Category Archives: Gardening

Toil and Trouble … and Cats

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I’ve spent the first half of the day pouring large pots of boiling water on fire ant mounds. The actual carrying of large pots of boiling water is tedious and tiring, but the killing of millions of fire ants always brings me an odd sense of glee. If you live somewhere that has fire ants, you will understand. If you have never encountered a fire ant, you can’t possibly begin to comprehend the level of loathing they are worthy of having poured on them. Boiling water is barely adequate, but at least it does kill them. I haven’t finished the task, but it’s getting hot outside, which makes the ants move deeper underground, and my arms were getting tired. Tomorrow, there shall be more slaying of ants with large pots of boiling water. Die, fire ants! Die!

Last night, I massacred the fire ants that had taken up residence in two of my large pots, so this morning, I transplanted the last tomato plant into an antless pot and put it in it’s new home on the front porch. I’m hoping it gets to stay there and has enough sunlight, because if I put it back in the back yard, it will only become an ant condo again. We’ll see how that goes. I’ve had tomatoes in pots on the front porch before, and they seemed to do well enough.

The peas have started to come up in the two planters I already had on the front porch. I’m really late getting the peas started, but they do well enough in partial sunlight, so maybe we’ll get some snow peas before it gets too damn hot for peas to do their thing. Not that it isn’t already too damn hot out in the Texas sun, because it is, but by late afternoon the porch doesn’t have sunlight on it anymore, and late afternoon is when it gets REALLY hot. Anyway, here’s hoping the peas do OK, and if it looks like they aren’t, I’ll pull them up and plant something else there.

The first self-seeded basil of the season has begun to come up! This is the sign I was waiting for. It tells me the soil is now warm enough to plant anything I want to plant. Of course, it should be noted, we have not yet plowed up the new garden area, so if I want to plant anything today, it’ll have to be carrots, basil, radishes, lettuce, and things in pots. I’ll probably stick a few seeds in the ground later today when it starts to cool off again, and hopefully tomorrow we will get up off our collective butts and work in the yard. I need tilled soil … and a lot of it!

While I was working out in the back yard and running in and out of the house with large pots of ant-killing boiling water, two of the outdoor cats were doing their best to both annoy and entertain me. Sasha was being entertaining by trying to catch one of the many anoles (lizards) that hang around the back door. She had no success. She’s fast, but they are much, much faster. And they can climb walls. Meanwhile, Grumpy was busy deciding the area containing the walking onions was the perfect place to make a new cat napping location. None of the cats were at all interested with that particular spot of earth until I put bricks around it (to keep it from getting accidentally mowed over). Now, all the cats LOVE that spot. What gives?!

Grumpy Cat

Speaking of Grumpy, he’s finally beginning to catch on that cuteness, niceness, and showing humans a little love gets his feeding needs fulfilled much sooner than being a mean old cat. He actually ran up to me the other day, meowed sweetly, gave me an adorable look, and rubbed against my leg. Naturally, I immediately went and got the bag of food. That sort of behavior deserves immediate rewarding! I’m really worried about him though. He’s quite old, and now he’s looking rather skinny and ill. There really isn’t much I can do about that. Trapping has been tried, and he’s quite clever (has to be to have lived so long on the streets), and even if I did manage to catch him, I don’t really have the money to spend on finding out what’s wrong and treating it. He doesn’t appear to be suffering, but I suppose if the day comes when it’s obvious he’s in really terrible shape and is suffering, I’ll have to find some way to make the right choice for him, which will be sad. He may be a grumpy, mean old thing, but he’s sort of family.

I’m not even going to tell you what the indoor beasts have been up to today. Let’s just say if I were the sort of person to beat animals when they are being insufferable pains in my butt, there would have been beatings today. It’s all Ronin’s fault today, because Ronin is apparently in a mood. A bad mood. He likes to spread his bad moods around, so basically, there are three annoyed cats milling around being somewhat evil. Hopefully, they will get tired soon and go sleep on the bed together like good kitties. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting on that though. Some days, the cats are just major pains in my butt ALL day long.

