mudpies's Blog

A visit
May 11, 2009 | 4:58 AM PST
Tags: rain , a touch of frost , tribute

More rain over the past few days has kept me out of the garden.  We had frost overnight.  I'd been bemoaning the fact that my annual seeds haven't germinated.  It looks, now, like that was a good thing.  More frost forecast for tonight.

Yesterday, a contractor who hires my husband to pour concrete foundations for him came by to get a price on another job.  Actually, I think he dropped in because he was lonely.  He lost his wife to cancer in January.  Bev had been a healthy, active woman all her life, and one of the founders of our local walking trailway system and an avid gardener.  The disease took her quickly - just a few weeks after the diagnosis.  Her death was a huge loss to our community and devastating for her husband.

Bill stayed a couple of hours, and I was happy to share his memories of Bev.  We talked about our gardens.  Bill always maintained a sizeable vegetable garden and left the flower beds to Bev.  But this year he intends to care for her flower beds and create a new one in her memory.  What a lovely tribute.  I can't think of much that would have pleased her more.

OMG - How embarrassing!
May 3, 2009 | 8:15 PM PST
Tags: rain , tractor , cultivator , stinging nettle , holding bed , visitors , onions , Asparagus

Took a couple of days off from gardening due to the weather.  We are getting an inordinate amount of rain this spring.

Got up this morning, raring to go!  Just a smidgen of rain yesterday; and today promised to be sunny and warm.  I wanted to get my onions planted at the farm.  My husband was eager to get started at it, too, so I gathered my sets up and headed out.  I hadn't showered this morning and I had dressed in my ratty old gardening clothes.  No one would see me down there.

When we arrived at the farm, I was dubious about planting.  The soil appeared too wet.  It was really windy and my hubby thought that if he tilled, it might dry sufficiently to get the onions in.  He got our little tiller going, but it was difficult to operate in the damp soil, so he decided to borrow a friend's tractor (The friend had already put his cultivator on.) and do the entire garden quickly.

While he went off to get the tractor (I knew it would take a long time because friend and hubby love to discuss the weather, the state of the economy, the price of wheat, beans and hay, any new equipment a neighbour may have acquired, the prospects for a prosperous harvest, the declining behaviour of teens these days, etc., etc., etc.  You get my drift.), I cleaned up my holding bed.  There was a lot of stinging nettle, so I used latex surgical gloves.  That was a successful experiment.  I'm not good with most gloves, but these worked well.  Most of my plants over-wintered well.  I worked away digging out old sunflower roots and lugging them to the compost pile, getting dirtier by the minute.

Back came hubby with the big tractor and cultivator.  First he ripped up an old strawberry bed from which I had intended transplanting some of the healthy runners.  Oh, well!  Next, he came booting over near my holding bed (which isn't a bed unto itself, but rather the upper corner of our vegetable garden).  Before I could place myself strategically  to protect my perennials, he had managed to rip two of them out.  That man is a disaster with any piece of machinery powered by gasoline!

Eventually, hubby finished cultivating with no further mishaps.  I continued weeding and getting rid of the sunflower roots.  I had taken my gloves off to open a soft drink and forgot to put them back on.  Ouch!  I hate stinging nettle with a passion.  Brushed hair off my face with my filthy hands and managed to get soil well distributed throughout.  Soil is definitely not an appropriate hair care ingredient!

 I was just thinking longingly about a nice hot shower when I heard a vehicle come up our laneway.  Customers often stop by to purchase hay, so I simply went about my business behind a large shed, assuming hubby would attend to the matter, an no one would see this unkempt, filthy old lady.  Wrong!!  My cousin and her husband were passing and decided to stop by when they saw our truck.  Not only did I look awful, I'm sure I didn't smell very nice, either, not having showered then slugging away for most of the day.  I'm sure our visitors left wondering if I was short of soap and water.

I didn't get any onions planted so will have to try to get them in tomorrow.  (The forecast is for rain Wednesday through Saturday.)

The bright spot in my day was finding asparagus almost ready for harvest.  Can hardly wait to enjoy it tomorrow with Hollandaise sauce.  Mmmm!  Mmmm!