Thursday, June 29, 2006

Disaster! (or, Attack of the Giant Dogs)

Tuesday afternoon, somedoggy managed to pull the bottom corner of welded-wire fence loose from the chain-link at the end of the patio. Through the hole it created, the Big Sister and the Goofball got into the garden. The lima beans were planted in the area where they broke through, and were completely destroyed. All four of the string beans were trampled on; one was completely destroyed, two were flattened, and the fourth was bruised. One of the flattened ones died, the other is recovering.




The empty dirt in the bottom half of the picture is where three lima bean plants were, including one that was already over a foot tall as it was a survivor from the indoor seedlings. Of the three string bean plants in the top half the pic, the bottom one and the one above it survive. I planted some more limas and a couple more string beans.... I'll be lucky if I get limas by September!

(I rewired that corner of the fence, then put up a new piece of welded wire attached on one side to the welded-wire section of the fence and on the other to the chain-link section, completely covering the "seam" where they were originally joined together so the dogs can't get to it at all. Hopefully that'll do the trick!)

They they also got the smallest of the "new" tomato plants, the ones I only transplanted into the garden a week and a half ago. Oh well, there are two more of the same variety, either in the garden or in pots. The others are doing well, though! The "newer" tomatoes:



The "older" tomatoes are thriving. Here's the heirloom Cherokee Purple, it's almost 3 feet tall already! To the right of it are two very small plants, survivors of the indoor seedlings. These plants are roughly a month or a little more behind the "store bought" tomato plants, but this is a variety that's supposed to produce tomatoes in 45 days from being transplanted into the garden and produce continuously until fall, so they should still yield well. In the background, you can see the cucumber plants really starting to take off.


Here are the two original store-bought tomato plants, one a Roma and the other a beefsteak-type. On the left are the two small "Fourth of July" plants that were in the pic with the Cherokee Purple. In the lower right corner is the Sugar Baby watermelon.

The begonias I transplanted into pots a week and a half ago are doing well:


Free Image Hosting

The pot of impatiens I've got sitting on my air conditioner in the patio is thriving, and I'm so pleased with it.

Free Image Hosting


I had a round clay flower pot I bought years ago when I lived in California. I'd only used it that year, had never lived in another place where I'd been able to have anything in pots outside. I got it out of the box it had been stored in for over 10 years, filled it up, and planted it with cosmos seeds. When the seedlings emerged a couple weeks later, I put it out on the air conditioner. Less than an hour later it was smashed on the ground. (Another reason the dogs are closed out of the patio unless I'm there to supervise!) The seedlings were smashed along with the planter, but apparently there were some still-unsprouted seeds in the soil. I've got cosmos growing at the base of the air conditioner:


Free Image Hosting

The plants on my home-made plant-shelf are filling out beautifully. If you look in the background, you can see some of the roses that are blooming all along the pole barn:

Free Image Hosting


Yes, the grass is long. No, I don't have a working lawnmower yet. I asked my neighbor to take a look at the "new" one on Tuesday; he fiddled with it for over an hour and didn't get any better result with it than my sis and I did. It'll start easily on starting fluid, but then dies quickly as gas isn't flowing into the engine. I'm going to have to take it into the hardware store in town (per recommendation) and have them fix it. I've got to work up to putting it into the car to get it there, though, it's a heavy sucker.)

Finally, a so-far success story: I climbed up on the stepstool yesterday and got a pic of the new clutch. I could see three baby birds in the nest, and all are kingbirds. I'm keeping a close eye on the weather, and I'll do whatever I can to keep this clutch from dying because of heat like the last ones did.


Free Image Hosting

Monday, June 26, 2006

A Working Weekend

Boy, it was a busy weekend! My sis came up after work on Friday to spend the weekend. Her approach to a weekend is "let's get things done!" so the little slave driver ran me ragged for a couple of days. Friday night we got the firewood ring set up and got the firewood transferred to it, then we swept and rearranged the patio.