Now I suppose I should go finish the dishes I started an hour ago and forgot about and stick a few seeds into garden beds. Probably wouldn’t hurt if I did some laundry too. OK, it will hurt, because I don’t feel like doing laundry at all, but it needs to be done. Clean clothes (and clean dishes) are nice things to have on hand. LOL!

Destroyer of Worlds

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Yesterday, I was the destroyer of worlds. Whole universes were torn asunder as I ripped up weeds in the garden. It’s amazing the complex ecosystems that develop in and on healthy soil when one ignores it for a few months. While I do feel sorry for all the now-homeless bugs and dead weeds, I reserve the right to fully claim my small patch of earth to use as I will and bend to my desires. Nature has the rest of the back yard to do with what it will.

The weeding was tedious in the way only weeding can be. Oh, my aching arms and back! It’s my own fault, of course, that there were so many weeds to pull. I could have not ignored the problem all winter, but that would have required going out in the cold to work in the garden, and well, that’s just never likely to happen. Like a bear, I just want to curl up in my warm den at the first sign of cold weather and snooze the short days away. Therefore, massive amounts of weeding are necessary when the sunny warmth of spring returns. Like I said, my fault the task was so tough and tedious.

Thankfully, the weed most dominant this spring (no idea what it is) only looked plentiful. There weren’t as many actual plants as I expected. They were just large and sprawling. Once those were pulled up, I removed what clover I could with the least amount of effort. Clover doesn’t especially bother me. Makes a nice natural mulch, and it fixes nitrogen (as do legumes), so it’s not on my list of plants that must die immediately.† I do need it to be out of my way somewhat during the planting stage of things though … and during the initial seedling stage of growing. Then the clover can go as wild as it likes. I wouldn’t mind if it took over the whole yard actually, but that doesn’t seem to be happening at all. The clover only wants to grow in my garden beds. I take this as a sign the soil is healthy and rich.

The lettuce and garlic bed wasn’t especially awful to clear out. The lettuce and garlic are large and don’t look anything at all like weeds. The carrot bed, on the other hand, was a pain in the butt (and literally, the neck). I allowed the carrots to self-seed, which means there are baby carrots randomly growing all over the place, and baby carrots, for the record, are small and look amazingly like weeds. I think I only pulled up one baby carrot, but it’s possible, as my back started aching and I became interested in no longer being outside, that a couple may have been pulled up without my noting it. Collateral damage. Oops. We won’t be wanting for carrots though. There are oodles out there now, and I intend to plant more this coming week. I suspect we’ll have more than enough carrots.

Interestingly, the now two year old carrots I allowed to go to see last year, and which I haven’t yet removed from the garden, are once again going to seed. I didn’t expect this. I’ve never just ignored carrots before and let them do their own thing. All winter long I expected those old and crusty carrots to die and require removing, but no, they made it through winter, and now they want to propagate themselves again. Bravo! It’s starting to feel like my dream of beds of edible plants that plant themselves naturally and grow well may eventually become reality. Both the carrot bed and the lettuce bed are well on their way to being fully self-recovering, and the carrots and lettuce are well on their way to being plants “native” to those beds. See what wonders happen when you allow nature to do her thing? LOL!

Today, I have to fight back the Bermuda grass in the bed containing my wild onions. I’d relinquished that area back to nature, because I hadn’t expected there to be anything coming up in it. Sure, I allowed the cucumbers to self seed, but seeing as they were hybrids, I figured none would come up (and they haven’t), and sure, I planted some of the “seeds” from the walking onions by the house into that bed, but it’s been a year … so I didn’t expect they would ever decide to grow. They did, much to my surprise and happiness, and so now I have to clear them a little room. I’m sort of torn about whether or not to do so though, because the ones by the house are large and happy onions (for wild onions, which are really quite small), and I assure you, no weeds are pulled in that location. They’re lucky to get watered once or twice a year. I’m going to make a little effort though to get some of the grass out (and the weeds), and then I’ll put a ring of bricks around it and leave it be. They are, after all, wild onions and accustomed to fighting for survival.

