Babysitting - March 30, 2025

We babysat our 17-year-old grandson this weekend.  ;)

He called me Friday afternoon to ask if we had plans for the weekend.  We did not.  I told him to come on over.  Last night, he brought his girlfriend over.  (I liked her!)  He just left our house to go to his school and board a yellow school bus for a trip across the state, a HOSA competition.  It was a joy to have him here.

Friday, I planted 27 tomato plants, a row of Anasazi beans, and four seed display packages of sweet pea seeds that my sister gave me.  I planted the sweet peas between the tomatoes, thinking they might share the fence amiably.  They should put nitrogen in the soil (if the rabbit doesn't eat them), which should suit the tomatoes.  If the peas get too vigorous and start to wrap up the tomato plants, I'll just yank out the peas.  

I did not water the tomatoes since the weatherman predicted rain this weekend.  We got a good, slow, soaking rain yesterday.  Thanks, Mother Nature.  :)  Maybe now the onions and kohlrabi will come up.

Last weekend we ordered a hiller/hipper/row-maker.  It's supposed to be here Tuesday.  Hopefully, by the weekend, we'll have made rows in the rest of the garden and I will have planted purple hull peas and squash.  It might be too early.  I'll replant, if necessary.

Yesterday afternoon, between rain showers, I was sitting on the back porch and caught out of the corner of my eye a little flutter on the stepping-stones outside the porch.  At first I thought it was a wet leaf fluttering against a clump of grass that has grown up between the stones.  When it didn't blow away, I got up for a better look.

It was not a leaf; it was furry and gray - I couldn't tell what it was - and it was trying to burrow between two stepping-stones.  I went in the house and said to The Husband, "I need you to come kill something."  He gave me a strange look, but he came out and grabbed an old rake handle from the corner of the porch.  The gray burrowing thing turned out to be a baby mole.  How/why it was on the stepping-stones is a mystery.

 

Tomatoes, Sweet Peas, and Anasazi Beans - March 28, 2025

All of the above went in the ground this morning.

Come on, rain!

Talking - March 28, 2025

I talked all day yesterday.

My sister texted me before 8 a.m.:  "Are you up?  And talking?"  I replied that I was up and had told The Husband "bye."  She gave it another hour before she called.

She's worried and sad.  Her little dog, Sparky, a Yorkie, had a tumor removed from his neck earlier in the week, and she is worried about what the biopsy will show, dreading the worst.  He's been her companion for maybe 10 years.  She treasures him.

Before you entertain visions of a sweet little ball of fur, be advised that he is a 4-pound ball of FURY.  When my sister rescued him, he was doing his third stint at the shelter, having been labeled as a special needs dog because of his foul temperament.  My sister and her children managed to gain his trust, but he will try to eat anybody else.  If he were a big dog, he'd have killed somebody by now.  Fortunately, his tiny little mouth prevents him from seriously injuring a grown-up.

We talked about Sparky, and gardening, and other stuff.  We made plans to get together next week.

Not long after we hung up, my BFF called.  Her daughter just got engaged, and the two of them have been pondering wedding plans.  My BFF has mobility issues and gets depressed about being unable to do all she wants to do.  And the depression spills over to prevent her from doing a lot of things she CAN do, such as picking up the phone to call someone to do the yard work.  I chastised her for this - "Just pick up the phone!"- then I chastised myself for the same thing.  I've been needing to order replacement parts for some of our lawn equipment but haven't done it because I needed model numbers.  While I was on the phone with my BFF, I went outside and took pictures of the model numbers, and as soon as the conversation ended, I sat down and ordered the parts.

Not long after that, my other BFF called.  We spent our time commiserating about our arthritis and other ailments.  

Three marathon phone calls in one day might be a record for me.  By the time I hung up from BFF #2, it was time to start supper. After we ate, The Husband and I walked down to the garden and attached the wire fencing to the t-posts in what will become the tomato rows.  It got dark on us before we got to the bean fence.  

In a little bit, I'm going back to the garden to plant tomatoes and beans.  If it turns out to be too early for planting, so be it.

  

Zinnias and such - March 27, 2025

Yesterday morning, I went to work on a flower bed beside the driveway.  It was full of leaves and last year's flower stems.  Under all that debris, stuff was coming to life.   I raked it all out, scuffed up the soil, and sprinkled seeds - zinnia, cosmos, and bachelor's buttons.in that bed and in the "stump bed" down the hill.

In the stump bed, a rudbeckia that I planted last year is coming back to life, and it has made babies.  I dug up two of the babies and moved them up to the driveway border. 

The aster I planted last year in that same bed is budding.  

Fire ants have built a nest against the stump.  I guess we've run them out of Nanny's yard and into ours.

I worked on the driveway border until nearly noon.  Shredded leaves for the compost bin. Sprinkled mushroom compost on the pile and mixed it in.  It needs to be wet, but dragging the water hose that far (and rolling the blasted thing back up) took more gumption than I had.  Hopefully, we'll get the rain that's predicted for the weekend.

