The Not-so-grand Canyons

Last Friday, Mother Nature sent us some rain. Okay, a LOT of rain! Maybe the hardest rain I've ever seen. It was a real gully-washing, frog-strangling kind of rain. We didn't float away, but it did manage to carve some really interesting and complex canyons into our gravel driveway, some of them more than a foot deep.

The force of the water was so great that it washed the gravel all the way to the bottom of our hill, about 50 yards or so. I wanted to fill enough of the gouges so that we at least had a car's width to drive on, so I had to bring the gravel up from the bottom of the hill. To my great amusement, the ground was too wet for me to get any traction with my garden tractor and dump cart, so I got out the wheelbarrow. I don't know if I'd describe the repair work as fun, but it certainly did help me to pass the time, and bashing my shin into the undercarriage of the wheelbarrow, when it's forward progress was suddenly halted by an unseen rock, allowed me to expand my vocabulary of synonyms for those of illegitimate birth. We have an excavation contractor coming in later this week to refill the rest of the driveway and grade it smooth.

I still have nothing in the garden, it's been too wet and too cold, but I did get some tomato seeds from my friend Mark in Pittsburgh. They are from a pair of varieties grown by members of his family for decades, you have to love a tomato named 'Luigi'! I hope they grow well here, I started the seeds indoors as soon as they arrived. Just give me a few days of warm, dry weather and I am ready to spring onto action!

Falling behind the pace...

I am well behind last year's schedule for planting, but there has not been much to do about it. I have not been able to get in and attack the garden too much because it has been too wet, and I made the mistake last year of rototilling wet clay soil. I have managed to get all the debris and detritus of last year's garden cleared away, and I just may be able to do some tilling this afternoon, we will see how wet the dirt is.

Jung Seeds has already mailed me my potatoes and onions for the year, I think they sent them too early. They are currently taking up valuable space in the bottom of our refrigerator, waiting for me to get the dirt ready. Every morning I say to them "Soon! Soon you will be secure in the earth!" Hopefully they don't get too depressed.

Nikki and I are observing "Turn Off Your TV Week" this week, so please do not tell us what happens on LOST, we'll have to wait for a rerun, I guess. I am staying busy by taking down 3 or 4 trees that are either dead or annoying, and I have 3 yards of "traffic bond" in a pile at the end of the driveway for repairing all of the scrapes, gouges, and potholes I plowed into the driveway over the winter. Not to mention that I still have school 3 nights/week. Only 4 weeks left to go, though.

Thanks for staying tuned in to the blog, now go turn off your TV!

Everything is muddy and wet, so it must be spring.

Last weekend I ordered the seeds I need for this year, my potatoes, and my onion plants. I did remember to look at my advice to myself from last year and ordered more potatoes.

I decided not to grow white onions this year because they just don't keep, so it will be yellow and red onions only. I don't think there is all that much difference in flavor between yellow and white onions anyway. I just pulled the last red onion from last year's garden out of the cellar last week, so I need to grow just a few more this year.

I have a little more than half of the garden beds planned out for this season, I'll probably finish doing that on Sunday. I'm not trying to jam plants into every square inch like I did last year, just trying to keep things close enough that weeding is reduced. 2007 was a very instructional year, though, because it showed me just how much food you can produce out of 1000 square feet. I'm sure that with practice you could even do a lot more.

Not much else is going on, things are very busy with work and school, but staying busy is good for me.