My Lucky Day - Friday, 6/13/18

Today seems to be my lucky day (knock on wood, for the day is not over, yet).

The air-conditioner at my office has been on the fritz.  It was 80 degrees at my desk (and rising) when the repairman arrived at 10 a.m.  Fortunately, I did not have to stay while he fixed it.  I high-tailed it out of there around noon.

I'd been pondering a little painting project for a couple of weeks, but hadn't had the time or the materials on hand to work on it.  After leaving the office today, I stopped at the lumber store and bought myself a 1" x 8" x 8' board and some paint, and came home and got to work. 

Now, my project was never intended to be 8 feet long - it's only about 4 feet - but I thought it would be good to have extra wood, to prepare for the inevitable screw-up of the first draft.  Of course, that meant having to saw the board in half.  This prospect did not daunt me.  I have a chop saw.  I probably blogged about the little table saw that The Husband gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago.  Since then, I have also acquired a jigsaw AND a fold-up work table, complete with clamps and such.  Sawing the board in half was not supposed to be an issue.

Well, it turned out to be an issue. 

When I set up the table saw, it would not turn on.  The little red safety switch felt floppy and had no effect when moved.  I thought, Oh, no...the switch is broken.  I decided to flip it over and have a look.  The switch was housed in a plastic box that was attached with screws.  I couldn't see anything of the switch.  Found a screwdriver, unscrewed the box, but could not get access to the red part of the switch.  Put the box back on.  Flipped it back over.  Switched extension cords.  Nothing.

I had a mind to pry off the switch from the front (heck, it wasn't working, anyway, was it? and I still had a chop saw and a jigsaw, didn't I?), but then it occurred to me that maybe this was a common issue that I could read about online, some simple little fix.  So I searched for one.  Nothing.

But here's where my luck started to change:

I had registered the saw when I got it and, wonder of wonders, I still had the confirmation email.  It had a phone number on it.  I called it, and got a nice man on the phone fairly quickly.  I explained the problem:  "This little red safety switch is floppy, and the saw won't turn on." 

He said, "Is the yellow tab securely snapped in?" 
I said, "What yellow tab?"
"There's supposed to be a yellow tab."

Well, I started yammering about a yellow tab, and how I had no idea where - and this is where the REAL luck kicked in - ....

Laying on the floor under the edge of the cabinet where the saw had been stored was a yellow plastic thing, something I probably would have thrown away as extraneous junk the next time I swept the porch.  I don't know how long it had been there - could've been minutes or months.

I picked it up, and it snapped right in place.  I said, "Holy Moly!  Hold on while I see if this works."  I plugged in the saw, hit the switch, and IT WORKED.

I sawed my board in half.  :)

The first coat of paint is drying now.

Garden Report - 7/10/2018

The new belt for the black tiller was in the mailbox today.  I took it down to the shop and laid it near the toolbox, then went to work in the garden for a bit.

The pitiful row of butterbeans has been choked with grass for two weeks.  I have spent my energy elsewhere in the garden, since only 12 plants or so had sprouted on the 60-foot row, but the rest of the garden was in pretty good shape today, so I went to work pulling up grass from around the beans. 

Nanny came out to the garden after a bit, and we discussed the cucumbers.  The vines are producing fairly well - we're harvesting a dozen or so every couple of days - but the cucumbers are trying to turn yellow before they get very large.  Today, there were a good many that were the perfect size for pickles, but Nanny wants to make cucumber relish, and she likes big ones for that, but not big yellow ones.  I am afraid that if we try to let them get much bigger, they'll go yellow, first, so I suggested that we go ahead and pick the biggest ones and refrigerate them until we get more.  She didn't much like the idea, but she agreed, and we picked a shopping bag full.  I still don't understand her reluctance to use 20 medium cucumbers instead of 10 big ones in her relish. 

After about two hours in the garden, I decided to call it a day.  When I got back to my house, The Husband was home from work.  As I was taking off my gloves and my gardening apron, I said to him, "The tiller belt came in today." 