When The Husband came home from work, we set the t-posts in the garden for fencing - two rows for tomatoes and one for the anasazi beans I'm going to try.  Before we went to the garden, The Husband said, "I wonder if a little girl [meaning the Little Rotten Baby] would like a ride on the tractor.  We went across the road to ask her; of course she wanted to ride the tractor.  She and her next oldest sister (age 10) went to the garden with us.

Riding the tractor while it's setting t-posts is not much fun for a kid.  The Husband drives to the end of the row and backs out of it, 8-10 feet at a time.  Within 5 minutes, the LRB was sitting on her butt in the newly-tilled soil on the far side of the garden, throwing dirt in the air.

The girls came home with us for supper.  After we ate, until it got dark, I pushed the LRB in the swing, then we walked them home.  

After supper tonight, I will try to cajole The Husband into helping me put up the fence wire, and tomorrow I will plant the tomato plants I've been babying for two weeks.  If a late frost comes, we'll just have to tie shopping bags over them.

Lavender--cide - March 26, 2025

This morning, I probably killed one of my two ancient lavender plants.

It started when I decided to rake the leaves out of a flower bed along the driveway, where yarrow, beebalm, and larkspur are beginning to emerge.  That bed had been invaded by English ivy, so once I got most of the leaves out, I started pulling ivy.  Of course, one thing leads to another....

The lavender grows 8 feet to the west of that bed.  I planted it - probably 20 years ago, on a rocky, sunny bank - never expecting it to make it through the first winter.  But it did, and it continues to live.  I have never pruned it, never raked off the leaves, for fear of killing it. It, too, has been invaded by ivy.  Last year, it had only a few stems peeking up through the debris. This morning, I decided that it would probably not survive another year of being choked, so I got out the pruning shears and the rake and attacked it.  In the process, I broke off the only stem that showed signs of life.

This stem had sprawled and grown roots where it touched the ground.  I re-planted the stem. Now that I think about it, I should probably go back out and lop off the foliage so that it can concentrate on re-rooting itself.

Later this morning, I'll need to tackle the piles of leaves.  They'll make a good start on a new round of compost.  Last week, I bought a bag of mushroom compost to use in the vegetable garden.  A few handfuls of that mushroom stuff might jump-start the new batch of compost

This evening when The Husband gets home, we're going to set the t-posts for the vegetable garden fencing.  The tractor makes short work of that terrible job.  

Speaking of the tractor, Son #2 borrowed it this weekend to push up a bunch of brush and pine needles around his property.  The Little Rotten Baby (now age 4) insisted on a ride on the tractor.  Her daddy even let her raise and lower the bucket.  When he prepared to return the tractor, she told him, "I feel like I need to keep this."  

I can see some benefit in having a granddaughter who knows how to drive a tractor, once she's big enough to reach the pedals. :)

Tuesday - March 25, 2025

I'm sitting here on the back porch this morning, watching two big woodpeckers running the table at the bird seed spot.  A dozen little brown birds are waiting on the outskirts, and when the woodpeckers leave, they rush in to eat until the bullies come back for seconds.  The nuthatch and chickadee do "touch and go" maneuvers and get their meals to go.  The bluejay came and ran errrrrbody off.  And now the bird food spot is empty, for there's a hawk circling above the trees. I suppose this would be a good breakfast place for him, too, if he had the airspace to swoop in.

I've got two hours to kill this morning before a scheduled phone call, then I have to go pick up my grocery order.  Middle-of-the-day obligations screw up the whole day.

Have a look at this redbird I whittled yesterday out of a Polonia limb from my yard:

See that ragged spot on his head?  That's a hole.  It goes all the way through the stick.  I intend to whittle a couple more birds - maybe a bluejay (which will essentially be the same bird, only blue) and a chickadee- and string them up, like windchimes, on a stick.  PRE-DRILLED HOLES! 

Broccoli and Lettuce - March 24, 2025

As payment for helping me plant onions this weekend, I went to the greenhouse and got six broccoli plants (he likes broccoli, he says) and set them out on the onion/kohlrabi row.  I also planted six lettuce plants - four in the vegetable garden for Nanny, and two in a backyard flower bed for The Husband and me.  

While it was still cold, I planted butter lettuce seeds in a bag of potting soil in the cold frame I bought last year.  They're up and doing well.  It would probably be a good idea to raise the lid on the cold frame, eh?  At least in the daytime.

I've been hauling a tray of tomato plants on and off the porch since last week.  I kind of wish I hadn't bought them so soon, but these old tried-and-true varieties vanish before it's time to plant.  Last year I was stuck with a bunch of purple grape tomatoes that I started from seeds and some left-overs from the greenhouse.  Our tomato crop was pitiful.  I'd like for this next one to kick butt.