the_rck | Entries tagged with gardening

Scott just bought an electric lawnmower that runs on a chargeable battery. He got tired of having to go out and buy gas to run the old lawnmower but hadn't wanted an electric mower that needed a cord. The leaf blower and snow thrower both use cords, but neither of them are designed specifically to chop up things that get underneath them.

We finally managed to repot the Christmas cactus that Scott's mother gave Cordelia more than a decade ago. It's needed repotting for at least five years, but my hands weren't up to the task. I also had a moderate sized chunk of the plant in water after the cleaning lady knocked it off the plant in January 2020. It flourished in that glass of water in spite of getting no sun whatsoever.

At any rate, I melted down over the damned plant about six months ago because nobody else would water it unless I stood over them and watched and because I couldn't safely move through the dining room to get to the plant on the window sill. I have always resented the plant but have been unwilling to abandon it because it's a living thing (I have no idea why I didn't throw out the piece I ended up rooting. No, I know. It was such a large part of the plant, maybe a third of it).

At this point, Scott's actually clearing the path back to the plant occasionally. I still have to ask, but he no understands that I can't walk through bags and boxes and can't move them without help. He also bought me two large pots and twice as much potting soil as we needed. We had that for about four months before I managed to catch him when he could help. I could do most of the work, but I couldn't get the plant out of the old pot or open the bag of soil.

I set up with a large box in the living room and put the empty pot and the bag of soil in the box. That let me sit on the couch and bend down to work which was about the only way I could have done it without injuring myself and without making a huge mess. The whole process took about 15 minutes with most of that dedicated to slowly water the repotted plants. The original plant looks so much healthier now that it's no longer root bound, and the rooted fragment seems to be happy.

I'm still looking for someone to take one or both plants. Cordelia says she doesn't want them, and I really don't either. I also don't think I can keep taking care of them even at the water once a week level. The dining room is a tight space, and it holds a lot of things that Scott really wants to keep but that don't have other homes. Since we don't eat out there, the area around and under the table ends up as storage for things like empty boxes that won't fit in that week's recycling and books that we can't currently donate and board games Scott wants to play but doesn't have opportunities to play.

Our local niece has said she's willing to take the plants, but she's still in college in a dorm room a ten hour drive from here. Well, she's half an hour away right now. I just don't think she wants to give up that much carrying space for plants, and if she's leaving them with her parents, I want their consent first. I'd feel better about giving her just one of them.

evalerie came over around 11:00 yesterday morning. She brought a lot of plants from her yard in the hope that some of them would survive transplanting and do well in my raised beds. She yanked out all the weeds in the raised beds and cut back the sage which was trying to take over. I sat and watched, and we talked. She finished around 1:00. Our original plan had involved going to lunch downtown, but we simply didn’t have time. She needed to meet someone else at 1:30, and I needed to be sure of both getting lunch and being home by 3:00. She offered to drop me off downtown so that I could do my errands anyway, but I just couldn’t see taking care of everything, including lunch, and still getting back here in time.

Cordelia, her best friend, and her best friend’s brother all got here a little after 3:00, while the cleaning lady was still working. They ended up in the basement. I think they were watching a movie for a while, and someone did some really awful sounding things with Cordelia’s friend’s violin. I rather hope it was the younger brother, but I don’t know.

Our guests were supposed to bring money for pizza, but they never gave it to me if they had it. I spent about $35 (including tip) on pizza for the five of us.

The fifth grade portion of the orchestra concert ran half an hour. The sixth and seventh grade sections were only ten minutes each. Both older groups played two longer pieces, and the teacher didn’t talk much. I think that part of the half hour for the fifth graders was her explaining what each short piece had taught them.

Scott’s father came to the concert. Scott’s mother went, instead, to an event for one of Scott’s sister’s children (probably our niece, but I’m not certain). I was the only one of the three of us able to find a seat during the fifth grade part of the concert, but the couple sitting next to me left as soon as that was done, so Scott and his father were able to join me.

Scott discovered that the battery for the videocamera has completely died. It will claim to be alive when it’s plugged into a power source and then not so much as power up when unplugged. Scott ended up using my cell phone to record the seventh grade part of the concert. We haven’t tried to retrieve the recording yet, and I’m not sure I’ll believe in it until we do.

Cordelia’s friend’s mother told me that her daughter is starting to ride the city bus alone and wants to learn the ins and outs of taking the bus to our place so that she can visit whenever she wants. The other mother also told me that she’s making a project this summer of teaching her two how to ride the buses and that she’d be more than happy to include Cordelia. I jumped on that opportunity eagerly. Cordelia needs to learn, but she’s not willing to learn from me. I’m also not sure I’m a great teacher given my anxiety levels around riding the bus.

