A Day in the Garden
All of my good intentions to weed Friday morning were upended by a line of thunderstorms that came through here as I was getting ready to get out of bed. (One clap of thunder was so loud that I thought it was going to scare me back into heart palpitations.) I don’t mind weeding, but I do mind weeding when it’s hot and muggy—which it was for most of the morning—so I stayed inside and reorganized the pantry. I’ve got nice big cabinets, but they are deep, and sometimes stuff gets lost in the back of them. That led to cleaning and organizing the laundry room, and the whole project took most of the day.
My friend Susan came by in the afternoon. She is making an I-Spy alphabet quilt for her grandson, and I told her not to buy more fabric until we went through my collection. She left here with a bag of goodies. We tore the fabric bins apart in the process, but I assured her that was perfectly fine because they are on my list to reorganize, too. I think we’re going to have to figure out how to get the new cutting table upstairs. Having it down here is not working well.
Yesterday was much cooler. The husband went out to get the pig pasture ready and I worked in the garden. I finished weeding the potatoes and then mulched them with straw:
We got a huge round bale last spring that has sat and rotted nicely for a year. Rotted straw makes great potato mulch and then it just becomes part of the soil amendments. The bale is sitting at one end of the garden, so I forked the straw into the old Little Tykes wagon to haul it over to the potatoes. That worked.
The husband used the big string trimmer around the edges of the fence to make sure the electric fence wire was exposed. The piglets will learn to respect it. He also trimmed the perimeter of the garden for me:
My goal is to have a wide enough strip of grass around the edge of the garden that I can just come in there with either the rider or the push mower and keep that trimmed down. With all the rain we got a few weeks ago and then the hot weather, the grass in that area was over a foot high. Now it’s manageable again.
We moved one of the billboard tarps to a different part of the garden to kill the rest of the weeds. We’re trying not to till—because we actually have fewer weeds that way—but there are some really stubborn weeds that take drastic measures to eradicate. I won’t use chemicals.
And we decided we will close off that back portion of the garden where the strawberry bed used to be and let it become part of the pig pasture. That area got all overgrown with quackgrass. I’m going to move the strawberry plants that are left to a different part of the garden. There are only two of us here and we don’t need as much garden space, so it’s time to consolidate some things.
I took lettuce seedlings out of the tray in the greenhouse and transplanted a row of them into the garden, then re-seeded the tray.
My currant bushes are looking phenomenal. Cathy suggested I prune them and they seem to concur with that advice.
My garden/yard projects for this week are:
Move strawberry plants and mulch them
Plant the corn (I didn’t do that yesterday because the location will be dependent on where the strawberries go)
Weed the peas (that won’t take long)
Keep the grass mowed everywhere
Plant some beans?
Pick rhubarb
I also need to make up my class handout for the serger class. Five people have signed up so far and the owner of the quilt store is thrilled. I put a limit of 10 on the class, but that is pushing it a bit. Five students will be a good-sized serger class.
We pick up piglets this afternoon!