Not Really Been A Good Year

I'm not gonna try to list everything.   Some things you don't need to know, some are boring, and I'll probably forget to mention some.

The neighbors got a yappy dog.  The Mom there lets it out in the backyard as soon as the kids leave for school.  It runs around barking all day long,  It drives me crazy when I am in the backyard.  It seems convinced it should kill me.  Which is sort of funny, because if it somehow got in my yard I could strangle it with one hand.  Not that I would, but if it died of natural causes or the family moved away, I wouldn't shed a tear.  

And I suspect the Mom doesn't much love it either because as I said, she puts it out in the fenced backyard as soon a the kids leave for school.  It must be maddening to have it in the house.  I am surrounded by dogs on 3 sides.  The yappy dog on the east, a large barky dog on the south (which desperately tries to get at me through the fence), and 2 large dogs to the west (which are at least mostly indoors and don't threaten or make much noise).  But the east and south dogs make being in my backyard less pleasant than it should be.

Taxes were a misery last April.  I fill out the H&R Block software forms, then tried to "finish" them.  I kept getting a notification that I was "not on the network".  Which was ridiculous because I was all over the internet otherwise.  I wasn't going to try to call H&R Block just a few days before the filing date, so I filed for an extention and sent the Feds and State estimated additional tax payments to be safe.

The next day, I had my annual physical exam.  Everything was fine.  But 2 days later I woke up , got out of bed and fell to the floor with terrible right hip pain.  Three days later, I had an appointment with my primary care doctor.  He got me scheduled  for a hip x-ray at the radiology lab in the same building (it's not a hospital but a combined medical center).  

Guess who didn't have an x-ray technician on staff (vacant position for 4 months)?  But the center had an emergency x-ray center a block away.  They were alarmed at the results.  They said I had either bone marrow or metastatic cancer.  I went through a more detailed series of tests over the course of a month (needed a roller-walker to get around with difficulty), and was then referred to an oncologist and an MRI specialist to have more tests.  3 month waiting list...

But the pain went away after another (2nd) month.  It became obvious that the problem was a very severe groin muscle injury that healed slowly.  I felt perfectly fine again.  

But that completely ruined my gardening season.  By the time I could get around outside, I was late with my tomatoes, corn, and beans.  I had ordered ten 10 gallon buckets (so I could put them in the sunniest part of the backyard) to plant them in and bought a small trailerload of 50/50 topsoil/compost to fill them.  But by then it was June.  I never got a decent crop of anything.

Funny thing about the trailerload of soil/compost.  I have good at basic geometry.  I calculated the cubic feet for 10 cylindrical buckets.  Looked up the volume of the nursery bucketloader.  It said I needed 2 bucketloads, so I went and bought 2.

The nursery apparently has a very wrong idea about the cubic feet the bucketloader delivers.  I filled up all 10 buckets with only a 1/3 of it.  Not knowing quite what to do with the other 2/3s, I covered the trailer with a tarp waiting for inspiration.

But before my hip injury, I had ordered about 500 various Spring bulbs.  They arrived in mid November and sat in my chilly basement.  I decided to smother the grassy weeds in the front yard island with standard brown packing paper, cover it with the trailer soil to hold it down, and then plant most of the island with the daffodils by using an auger to drill holes through when the paper was wet.  

But that's a lot more work than it seems.  Even mild breezes want to blow the paper around.  So I bought 50 thin "bricks" to hold them down.  I got the island all covered with bricked paper.  Digging the trailer soil into buckets was harder than it used to be.  I have probably never quite recovered from falling off the extension ladder in 2021.

I am happy to say that I emptied the trailer of the last of the soil mix and covered the paper inn piles and raked them carefully to smooth it out.  We are supposed to get about 1.5" of rain the next 2 days, so the paper with be soft.  I will use my auger to drill 200 holes for the new daffodils.  Drilling holes with the auger is is not difficult.  Dropping bulbs in the holes is not difficult.  Raking the displaced soil back over them is not difficult.  The hard work is done.

I scraped the trailer pretty well of all soil.  The rain will clean the trailer of any leftovers.  So I will finally be done with that project.  Next is the crocuses and hyacinths.  I think I will just plant them (rather than make metal cages).  I'm just too tired these days.  I still have some crocuses and hyacinths surviving after 10 years (that the voles have never found) so I'l just hope for another 10 years.  By then I probably won't be able to do much landscaping anyway.

Behind Yardwork

I find it harder to do yardwork these days.  Bad knees, bad back, muscle cramps from gripping tools tightly...  I think I have pushed my body too long doing too many things it really takes 2 people to do.  I sure wish I had a cloned Me to help out.  I may have to hire one.

Today, I got up and (because it was going to be 40F and windy) put on thermal underwear to prepare to move the last of the topsoil from the trailer to the front island bed (to start to plant bulbs I ordered last Spring) etc, it was past 4 pm.  It gets dark before 5 now.  Not much time to do anything useful!

Shorter days and Standard Time really mess up my life November to March...  I am not an early-riser these days.  