I’m having a devil of a time trying to remember the new names for the bus routes. I’ve been calling the ones near here the #1 and #2 for twenty years, so switching to calling them the #22 and the #23 and #65 is hard. The change also makes the Plymouth Road buses more difficult as the bus that goes downtown, the #23, doesn’t cover all of Green Road. To get that, one has to catch the #65, the bus that starts at central campus. I need to remember both the #23 and the #65 as, if I’m catching a bus from campus, either of them will work to get me home. I think the #65 would be a little bit faster, but the #23 runs more often— once every fifteen minutes between 6:30 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. and then every half an hour until 11:15 p.m. I just try not to take the buses at night because the light inside means that I can’t actually see anything outside of the bus, and only some buses announce time points (and not all stops are time points).

Scott did the bills last night and concluded that we absolutely must cut cable as soon as we can. Right now, his intention is, if he’s not working on Saturday, to take all of the equipment to the Comcast office on Saturday. I’ve started looking a bit at other internet options. I haven’t gotten far at all, and I know Scott has done this work before, but… He hasn’t looked at alternatives for hosting our websites.

( Website and internet discussion )

Anyway, for today, I’ve got a few goals— First, I have to find the damned genetics counseling paperwork and finish it. Second, I have to write. Third, I need to do some cleaning in the basement. I will probably end up doing some cat waxing in terms of looking at internet options, though.

Comcast isn’t a good option because they would only be cheaper than Earthlink for the first twelve months (and probably not even that, depending on how much we would have to pay to host our websites offsite). If we could limit our internet use to one device at a time, we could get something that would be cheaper than Earthlink, but there are three of us. The other big option around here is AT&T, but I don’t expect their prices to be better.

In Ingress news, I just got the badge for holding a portal for twenty days. The next step up on that one is steep— Holding a portal for ninety days. I think that’s pretty unlikely ever to happen unless I find a portal somewhere that’s only physically accessible once a year or something. I’m a very long way from most of the other badges. The only one I’ll likely manage soon is the one for consecutive days of hacking. All of the others are going to take months.

Cordelia’s PT today is going to mean her missing yet another standardized test. This one is likely to have more restrictions in terms of when she’s allowed to make it up because it’s actually a test that determines the school’s ranking and affects funding. The one she missed last week was just an evaluation to see if her reading lexile has changed much. They generally want kids to get higher scores in the spring than in the fall, but Cordelia was already near the top of the scale, so I don’t think any of us feel any urgency about it.

I suggested that, since Scott’s driving us for the PT appointment and since we would be getting Cordelia back to school right before lunch, the three of us should go out for lunch. I was thinking Applebee’s because it’s very near the clinic and because we can all find something edible even if not thrilling. Scott is pitching a sushi place, based largely on them having bubble tea. Looking at the online menu, they do stuff that isn’t sushi.

Cordelia wasn’t sure about going to lunch because of missing the lunchtime meeting of the Gay-Straight Alliance, and I told her it was up to her. I can see that lunch with her parents might be less attractive than lunch with her friends. She finally decided that lunch with us would be better. I suspect that the realization that, if we brought her straight back, she’d arrive at school with twenty to thirty minutes of the hour scheduled for the NWEA left to go had an impact on her decision. That’s not long enough to finish but is also too long to just sit there and not make an effort to finish.

The GSA is trying to set up a reading of I Am Jazz! by Jessica Herthel at one of the local bookstores. I don’t think they’ve gotten anybody to agree to host yet, but they do have a date in mind (which seems backwards to me, but oh, well). They’re really hoping for Nicola’s to host.

I haven’t heard anything else from either my mother or my father. Cordelia wants to make plans with her friends for the weekend, and I don’t want to keep her hanging. I also don’t want her to miss the chance to see her grandmother if that could happen. I really don’t know. Mom might just do the work on the house and head back to Louisiana without coming over to our side of the state.

My father… Well, I’m a little confused. He said he’d be coming by the end of the month, and there’s only a week left. Surely he knows his schedule by now? At least, when he arrives in state and when he leaves again, I mean. He may be trying to work out the logistics. I’m sure he doesn’t want to rent a car, but if he doesn’t he really won’t be able to visit us and his mother and siblings. Also, if he doesn’t rent a car, my cousin pretty much has to drive down to pick him up at the airport, and my cousin doesn’t have a lot of time for things like that. I’m pretty sure that seeing his mother and siblings is higher priority than seeing us (though he probably doesn’t want to admit it). His mother is 91 and fading. His brother and sister are both in very, very poor health and unable to go anywhere without an oxygen tank. My aunt has been in hospice for years now because they’re the only ones in the area who can provide the oxygen tanks.