I still haven’t decided what to do about the tomato plants. There’s one spot in the lettuce bed that looks like it would be nice for a tomato plant, and there’s a spot in the carrot bed that might work OK. That leaves me with one plant with no home. I’d thought I would put it in a pot on the front porch, but I haven’t had potted tomatoes in years, and I’m afraid it won’t work this year. A silly fear, so I suppose the cherry tomato will end up in a pot on the front porch. If it doesn’t like it there, I can always move it or transplant it elsewhere. And don’t even ask me about all the other tomato plants that are still in seed form. I should have started them weeks ago. I’ll probably make some newspaper pots today and get those going too. We must have plenty of tomatoes!

This weekend, there must be plowing and tilling and compost adding so next week there can be planting! We’ll be adding about 200 square feet of garden space. I’m of mixed feelings on this. I’m happy to be expanding and thus potentially growing more food, but oi … it’s going to be a lot of work to maintain and keep growing. Mostly, without there being raised and contained beds, the Bermuda grass is going to be a royal pain in my butt. It grows fast and it spreads itself far and wide. Have I mentioned I hate Bermuda grass? Well, I do. To me, it’s a damn weed, and an ugly one at that. But we can’t possible build 200 square feet of beds right now, so native soil flat with the earth will have to do this year. I’ll just have to be diligent at keeping the nasty Bermuda grass at bay. It’s going to suck.

The only other plan that needs to be implemented is the new seating area in the garden. Previously, the seating area was the potato bed, but thanks to all that rain we got last year, the trees have grown, and now there’s far too much shade to grow anything at all. It gets a little sun in the morning, but it’s not enough sunlight for most plants. Weeds don’t even seem to want to grow there. My plan is to use some of that stack of reclaimed bricks we have to make something resembling a small patio area for my lounge chair and a table. Concrete pavers are terribly expensive though, so it’s possible I may go ahead and spend my birthday money on some. First I have to get the ground in that area ready, and that means killing the GIANT fire ant mound existing there, making it all somewhat level, and laying down some plastic. I don’t expect any of this to happen today. My arms are too tired to carried large pots of boiling water out to the fire ant mound and back again for an hour or more.

And eventually, something will have to be done about the front flower bed, but I’m choosing to not think about it right now. It’s a nightmare (due to total neglect). There are two year old pecan trees growing in it that are almost as tall as the house, and it’s a bramble of weeds and plants. I really don’t feel like dealing with it all all, but I suspect it can’t be ignored for another year. I don’t even want to imagine what it will be like if it’s ignored for another year.

So today’s mission, which I have chosen to accept, is only to come to a decision about what to do with the tomato plants, get some tomato seeds started, and do something about the area with the walking onions. Doesn’t sound like much, but I know that once I get started on it all, it will take ten times longer than I expected it to take. That’s always the case, isn’t it? LOL!

But first, another cup of coffee to increase my motivation level!

Footnotes
  1. † Clover hasn’t always been known as a weed. The only reason people see it as one these days is because modern herbicides kill it. Seriously. People used to like clover to be around. Of course all weeds are just plants growing where one doesn’t want them to grow. Most people would have heart failure if they saw all the “weeds” that I allow to grow in my yard, but to me, so long as they aren’t in my way, plants are plants, and native plants are wonderful to have around … even if others might call them weeds. [↩]

Hot Dog! It’s Cold!!!

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I was supposed to have a day with temps around 40º and not freezing until sunset. I wasn’t going to have to worry about covering my garden beds until after noon, which would allow my plants to get a little of whatever sunlight was available this morning. That’s what all the professional weather people who are supposed to be able to ascertain these kinds of things told me. Well … lies, lies and damned lies!!!