So by the time I made lunch, fed The Mews, started some laundry, cleaned the litterboxes, got the mail and newspaper, put out trash for pickup, cleaned up the kitchen pans and plates for the dishwasher, the light was about gone.

I just can't seem to get out of bed after only 8 hours these days.   8 hours in bed doesn't mean 8 hours of sleep for me.  I need 10-12 hours in bed to get 8 hours of sleep these days.  Getting old is bad enough, but needing that much bedtime for 8 hours of sleep is worse.  My awake time is getting less.  

I resist taking sleeping pills, but I've seen ads about"non-addictive" ones.  I will add that to the list of things to discuss with my Dr.

When I retired in 2006 after 35 years of getting up every day at 5 am (and returning home at 6 pm) I swore I would never get up that early again.  I might have to start forcing myself to get up earlier.

I have the front island almost covered with paper (to smother the grass) and soil covering most of it (to hold the paper down and fertilize the tree and future bulbs).

But I need to finish the soil covering and plant the bulbs.  😓

The odd part is that planting the bulbs will be the easy part.  The drill auger makes creating 6" holes in good soil easy.  Putting the bulbs in the ground is easy.  Raking the loose soil to cover the bulbs is easy.  

It is shoveling soil from the trailer into buckets and dumping the buckets onto the paper that is the hard part.  But any project has a hard part, and I have to get at that part before I can to the rest!

Garden Plantings

I don't know why I am so late this year (but the ladder fall, limping around, feeling tired, staying in bed late , and bad weather when I had the time to plant) all added up.  Things kind of got beyond me a bit this year...

Anyway, I have finally felt more active lately and got some useful work done.  Yay!  Well, better late than never.  At least they have time to produce SOME harvest.

The tomato seedlings are planted.  I had laid down permeable fabric beforehand and cut Xs where the seedling would go in; then stuck markers in the ground and pulled the cut-to-fit fabric aside.  Then I gave the soil some care.  I take a good few shovelfuls of soil into a bucket and mix organic fertilizer in as I add it back.  That way, there is basically a 5 gallon bucket of well-mixed loose fertilized soil for the seedlings to go into.  The tomato roots don't spread further than that.

So then I put the fabric back on and use a bulb-planter to make a hole for the seedlings.  Tomatoes grow roots from asny buried stem, so the deeper the better.  Early roots are better than early top growth!  [An exception is grafted plants.  The graft has to be above the soil line].

So I got them all planted this week.  I can fit 6 tomotes in a framed bed and there are 2 of them.  Here is one...

A close-up of one seedling. ..

The cage is made of concrete wire mesh.  22" in diameter and 5' tall.  I made them 25 years ago and they are as sturdy as when new.

This isn't new this year.  They are broccoli and purple cauliflower plants.  I planted them last year and they didn't do much.  But they survived the Winter and I' have hopes they will sprout.  There were more broccoli, but the ones that developed heads (and then smaller side-heads) were harvested and pulled.  One neat thing I've discovered is  that the green cabbage worms don't like purple leaves.  They are too easy for predators to find.

I'm trying an idea with the pole beans.  I made a frame of concrete rebar and bent some leftover wire mesh at an angle.  The idea is that the beans will hang down from among the leaves and will be easier to find and pick.

The beans are growing fast!  One month and they are 6' high!  I read a study once that suggested delaying planting of many crops.  The idea is the cool weather slows their growth and later-planted crops often surpass the early ones in total growth and productivity.  Well, I guess I am sure testing that this year (unintentionally).

I also planted small-seeded cucumbers, cantelopes, honeydews, and watermelon along the framed bed trellises (more concrete wire mesh).  Those may seem rather heavy fruits to grow on a trellis, but I have a bunch of plastic mesh bags to support the fruits.  Vertical space IS free, after all.

And after all that, I weeded the remaining areas of the beds.  If I have been late to the Spring-plantings, I am ready for the Fall plantings in late July.  Most people ignore Fall, but it has some advantages.  Summer warmth promotes fast growth, and Fall temperatures actually improve the flavor and extend the harvesting time for some crops.  I can have a second crop of snow peas, and most root crops turn starch into sugars, much as fruits do.

As farmers do, I fear the worst, but hope for the best.  Some years are better than others.  ;)

Garden

Between one thing and another, I got SO behind on my gardening this year.  But I'm hoping to catch up.

I only got my tomato seedlings planted last week.  Granted, they were in large pots after 2 transplantings and 18" tall, but I can only hope there is time for fruits to grow and ripen.  They should.  Most take about 85-90 days and I have 120-150 days before first frost.  But this will not be one of the great tomato years for me.

I also planted corn, and that will be "iffy".  I planted pole beans and cucumbers, and I'm not sure how they will grow.  All the cucumber seeds came up.  The pole beans are about 50%.

But for once. I am on a Fall planting schedule.  That is best for some crops.  They grow faster on the Summer heat and mature in the Fall coolness.  The cole crops (broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, brussel sprouts prefer that.  Root crops are protected from early frosts, bein underground, so I may finally get carrots and beets larger than a single bite, LOL!

I need to plant more carrots, beets, radishes, celery, and lettuces

I would provide pictures, but a 1" corn plant is not very impressive.