighborhood.

I decided to tackle this systematically.  First, I picked up pine cones.  Three big yard wagon-loads did not get them all.  I hauled the cones to a spot in the garden that has not yet been planted, and set fire to them.  I figure it will help with the weeds in that spot.

After the cones, I did the needles.  Three big loads.  They were a foot deep in some places, and underneath them was white stuff that could be fungus or it could be *smolder*.  It might not have been smart to haul fungus to the garden for mulch, but that's what I did.  I turned the white stuff up to the sun.  We'll see what happens.

About 2 p.m., I gave out.  I raked up one more wagon-load of pine needles on my way back to the house.  The wagon and rake are still sitting under the pine tree.  I'll deal with them later.

At the end of our driveway near the road, I found three little white plastic cups, laid over on their sides.  One held a tomato plant, one held a pepper plant, and one was full of basil sprouts.  Nearby was a plastic bag with planting instructions.  How cool is that?  I believe there is a tomato greenhouse not far from here.  I bet they're the tomato fairy.

Going back to the garden later this evening.