Saturday morning we drove down to Chris's to get a 6 X 6 chain link kennel panel with a gate in it. When we got home with it, we fixed the end of the fence by the pole barn where I'd had a gate and a couple of crate panels wired in. Took out the crate panels and the gate, moved a couple of poles, and wired the kennel panel in that spot. Now I can get from the yard to the pole barn and vice versa without having to go through the house. If I ever get my new project lawnmower started, I won't have to take that through the house either to get it into the yard. (We worked on that yesterday, got the frozen wheel loosened and rotating again and got the spark plug changed, but it doesn't seem to be getting enough gas. My neighbor offered before to have a look at it for me, I might take him up on it. I don't think it would take long for someone who knows what they're doing to get it running.) I put a lock on the gate, so nobody can open it without the key.

We were still working on the fence when Mom arrived to visit. When we finished the fence we came in, and my mom and sis visited while I cooked meatballs and sauce for dinner. After dinner, my sis did some weeding in the rose bed while I fertilized the potted flowers.

Yesterday we replaced the plastic "feet" on my coffee table with new ones, got the queen mattress off my bed and carried out to the pole barn, and got my old queen mattress into the house and onto the bed. (My mom had given me her spare room queen mattress and springs, thinking they were better than my old ones, but they weren't. I've been sleeping on an uncomfortable bed since January because I couldn't get my comfy mattress in from the pole barn by myself. I slept really well last night!) Got my sis to give me a haircut - I can do the front myself but can't do the back, and have a hard time with the top, so she got the back and top short and I finished the front after she left.

I got tired of seeing the Youngster with a mouthful of cat litter, so I finally installed a couple of eye hooks on my sliding laundry room door and hooked either end of a bolt snap to them, so now the laundry room door is only open wide enough for the cats to get through to the litterbox but the bolt snap prevents dogs from nosing the door open. I brought my "shelf" boards in from the pole barn and got a couple of milk crates emptied; in a little while I'll go empty out 4 more milk crates and then set up some shelves in one half of my bedroom closet, to hold piles of jeans, t-shirts, shorts, etc. I've been trying to switch wardrobes - get my winter stuff stored away, get the summer stuff out, but everything's piled on the counters in the laundry room because I just don't have anywhere to put it. Once I get those shelves up I can put away everything piled in the laundry room and then finish organizing the laundry room. That's this week's major project.

I finally quit procrastinating and mixed up three more stepping stones today. Now that I've gotten one 60-pound bag of quikrete emptied into a bucket from which I can easily measure it (and the other bag standing next to the bucket for easy access), I'm going to try to pour three more every other day and get as many stones made as possible in the next 4 months.

Last Monday I finally transplanted the other little tomato plants I picked up the previous Thursday. They were a little peaked, but man did they take off once they were transplanted! I put 7 more into the garden (two of 3 different varities, one of another) and put another 5 into "pots". (Two of my pots are 2-gallon laundry detergent bottles with the tops cut off.) They've tripled in size in just a week, and the ones I put into the garden have nearly tripled in size. The Cherokee Purple tomato plant is over 2' tall already and is doing really well. The three tomato plants in the rose bed are also thriving. The beans, zucchini, and cukes are doing really well. I fertilized the garden today and thinned out the carrots; I planted too many carrot seeds too close together so I'm not going to have as many carrots as I'd like, but now I know how I should have planted them instead and I'll do a better job of it next year. The peppers are doing well, too.