Cordelia’s school is doing their annual plant sale. Normally I’d at least buy a gift card since they’re working with the place where I normally buy seedlings, but I’m not sure that I can really do anything at all out of doors as it gets warmer. I don’t know that I want the raised beds in front of the house full of weeds, but none of us are going to be able to keep up with them. I will miss the herbs, but it’s not like I’m going to be going out there to appreciate them or harvest them. I know people who’d be willing to help out in getting the beds set up. I just don’t really know that it’s a good use of their time.

There are a few things we should have done while Scott was on vacation, and I'm not sure how they're going to get done now that he's back at work. Cordelia and I both need our hair trimmed. We were due for that in May. Cordelia needs a bigger viola before school starts, the sooner the better, so we all three need to go to the rental place (my name in on the rental agreement, so I probably need to be there). Then there's all that stuff with my laptop. Google hangouts/chat has pretty much stopped working in Safari, and the account I use with Firefox spontaneously blocks people I chat with and won't let me unblock them unless I sign up for Google+ which, well, that's my pseudonymous account. I do enough stuff in Firefox with that account that I don't want to try switching and using that one on Safari and the one I chat with on Firefox, and I really don't want to use both accounts on the same browser.

I'm also a bit concerned about my laptop because, Friday night, I tried to restart it because the Time Capsule had been trying to back up for a couple of hours straight and hadn't gotten past preparing to back up. All the programs closed just fine except Time Capsule, but the machine wouldn't actually shut down. It just presented me with a blank, white screen for about ten minutes. I finally had to force a shut down. When I restarted, everything went well until I got into my profile. At that point, the cursor started spinning and spinning. I waited quite a while but finally had to force a shut down again. This time, when I started back up, everything worked, but I'm not particularly reassured.

I've been looking over what I'd written previously of the story that I signed up for

iddyiddybangbang with. I think I stalled out on it because I'm concerned about the characterization of one person in particular. I don't think there's anything in canon to contradict how I'm interpreting him and the backstory I'm throwing in, but he's very different in this than in other things I've written with him. The story hinges on those differences; without them, nothing happens.

I ended up not watching my movie yesterday. I forgot that I needed to stay online for a couple of hours after the Metanews post went up to make sure that I caught and corrected any errors people might point out. I was pretty sure there weren't any, but I've missed major things before, so better safe than sorry.

I have to return two unfinished books to the library today. One has a waitlist and is actually due today. I've enjoyed some of what I've read of it, and I like the main character (who is not the title character). It's a graphic novel, so I ought to be able to finish it quickly, but I keep needing to take breaks from it, and I'm only halfway through it. The other book, I've renewed three times already and just keep forgetting to dig out and actually finish it (it's buried in a stack of magazines next to my side of our bed. I know exactly where it is. I just haven't pulled it out in over a month). There's no waitlist, so I could, in theory, renew it again, but three renewals seems like it ought to be enough. It's not actually due until Saturday, so I'm debating keeping it that long. The main consideration against doing that is that it would require Scott to make an extra trip to the library next week.

Scott got me to sign up for Ingress. I don't know that I'll actually end up playing much as, by the time I can walk enough to do much, it's likely to be cold enough that I won't want to spend more than five to ten minutes outside at a time. I think Scott mainly wants me to hold his excess stuff and to back him up when he tries to hold the local portals. He does have some ideas about me playing while he drives me to and from places, but I don't know if I'll end up doing that. I'm Green because Scott is, and he is because the friends we see most often are.

The battery life on my new phone isn't as awful as I feared. I suspect that it helps a lot that I don't use it very much at all. Most days, it's just two five minute calls from Scott, a have-you-eaten-yet alarm at 7:30 each evening, and an occasional check of the weather. I charged it Friday night, and it's still at 90%.

Cordelia actually watered the raised beds yesterday without being asked or prompted in any way. That really surprised me. Oh, and I forgot to mention before-- On Thursday,

evalerie and her youngest came over so that she could plant some forget-me-nots in the raised beds. She's not sure they'll survive because she had trouble getting much root for them when she dug them up, so she gave me some seeds for next year, just in case. Now I just have to find a good place to put them where Scott won't throw them out and I won't forget about them.

I wish I were still in bed, asleep, but I was up at 7:00, and when I'm awake at 7:00, I might as well get up. I can't afford to sleep past about 9:30 for medication and meal timing reasons, and, if I go back to sleep as late as 7:00, I'm likely to sleep well past 10:00, especially given that I was up until a bit past 1:00, reading. I expect Scott will sleep late as he was up for about twenty three hours straight yesterday.

I'm going to try to do some link finding today. I have doctor's appointments on Tuesday and Wednesday that will cut down the time I have available then, so starting early seems to me to make sense. I might try to go grocery shopping with Scott. It will depend on how my ankle is feeling and on how I'm feeling otherwise. I've been having intestinal difficulties that I suspect may be due to the erythritol in the Zevia I've been drinking. The viola rental place is closed on Sundays, so we can't do that today, but we might be able to do hair trimming. And, of course, we will definitely go to the library and get bubble tea.