He said, not sarcastically, "Oh, good." 

I said, "I took it to the shop and laid it on top of the toolbox, so it'll be handy in case you get a sudden urge to fix something."

He gave me The Look.

I just ignored it, and went to the bathroom to wash my nasty feet. 

The urge to fix something did not arrive this evening. 

Birthday Loot

Look what I got for my birthday!




The Husband and The Grandson hooked me up.  They put it together on the back porch, and I immediately filled it with the compost I've been making.  Had a whole wagon full, and some left over. 

I said to The Grandson, "Let's go spread this around the tomatoes at 5:30 [when the garden is in shade]."  At 5:15, the bottom fell out of the sky, and it rained hard for about 20 minutes.  I wasn't about to drag the wagon, heavy with wet compost, down Nanny's long driveway.

When I came home from work today, I pulled it down there and shoveled compost around all of the tomatoes.  Don't know if it will help them, but it can't hurt them (can it?).  Even had a bit left over to do a few of the squash.

Unfortunately, one of the two cotter pins that holds the handle on came out, and I couldn't find it anywhere.  Thankfully, I caught it before the little peg fell out.  I can get another cotter pin at the hardware store.

We're getting another hard rain shower right this minute. 

Garden Report - July 3, 2018

Well, damn.

Tonight after supper, we went down to the garden to plant okra.  I dragged the big black tiller out of the shed to till up the row.  About 1/4 down the row, the tiller ran out of gas.  I re-filled the tank, and when I tried to crank it again, the pull cord broke.  This tiller has an electric, push-button starter, but it has to be plugged up to electricity to work, and the extension cord wasn't half long enough to reach the garden.  The Husband and I wrestled the tiller to the back door of the shop.  On the way, while wondering why the tiller was so hard to push, we noticed that one of the tires was going flat.  We aired up the tire, plugged up the tiller, and it cranked right up.  Back to the garden I went.  I finished out the row and was about to start back up it for a second tilling when the tiller started making a funny noise.  Soon, the wheels and the tines quit spinning.  The Husband prodded and poked around under the engine cover and discovered that a belt had broken.

Lord, save me from mechanical equipment. 

In truth, I really can't be too mad at this tiller.  In the 8 years or so that I've had it, it has never ONCE failed to crank and/or till.  I do not begrudge it a little TLC after all this time. 

We did manage to get the okra planted.  It's a long row, enough okra for everybody in Tennessee, probably.

I also weeded the tomatoes and fertilized them with some calcium-rich fertilizer.  Maybe that will help the mushy bottom situation.

Nanny found little cucumbers on the bloom-laden vines.  Maybe we'll soon have enough to make pickles and relish.

The squash aren't blooming, yet.  Neither are the green beans.

I still want to plant a few zucchini.

Everybody else is picking their gardens, already, and here I am, still planting seeds.

Fishy things - 7/2/2018

So, far, the garden is not worth reading about.  We walked down there last night to check on the tomato worm situation.  Last week, we pulled off about a dozen worms before they had a chance to do much damage.  Not seeing any new poop yet, so hopefully we have won round one.  That's about the only good news.  The ground has been almost incessantly wet ever since I planted it.  Half of the butterbeans never came up, and I have not had time to plant the skips, nor have I had time (or the seeds) to plant any okra.  And today the farmer came and sprayed his beans again, so the plants that have managed to survive so far may get speckled.  *sigh*

But I didn't sit down to write about the garden.  I sat down to write about fishing.  Sort of.

My daddy loved to fish, and did so every chance he got.  He fished for bait, then he used the bait to fish for bigger fish.  He caught minnows out of a nearby creek, using a hardware cloth trap he made himself.  I watched him do it.  He would lace it together with wire and needle-nosed pliers.  Sometimes, he'd let me do a little of the wiring.  When it was finished, he'd take it down to the creek, bait it with a biscuit, and chunk it in the water.  He'd tie it to something on the bank, and go back the next morning to see if he'd caught anything.  Most of the time, he had, and he'd open the little hatch he'd built into the side, dump the minnows in a 5-gallon bucket half full of creek water, and take them home to await whatever fate he had in store for them. 

