Around midday yesterday, having spent the morning "reading the fine print," I needed some air and decided to walk down to Nanny's to check on the garden and the 18 pepper plants I'd stashed under a tree last week when the soil had been too wet to plant. I did not plan on doing any gardening; I just needed movement and sunshine.
Long before I got to the peppers, I could see they needed watering. Their little heads were staring at their little feet. I did not want to turn on the outside faucet just yet, though, because it makes a noise that can be heard inside the house, which alerts Nanny to my presence. I'd hoped to get in and out of there undetected, come home, maybe have a bite of lunch and get back to work, so I left the peppers alone, expecting to come back and water them in the evening, and went to check on the garden plants.
Pitiful.
Our garden is like an old mattress with a sag in the middle. This spring's attempts at soil amendment helped some, but there's still a "dip." The garden was no longer standing in water but the low part - really half the garden - was still muddy. The only things surviving in that end of the garden were the cucumbers we'd planted on "hills" and a whole lot of "water grass," as Nanny calls it.
The two half-rows of great northern beans were doing okay, though they are looking a little pale. I guess it's from all the rain we had last week.
Next to them is a row of squash hills that extends all the way to the other end of the garden - 12 hills, 5 of which had not been tall enough to keep their heads above the water. I wasn't too upset about the drowned squash. Twelve hills was too many, anyway.
The tomatoes. Pitiful. Some of them had drowned. The others do not appear to have grown an inch since we planted them. And their color is not good. They should have been fertilized when we planted them, or soon after, but weather issues got in the way. In the garden shed, there was a box of (damp) Miracle Grow, the kind you apply with a garden hose, but the soil hasn't needed more water, and I haven't had any pellet fertilizer on hand.
The purple hull peas had sprouted sporadically. As I stood there pondering whether to plow them up and start over or re-plant the skips, I heard Nanny's back door slam shut.
Busted. Might as well go ahead and water the peppers before I walk back home.
This activity gave Nanny opportunity to run through her list of complaints, most of which I cannot do anything about. One of her new worries is her FEMA application. The tornado that came near us on March 31 tore some shingles off the front of Nanny's house, and completely took off the roof covering on her back porch. Her homeowner's insurance barely covered half the cost of the repairs (which still haven't been done). FEMA set up a local office to help people file applications for disaster assistance, and Nanny filed an application in person. She has not had a minute's peace ever since, worrying about the application and how she's going to pay for a new roof if she is not approved. FEMA has been responsive, but - you know, government things take time, and Nanny's damage pales in comparison to the homes and businesses that were completely destroyed.
I made the mistake of offering to call the number on the FEMA papers to make sure Nanny's application was complete and ask about its status. When we finally got to a live person, the phone connection was bad, plus he did not speak Southern. He wanted to speak to Nanny, herself, so we put him on speaker phone, which made matters worse. She wanted to explain everything that happened since the time she was born, and we had a hard time keeping the conversation on track. We finally learned that the application was complete and was being "processed," and we also learned that we could go online and see the status any time.
My second mistake was offering to help Nanny find the application online. Nightmare, but we finally got it done.
By this time, it was 2 p.m. I had decided to go on the hunt for some fertilizer for the tomatoes and ended up finding a shaker bottle of slow-release pellets at the local dollar store. When I got home with them, I gathered up my gardening paraphernalia and went back to the garden, where I loosened the rain-packed soil around the tomatoes, applied the fertilizer, chopped a little grass with a hoe that needs sharpening. Meanwhile, I'd decided to start over with the purple hull peas, and so I dragged out the big tiller and made a couple of passes on one row. You might remember that the last time I used the tiller, the tire fell off, and I "engineered" a solution. Well, my engineering wasn't working so well. The good tire turned like it was supposed to; the bad tire turned when it felt like it, which was not nearly all of the time, and when it did turn, it was kind of wonky. The machine was a beast to control.
I put the tiller back in the shed and planted the peppers (with fertilizer) in the row I'd just tilled. It was now 4 p.m. Clearly, there needed to be some work done to the garden equipment before gardening could proceed. I began to plan The Husband's evening for him as I walked back home, faint with hunger (I'd never gotten around to eating).
Thankfully, I'd put a pork butt in the crockpot early in the morning, and it was fork tender and soaking in spicy south-of-the-border sauce - street tacos coming up! I made some slaw, and as soon as The Husband came through the door, before he could even go pee, I sprung the agenda on him. Happily, he agreed to the plan after I promised I would not ask questions or make suggestions and would try to keep Nanny occupied while he tackled his chores. We ate our tacos, packed up some leftovers for Nanny, and went back to the garden.
I've been paving the tomato row with disassembled cardboard boxes to help keep down the weeds. (It is not totally effective, but it helps.) While The Husband set about working on the tiller tire, I went to the garden and started taking apart two more boxes I'd brought from home. This inspired Nanny to gather up boxes from the big shed, where The Husband was trying to find something to fix the tiller tire. He stopped his search to help her bag up debris from the boxes, but once we got her boxes to the garden, I kept her busy opening them up while The Husband put a bolt through the tiller axle.
[I think we've tried that bolt solution in the past, and the nut will come off eventually. I should stop now and order the correct part. See ya.]
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