Hallelujah!

I have the joy, joy, joy, joy, down in my heart...!*

Rumor has it that my garden is being tilled as we speak.  I have not yet seen it with my own eyes, but The Nephew called up here a little while ago and said that his buddy, Chris, wanted to borrow our disc, and as a favor to us, he (reportedly) disked our garden with his tractor!  Not only that, but he came back with a pull-behind tiller and is TILLING it. 

Somebody pinch me.

Earlier today, unaware of Chris's offer, I bought 12 tomato plants, feeling downright determined to get SOMETHING in the ground in the next day or two.  It supposed to rain tomorrow, so I may be out there digging holes in the dark.

* If you were raised in the South and went to church, I apologize for the brain worm.

Breaking up is hard to do....

Gardening wouldn't be such a b*tch if I could get people and equipment to obey me, instantly, and without debate. 

Every year, I have trouble getting my spring garden plot ready to accept seeds and plants.  It is most often because I depend on other people to break the soil; they get around to it when THEY are ready, which is understandable (I mean, they *are* doing me favors) but unsatisfactory when I am itching to plant and they aren't.

I thought I might have that problem solved last year when I went to a lecture on soil and learned about "no-till gardening," a method that does not require a deep breaking up of the soil, which, theoretically, should have enabled me to plant whenever I choose.  You've heard me sing that no-till blues song ad nauseum;  I will simply remind you that last year's garden was a colossal failure, for a variety of reasons. 

So, this year, it's back to breakin' and plowin', with the added joy of contending with the hay and the newspaper and the landscape fabric left over from last year's no-till fiasco.  My older son graciously offered to do (and did) the break-plowing for me this past Easter Sunday.  The job required about an hour of work just to get the old green tractor running - something about the battery, which is an easy solve IF you have all the right stuff.  I wanted him to disc the garden, too, but the tractor began to leak water from somewhere just as the breaking was finished, and the disking didn't happen.  I am left with rows of basketball-sized clods separated by deep trenches, over which I have sprinkled 120 pounds of lime that needs to be worked into the soil.

Dang it, I am *ready* to plant, even if the garden is not.  Today was an absolutely beautiful day, and I decided to see what my big black tiller could do with the clods and trenches.  It is supposed to rain this weekend, and I thought I might work up a small patch of soil for some spring greens before the rain turns the clods to bricks.  Big Black fired up right away (check!), but it didn't much like those clods, and I had to man-handle it a good bit to keep it going the way I wanted it to go.  All that wrestling wore out my winter-limp muscles really fast.  Finally, I gave the tiller its head and just followed where IT wanted to till, resulting in a pulverized curlique that meanders all over the garden, not the neat rectangle I'd envisioned.  Sooner than I'd hoped, I gave up, cut the engine, and left the tiller where it sat in the garden, for I had brought other power equipment - a riding lawnmower that had muled a heavy gas can down Nanny's long driveway - that I could put to good use.

I had cut up a snake with the tiller in the garden right off the bat (I don't think he was poisonous, and I might have saved him if the reptilian portion of my own brain had not kicked in before the logical portion of my brain could decide not to run over him), so I know that they are out and about.   And Nanny's grass had gotten really tall.  Nanny thinks any snake is a bad snake, and I hated to think about her walking upon one in the tall grass, so I mowed her yard.  In the process, I got too close to a shrub, hooked a limb under the lawnmower fender, and snapped it right off.  Pow!  It went flying into the neighboring bush.  I plucked it out, laid it on the lawnmower deck between my feet, and moved on.

When the mowing was done, I had to get the tiller back to the shop.  I'd left it leaning sideways, astride a big clog and aimed in the wrong direction.  When I finally got it off the clog and aimed the toward the garden shed, I noticed that one of the wheels wasn't turning.  Evidently, I'd twisted the tire loose from the rim as I was trying to turn the tiller out of the trench.  It limped back to the shed, and I got on the lawnmower, settled the gas can on top of the fender between my feet, and headed home.

There was enough daylight left to mow part of my own yard, and since it's going to rain tomorrow, I decided to go ahead and mow the high-traffic part of the yard.  On the second lap, I hit something serious - a big metal rod - in the grass.  I just knew I'd torn up the lawnmower, but it kept on trucking.  As I was about to finish the back yard, the lawnmower ran out of gas.  I still had the gas can between my feet, so I hopped off the mower and filled up the tank.  The lawnmower only grunted when I got back on and tried the key.  After about 50 grunts, with the battery beginning to sound tired, I got off the mower, shot it the bird, and came in the house, disgusted.  About 2 minutes later, The Husband went out there, twisted the key, and the thing fired right up.

I didn't shoot it the bird again, but I wanted to.