I need to fertilize the herb bed, but it doesn't need watering yet so I'll do it the next time I need to water. Things are growing slowly there, but they're growing. Fertilizer should help. When I bought the extra tomato plants I also got a couple small begonias which are growing quickly now that they're into pots. The purple petunias I got are starting to get new flower buds on them, they should be very pretty in a few weeks. My impatiens baskets and pots are really starting to look nice, they make the patio such a pleasant place to sit! On our way back from going to get the kennel panel we stopped at a "barn sale", and for a buck I picked up a pair of heavy glass votive holders. I put those up on the plant shelf in the patio and they look lovely twinkling away there in the evening. (I'm not going to lose this pair the way I lost the last ones, to dogs knocking them down. They come in and sit on the mantel in the family room when I come in for the night.) I put a pot of impatiens on either side of the center roof support pole on the edge of the patio, and tied the pots to the pole so they couldn't be easily knocked over. So far, so good. I just have to keep an eye on my plant-chomping Goofball, so he doesn't bite all the flowers off.

Saturday morning I climbed up on the step stool to see if I could see anything in the kingbird nest. I can't actually see inside of it, but I can see anything that reaches the top of it and I saw one little yellow beak opening and closing. Saturday evening I could hear at least three different little voices peeping for their dinner. It looks like mama successfully hatched this clutch without being parasitized by a brown-headed cowbird. The weather is supposed to be baby bird-friendly until at least the weekend, but I'll keep a close eye on the temp under the roof and put something onto the roof to block the sunlight, and put a fan on to circulate air if necessary. Mama's become a lot less fearful of me, and will fly back and forth feeding her babies even if I'm sitting outside. I have high hopes for this little family, that the nestlings will make it and the whole family will stick around and help keep the flying insect population down.

Break's over, time to get back to work. I wonder where those other milk crates are.......?

Sunday, June 18, 2006

Grow, Little Green Things, Grow!

I went up to Mom's on Thursday to help her with some housework she can't do by herself any more. When we were done, I asked her if she had an extra hose she wasn't using; she said she had several, and I should help myself. So I grabbed what I thought was a very long hose but which turned out to be two hoses, so I don't have to keep switching my long hose from the back yard to the front. I also mentioned that I thought maybe I'd remove the soaker hose from the flower/shrub bed north of the driveway over to the vegetable garden, and mom said "gee, there's a brand new soaker hose in the garage that I'm never going to use - take it!" Don't have to ask me twice, so that hose went into my car too. I also did a little more "shopping" in the garage, and took the sledge hammer (which Mom can't even lift, much less use) so I could use it to pound in fence posts (I had to return my borrowed post-driver), a big tubular ring to hold firewood (when I get it put together, I'll put it out on the patio to hold the logs that are just stacked out there), and a 5-foot step-ladder (I left the 8-footer there) so I can hang a wire-fence canopy over the well-house to keep kitties from reaching the roof, and I can also get up high enough to clean the leaves and debris off the patio roof and make sure the gutters are clean.

I put the soaker hose in the vegetable garden. It had been coiled up so long it wouldn't lay flat, so instead of putting it on the ground I've temporarily draped it over the top of the fencing, back and forth so it would cover the entire area. I may just leave it there - it's not pretty, but it reaches every corner of the garden and I'm not sure it would if I laid it on the ground on the paths. We'll see. In any case, it's been a life-saver and a life-giver to the garden, everything's really starting to take off.


Carrots (needing to be thinned out) in the front, lettuces in the back


Tomatoes in front, peppers in back


Zucchini


Cukes


The lone watermelon vine


There are beans - both string beans and limas - along the back fence, and there are a couple of tomato plants on the left side of the pepper bed. There are also moonflowers coming up along the left fence, and Cosmos coming up along the front fence. On my way home from Mom's on Thursday I stopped at the garden center again; they had all their vegetable plants on sale, a 4-cell tray for a quarter. I picked up 4 more varieties of tomatoes. I haven't had a chance to transplant them yet, but later this afternoon I'll put one plant of each variety in the garden (there's room in the pepper bed) and one plant of each variety in pots, maybe one or two more plants out back, and I'll give the rest of the plants to my neighbor if they want them. I also picked up two trays of begonias (white, I think) and two trays of petunias (two shades of purple, one a single flower, the other a double) and I'll put those into the pots where I'd transplanted my butterfly impatiens which didn't make it. Total expenditure for tomatoes, begonias, and petunias - $3.95. Good deal. The geraniums I got from this place are in full bloom, and are absolutely gorgeous:



And my Stella D'Oro lilies are blooming:



Mama kingbird is still sitting on her nest, so the eggs haven't hatched yet. They should hatch any day now, as far as I can figure it's been about 13 days since she started over. So far, the long-range weather forecast isn't calling for nestling-killing temps, so I have high hopes for this clutch of babies. Mama's not quite as spooky as she used to be, as long as I don't stand around under the nest she'll stay there and not fly off when I come out. When she does fly off, she'll usually come back pretty quickly; she'll sit on the fence and give me the eye for a few seconds, then fly back to her nest. I think she's finally figured out I'm not going to mess with her or her nest.

The Youngster and I had a great time at the dog show on Friday. It was nice to see the gorgeous dogs who were competing, meet their owners, renew the acquaintance of a breeder/handler I really like, and I got the opportunity to meet someone who's been a cyberfriend for about 4 years. They even fed me lunch! The breeder/handler did all the cooking, and he makes the best darn potato salad I've ever had. His grape-and-walnut salad wasn't too bad, either. This attractive, gentle, funny man is single and unless my instincts are impaired - and they might be, I'm seriously out of practice - he was flirting with me. He only lives about a 4-5 hour drive away....... I'm hoping to see him more frequently in the future. A couple of pics from the show:


The beautiful Posey, with her breeder/handler. Posey took "Best Opposite Sex".


The girl who took Reserve


The handsome Best in Breed winner
(Very nice dog, not only gorgeous but very sweet, bred by Posey's breeder/handler)


The little whiskered packages arrived Friday. They're very sweet, and I'm having so much fun with them!

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary...

How does your garden grow? Did you have better luck with your seedings than I had with mine?

Only two of the original tomato seedlings are still doing OK. They're small, but they're hanging in there. Same with 4 of my pepper plants - one habanero and 3 sweet peppers. The others didn't make it, so they've all been replaced with store-bought plants. (I found a place that had a little container of 4 identical vegetable plants for 99 cents. Bought two varieties of tomatoes, two varities of peppers.) There are two Big Boy plants and one Roma out in the rose bed, the other two Big Boys and three Romas went into the garden, as did a larger, single heirloom tomato called a Purple Cherokee ($1.19) . The store-bought habaneros and jalapenos went into the garden too.

Hopefully I'll have better luck starting seeds next year. The biggest problem this year was that I had no heat during the germination period and the indoor temp was too low. It was very hot the weekend in April when I planted all my seed trays and I turned the furnace off so I could turn the fan on to circulate the air indoors. Two days later, when the temp dropped back to normal April temps, I switched the furnace back on and the burner wouldn't ignite. I didn't bother to get it fixed then; since I'm used to cooler temps and the little electric heater kept most of the living space in the mid-60's, I figured I'd wait until later in the summer to get the furnace repaired. (If the problem is what I think it is, it's a quick fix that'll run under $100, but it isn't something I can do myself.) But the cooler temps weren't conducive to strong seedling growth, and cats reaching in through the crate bars to bat at the seedlings that did grow combined with too little light where they were sitting didn't do anything to help. Next year I'm going to start some things earlier (impatiens, tomatoes, peppers) and others later (beans, melons), line the sides of the crate with cat-proof but transparent/translucent material (I'm thinking clear kitchen cutting mats, the kind you can get 2/$1 at the dollar store, might be just the right size), use heating pads under the crate to encourage germination, and hang a grow-light above the seed trays inside the crate which can be raised as the seedlings grow.