Gardens - domestic or otherwise. (

heliopausa)

I garden a little. Mostly, it consists of planting relatively hardy plants (or getting someone else to do the planting if I'm not currently up to it) and ignoring them all summer. Some plant still thrive; some decidedly do not. Pineapple sage grows huge (most sage does really well). Lemon verbena generally ends up stunted (I know this because, one year, I watered regularly and the lemon verbena grew huge). Coleus survives well enough, but it doesn't get big.

My three raised beds get partial sun. They're on the west side of the house, so they don't get morning sun, and there's a big maple tree that blocks the sun after a certain point in the afternoon. I think we get three or four hours of sun. There are a lot of plants I'd like to try to grow, but they need more sun than I can get anywhere but the middle of the driveway (and Scott likes being able to park in the driveway, so).

Come spring, I will need to spend some serious time weeding the three raised beds. I didn't do it all last summer, and I got some spectacular weeds. The smallest raised bed was quite overrun. I was hesitant to weed that because it's got forget-me-nots still coming up from a couple of years ago, and I'm not sure I can recognize those before they bloom. We have a straggly rosebush in that bed that Scott really wanted. (He bought it and planted it himself. I just told him where to put it.) Neither of us know anything about taking care of a rose bush, however, so I'm not sure how long the dratted thing will survive. We've had it two summers now.

I like growing herbs. I seldom use them for cooking, but I like knowing that I could if I wanted to. Sage plants are pretty and smell nice (I have regular and golden sage that will overwinter. I buy pineapple sage every spring). I always get a rosemary plant, and a lemon verbena. Cordelia loves to eat fresh dill, so I plant a lot of it even though it doesn't do very well with the little sun it gets. (Cordelia won't eat dill when it's used to season food. I have no idea why.) I have thyme in a variety of nooks and crannies. I've planted it around the rosebush and in the tiny gap between the raised beds and the walk from our front steps to our driveway.

Scott likes color, so I plant coleus everywhere where I don't plant herbs. I get a tray with as much color variety as I can manage.

I would like to plant lemon balm because I love how it smells, but I'm not willing to let it take over, and I know that's what would happen. Lemon balm is, I believe, a mint. Mints spread like crazy and are almost impossible to ignore, particularly for a gardener like me. I've thought about getting a pot and raising lemon balm in that. I just haven't gotten around to it.

The past two years, I've raised a couple of cherry tomatoes in pots in the backyard. They don't get enough sun there, but they get more than they would in the front yard. I don't like tomatoes. Scott doesn't like tomatoes. Cordelia does like tomatoes but is very, very picky. If she gets a bad one from a plant, she won't touch any future fruit from that plant. She likes picking the tomatoes quite a bit if she thinks they'll be good. The first year, she ate most of the tomatoes. Last summer, she tried a couple and rejected the rest. They rotted.

I do water tomato plants daily, at least up until Cordelia decides the tomatoes aren't worth eating. If nobody's going to eat the fruit, I don't see the point in taking the trouble to water. I suppose I could harvest the tomatoes and give them to someone else. I just have no idea who. It's a matter of three or four at a time.

At one point, several years ago, I tried raising zucchinis in planters. They did not thrive. I think I got one zucchini. I suspect the problem was a combination of lack of space and lack of sun.

The people who lived here before us seem to have had a garden in the backyard, behind the garage. We tried clearing that plot one year and planting stuff, but the bugs were so terrible back there that I couldn't even water the plants. We let the plot go back to burdock and bindweed.

We planted some rhubarb next to the garage. I keep forgetting to harvest it for weeks at a time, however. Still, we get a pie or three and some stewed rhubarb out of it most years, and we give some to Scott's parents.

We have some black raspberries growing along one of our fences. Cordelia loves those. There's not enough fruit to do anything with but to pick and eat. Scott and I really need to spend some time cutting back and tying back the black raspberries. They creep gradually into the rest of the yard. If we don't watch out, eventually, we won't have anything left back there but black raspberries and the weeds they shelter. The problem with that is that Scott is really busy with overtime all summer and that I can't do the work. I suspect that, next summer, we'll have to give in and hire someone to do the work and to tend to the big bushes along the back fence (those may require an arborist. They're very tall). The bushes are nice. Someone planned those-- We have something blooming back there for most of the summer.

We have poppies that grow along the side of the garage. We didn't plant those, but we do enjoy them. They come back every year even though, once they're done blooming, Scott cuts them down with the lawn mower. Once or twice, I've planted other things in that space once the poppies were done. Those ventures were not notably successful, but they also weren't complete failures. If I ever try zucchini again, it will probably be right there.