And I still don't have the garden tilled.

But as I was mowing, I could see Uncle B up the road on his tractor, mowing the part of his yard where he plants his garden.  If my guess is correct, he will soon be swapping the mower for a disc, and when he does, I'm going to beg or bribe (or both) him to do mine, too.

#)@(! Dog

The weather here today has been nothing short of perfect.  When I came home from work, I puttered around inside the house for a bit, and then headed outside with my loppers to tame a wild rose bush that I once foolishly planted too close to the walkway.  After trimming the rose bush, I decided to move on around the yard to trim another bush, but when I took one step off the walkway, I realized I was wearing my prized houseshoes, a wonderful felted wool pair that my friend knitted for me.  I didn't want to walk in the yard in them, so I kicked them off on the porch and went inside for a pair of garden clogs. 

Now, Cousin Roger across the road has a white pit bull named Homey.  Homey loves a stick better than anything.  He doesn't fetch, exactly; what he does is grab the stick (or whatever you're holding) from your hand and run with it like a crazy dog.  He zooms by at full speed, back arched, hind feet mostly parallel to the ground, almost close enough - almost! - for you to grab whatever it is he's got in his mouth.  Grabbing it, however, is futile, and possibly dangerous.  Once he's locked his iron jaws on the prize, there's no turning it loose, and when he's at full speed, if you are lucky enough to grab it, he's more likely to pull you down than to lose his grip on his trophy.  When he tires of the game, he lies down with the object until he sees you're approach, and he grabs it and runs again.

Homey is also a thief.  Lay something down, and he's got it and gone, and the only way you're getting it back from him is to trade him something more valuable, like a stick.

Homey came over to visit while I was lopping bushes.  I greeted him, and went on with what I was doing.  He sniffed around a while, and followed his nose on around the house and out of sight.  As the light began to fade, I gathered up my tools to go to the house, when out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Homey trotting across the road with one of my houseshoes in his mouth.

I called to him and told him to come back with my shoe, and he stopped and looked at me for a split second, and then he took off like he'd been shot out of a canon.

I dropped my tools and took off after him.  Of course, there was no hope of catching him, but as I hurried across the yard, I grabbed up a good, long stick from the ground and yelled, "Hey, you sh!thead, look here what I've got!," and I waved the stick around for him to see.  By this time, he was across the road in Uncle B's yard, and he stopped and turned to look at me again.  As soon as he saw the stick, he dropped the houseshoe and came running, ninety-aught-nothing, ready to play.  Holding the stick out of his reach, with him leaping and snapping, I managed to get my houseshoe while his mind was on the stick.  I was so mad at him I wouldn't even throw the stick. 

I felt smug about having outsmarted Homey until I got back to my porch and saw that the other shoe was gone, too. 

Muttering words that would shock the parson, I searched (in vain) my yard and Uncle B's yard for the missing shoe, but it soon got too dark to see.  I came inside with my one shoe and texted The Husband:  "Text Roger [I don't have Roger's number] and tell him that Homey has run off with my houseshoe, and if Roger doesn't find it, or finds it in Homey's sh!t, Roger's fixing to learn to knit."

A few minutes later, my telephone rang.  Roger said he'd buy me a new pair of houseshoes.  I told him he couldn't *afford* houseshoes that special, and that if he couldn't find mine, he'd have to learn to knit and make me another one.

He said, "I'll try."

That's all I can ask of him, I reckon.


 

Spring 2015 Pre-Season Countdown

I did a little blogging elsewhere today and thought I might ought to hit this one a lick while I was at it.

In truth, I have very little to report in the gardening department.

You may recall from previous posts that last year's garden was a complete bust.  I spent a lot of time, effort, and money trying out a "no-till gardening" method that was part of the reason for the garden's epic failure (the bizarre weather pattern being another).

Before last year's gardening season was even over, I resolved to do better in 2015.  To that end, last fall, I cleaned off the garden debris and removed the existing support structures  (something I rarely do until the spring), and I attempted to "burn off" the garden spot, which had grown tall grass during my abandonment phase.  The damned thing would not burn.  Oh, the tall grass caught fire and vanished in a quick "poof," but the layers of hay and newspaper in the row - the stuff I really wanted to burn - would not catch fire.

The Husband went to the garden a few weeks ago and attempted to set fire to it again.  Same result.  And since then we've had snow and ice and rain, so all that compacted stuff is now re-soaked and probably won't dry up until July.

We may try one more burning before we turn it all under with the breaking plow come spring.  I suppose that hay and newspaper might eventually be good for my soil, but it's probably going to eat up a bunch of good soil nutrients in the process. 

I should probably be down there, right now, spreading lime and chanting magic spells over the soil.

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.