On the other hand, the watermelon plant is doing well - it about doubles in size every day. And some of the seeds I planted are starting to come up - cucumber plants, a couple of moonflowers just peeking out of the dirt, and little lettuces all in a row. In the herb bed there are tiny green things coming up all over but I still can't tell which are herbs and which are weeds, so I've been weeding very carefully. (I didn't plant rows there so much as I planted areas, to be thinned out as necessary as seedlings develop.) If I hadn't seen just-sprouted dill at a friend's house yesterday, I probably would have weeded out my dill sprouts today - they look just like little grass sprouts. It should get easier to tell the difference over the next couple of weeks, and if I planted right, the herbs themselves will shade the soil and prevent at least some of the weeds from growing. Four of the bush-type morning glories I planted in the tub out front are still growing, and the three little hibiscus plants I planted along the south side of the pole barn have survived 48 hours inside the yard without dog damage, and have doubled in size in just 2 days. Dare I hope they're going to make it? One of them bit the dust before it ever got into the ground; I had the 4 paper cups holding the little plants sitting next to me while I dug the hole for the first one, and didn't pay any attention when The Goofball came up beside me. But when I looked over to get the first plant to put in the hole I'd just dug, the only thing left in one paper cup was the stub of a stem and The Goofball was happily chewing away. I forgot that one of his favorite activities as a pup was grazing around the yard biting the heads off dandelions. Sometimes I think I live with a herd of big white cows.

The color cartridge for my printer arrived Saturday, so I printed up some flyers advertising classes to start in July. One during the day, one in the evening. I got some of them posted around today, and will get the rest out over the next few days as I go in different directions to run errands. I've gone public, no going back now. I've got a month to get the training center and the office ready for business. Summer's not usually the best time to hold obedience classes; vacations too often conflict with the 6-week run of class. But out here, where there is a large summer population, I'm hoping that between local folks and summer people there will be enough students to have two good classes, and that'll give me a jump start for fall.

I've got another "project" lawnmower. This time, a gas-powered, self-propelled model with a nice wide deck. It's an extra Chris's landlady had, she gave it to me on Sunday when I was there. I haven't had a chance to work on it yet, one front wheel isn't turning and it hasn't been used in a couple of years so it's probably going to take some fiddling to get it started. But I know that the only reason it was an extra is that they needed a smaller mower to make it easier to mow the agility yard (with its tight angles and small spaces), and that the mechanically-capable landlady takes excellent care of her tools so I'm sure that once I get it started it'll run well. It's just a matter of finding the time to work on it.

I've been really busy the last week. I'm tired, but it's a good tired. Tomorrow I'm going up to my mom's, to help her out with some cleaning she just can't do by herself any more. I'll stick around and cook dinner for her, and I know she wants me to stick around to go with her to the community band concert in the evening. I dread the thought - she'll parade me around and introduce me to everyone she knows - but I'll probably go anyway, unless I'm just too beat or too grubby. At least it's the community band, which is a lot easier for me to listen to than the community chorus my mom sings in. (Gad, don't ever tell her I said that! But I can handle instrumental mistakes a lot better than I can off-key singing.) Friday's a busy day, too, there's a big UKC dog show a couple of hours away and some of the folks I know from the rare breed community will be showing their dogs. The owner of The Youngster's maternal grandmother will be there. I need to go down there anyway to meet a cyberfriend who's bringing me a pair of little whiskered packages, a certain torxie and her creamsicle brother. *smile* If I can get everything I'd planned to do on Friday morning finished by tomorrow night, I'm thinking about getting up before breakfast so The Youngster and I can be out of here by 7 am to make the 9:15 am ring time so we can catch up with the breed folks. Good socialization opportunity for The Youngster, great opportunity for us to educate breeders and advocate for placing deaf pups in responsible homes rather than killing them.

Amalie nearly gave me a heart attack this afternoon, she managed to get up onto the roof from the patio. She went from the top of the wellhouse to the roof, and it's a long jump up. I didn't think she could jump that high. She came down pretty quickly when I called her, despite the panic in my voice (or maybe because of it), going from the house roof to the patio roof and jumping down from there. (Scaring the heck out of the kingbird mama, too, when she walked on the patio roof over the nest.) I'm going to have to attach a piece of fencing from the eave of the roof to canopy over the entire top of the wellhouse so nobody can get up there that way again. I don't recover from adrenaline rushes as fast as I used to.