I've decided to let our tomato plants die. They're in terrible shape. I think the pots I got weren't big enough. There were also a few days, here and there, when I neglected to water them. I'd try to nurse them along, but Cordelia has tried tomatoes from both plants and pronounced them terrible, bad enough to spit out. There's no point in raising tomatoes that nobody will eat. Scott and I don't like tomatoes at all. I'm raising them entirely for Cordelia.

Next year, I'll get bigger pots. I'm not sure what to do to make sure the tomatoes taste good. One grape tomato plant looks very much like another. I mean, I know there are varieties, but I don't know which I got this year or if it's the particular variety that Cordelia doesn't like. When we buy cherry or grape tomatoes, half the time, she decides that the entire box is bad. We can't tell when we buy whether or not she'll like them, so we usually don't bother buying. We run into something similar with peppers and cucumbers.

Cordelia and I were too tired last night to go to the Girl Scouts gathering that was scheduled at 7:00 (we were to make SWAPS for the bridging ceremony today). Cordelia was reluctant to go to bed, but she was also so tired she didn't want to move.

Scott worked until seven yesterday, his second twelve hour day in a row. He has the entire weekend, but he's been told not to expect another full weekend in the foreseeable future.

Cordelia had a soccer game at 11:30 today. Her team lost. They were playing a team that's always pretty tough, season after season. The other team scored three times. I don't think Cordelia's team scored at all. Cordelia has definitely settled into playing defense. At her request, the coach doesn't put her anywhere else.

The sun was really beating down during the game. All three of us put on sunscreen. I even sprayed the top of Cordelia's head. She got burned there while she was at camp, and I didn't want it getting any worse.

I'm expecting

evalerie to come over in a few minutes, bringing dill and thyme and her youngest child. She says she's not sure the thyme is actually transplantable, as in it may not have real roots. The dill should take, though, and this will prompt me to water the plants in the raised beds (all of which look healthy) and maybe properly stake the two tomato plants and move them to the back yard where they'll get marginally more sun. (All around our house, we get only partial sun. I don't dare plant most things that really need full sun. Well, I plant, for example, dill anyway. Cordelia likes it. It's never dreadfully healthy, but it's good enough for Cordelia to munch on.)

Reading fic on my e-reader at camp reminded me that I can do that. Maybe it'll lead to using my e-reader more. I just have to finish (or give up on) some library books before I can focus on fic reading. I just have so much that I want to read and so many distractions like Tumblr that can eat as much time as I'm willing to give them.

Yesterday, the school had an assembly to acknowledge the kids who participated in the Science Olympiad. Scott was really pleased to be able to go. Cordelia even seemed pleased to have him there. The whole thing took about half an hour, including taking pictures after the certificates were given out.

In the afternoon,

evalerie came over to help me get my plants into the ground. We had to do some weeding first, and that kind of wore me out.

evalerie did most of the planting. We ended up with unused space, so she's offered to bring me more dill (Cordelia and her neighborhood friends love to pick it and eat it) and more thyme. I plant thyme in the little border between the raised beds and the sidewalk.

It started raining just as we finished. It only rained for about ten minutes, but it rained hard. Scott was glad that he'd gotten the gutters cleaned out (mostly). I had just watered everything we planted, so I felt like I'd gone to unnecessary trouble.

This morning, it was raining when I walked Cordelia to school. We had to go around to the back parking lot to wait for the bus to camp. All the kids were pretty excited. Cordelia pretty much ignored me in favor of running around with her friends, but she'd made me promise to stay until the bus left, so I did. I was wet enough by the time I got home that I had to stick my clothes in the dryer.

I'm packed but for my hairbrush. I'm going to need that in a few hours when my hair finally dries (I showered after coming back from the school. I won't have the opportunity to shower again until after I get home on Friday, so I want to start out clean. There are showers there, but my bags are stuffed even without bathing stuff). I managed to shove my pillows into my suitcase and my backpack, so I think I'll be able to carry everything at once. It won't be easy, but I probably can do it.

I'm tempted to lie down and nap. I don't expect to sleep much while I'm gone. The bed will hurt me. There'll be a dozen kids in the room with me. I have a sleeping bag but nothing to cover me if it's too hot for the sleeping bag (I wanted to pack a top sheet, but there's no room for it at all). I still haven't figured out the best way to wake myself for my thyroid medicine at 5 a.m. Setting an alarm on my phone and putting my phone on vibrate might work, but it might not wake me, or it might wake more than just me.

