Twiggybet1's Blog

The weather here has been pretty weird the last couple of days.  Yesterday was the day my daughter had her friends over for a cook-out.  It was sunny and gusty in the morning, clouded up, rained a little bit, sun came back, more clouds moved in, hailed a few minutes, a bit more rain, then remained overcast and windy on and off for the rest of the day.  My daughter managed to get the food grilled during one of the dry spells!  Her and her friends rescued the screen house when it started doing cartwheels across the yard.  Oh, well, it's Michigan.  We have a saying here, "if you don't like the weather, wait 10 minutes."  Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, weather notwithstanding.  One of my daughter's friends is the daughter of my long-time friend, and my friend came too.  So we had a nice visit, which doesn't happen as often as we'd like.  We live almost 2 hours apart (another Michigan quirk, we are more likely to refer to distance in terms of the length of travel time rather than the number of miles).

Today the weather was just as weird.  More sprinkles, clouds, winds, some sun on and off, and another couple of minutes of hail. It was more like sleet, really.  The chunks were pretty small.  Hubby and I spent almost the entire day out in the garden.  We planted potatoes, sweet peppers and hot peppers, and (for the first time in our gardening history) celery.  We had heard that celery is exceptionally fussy, and difficult.  Well, this year, we decided we are up to the challenge! 

My peas are all sprouted, and starting to climb the pea fence.  The green beans are sprouted too.  Radishes are getting pretty big and the beets are coming along.  I'm not sure what the carrots are doing out there, so far, no sign of them sprouting.  We are enjoying the asparagus, we still have a few weeks for that.  I have been getting some rhubarb every couple of days, but, very little, because we just planted it last spring.  We left it alone last year so it would establish, but I'm impatient, and I think I should leave it be for a while.  I don't want to take too much and kill it.  We newspapered and mulched between the rows, using our newly mowed grass clippings for the mulch.  We decided to wait a day or so more before we plant the tomatoes because the temperature is supposed to get down to the upper 30's tonight. 

Tomorrow, I plan to plant some onion seed, for green bunching.  I also need to dig out the black mulch for the sweet potato row.  We hill up a row  and cover it with the black plastic mulch to get the soil nice and warm.  We will leave it on to help control the weeds.  And if time allows, then we will plant the tomatoes tomorrow.  The night time temperatures are supposed to be warmer for the rest of the week.  Oh, and I want to spend some time on my flower beds.  I have a flat of pretty buttery-yellow petunias, called prism sunshine. 

I finished screening the compost pile today also.    And I found the robin's nest.  It's in the pine tree, over the place where we moved the compost pile to.  I have a picture in my albums.  Every time I went near the compost pile, the robin would make some noise and move a branch or two away from the nest.  I imagine she's trying to steer me away from the nest.  And of course, while we were digging, the robin was going right behind us searching for worms.  I think the robin family got a nice Sunday dinner today.  Good for them, my family had left-overs from yesterday's cook-out!