Friday, June 09, 2006

It's All Up To Mother Nature, Now

I finished my garden this evening. I got it fenced in yesterday afternoon, and got half of it planted. Got my bean plants in and planted a couple extra seeds of both regular beans and limas - my seedlings had been in plastic cups indoors for too long, they were tall but spindly, and all but one plant of each type ended up breaking. So there is one seedling of each in the ground, and two more of each kind of seed planted. Those are near the east (back) fence, which is shared with the yard. Along the fence on the south side, I planted zucchini, pickling cucumber, and cucumber seeds. Along the north fence, which is the chainlink fence at the south end of the patio, I planted moonflower seeds, and along the west (front) side I planted flowers - cosmos and bush-type morning glories.

This afternoon, I transplanted 6 little tomato plants. I hope they make it. I'm going to buy a couple of small potted tomato plants, just for insurance. I also planted 2 eggplant seedlings and one sugarbaby watermelon seedling in the same area. I did another area with just peppers - habaneros, jalapenos, yellow banana peppers, and a "carnival" mix of sweet peppers. There are 5 colors of peppers in the carnival mix - red, yellow, orange, pale green-white, and purple. I only had room for 8 of them, I hope I'll get at least one plant of each color. Of all the pepper seedlings, the habaneros are the sturdiest; they're only about 3" tall, but they already have several sets of leaves and look like miniature pepper plants. I had a couple of good yellow pepper seedlings left over, I planted both of them in a large planter and put that in front of the garage. In another area of the garden I planted lettuce and carrot seeds. So that's the vegetable garden, except for the pumpkin seeds. I'm still trying to decide whether to plant them up front, outside the garden fence, or to plant them out back in the leaf pile. There are 10 seeds, that'll make 4 hills (two with 3 seeds/vines, two with 2 seeds/vines), so maybe I'll plant two hills in front and two hills in back.

I also transplanted my baby impatiens seedlings. These are the "butterfly" mix - pastels with deeper colored throats. I had enough seedlings for one large planter (6 seedlings) and two 6-inch pots (3 seedlings each); after they've had a couple of days to get settled into their new homes I'll move them out to the patio with the rest of the non-hanging impatiens. I'm going to bungee-cord the larger planter to the middle post of the patio roof, so it doesn't get knocked over by dogs or cats. My sis had gotten a pot of moonflowers from her MIL for me; she told me to separate them, not to plant them all in the same place, so I split them into three deep, 8-inch pots and put those pots on the north side of the fence, outside the yard. If they make it, they should grow up the fence and give me a little privacy screening in that corner.

The wire crate I kept the seedlings in is empty now; if I get a second wind I'll get it cleaned up and taken down tonight, otherwise I'll do it in the morning. It'll be nice not to have it up on my dining table any more! I still have a couple of little plants in paper cups on my bedroom windowsill, I'll get those planted out in the yard tomorrow. If I plant them along the south side of the pole barn they'll be inside the yard, but the dogs aren't bothering the daylilies there so hopefully they won't bother these other little plants either. I'm going to plant some catnip there, too, and more out in back of the yard. I still have some perennial herb seeds to plant. I decided today to plant lemon balm and peppermint in the flower bed on the south side of the house along the bedroom wall, there isn't much there now and it'll be nice to have the lemon balm under the bedroom windows, it's got such a fresh, lemony scent. I'll do that tomorrow, too.

It's all up to Mother Nature now - all I can do from this point on is weed, fertilize, and water! Now I can turn my attention back to the lawn. *sigh* I'm not going to try to cut it all at once, I'll just do a little every day until it's done, wait a week, and start over again.