We harvested some rhubarb yesterday. I have to decide what to do with it. Stewing is easiest, but we tend not to eat it if we stew it (stewed rhubarb is excellent on ice cream, but one has to remember one has it). A pie is more difficult, but we would probably eat it. Maybe I'll have Scott pick up a pie crust on his way home (it'll have to be tomorrow. He has the fourth graders coming for Science Olympiad practice at 5:00 today). I'm not sure I've got enough rhubarb right now, but I can always go out and pick some more. I also can't remember if Cordelia likes rhubarb pie or not.

Hopefully, this year, I'll keep up with the rhubarb. I tend to let it get away from me so that it blooms, and then somebody has to hack it down. The last few years, it's mostly been Scott's father doing the hacking down, and he's not going to be up to it this year, even if his surgery goes well. I think I need to be harvesting about once a week. That's a lot of rhubarb.

Anybody local interested in rhubarb?

Scott did the work on the raised beds yesterday. He transplanted the rose bush again (we moved it last fall because we thought the raised bed where it was would be dug up by the sewer people). Time will tell if it has survived. If it didn't, we'll replace it. Of course, I'm not sure we're taking care of it right. I think it needs to be cut back or needed to be in the fall. I have only the vaguest idea of how to care for a rose. My usual method for dealing with plants is benign neglect. I do a spurt of work early in the year and then water occasionally.

Scott dug up the dead plants. I decided to get rid of the sage plants rather than fuss with trying to move them. They'd sort of been dumped, willy-nilly, and were big lumps in awkward positions. Then he spread some dirt in the medium sized raised bed. I think he put in six bags. It wasn't enough. I thought it might not be.

We need some mulch, too, to go around the raised beds. I had ground cover on one side (ajuga), but the sewer line guys buried it in dirt. I'm hoping it will come back-- ajuga is tenacious-- but I can't assume that it will.

I need to cut back the winter savory severely. It's trying to take over the big raised bed, and a lot of it is ugly, bare stems. Hopefully, I can chop it back without damaging it. I'm just not sure when to do it. I suppose I could dig it up and replace it with a younger plant, one that's a bit tamer. I just hate to kill a healthy plant.

I'm waiting to see the effects of recent cold nights on my plants. Sunday night, the prediction was for 'patchy frost.' I only found that out after I was in bed, so I couldn't bring in the tomato plants. They aren't dead, but last time, it took a couple of days for the leaves that browned to go.

I am having trouble judging when the tomatoes need more water. I don't want to over water them, but the soil always seems to look damp. I can't tell if it's really damp or just looks that way.

We do have a few proto-tomatoes. Cordelia is keeping an eye on them. She likes to eat them freshly picked, and it looks like we'll have a better crop this year than last. I guess fertilizing the plants really does help. I just wish the fertilizer came with more detailed instructions. I'm not clear on how much to use for a plant in a pot or how often to apply it. The instructions assume a larger bed.

I need to get out to the raised beds to do some weeding. Those definitely need watering, too. It's just that it's chilly enough that I really don't welcome getting as wet as watering gets me. I need to remember to have Scott buy a new sprayer attachment for the hose.

Most of my plants seem to have survived the cold weather. I'm not sure if we had frost any of these really cold nights, but it wouldn't surprise me. The coleus seems to be fine. I'm most worried about the tomatoes-- They both have leaves that are turning brown. It's not all the leaves, though, so hopefully they'll pull through. I am having to keep moving one of the plants from patio to porch, what with all the rain. That particular pot doesn't drain, and I'm afraid the plant will drown if I leave it out. It can't live on the porch, though, because that gets a good bit less sun than does the patio.

Cordelia has already started eating the dill. I'm wondering if I bought enough of it. Dill looks so fragile, and it doesn't grow really well in our raised beds because there's not enough sun (there are probably 4-6 hours of good sun each day). It seeds itself, so I tend to have it popping up for years after if it makes it to blooming.

Scott cleaned out the dryer hose. There was a lot of lint but nothing dead. We still don't have an explanation for the smell in the basement. I do notice that it's worse when we've been doing laundry. I don't know.

( The Last Few Days )

I've put the two grape tomatoes into pots. One pot is smaller than ideal. The other isn't great because it doesn't drain out the bottom. I'll have to watch that when it rains so that the plant doesn't drown. I'd intended to buy new pots, but there was no way that was going to happen this weekend, and I wasn't sure the plants would last another week. Now I just have to get Scott to spread the extra potting soil around the smallest raised bed. The rosebush isn't in deep enough, and a little extra dirt can't hurt.

I'm wet because the sprayer attachment on our hose is leaking wildly. I forgot, last fall, when I had Scott disconnect the hose, to have him take off the sprayer. I knew it needed to be done and that I wasn't physically strong enough to do it, but I didn't think to ask if he'd done it. Hopefully, Scott can make it to the hardware store for a replacement early this week. In the meantime, I'll get soaked below the knees (up to the waist if I'm at all careless) every time I water the plants.