Five hours ago, I was standing on my front porch barefoot and wearing shorts and a tank top. I would have describe myself as merely being a little chilly when the breeze picked up. It was still in the 60′s. Then … the storm before the front hit. The wind was insane. I swear I heard hail (and maybe at one point even sleet) mixed in with the rain. Four hours ago, the temperature dropped from 66º to 40º about as quickly as air temperature can drop (30 minutes or less to be more precise). Since then, there’s been a strong sustained wind with really high level gusts, and the temperature has just kept going down. Currently, it’s 32º. With the wind chill figured in, it’s just ridiculously cold (about 20º). Yes, it’s as cold now as they said it would be at sunset tonight. I’d say the cold front got here a little earlier than expected.

I’d already determined there wasn’t anything I could do about covering my plants until after it had rained as much as it planned to rain. I don’t have things set up to deal with plastic covered beds in the rain, and I lost a lot of plants once when it both rained and froze at the same time, which lead to the plastic smashing my plants (and then they froze too). So I let the rain do it’s thing, and then I go out and cover my plants. This wasn’t going to be a big deal, because it wasn’t going to be this damn cold already. But it was, so I had to go out as soon as I got Lin off to work and cover the garden beds as best I could.

I had to keep coming in and warming up a bit, because the wind is just freaking BITTER. After just a couple of minutes, I’d start losing the feeling in my fingers. There is no joy dealing with thin plastic sheets and heavy bricks with no feeling in one’s fingers. After a few trips in and out to get things safely tucked away under plastic and flannel and canvas, I declared the job as done as it was likely to get. This is really some freakish weather, and I expect I may lose some plants no matter what, but the ground is warm from a few days of warm spring weather, the plants are somewhat buried under the rotting leaves I have neglected to clear from the beds, so maybe everything will be OK. I may put some hot water in soda bottles and slip them under the plastic this evening, just to give a degree of extra warmth to anything under there with them, but I doubt that would really help. It’s going to get down into the teens tonight. Ugh.

So now, thanks to the weather not doing what was expected, my plan for the day has had to be changed. First off, I will not not be going to get my truck reinspected. Screw it. I have 15 days to get it back over there, so there’s no sense going out in this cold mess. Secondly, I have not had any sleep yet, so working on any of the multitude of things I really need to be working on today is going to have to wait. New plan? Go to bed and wake up later. I don’t think I’m even going to set my alarm. I solved a major problem with one of the projects last night while I was not sleeping, so really, I guess I already did some work on it for today. Right? Just say “Yes, you did!” I will accept no other answer.

At some point today, I will wake up, bake some bread and cookies (love a hot oven on a cold day), contemplate what to make for dinner, make something for Thing-a-Day 2011 (which started today), and maybe do a little work on one of the other art projects waiting for my attention. Sounds like a busy day, but not really. Making art isn’t like going to get a truck inspected or doing grocery shopping or cleaning the house. It’s fun. LOL!

‘Til later! I gotta go get some sleep.

Zzzzz…

First Lettuce 2011

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Last night’s dinner wasn’t any kind of fancy gourmet meal, just some whole wheat spaghetti, sauteed mushrooms and ground beef, and Alfredo sauce (from a jar – eek) … and a side salad. Nothing terribly exciting, except all the lettuce and radishes came from the garden, which is quite exciting to me! LOL!

First Lettuce 2011

Last night before I tucked the lettuce in under their freeze-protecting blankets, I decided to quickly thin the little plants out a bit. There’s still a lot to be thinned out in order to give the largest of them the best conditions for growing perfectly, but I didn’t want to waste any, so I only picked what we needed for last night’s salad. If I do that a few more times this week, everything should be spaced out well enough.

I’m quite thrilled with this winter’s lettuce. The Black Seeded Simpson (a leaf lettuce) is behaving in a weedy manner (which I like) and looking and tasting great. The few head lettuce seeds I planted on a lark (really not winter hardy at all) are already getting large enough to start pulling together into little heads too. I think this is the earliest we’ve had lettuce on our plates from seeds planted at the beginning of winter. Last year, we did have some during winter, but all of that was from summer plants I babied like crazy to keep going through a few freezes. Old lettuce plants may provide good nutrition, but after a while, it just doesn’t taste as sweet as the leaves of new plants.