I found my stash of lye, so I got the soap made for Weim Rescue today, too. By tomorrow afternoon I'll be able to unmold and slice it, and I'll take it down to Chris on Sunday - I'm going down for the monthly open house - and it can finish curing at her house. It smells good in here - lavender and lemongrass. Yum. I'll get at least a couple of soap balls out of it, from the trimmings, they'll smell great in a guest soap dish in the bathroom.

I'm behind on housework, and I've still got some unpacking and organizing to do, but now that I don't need to be outside working on getting the gardens set up, I'll have more time to work inside. This week's projects are to get the living room, dining room, and kitchen carpets steam-vacced, get some blocks made to raise the foot of my bed and then move it back to the outside wall, and get my summer and winter clothes swapped out of and into storage bins. The printer cartridge I ordered should be here soon, maybe tomorrow, and I'll get to work on advertising flyers for obedience classes to start in July.

I think I'm going to put clean sheets on the bed, take a shower to get the garden dirt off, then have a nice soak in a tub full of hot water and scented bath salts. Then I think I'll have a cocktail or two. I've earned an evening's pampering.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

If At First You Don't Succeed.......

try, try again. All last week, I kept looking up at the kingbird nest on the patio rafter, thinking "I really need to take that down and dispose of it," but I never got around to doing it. I hadn't seen the kingbird pair anywhere, I figured they'd started over elsewhere. While I was working outdoors on Sunday I saw mama kingbird a couple of times, perched on the fence. Last night, when I was sitting out on the patio, mama buzzed my head on her way in to the nest. And she sat on it overnight. She's trying again, in the same spot. Fortunately, it's not hot enough to be a problem for her or the eggs, and the 7-day forecast doesn't include any high temps that would threaten the new family-to-be, so I've got a little time to work out a way to shade the roof panel above the nest and work out placement of a fan to circulate cooler air upward to dissipate the hot air that collects under the porch roof when the sun's shining on it. I wonder if just a large sheet of aluminum foil, shiny side up, over the nest area would help keep it cooler there to begin with. I could probably just put little rocks around the edges to hold it down in case it gets windy. I think I'll try that first, then develop a "Plan B" if it doesn't work. I've got one small oscillating fan, a very old one which can be adjusted to aim from straight up to about 135-degrees downward, that I'll try first to provide air circulation. It could be problematic simply because the Big Sister is a little OCD about things that flash - as the blades of fans do as they rotate. I know she's OK with box fans, though, so if the little oscillating fan sets her off I can always use one of the box fans instead.

I've been a little "off my game" the last week or so. I'm not sick, no major problems, just a lot of little stuff combined that's had me operating at less than full productivity. I haven't gotten as much done as I wanted to, but at least I've gotten some things accomplished. I stopped at the lumber yard on Friday and picked up two 60-pound bags of Quikrete; that's enough for about 22-24 stepping stones. (Last night, I finally wrangled one of those two bags out of my car. 60 pounds in such a small, compact package is hard to lift!) A new 3-stone batch of plain stones is on today's schedule. I also picked up a ten-foot 1 X 10 board and some shelf brackets. Sunday, I got the board cut to the right length, covered it in light-tack Contact shelving paper, and hung up on the chain-link fence at the yard end of the patio. It's crooked; it is, at least, level from side to side, but it slants downward from back to front. I don't care. It's not so bad a slant that flower pots will slide off, and the flowers should eventually hide the slant. I sat on the patio and finished potting the last of the two flats of impatiens I got a couple of weeks ago and got those up on the shelf:


Free Image Hosting


I also hung up the plastic-bag hanging planter that I transplanted impatiens into late last week. Once that really starts to fill out it's going to be gorgeous:

Free Image Hosting

Free Image Hosting


The hanging basket of impatiens I hung up under the patio a couple of weeks ago is really starting to take off, and I've got enough baby lettuces that I can have a small, fresh salad every day:

Free Image Hosting

Free Image Hosting


I went to visit with my mom yesterday, and once again I stopped at the little rural garden center on my way home. I wanted a couple of geraniums. I was thinking I'd get red ones, or orangey-red, or maybe even white, but then I saw these:

Free Image Hosting


(I seem to be on a pink kick lately. Hot pink flowers, hot pink pitcher and glasses, hot pink plastic ashtray for out on the patio. Plus a pink depression-glass sugar and creamer, an addition to my sugar/creamer collection and my very-small-but-destined-to-grow collection of depression glass.) Now I just have to go out to the pole barn and find a couple of planters for the geraniums and get them transplanted. Also on my schedule for today.

