Green Beans

Cousin Becky called today and said that Uncle Jack had green beans that needed picking, and she wanted to know if I wanted to pick them.  Well, I most certainly did, considering that my green beans didn't come up at all (twice).  I looked around the house for something to put the beans in as I picked them, and came up with a big blue plastic tub, the kind that would hold three bed pillows if you smash them down and snapped the lid on real quick. 

The first thing Uncle Jack said when he saw it was, "Your bucket ain't big enough."

I thought to myself, "Oh, shit!" 

Might have said it out loud, now that I think about it.

Uncle Jack went to the garden with me, bringing his own 5-gallon bucket.  His green beans are runners - rattlesnake beans - and he had them running up a sturdy hog-wire fence.  He picked on one side of the fence, and I picked on the other.  We did some good gossiping through the vines.  I'm not Catholic and have never been in a confessional, but picking green beans with Uncle Jack was kind of like what I imagine the confession process would be - talking to someone you can't see, and having them talk back!

Anyway, as we were picking, I thought about a local conservative talk-radio station conversation I'd heard on the way over.  The subject was California's new proposal that restaurants may turn away families with young children.  By far the largest consensus among the primarily Southern callers was that modern children need more discipline, so they would know better than to act up in a restaurant.  One caller said, "Why, if I'd acted like that when I was a kid, the minute we got home my mama would have sent me to the back yard to cut a switch for a whippin', and I'd better not cut one too little, either!"

I thought about my own childhood, and couldn't remember ever getting a whippin' with a switch.  My daddy whipped me with a razor strop once, punishment for deliberately disobeying his order not to cut off my doll's foot after he warned me that I'd get a spanking if I did the deed.  (In my defense, I had two male cousins in the background, egging me on.  He waited until they left before delivering on his promise.  I'd sweated it the whole time.)  That's the only spanking I remember getting from him.  My mother, on the other hand, had a more hands-on, shock-and-awe approach.  If you pissed her off or misbehaved, she'd haul off and smack you with her hand at the first place she could reach - cheeks, forearms, thighs, butt.  No warning.  Just whack!  But I didn't remember a switch.

I asked Uncle Jack if his mama had ever made him cut his own switch for a whippin'.  Indeed, she had, he said, and on more than one occasion.  He said his father, like mine, had been slow to administer punishment, but his mother, a little bitty banty hen of a woman, was just the opposite.  He said that whenever she whipped one child (3 boys), she whipped them all, regardless of who did what, and she grabbed the closest thing handy to whack them with.  As I was contemplating how whipping all the kids at once probably cut down on sibling tattling, Uncle Jack said, "I remember the last whippin' Mama ever gave us."

He said he didn't remember what they'd done to need a whippin', but it made his mother mad enough to get after them with a broom.  He said, "We just took the broom away from her and laughed at her.  She never did try to whip us no more."

I wish I'd asked which of the three boys first suggested resistance.  ;)

We moved on to other subjects:  grandchildren, gardening, the weather.  By the end of the row, he'd filled up his bucket, and mine was almost full.  We managed to pack them all in my tub.  While I wasn't looking, he sneaked five giant zucchini in my Jeep.  Maybe I'll make him some zucchini bread.

But, first, I have to do something with all these beans.  The Husband and I snapped them all tonight, and ended up with a 13-gallon bag half full of beans, ready to be washed and canned.  We pulled the canning equipment out of the attic tonight.  Guess what I'll be doing tomorrow.

Sanding....

When The Husband asked if I wanted anything in particular for my birthday, I told him I wanted a Dremel tool.  And guess what?  HE GOT IT FOR ME!  YAY!  And he got some cool accessories to go with it.

I could not WAIT to try it out.  As soon as I got home from work today, I loaded a wire brush into the collet, rounded up an extension cord, and went outside to see if the Dremel would take the chipping paint off my concrete patio table. 

This thing rocks.

Only maybe the wire brush was not the right tool for the job.  After about 20 minutes of sanding, I noticed that the brush was getting smaller.  Five more minutes, and the bristles were down to nubs.  And I didn't get anywhere NEAR finished.