The thing I am most thrilled about concerning the lettuce is that while I have been covering most of the seedlings during freezes, some of the self-planted ones were just outside the range of my blanket, and I couldn’t be bothered to cover them … and they haven’t died. In fact, some of them look really, really healthy. What will be interesting to see, as the season progresses, is whether or not they are not only freeze hardy but also don’t go to seed at the first sign of a warm spring day. Either way, I’ll be saving seed from these plants, because they will be the ones to plant at the start of next winter planting season, but if they also show themselves to be tolerant of warm and sunny weather, I may have my perfect lettuce seeds at last. Something that can be grown and enjoyed through winter and into early summer. That would be great!

In other garden news, I really need to get out there and do some weeding and prep work for spring planting. I’ve done better at keeping up with it this winter (and certainly better than I did this last summer), but it’s either sunny but too cold or warm enough but too wet to be outside puttering. It’s not especially overgrown, but still, weeds are weeds and they have to go. I also need to plant more radishes and carrots, as well as tear out the total failure of arugula (it just isn’t going to grow in my garden) and plant some more head lettuce.

It’s also time to start my indoor seedlings and maybe order some seeds of some kind to try some new things this summer. And “we” need to get out the tiller and till massive areas of the yard. I want to do a grain crop this year, plus I need to buy some potato starts to begin the potato experiment anew. OMG, there is so much gardening stuff I need to be doing and I am so busy with other projects! Maybe I should take a day off from the artwork and spend some time planning and working on the garden projects. I yet again have hope that this year will be THE YEAR my garden is totally awesome. Yes, hope does spring eternal in the gardener’s heart. LOL!

Survival of the Fittest!

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The temperature outside has finally gotten up over 40º, and according to the weather reports, it’s not going to go back below freezing for a few days. Yeah! Though it is dreary and drizzling. Boo! Really shouldn’t complain too much. It could have been drizzling and raining while being below freezing, which would have made this week’s weather suck even worse than it did (if that’s even possible).

Since 44º seems almost warm compared to the last few days, I finally went out to the garden to uncover my lettuce plants. They’ve been covered for days. It never got warm enough to risk taking the covers off, not with the wind chill keeping things at freezing. Lettuce really doesn’t like it all that cold. I had no idea whether they had survived all this or not. I was expecting to pull back the sheets of plastic, canvas, and flannel to find brown, withered, dead little plants. They were finally getting large enough to thin out –thus offering us our first salad fixings– so I was prepared to be peeved. Not heartbroken, seeing as trying to plant lettuce in the fall and keep it going all winter is really just an experiment, but definitely peeved. I was looking forward to eating some of it next week! It can’t be dead!

But no! Even after multiple days of freezing temps and no sunlight on top of it, all my precious lettuce is alive! I almost couldn’t believe my eyes when I pulled off the last cover and there was all that bright green! It made me so happy I actually gave a little jump for joy. Additionally, the things I didn’t cover at all –carrots, radishes, garlic– are all looking green and happy too. So is the parsley plant I finally got started.

Yippee!!!

My seed line for Black Seeded Simpson lettuce is really bringing me joy. The seeds off this year’s plants are going to be the best yet, and after four years of letting the plants do what they want to do while also helping them along just a little by lightly covering them when the weather just gets too ridiculous appears to be leading to what I have been looking for: a minimal care lettuce plant that can be grown and eaten all winter without much fuss. A plant that is adapted to the ground it is growing in is always going to be better than a plant fresh from the seed farm far away. This year’s lettuce are third generation seeds from self-propagating plants that survived winter. Even better, the plants these seeds came from also continued to produce tasty salad goodness well after the heat should have made them go to seed! I have successfully extended the growing cycle … by pretty much letting the plants be plants and do their own thing. LOL!

