Yesterday morning, when I came home from running errands, I went to the vegetable garden to plant the purple hull peas and do some weeding. Nanny was already at work in her big straw hat, chopping weeds on the first tomato row.
My main objective was to get the #(@)! peas in the ground before the day was over. The Husband had tilled up the pea patch with the tractor one evening a week or two ago, but it had rained the next morning, and the soil hadn't dried up enough to work until yesterday. The ground was crusty on top, and I decided to till it again - just the rows, not the middles.
The little red tiller would have been perfect for the job, but I couldn't get it to crank. The big black tiller's hand-yank starter cord broke the first time I yanked it this year, and although The Nephew had volunteered to fix it, he had not done so. This tiller has an electric starter, so I pushed it from the garden shed to the shop, where there's electricity. It fired right off. I tilled up 7 rows and then sat down in a lawn chair to rest and drink some water. Nanny took a break, too, and while we were sitting there, a wasp stung me on the hand (he was building a nest under my chair). I came back to the house to ice the sting and put medicine on it. After eating a sandwich, I went back to the garden to plant the peas. Nanny came back out to help. By this time, my stung hand was swollen enough that I had a little trouble getting my gloves on.
We had work on the bicycle-on-a-stick planter to make it drop the seeds correctly. We made quick work of the planting, once we got going. I dug the drills with a hoe, and she came behind me with the planter. When we finished the planting, I started weeding the back side of the tomato fence.
The Husband and I made a big mistake when we set up the tomato fences; we situated the hog wire all the way to the ground, making it difficult to do the weeding with a hoe. We discussed raising the wire at least a foot off the ground, but we never got around to it, and the weeds and grass had taken over and needed to be DUG out, not chopped out. The ground was hard, and I dug with a hand spade for about an hour, making very little progress. I tried the little red tiller again, thinking I'd run it along the fence to loosen the soil. Surprisingly, it agreed to crank, and I was able to get about 75% of the row weeded before I snagged the fence with one of its tines. The tiller objected to cranking again, and I didn't blame her. I was tired and irritable, too. It was 4:30. There were things that still needed doing, but I was pooped. I came back home to await The Husband's arrival from work, intending to draft him for the rest of the chores.
We mostly solved the weed problems around the fences by sliding cardboard boxes under the fence between each tomato, smothering the weeds on both sides of the fence. We then laid down a bunch of landscape fabric in the middles of the pea rows. The Husband asked if I wanted him to start moving the arborist wood chips to the garden, but I was D-O-N-E by then. Hopefully, we'll get to that this evening.
I still need to get the okra, cucumbers, and squash in the ground.
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