Weekend wrap-up

Heh. One of the big things I did this weekend was start clearing out the year's worth (in some cases, more than a year's worth) of accumulated brush (backstory: I started doing it last spring, my hives got so bad I got scared to do any more, and I didn't really do much gardening last year. But now with the hives (mostly) under control, I think I can work outside again without fear.

I will admit - considering the title of this post - I thought, "This is the closest thing to a Winter Wrap-Up we do in Oklahoma" and wound up singing a few bars of it in my head. 

So the first thing was to get the raised beds taken care of. I bought a few bags of topsoil (REAL topsoil this time; none of that stuff produced by a fertilizer company that seems to be mostly shredded bark) and a bag of mushroom compost and mixed them and then re-filled the raised beds. (In the taller parts, the soil tends to "leak" into the shorter ones: it's a design flaw).

I also bought some tomato plants (four Romas and four Marglobe - though I may regret the Marglobe, I forgot they were a determinate variety). And the requisite marigolds (they keep parasitic nematodes away from the tomatoes). I also bought a couple of basil plants - I vaguely remember my mom had a book called something like, "Tomatoes Love Basil" - it was all about "companion planting" and how there are some species of garden plants that do well together. And I bought one flatleaf parsley just to try out - I've never tried growing parsley here, thinking it may get too hot too fast for it. But I'll see. (I'm also thinking, maybe the cool, shady north side of my house would be another place to try - that's another place I started clearing brush.

I also planted a couple rows of beans, and left one bed open to do a couple more in two weeks, so I will have a longer harvest period. Green beans do well here, and really, they are so good fresh from the garden (frozen green beans are okay, but don't compare. And most fresh beans in the store are picked far too mature and trucked in from far too far away to be really good)

I also cleared out the space under my bedroom window, which was a place I used to occasionally plant tomatoes. I have to decide what to do - I contemplated getting some of those cement edger things and making another sort of raised bed, either a circular or sort of rounded-triangle shaped one (there are two nandinas planted right up against the house and I lack the motivation to try to rip them out, and also I know they'd be sucker-sprouting FORever if I didn't get the entire root system) and put another tomato or two in there.

Though, I don't know. Tomatoes may be a lost cause, as I found a creature-burrow in the side garden. Not sure what creature it is - probably too small to be an armadillo (it's about 6" in diameter, as best I remember). There's an apron of soil thrown up in front of it so I'm wondering if it could be a gopher or something like that - any of the rodenty things will eat tomatoes. I don't think it's a skunk; it looks too small and at any rate, I think a skunk would choose the path of least resistance and just move in under the house (and evict the neighbor's semi-feral cats that tend to hang out there. I don't worry too much about the cats because I figure they keep down the mice). So, I don't know. I don't know if our ornithologist (who is the closest thing we have to a mammalogist right now, he teaches Mammalogy) would be able to give me ideas as to what it was if I took a photo. (I don't know if we have woodchucks down here, but there didn't seem to be enough plant material eaten up - in fact, there was really none eaten that I could see - for it to be one of those). I suppose it's also possible it's something that either no longer lives there or is no longer living. I don't want to just fill the hole in; I don't want to be responsible for killing some kind of critter, especially if it's something relatively benign like box turtles.

I will say one thing about gardening, especially the kind of heavy-work clear-it-all-out gardening: it is hard for me to worry about the state of the world (or the state of my profession, or my upcoming tax bill*) when I'm working on something like that. I think I need to do that more often, or to go out and do that when I feel inclined to turn the news on. I think it's because it's a what I control/what I don't control thing. I get nervous over stuff that will affect me, but which I can do no material thing to alter (Yes, one can pray, but that doesn't feel very material). But the state of my garden: that's something I can control. I can get rid of all the darn mulberry that seeded itself in; I can clear out the old leaves and replace them with a mix of soil and compost and plant flowers.

(*My dad called me up Saturday night to tell me what his tax bill was going to be, and to ask me if I could float him a quick loan for a month or two (!) to help cover it. Considering the bill *I* have coming due....no. Oh, he can cover it, he just said he'd rather not dip into his brokerage account to do so. I have my "emergency what if the roof caves in" savings money, I have my checking account, I have another smaller checking account another place that's my real-freak-out emergency money (like: how will I cover my bills if my credit union account is somehow compromised)....and I have an I-bond I should probably cash in some time seeing as it matured in 2011. But other than that, no, no sources of ready money. I'm having to get a check out of MY brokerage account to cover my tax bill....)

I think THAT is part of why I need the weekend breaks, however much I get on a weekend; to get away from the doom and gloom of the impending HLC visit (which probably won't be all that doomy and gloomy, especially if we don't listen to Certain People who are going, "Well, all these things that have been working, you need to change them NOW") or the fears about what the future of higher education will look like, or more vague fears about the future of the world....


I also worked some on the current quilts - did some hand-quilting, sewed up a few more blocks, and got most of the rest of the cutting done for the aqua and red quilt.