Ambition, Foiled

The husband had an ambitious to-do list yesterday. I usually don’t decide what I am doing on the weekend until I find out what he has planned, in case it’s a project where I can help. The first item on the list was planting fruit trees. We had the two apples from Costco, and while he dug holes, I ran up to Susan’s and picked up the Westfield Seek-No-Further and Northern Lights apple trees that she grafted for me. She also gave me one called Hidden Rose (AKA Airlie Redflesh). She gets the most interesting varieties. Her DSIL’s dad also loves to graft and grow apple trees, so the other Westfield Seek-No-Further start is going to their place in Kellogg, Idaho.

All the holes were dug by the time I got back. We are putting these new trees in the front yard with the rest of the apple trees:

The new trees are hard to see because they are just skinny whips at this point. (That black blob is Lila, our project supervisor.) This is looking north on our property, toward the back of the old garage that was here when we bought the property in 1994.

This picture is deceptive. The day was sunny—sort of—but with a stiff, raw wind. We got two of the trees planted and then the pager went off for an out-of-control grass fire. (We didn’t burn because it was too windy, but apparently, other people didn’t check the weather forecast.) The husband left to get the engine and I finished planting the trees. Just as I got back to the house, the wind picked up even more and it started snowing. By the time the husband came home from the fire, snow was covering the ground, but then the sun came out and it melted. Those squalls kept coming, on and off, for the entire day.

Welcome to Montana.

He had wanted to plant potatoes, but it was just too raw out there to be digging in the garden. Instead, he put compost around all the trees and made sure the new ones were protected with wire cages. My friend Anna had gifted me two large bags of Brussels sprouts, so I trimmed and roasted those and finished the last of my MIL’s Guidepost sweaters. Those will get boxed up and mailed this week. Neither of us had the most productive day, but oh, well.

FedEx delivered this:

I am trying a Ruggable system. These are the ones that are supposed to be washable. We have always had area rugs in the living room, but Lila hauls in a huge amount of dirt. She has quite a few “mud wallows” around the yard that she loves to lie in, and all that topsoil ends up in my living room. She’s also had some accidents on the rugs—those have been happening ever since we got her as a puppy, and it’s usually because she drank a whole bunch of water and needs to pee in the middle of the night. (Of course, she doesn’t pee on the vast expanse of wood floor, which is easier to clean up; she pees on the carpet.) I threw out the last stained and dirty rug and went a few weeks with nothing on the floor, but that room is too big not to have some kind of carpet. The walls are painted brick red. I picked this pattern in hopes that the dirt would be less noticeable. The system consists of a grippy pad—I bought the extra-cushy one—with a thin, flexible, obviously petroleum-based carpet on top. The top layer can be peeled off and thrown in the washer.

We’ll see how it works. I want my house to look nice, but it’s a constant battle out here on the farm.