Weeding, Weeding, Weeding

I spent most of Saturday out in the garden. The straw, black plastic, and cardboard are doing a great job of keeping excess vegetation down this year, but I still have to weed. Most of the weeding I have to do right now is in the rows of potatoes. I put straw between the rows a few weeks ago, but I had to wait until the potato plants emerged and were big enough for me to see them before putting straw around them. While I was waiting for that to happen, the weeds in the rows also grew. I pulled the weeds between the potato plants, then mulched the plants with more straw.

[“Weeds” includes all the chamomile, dill, and cilantro that have seeded themselves everywhere. I’m going to leave some of them to grow and use, but we don’t need half an acre of dill, trust me. I’ve also got parsnips popping up in odd places, like the middle of the raspberry patch. I planted parsnips once. I haven’t had to plant them since.]

Weeding is like cleaning. It’s basically just rolling the same rock up the same hill over and over, but for a few minutes after it’s done, everything looks really nice.

I am happy with how things are coming along. The peas have put on blossoms. All of the potatoes are up. The lettuce and broccoli look wonderful and we are eating salads from our lettuce every night. There will be currants, blueberries, grapes, and raspberries, and the elderberry bush I put in a few weeks ago has grown by leaps and bounds. The corn is making steady progress. As soon as we get some hot weather for more than a day or two, I expect the tomatoes, zucchini, cukes, and melons to take off. Hopefully, with all this rain, the beans will sprout soon. I have given up on the cowpeas, though. They are just sitting there. Maybe they are doing better at Cathy’s house down in the valley.

I saw half a dozen ladybugs and one garter snake in the garden. We had a lively discussion after church last week about bees—the consensus seems to be that there aren’t as many bees this year. I’ve seen quite a few of the big bumbles on the dandelions. I’ll see what happens when the lavenders bloom. If they aren’t covered with bees as they normally are, that will be cause for concern.

Right now, the garden is healthy and that makes me happy. And the exhaustion at the end of the day is good exhaustion from working hard.

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I’ve moved most of my sewing machine stuff out to the old garage. In the process, I located a few things I had misplaced (which means I had filed them so well I couldn’t find them again). Many of my older sewing machines, like Vittorio, don’t have measurement markings on their needle plates. That’s not an issue if I am piecing quilt blocks because I’m using a quarter-inch foot, but sometimes I need a 3/8” or half-inch marking. I had purchased some adhesive marking stickers from Sew-Classic and promptly lost track of them. They resurfaced yesterday. Now Vittorio has measurement markings on his needle plate:

The old garage will be a nice place to work on hot summer afternoons as it’s cool in there. The first job on the list is to organize and inventory what I’ve got. Some items could get listed on eBay, but I have to decide what to keep, first.

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We had given Elysian our Black Australorp rooster about two months ago, but he’s older and wasn’t taking care of her hens, so she brought him back here yesterday. I said to the husband that I think he was homesick at her house. As soon as he got back to our place, he began crowing nonstop, and when I went out to the coop after dinner, he had gathered a bunch of hens around him. Hopefully the two roosters will co-exist peacefully.

The biggest rooster chick—his mother was a Brahma hen—likes to stand on top of the waterer and survey his kingdom. He won’t let anyone else up there. If he doesn’t develop an attitude problem, I think he has the potential to be a fine rooster.

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I am uninspired by sewing projects at the moment, so I’ve been working on another Candy Coated quilt. My pile of leftover strips never seems to get any smaller. I’ve come up with a slightly different system for this CC in the interest of efficiency. I have quite a few long, width-of-fabric strips. I sew those in pairs, then slice them into batches of progressively shorter strips. I needed one row of 10-1/2” strips sewn together, so I did those first, then the 10” strips, then the 8-1/2” strips. Now I am at the point where I need three rows of 8” strips, and one of those is already done.