My Chantenay carrots are currently growing their second generation. This is the first time I let the hardiest of them go to seed and plant themselves however they wanted. They’ve been growing slowly, due to the crappy weather this season, but they are growing and looking good. I haven’t even bothered to cover them when it freezes. I’m quite eager to see how this year’s carrots turn out, because last year’s carrots were totally awesome (and plentiful). I have some of last year’s seeds I saved that I’ll be planting when it warms up just a bit more though, just to be sure we have lots of carrots. We do love the carrots.

My mission with all of this seed saving and letting plants do their own thing as much as possible is to find those things which grow in my back yard without the minimum amount of care and hassle while producing loads of food. In short … I want my garden plants to become weed-like, and I have been having some measure of success. The lettuce is almost to the point of being weed-like. The basil already is. In fact, the basil is so weed-like, I’m afraid to imagine what that bed is going to look like come spring. It was already insane last year. This year, I think I’ll find basil growing everywhere, even outside the bed. I don’t have a problem with that! Basil is very, very useful.

So far, the things that do really well in my back yard seem to be lettuce, carrots, and basil. I need to find some other things to add to that list. I still need to find an heirloom tomato variety that is happy with my particular growing conditions and some kind of beans that will thrive. I’ve had trouble with both of those, and I really want some tomatoes and beans. I’ve had nothing but total failure with squash and cucumbers too. I may very well give up on squash (so cheap and plentiful to buy at the market anyway), and last year I finally gave in and planted hybrid cucumbers, which did well and is worth repeating. I’d prefer heirlooms that would self-seed and adapt, but I also prefer having enough cucumbers for pickles and salads. Maybe someday I’ll find the perfect variety. In the meantime, hybrid cukes it is.

Can you tell I am getting excited about spring coming and the serious growing season starting again? I can’t wait to get my spring stuff in the ground and have all manner of edible green things growing again. Of course, I have to wait though. We’ll still get at least a couple more freezes, and I always try to rush it along, and that always leads to sadness. But I can look through my seed catalogs and start picking out varieties to try this year, and I can get my tomato seeds started indoors soon too. The ramping up for the 2011 spring garden shall begin any day now! Woo hoo! Come on spring!!!

Meanwhile, the weather is completely depressing. So tired of the lack of sunshine.

The Garden is Go!

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My hands are nearly useless balls of pain. My back is stiff and achy. I’m covered in scratches and bug bites. My sinuses are completely clogged. But … I got the garden planted before the cold front and rain arrived! Yippee!

Didn’t go too crazy this year. Last year’s winter garden was somewhat dismal. I can’t really complain, because we did have lettuce carrots and radishes almost all winter long, but most of the things I planted just didn’t do anything, which means I could have had more of what did had I known not to bother with broccoli and cauliflower (and whatever those beans were). Therefore, I only planted lettuces, arugula, onions, garlic, carrots, parsley, and radishes (and only in the two raised beds). I am, of course, excited. I’m always excited when the seeds go in the ground. Now I have a reason to run out there every day and look to see what’s coming up!

There are only two things I still need to do out there. First, I need to create a decent frame for plastic sheeting to protect from the few actual freezes we get every winter, and I need to lay out some black plastic sheeting in the areas we want to extend the garden into this spring (to kill off the weeds and grasses). Normally, I person would kill off stuff with plastic during the hot summer days, but I was already using the areas this summer (for the successful cucumbers and the failed beans), and I suspect it’ll work just as well during the winter here in Texas. It’s not like it really gets all that cold here.

Neither of these things is going to get done until my hands and back are a little happier. I kicked butt getting the garden into working order as quickly as I did, which means I totally overdid it (and am now paying for that). Once those two things get done, all that’s left to do is wait for the soil temperature to drop low enough for stuff to germinate and keep the weeds at bay. Won’t be long and we’ll be having fresh baby lettuce and tasty fresh radishes!

