Sunday, June 18, 2006

6-18-06

I was really thinking I would update weekly, but it seems that being the only one doing the yard work takes up a lot of time. Ugh!

So far this year I've learned how to start the blower and weed whacker all by myself. I've become really good with the blower (getting our driveway clear every Sunday because every time I blow it off we get more wind and more crap from the trees!) The whacker... I'm not so good at. The stuff I whacked last week sprouted back up... so I didn't whack it so much as pushed most of it down.

My favorite part of using heavy equipment (read: anything loud) is that I get to wear the noise canceling headphones. Underneath that, I wear my iPod headphones. This means that every time I go out for hard labor I'm treated to some private music listening time (which I seem to require more and more as my stress level rises) On top of that, our lawn tractor has a cup holder. Mowing the lawn is now my most favorite chore... music, coffee in my travel mug, and driving around in circles. Woo hoo!

Alrighty... we're a month into my garden, so here are the photo updates:

This is a shot of the entire garden area (see my shiny coffee mug in the Lawn Buddy?) The zucchini is coming along pretty well, still under my bird netting to keep the squirrels out of it. I've had one cucumber plant eaten, but the other 8 are going strong and are so far not bothered. I did string fishing line up around the beds to keep the deer from walking through. I know... everyone else does 8 foot fences, but they won't walk through if they rub up against something they can't see. They could still stick their heads in and eat stuff, but they usually don't like what I grow.


The early girl tomato plant (in the center) is growing like crazy. The Mystery Heirloom is doing well (on the left) and the roma already has some flowers on it. My beets are doing... poorly. I found the beds covered with little sprouts of Forget Me Nots (AAAAAHHHHH! *slams head against wall*) I sat there this morning pulling out little sprouts trying to not disturb the rows where I planted the beets... but after about ten minutes I said "fuck it" and just scraped them all out. I only have about 10 beets coming through... I think I planted the seeds too deep. I have another pouch of seeds so I'll be throwing those in the ground to see what happens.
Oh yeah... there were also foot prints through the middle of the garden, from the fucking racoons.
Fuckers.

Some creature shots for today:

Mr. Wolf Spider

This creepy crawler made a home underneath Gayle's toy truck in her sand box. I emptied the water from the cover today so she could get in and play, and found the cobwebs covering this truck, and Shelob hanging out in the middle. Ick.

Happy Tree Frog

This fellow was hanging out near the fire pit on a little shovel I'd left out (which I'd picked up and carried before seeing him there) I scooted him onto the rocks next to the pond, where he hung out for a picture.

Incidentally... I tried to empty the pond out today so I could clean out the dirt at the bottom (which came from the fucking racoons diging out my water lilys) As the water drained I saw one, then two little squiggly guys swimming... tadpoles! I had no idea the frog eggs survived the last cleaning, but there they were. So I stopped the draining, pulled out as much dirt as I could with the shovel, and filled the pond back up. The water lilys stay (with rocks in their buckets this time, hopefully they'll stay upright!) and hopefully we'll have more mini-frogs this year.