Sunday afternoon I got the raised bed re-cultivated and got my herb seeds planted. Tarragon in the middle, Rosemary on each side of it and in front of it. Moving outward from the sides is a row of lavender, and then a row of Blue Hyssop closest to the side rails. In front of the tarragon and rosemary is two rows of German Chamomile; in back of the tarragon (no rosemary behind the tarragon) is a row of Dill, and behind that a row of parsley. In a week to 10 days I should have a lot of little green growing things in that bed.

I've just about got all the sod clods out of the vegetable garden. By the time I get that finished, and get my seedlings transplanted and my direct-sow seeds in, I'm going to be about 10 days behind schedule. Getting this patch prepared has been a lot more work than I anticipated. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this area is going to work out for the vegetable garden and I'll be able to plant there again next year. Parts of it get a little more shade than I'd calculated on; if I plant carefully it should still be OK, not everything requires 8 hours of full sun and that can be planted in the areas that get shade for a couple of hours mid-day or in the early evening. The center gets full sun from morning until early evening, so the tomatoes and peppers should do well there. If I get a lower-than-expected yield this year, I'll probably prepare a different area next year - now that I know for sure what the sun/shade pattern of my yard is - and plant flowers in this year's vegetable garden instead. It would actually be a pretty good spot to have my perennial garden.......

The grass is getting very long again. I'm having difficulty getting motivated to get out there with the little electric mower and cut it; pushing that little, dull-bladed mower around is a lot of work. I'm actually considering buying a brand-new push mower, and using that instead. They're pretty light weight these days, and take less effort to push than my electric mower. I was reading an article on organic lawn care, and it suggested the way to a lush lawn is not to mow any shorter than about 3". That cuts off the tops of the weeds (which is where they get their nourishment) but protects the roots of the grass (which is where it gets its nourishment), strengthening the grass so it can choke off the weeds itself. Keeping the grass a little longer also keeps it from drying out later in the year when there's less rain, and should reduce and maybe even eliminate the need to water it. I'm thinking that just trimming off the tops of the grass with a push mower might actually require less physical effort than using the electric mower. Before I get a push-mower, though, I'm going to adjust the height on the electric mower to the highest setting and see if that takes some of the work out of pushing it around. Not today (it's supposed to rain in a little bit) and not tomorrow (supposed to rain most of the day), but I'll pencil it in on Thursday's schedule.

I've got to find my storage box of soap-making supplies/tools; I need to make a batch of lavender/lemon-grass shampoo-soap for Weim Rescue. The Weim National Specialty is being held in MI in a couple of weeks, and Weim Rescue will be making up small decorative bags containing essential oil room spray, essential oil mosquito repellant spray, and a bar of the essential oil shampoo-soap for sale. Weim Rescue supplied the oils, I'm supplying the other ingredients. (I'm donating my labor, and trading the essential oils I'll use in the soap in exchange for a microchip for the Youngster.) I need to get that delivered within the next week, and it needs to cure a few days before I pack it up. I originally wanted to do a color-swirled-into-white soap but I'm going to be molding this soap in cardboard quart half-and-half containers because I'm not going to be making the 10-pound batch my box mold holds. The half-and-half containers mold a soap shape I like, a rounded-side square that fits nicely in the palm and is easy to hold onto. It would be really tough to swirl colors in a tall, narrow mold so I'm going to dig out some old, colored practice soaps and cut them into "confetti" pieces and add to plain white soap before pouring it.