I sort of regret ignoring the garden as much as I did this summer while I was busy being artsy in my kitchen, but it was already showing signs of failure before I let nature run wild out there. It was much wetter this summer than expected, and due to it having been so wet our trees grew like crazy cutting off a few hours of the sun my two main beds get every day. The combination of those two factors made for a bunch of somewhat unhappy plants. I don’t actually think my being out there every day fretting over it would have made much difference. Not that the summer garden was a failure! We had more than enough basil, cucumbers, and carrots, and even though the tomatoes didn’t produce as well as I’d have liked –they never do, no matter what– we still had quite a few fat and juicy ‘maters. The garden never produces as much as I’d like, so there’s really no use complaining.

There are some changes planned for spring. A couple new raised beds in sunnier locations and plowing up a swath of the far back yard for corn, peanuts, and potatoes. Bed One is now almost entirely in the shade and only gets a few hours of sun a day, and Bed Two isn’t much better. These will now be devoted to edible flowers, greens, and herbs, which don’t mind not getting 8 hours a day of blazing hot sun. In fact, Bed Two is likely going to be nothing but basil, because I have to tell you, the basil really, really loves that bed. Grows like weeds! I am totally not complaining about that. I do love the basil.

Also, I’m going to be starting my tomato seeds really early this year. Might even start them as early as January so they are nice and big by the time it’s warm enough to move them outside. I really needed to get one pear tomato and one pineapple tomato for seed this summer, and that didn’t happen as both plants failed completely due to lack of sunlight. That means my remaining seed stock is losing its potency as we speak. I’ve got to get some of them growing as soon as possible, because I do not want to lose those two lines. Yes, I will be babying my tomatoes this coming spring, and while having plenty of them to eat would be nice, I mostly just have to be sure to get some fresh seeds from them!

And you remember how last year I carefully plotted out where to plant things and had a whole plan for every single little thing? I have totally given up on that. My experience watching things self-seed out there tell me that it just doesn’t matter so much. Unless it was something that needed to be planted deeper than a half-inch, I just liberally broadcast the seeds and chopped them into the earth with my hand tool. I’m not even keeping notes anymore. I’ve discovered I do much better just going with my instincts on when to plant and when things will be ready. I’m pretty good at reading Mother Nature’s intentions.

So while I may be hurting today from working so hard at there, it’s a good hurt … and I am all kinds of excited about the garden again. Any day now, I’ll start looking through my seed-buying sources and planning which new varieties to add this spring. I can’t wait for both the first fresh goodies from the winter garden and getting started on the spring planting (which isn’t really all that far off here in Texas). Wheeee! I’m back in the gardening game! LOL!

What’s Goin’ On

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Let’s see if I can find something to talk about. Considering I haven’t been paying attention to the world at large and haven’t been doing much of anything but existing in the kitchen with my art supplies, there’s really not too much to talk about.

Well, there is Saturday’s flash mob event! I’m so glad I did that. It was a blast! I rarely do silly things in public, or rather, when I do silly things in public, it’s just me being a weirdo goofball and I’m doing them all on my own (and almost nobody notices). This time I got to be a weirdo goofball doing something silly in public with a whole bunch of other people. It was nice to have fun with complete strangers for a couple of minutes and not be doing something silly all by myself. This one will be followed by others, as the ultimate goal of all this is to have a world record breaking event with some thousands of people doing it at the same time to draw attention to the issue of worldwide malnutrition. I’m going to stay involved and go to as many as possible, because everyone needs some public silliness in their life, especially when it’s for a good cause.

After the event, we went to eat at the Flying Saucer, which is at The Triangle, an urban development I was somewhat opposed to having been built. Oh yes, it’s nice, and there are nice shops and restaurants there, and it’s very pretty, but I still miss the big open green field with trees that used to be there. I’ll be putting my grumpiness about the loss of green-space into reserve though, because I really like the Flying Saucer. If you like beer, they have beer. I mean the beer list is HUGE. Pages long. Now I’m not terribly crazy about beer, though I like a good one every once in a while, so this is the kind of place I like. I can try something different every time I go … for the rest of my life. Who knows, maybe I will find a beer I really, really like! Next time, I plan to splurge on a $10 pint of beer made by Trappist monks. A bit pricey, but come on … beer made by Trappist monks. I have to try it. Oh, and they also have the best hot German potato salad I have had since my grandmother died. I could taste the apple and cinnamon! So very good. As was the bratwurst and the beer and cheese soup!