Potting the tomatoes and watering the raised beds left me shaking. I wouldn't have thought that the whole thing would be that strenuous, but apparently it was. I almost dumped a glass of water down my front because my right hand was shaking so badly. Fortunately, my left hand was steadier, and I could use that.

Today's soccer game was in the morning, at 9:30. That's the earliest time slot for the fourth grade girls teams. It was chilly enough that I wore long sleeves and didn't regret it. I didn't wear a jacket (I thought about it), though, and didn't miss it. Cordelia's team lost by one goal, but the girls played well. Cordelia's still obviously afraid of running into other players. She hesitates noticeably before going after the ball if there's any other player near.

The team Cordelia's team played apparently had another game scheduled for right after our game concluded. As soon as the hand shaking was done, the other team started warming up again. Scott thinks they had two games because it's quite a large team with almost enough players for two teams. They'd probably have split them into two teams if they'd had another coach. The coaches are all volunteers, and it's quite stressful each season, wondering whether or not there'll be a coach. I don't know what will happen to Cordelia's team in the fall. Scott probably can't coach due to the increased overtime that goes with cider season, and I don't know if any of the other parents will step up.

Cordelia's had two playdates today. That's keeping her nicely busy. She'd probably be busy anyway-- She's started playing with a couple of other neighborhood kids, one a boy in her class and the other his sister a year younger. All three kids have rollerskates. The boy does take off to play with the other boys in the neighborhood (boys Cordelia now refuses to play with for reasons she won't share with us. That worries us. The boys still come around looking to see if she'll play), but I have high hopes for the girl.

Mother's Day was very laid back. Scott took over doing the laundry, so I didn't have to do it. They tried to let me sleep in, but I had to get up to take my meds, and there was no way I was getting back to sleep.

We went out for bubble tea, and we had dinner at Blue Nile, an Ethiopian restaurant. We had the vegetarian meal at Blue Nile. We don't eat enough of the meat when we're there to justify the extra $2 a person. After dinner, we picked up dessert. I put off eating my dessert for a while because I was so full.

Monday, it was back to the every day. I finished the laundry that Scott hadn't completed, and I did the dishes (I'd cleaned out the fridge a few days before. Some of the stuff in the sink was kind of nasty).

Tuesday is my normal day for volunteering at the school library. There was a substitute. She was improvising wildly because the librarian hadn't originally intended to be out in the afternoon and hadn't left any sort of lesson plan. It didn't help that there was an assembly that started midway through the class time. The substitute seemed not to understand (English was not her first language) what was going on with the assembly, even when the fourth grade teacher explained it to her three times. She had the kids get out their laptops only to have to tell them to put them away three minutes later. The kids were confused and didn't do a good job putting away the laptops. I had to go in and check to make sure they were all turned off (several weren't), and there was one laptop that didn't make it back to the cart. The substitute and I had an anxious few minutes while we searched for it. We found it on top of one of the bookshelves.

Thursday evening, the PTO sponsored bowling in the gym. They had six lanes set up. I'd been afraid that it wouldn't happen because pretty much nobody signed up to do anything in advance (they use spreadsheets in Google docs to track volunteer shifts). I signed up to run a lane of bowling for half an hour and to do the bowling sales for forty-five minutes. Cordelia ended up doing the lane instead of me. She spent most of her evening doing that, just taking a couple of breaks to play games of bowling when one of her friends showed up.

There was supposed to be someone else at the table with me when I was handling the cash, but she was busy keeping other things running. Fortunately, it wasn't hard. I just collected $2 per person per game and made change. The hardest part was counting the money up at the end. There were so many ones, and I had to wait for somebody else to show up to confirm my count (It's supposed to be verified by three people, two volunteers and the PTO treasurer).

Scott worked 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. today. Because of his employer's bookkeeping practices, that was a Thursday shift. They count each day as starting and ending at 7 a.m. Scott got home in time to shower before walking Cordelia to school. She told me to stay home once it was clear that Scott was available to go.

Scott got started on wrapping Cordelia's presents while we waited for his parents to arrive. His father helped him put up a basketball hoop on our garage so that Cordelia can play basketball in our driveway. His mother helped me with my raised beds. We pulled weeds for a while. Then we went to the Produce Station for more plants. The Produce Station is fairly expensive, but they've got a wide variety of plants. I bought some dill, a pineapple sage, a lemon verbena and more coleus (the coleus I got from the PTO sale was almost all red, and I wanted some more variety).