But I've got a mouse sander and a wire brush, and that paint is coming off that table today, one way or another, for I want to repaint the table to match a two-butt rocker I bought this weekend. 

Running the Dremel and the sander are what I call "zone out" activities - you know, things you can do while you think about other things.  I was out there, sanding away, when I realized that the sun had come out and was cooking my head right through my hat.  I've laid the power tools aside for the moment, but as soon as the house shades the patio table, I'll be having another go at it.

Pitiful

I know you must be tired of hearing me whine about how awful my garden is this year, but I ain't playin'; it is pitiful.

NONE of the second planting of beans and peas came up.  None.  As I said in another post, it's as if the soil on that end of the garden has been poisoned, and maybe it has.  Last fall, we dumped loads of leaves (and a few pine needles) on that end of the garden.  After the fact, I learned that the decomposing leaves can rob the soil of essential nutrients.  Maybe that's the problem.  I don't know how to fix it, except to stop dumping leaves and maybe add some lime in the fall.

The tomatoes and the squash are stunted and yellowish.  The only plants that look halfway healthy are the okra and the cucumbers, both of which could probably grow and produce well in concrete.

Today I bought two 50-pound bags of 6-12-12 fertilizer.  (No, I don't intend to use it all at once, nor even all this year.  The second bag is for next spring.)  I fertilized the peas and butterbeans this evening.  Nanny said she thought that peas normally do not need fertilizing, but they sure need something. 

My no-till experiment seems to be failing.  Despite layers of newspaper and hay surrounding the tomatoes and squash, bermuda grass has seen the light and is creeping down the rows atop the hay.  It looks plumb snake-y. 

My only consolation is that most everyone I've talked to about gardens has said that their gardens look pitiful, too.  (Misery does love company.)  We're blaming it on the excessive rains we had in the spring, all the way through the month of June. 

Although I intend to continue to work this year's garden, such as it is, I have pretty much written off the idea of having any vegetables to put up unless some miracle occurs.

Thinking ahead to next year's crops, I have already asked The Husband to make it his project to plow and disc the entire garden this fall.  I will send off a soil sample to the Extension Service to see what nutrients the soil is missing as a result of this year's efforts and try to correct the problems we spawned this year.

4th of July

Cousins Gus and Ann always invite their extended family to a 4th of July cookout, every year, at high noon.  Gus roasts pork shoulders on the grill.  Ann decorates their garage in patriotic colors and makes gallons of sweet tea and probably does 90 million other things in the kitchen while Gus minds the grill.  The family starts pouring in around 11, bearing their specialty dishes, just about the time the shoulders are ready to be pulled apart for sandwiches.

If you have never been part of a shoulder-pullin', you have missed one of the most orgasmic food experiences in the world.  The skin on the outside of the shoulder is charred and crisp; the meat on the inside is warm and moist and fall-apart tender.  Juice runs down your arm when you sneak bites.  Heaven on earth. 

As always, I picked my brain for side dish ideas.  With so many people bringing food, it's hard not to duplicate.  We picked up a watermelon and a store-bought cherry pie while we were browsing the supermarket for ideas.  We ended up getting ingredients for a cool tropical fruit and marshmallow salad, with loads of pecans and coconut and whipped cream.  Thirty years ago, this salad showed up at nearly every family dinner, but I haven't seen it for a while. 

On the gardening front, my garden is still a mess.  I did some good work last week but didn't finish, and it has rained again (almost daily) since then.  My new "hula hoe" arrived this week, and I'm interested to see if it can make any headway against the grass.  Following some online video suggestions, The Husband sharpened the blades for me.  I may try it out this afternoon, if I'm not too full to move.

Redemption

Well, reader, I redeemed myself somewhat in the garden this afternoon. 

Ran the tiller, re-planted the green beans and some of the purple hull peas.  Planted a few hills of crookneck squash.  Hit the first few rows with Miracle Grow.

Can barely move now.

Worst Gardener Ever!

When I checked the garden last week, it was grassy and pitiful, and I made plans to remedy that situation this weekend.  Although I was up before the sun, it was late in the morning by the time I finally dragged myself to the garden. 

What a mess!