Sunday Lin cut back the overgrowth in the yard, so our property looks a little more civilized. It hadn’t been completely awful until we had that week recently when it rained every day, and then the prairie grasses grew exponentially. Some of them were at least waist high! I still need to get out there and chopped down the bits that invaded the garden area, but it’s over 100º outside these days, and I just can’t bring myself to do it. Maybe one of these mornings I’ll just force myself to go do it, but I’ve not been terribly inspired to pay too much attention to my garden.

Which brings me to the topic of my garden. Last year things went poorly because of the drought and heat. This year the weather has been nicely moist and until recently not too blazingly hot, which means things like bugs and fungus have been a pain in the butt (and weeds, OMG, the weeds). We got a good number of tomatoes before it got too hot for them to set fruit, and there’s still occasionally one or two every so often. Not as many as I’d like, but there never is. I never went without basil or cucumbers or carrots, so those were all big wins. The onions, garlic, and herbs all either died or were destroyed by bugs and large-footed neighbor dogs. And though the beans grew healthy and bloomed like crazy, we did not get bean one. Not a single bean. I’m not even going to bother mentioning any of the other failures, of which there were a few.

So this year’s spring/summer garden can be summed up as … somewhat unsatisfactory, just like every garden before it. Will this stop me from gardening? Of course not, because the NEXT garden is going to rock! Such is the way of gardeners. In fact, since it’s now August, I really need to get out there and clear out all the seedy basil, pull up the last of the carrots, and start clearing things for fall planting. I have no idea what I’ll be planting. With the art project taking up so much of my time and energy, I haven’t put much thought into it. I imagine I’ll just plant whatever seeds I already have from last year and see how they do this year. I expect the end result will be somewhat unsatisfactory, but that’s gardening for you.

Speaking of the art project, I am in the middle of drafting the pattern for Figure Two, and it’s going as well as the pattern drafting for Figure One went. In other words, not well at all. But I worked out the problems with the first one in a week or so, and I’m sure I’ll work out the problems with this one too. I’m grumpy about it all, but I am feeling surprisingly stress-free. The new deadline is in a couple of weeks, but having Figure One done was the initial goal, and I can finish it up in an afternoon. If I manage to get Figure Two done or the combined Figure One and Two piece done, well that’ll just be icing on the cake. I’m going to shoot for the final combined figure, but if it doesn’t happen, I’m not going to beat myself up about it. I’ll just finish it after the deadline, because it’s going to be an awesome work of art whenever it gets finished. So all I can say about the art project is that I am still huffing away on it.

Yesterday was the cats’ birthday! I totally forgot until I opened my calendar for another reason and noticed it was already August 1. I usually make a big deal out of their birthday, even though I know they don’t especially know why they are getting new toys and treats. Though I do have to say that they were all being terribly sweet and affectionate yesterday, so maybe they DO know when their birthday is. LOL! Anyway, Ronin and Myu turned four, and Tora is now two. My kittens are all grown up, not that they act like anything other than bratty babies though. I need to sit down and make a post about the cats soon, because there’s been some upset in the hierarchy among the cats, and it’s been pretty funny. I need to go clear the kitchen floor and tables of artsy stuff now though, and if I start babbling about the cats, I’ll be here for an hour.

I guess that about sums up things around here. Like I said, I haven’t been paying much attention to anything outside my own little world. Just been working on my artwork, doting on my cats, trying to keep the house maintained, and sleeping and eating and watching a bit of TV. In the grand scheme of things, from my point of view, life is good. This likely means the world has gone to hell while I have been ignoring it, so perhaps I’ll read some news with my morning coffee tomorrow. I’m sure no good will come of it, but I don’t like being completely in the dark about current events (even though I’ve discovered that ignorance really can lead to bliss).