He also knitted nets - trammel nets and hoop nets - out of nylon twine, for himself and for others.  He used a wooden mesh pin that he whittled from a spare piece of window facing.  Although he preferred plastic needles, I've seen him carve wooden ones out of a plank with his pocket knife when he was short of time and/or money.  He would drive a nail into the window facing in the living room, and hang a loop on it.  Onto the loop, he would "cast on" his rows.

I used to beg to him to let me knit, and sometimes he would, but he would never let me start a net - he said that the first row was the hardest part - or knit the throat.  He would get a net going, then turn it over to me until either I got bored and wanted to quit or something different had to happen in the process, such as an increase or decrease.  How he calculated the size is a mystery, something he never explained (or I never learned).  I don't know how long the nets were, but I remember him sitting in a kitchen chair on the other side of the living room, knitting on a net that was hung on the nail in the window facing at the opposite end of the room, so they were pretty long.   I don't know how wide they were, either, but I remember him flipping great widths of net when he started new rows, so they were pretty wide, too. 

I recall holding big wooden hoops upright while he laced the nets onto them (he would let me use them as hula hoops until he needed them).  He generally used 5 hoops, but I didn't pay much attention to the shape of the net when it was finished, or how he sewed them up. 

Lately, the subject of net-making has crossed my path from several directions, and I decided to see if I could make some.  Last week, I made a minnow trap out of hardware cloth.  Had to get some online hints about how to make the throat, and wrestling that mother into place by myself was a mess (now I see why Daddy let me help him!), but otherwise things went well. 

Then the subject of hoop nets came up . . . .

It's too early to tell if it's "so far, so good."

From the back porch - 6/19/18

Ahhhhhhhh...porch sittin'.  Nothin' like it. 

We've been gone for a few days - took a trip to east Tennessee to pick up our camper (which you could read about here ( http://susanshappytrails.blogspot.com ), if you're interested).  Things had changed when we got back home. 

For one thing, it's suddenly BLAZING HOT, pretty near too hot to sit out here until it's plumb dark, and even then the air is sticky and thick. 

For another, my daylilies and phlox and bee balm have begun to bloom.  Last fall, I divided some of the daylilies and scattered them around the yard.  They are showing out this year.

My "yard tomato" - one I planted in a bucket in the back yard - was lush and beautiful and had a golf-ball-sized tomato on it when we left.  When we got back, it was a skeleton, thanks to the four cigar-sized tomato worms I found on it.  They'd also eaten the bottom out of the one tomato.  :(  I put on some gloves, pulled the worms off, and drowned them in a bucket, for they were far too big and juicy to stomp, and instant death was too good for them.  I hope the plant recovers.

Last Sunday morning before we left, I planted 12 hills of yellow squash seeds, and they're all up, which is something of a miracle since the seeds were about 3 years old.  Nanny said that we got a big rain on Tuesday; I guess the warmth and moisture reconstituted whatever spark of life remained in those old seeds.  Amazing.  Now I need to dig through the seed bucket for some okra.  It should have been in the ground for a month, already, but my stash of "'round tu-its" has been scarce.

The cucumbers and green beans are growing like crazy.  Tomatoes are looking good, so far.  The butterbeans continue to be contrary; only half of the seeds sprouted, and they were fresh seeds!





 

Beans and cucumbers up! 6//5/2018

We've got a good stand of green beans - looks like every seed we planted came up.  Ditto for the cucumbers.

The butterbeans . . . well, they're being persnickety, as usual.  Yesterday, it looked like about every other seed came up.  I'm going to give the laggers a couple more days, then I'm going to replant the skips.

Still haven't planted the squash.  It's just been too stinkin' wet. 

The tomatoes are looking good.  I need to spray them again, for blight.  I also need to get the hay and the compost from my yard to the garden, but that's been a problem. 

And if I don't get all that stuff done before the weekend is over, it probably won't get done for two more weeks.