The original plan was to crank up the little tiller and use it to take out the weeds closest to the plants, then do the middles with the big tiller.  However, the previous tilling had left mounds and trenches that impeded the little tiller's progress, so I swapped tillers to do the middles first, then go back with the little tiller. 

The truth is that my heart just wasn't in it.  When I started, it was already putrid hot, but there was a cloud cover, so the job wasn't too bad.  About 45 minutes into the job the sun came out in full force.  I worked for another few minutes then shut the machinery down and came back to the house, intending to go back in the late afternoon, when the garden would be shady.  The return trip never happened.

None of the plants look very athletic.  Because of all the rain, everything is stunted and yellow.  I don't know if fertilizing would help or hurt, but something needs to be done.  The thing is, I am currently too lazy to do it.

Three Week Checkup

It's been about three weeks since we planted our vegetable garden.  I have not kept track of how many rain-free days we've had since then, but it hasn't been many. 

The nine cabbages that I planted in early April sat there like knots on a log, doing nothing, for the longest time, like they were fake cabbage sets.  When we planted the rest of the garden in late May, we dosed them with some fertilizer, and for a couple of weeks they grew like crazy.  They were fine until last week, when all nine of them suddenly went limp at the same time.  I think they are drowning.

Some of the tomatoes look great, but a few of them died, and a few others look blighted.  I am going to spray them with the baking soda/vegetable oil/water mixture that I used last year.

The squash plants are a little pale and sickly - too wet.

One end of my garden has a "dip" in it, and water tends to pool in that area.  For the past couple of autumns, we've dumped load after load of fallen leaves on that end of the garden, hoping to build it up, and for the past couple of springs, no seeds have sprouted there.  Last year, I thought the sprouting failure was because the soil stayed too wet for too long.  Since then I've learned that it's not a good idea to till those un-decomposed leaves into the soil, as it robs the soil of...something.  This year, I tried to rake the leaves away from the rows before I tilled them, but still nothing sprouted on that end of the garden, as if the soil has been poisoned.  I don't know what to do about this, except to stop dumping leaves in the garden.  I suppose I'll try to re-plant the seeds once the soil dries up enough to work.  Who knows when that will be?!

For now, the cucumbers and okra are doing okay.

The pepper plants are showing off.  They're already loaded with peppers.  I will have to stake them soon or risk having them topple over from the weight.

The newspaper/straw treatment is doing a good job of keeping down the weeds in the "no-till" half of the garden.  The other half of the garden is hairy with grass, but there's not much I can do about it until the ground dries.

This is not exactly garden news, but we have inherited a cat.  We had a cat, "Lucy" (short for "Lucifer") for years.  Although she was an extremely picky eater (nothing but canned shredded turkey & cheese cat food for Her Highness), she was a great rodent hunter, but she disappeared a couple of years ago.  Truth be told, we did not miss having a pet, as we like to travel and hated to ask the neighboring relatives to feed Lucy while we were gone.  But late this winter, we discovered that BOTH of our vehicles had become homes to rodents.  I found mouse poop in the front seats of my Jeep, and something chewed some wires in The Husband's truck.  I put a box of mouse poison under the rear seat of my Jeep and figured the problem was solved.  But about two weeks ago, I found more poop in the Jeep.  When I checked the rear storage compartment, I found a mouse nest!  We removed the nest and set a mouse trap in the compartment.  Evidently, removing the nest temporarily alleviated the problem, for the mouse trap has not been sprung, but I know it's just a matter of time before another mouse discovers the hide-away. 

Enter "Tiger."  Tiger is a full-grown male cat, orange and white, tall and sleek.  He's a card-carrying hunter, I'm told, and he eats what he catches.  When my son and daughter-in-law acquired some chickens this spring, Tiger watched them with longing in his eyes.  His family decided he needed to go before he developed a taste for chicken, and we agreed to take him, both to cut down on the rodent problem in our yard and to keep him available to our grandson.  They brought him to us yesterday afternoon.  I figured that he would immediately run home (through the woods, it's not all that far from our yard to Tiger's former home), but he's still here this morning.

So, welcome Tiger.  Now, get busy catching those mice!