When we got back, we dragged the guys off for lunch. That was Subway because we didn't have time for a sit down place. We got the plants into the ground and arranged for Scott's sister to take the extra coleus. I still need to get the two grape tomato plants into pots. I have one pot that's usable but probably too small. I have one pot that's big enough but full of clay soil that Scott dug out of our backyard when Cordelia brought a tree seedling home last year. The clay soil needs to go. It won't absorb water at all. I also still need tomato cages. Scott's rosebush went in the smallest raised bed with some thyme and coleus. I need more dirt to put in that bed, though.

At three, Scott's mother and I took a bunch of pudding cups to Cordelia's school and took them into her class. The kids seemed to enjoy the pudding. They sang happy birthday with great (almost savage) enthusiasm. A girl who moved away last fall (when her mother finished her graduate program) is back in town for the weekend and was at school with her parents. Her mother and I arranged for the girls to get together tomorrow afternoon.

When Cordelia got home from school, Scott's mother took her shopping for clothes. They've found a resale shop they really like, and I think they also went to TJ Maxx. Cordelia came back with three or four shirts, a pair of shorts and two dresses. She did a little fashion show for us.

We all went to dinner at Joe's Crab Shack. We sat outside because Cordelia was interested in the play structure. She didn't play much, however. She was more interested in food. Sitting outside was kind of chilly, so I wish we'd been inside. Cordelia, for the first time ever, managed her own crab. I'm so used to having to handle the extraction of the meat for her. It was pleasant not to have to.

Cordelia's school is selling plants as a fundraiser. I'm thinking to buy some there to get around the fact that I may not be able to get to the store for them for weeks yet. They don't have everything I want, but they've got several things that I could use.

From the sale, I'll get some coleus, a grape tomato plant (maybe two? I'd need to get another pot and some soil, but the one I got last year didn't produce much. Cordelia was disappointed.), rosemary and probably some thyme.

I use thyme as a border plant in the space between the raised beds and the front walk. About three years ago, I planted something like six different varieties. Some of them didn't do well, but a couple of them have thrived. Unfortunately, at this point, I no longer know which variety is which. I do need to get down there with a hand rake and get the dead leaves out of the plants I've got. I should probably trim them back, too.

The winter savory seems to have overwintered well enough. It needs to be hacked back. There's a lot of dead stuff in there. The sage plants are only just starting to perk up, so I'm not certain yet that all three of them survived. The golden sage definitely did, but the two other plants still don't look very healthy.

I need to dig out the dead plants from last year and get some mulch for the raised beds. I need to figure out if the plants coming up in the smallest bed are the forget-me-nots we planted last year that never sprouted or if they're just weeds. I'm not sure what forget-me-nots look like when they're just sprouting. I did see another rue plant sprouting in there when I walked by yesterday (I didn't have my gloves or I'd have pulled it right then). That means I'll still have rue coming up this year. I'd hoped that we weren't going to get any more.

When I can get to the store, I want a lemon verbena and a pineapple sage plant. Both smell nice and, if planted early enough, bush out a bit. I had them last year and enjoyed them, but they always die in the winter. It's no fun digging out the old plants-- The bushing out tends to be accompanied by deep roots. I may have to ask Scott to go after them.

The school sale is buying plants from the place where we usually go for such things. Maybe I'll get a gift certificate, too, to pay for the lemon verbena and pineapple sage. That way, the PTO benefits on those sales, too. Unfortunately, this place doesn't carry tomato cages. I got away last year without one, but I want them this year. I think they do carry pots, and I know they carry soil and mulch.

I've started spraying my herbs with soapy water. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be agreeing with the dill at all. It's also making the wild sorrel turn brown and wither. Maybe I was too enthusiastic with my first application....

I've also concluded that I'll have to prune the sage and the winter savory severely in order to make this work. Both are so tangled and bushy that there are leaves in the interior that aren't getting sprayed. I think the beetles may be living down near the bottoms of the plants.

The golden sage is probably dead. Most of the leaves have been eaten. I'm sad about that because it's managed to survive two winters. Maybe, if I get rid of the beetles, it'll manage to come back. We have a few months before the fall frosts hit.

I'm pretty sure at this point that what I've got is striped cucumber beetles and that the 'worms' I'm seeing are the larval stage. I'm not sure why the larva seem to be on the dill in a separate bed while the beetles are on the sage and winter savory in the next bed. Maybe I just can't see the larva over there and the beetles are going for the bigger leaves.

From what I've gathered about striped cucumber beetles, they'll eat anything and are very hard to eradicate. Of course, most of my information comes from websites written by people trying to sell pesticides. I'm hoping the soapy water will help. If not, I'll see if I can find neem oil and escalate.

So far I haven't seen any beetles in the new bed. It's several feet from the nearer of the two old beds (the front steps intervene), and the plants have been in less than a week. Nothing around the back of the house shows any signs of infestation, either. With luck, the pests will stay away. Or maybe I can get the beetles to eat the bindweed in the back yard....

I can dream, anyway.