It hasn’t been a great year for my garden, from spring right through now. I’ve had plenty, but not the abundance I usually have. As evidence: I have been able to eat all the zucchini that my garden has produced. Yes, there were a few weeks where I ate it every day, but still - one person should not be able to keep up with a zucchini plant.
The main thing left growing is my watermelon vines. They have had only one watermelon that’s been slowly growing for what seems like a month. Then, all of a sudden this week, there are baby melons popping out all over the place. I think there are 10 on the vine now, and they get bigger every day. It seems like I’ll be looking for ways to use it come September.
For the last two years, I’ve planted raspberries on the side of my yard. They come from the nursery as little sticks with roots, and the proceed to die as little sticks with roots. I need some well established bushy plants, not little sticks.
I’ve seen bushes at Whole Foods and finally I bought some today. I got a blackberry, kiwi, fix, and blueberry. Check out how many blueberries are on that bush!
This week is spring break week and I’m using it to take care of a bunch of outside projects. The first is to clean up this tree that fell during the Snowpocalypse (note: this picture is from a few weeks ago; the snow is all gone now):
I got all the branches cut off and most of the trunk cut down. We’ll see if the compost pickup will take all the branches that I left for them. They are bagged, though a lot of the branches is sticking out of the bags.
After bagging the branches I went to a task that I hadn’t been looking forward to: the garden. Grasses and other weeds really took over when I was away for 3 weeks last summer and I was never able to reclaim it. Those things were still there so I needed to turn over the whole garden. If I had a rototiller I would have used that, but I don’t. Renting one seemed like a hassle I wouldn’t make myself go through. Instead, I just got out the shovel and turned it by hand. I raked it over and it looks pretty good. Later this week I’m going to pick up some landscape fabric to help keep the weeds down.
There is lots more to do out there, but this is a good start.
While the rest of my world is buried outside, I have four toasty warm trees in my house. About a month ago I bought four dwarf citrus trees: a key lime, meyer lemon, naval orange, and grapefruit. They are pretty small right now, but they will produce fruit. The lemon has just started blossoming and hopefully will give us a few fruits this year!
The rat had been back a few times since Friday, but we haven’t seen him since Tuesday morning.
Perhaps he’s tired of K tracking him through the garden.
Perhaps he heard my curses.
Perhaps he saw the new weapon.
(yes, it’s a pellet gun with a scope).
In reality, I wish I’d had the chance to use the gun. I’m not gun-happy, but I think it would have been a kinder fate than what likely happened. The last possibility is that he’s responsible for eating the full tray of rat decon that I placed under my shed and found empty today.
I hate decon. I think it is immoral and cruel and vicious and dangerous. It makes me ill to think about that rat eating decon - especially decon that I provided. At the same time, I’m also morally opposed to a rat getting into my house and rubbing rat nastiness all over my garden. I’d prefer not to kill the rat, but he has to go. I just wish it could have been quick and relatively painless.
On Friday evening I was chatting with my mom online. K was looking out the window and got the look on her face that all golden retrievers get when they see a creature. I figured there was a squirrel in the garden, so I peered out the window to see not a squirrel but a RAT eating my strawberries.
A RAT. IN MY YARD.
I tried to take a picture through the window, but I could only caught a photo of the tail and the back half.
I called Orkin who promised someone would either come after shift Friday night or that they would call me Saturday. Neither happened (not surprising given the previous responsiveness of my local branch) but I am still going to try to get in touch with someone there on Monday.
I kind of hoped it had left since I didn’t see it Saturday. However, K is very intent on hunting it and chased it out tonight as well. I guess the good news is that it runs away from the house, but still. I will be purchasing a pellet gun tomorrow in case my hunting dog and I can deal with this on our own.
π, K, and I arrived home today from a 2 week trip to Chicago. My front yard looked like a jungle. My vegetable garden was primeval. Within half an hour of pulling into the driveway, I mowed the front lawn so my neighbors wouldn’t be mortified at how neglected the place looked. I had to take the weed whacker between rows in the garden. One of the tomato plants had leaned over and created a nasty rotten tomato mess.
Other than that, the biggest problem is that fruit flies have invaded my composter. I will be picking up some organic fly spray tomorrow to take care of that. Thankfully, during our time away there was no repeat of last year’s fridge incident.
So, we’re settling back in and, by tomorrow night, everything with dogs and jen should be back in order. We missed you, house!
How do zucchinis like this happen to me? I pick them every day, I check on them several times, and then every now and then I end up with arm-sized squashes.
Anyway, I’ve been working on this all consuming project for work. I only fit in a couple hours of sleep trying to get it done, and then rewrote and rewrote again. When I finally finished it around 1 this afternoon, I was seized with the urge to make something real. I also needed to get rid of all the fruits and veggies in my fridge that would go bad next week.
I spent seven hours in the kitchen and came out with this:
That’s 2 loaves of zucchini bread, 12 zucchini muffins, two little ramekins of the zucchini bread, 2 small blueberry muffin ramekins, 6 pints of lentil soup, 2 pints of spaghetti sauce, and 3 half pints of blueberry orange jam.
