Gutter Lettuce

Our neighbor, Mike, was out in his yard yesterday morning so I popped through the woods to visit with him for a few minutes. He has a garden and started some of his plants in the greenhouse this spring. His garden is doing very nicely. I asked him if the patch of corn was where the bodies were buried because his corn is four feet tall already! He laughed and said that there was an old compost pile out there, so he just raked it into that spot before he planted the corn. Obviously, the corn likes it.

He also rigged up a very clever lettuce-growing system which I refer to as “gutter lettuce.”

The gutter is slanted and has a hole at one end for drainage. The red variety on the ends is Ruby—my very favorite—and the green is Green Ice (I think), which is new to all of us this year. (We shared seeds among our little group.) This view is looking south, and our pig pasture is on the other side of those trees.

We have some very prolific gardens in our little community!

I put down a lot of black plastic in my garden this year to kill weeds. I’m also in the process of consolidating and moving some things because we just don’t need to grow quite as much. That has come with a tradeoff, though. If I let my garden become feral, which it tends to do all on its own, I’ll get all sorts of wonderful surprises like a huge crop of cilantro. Or volunteer parsnips. I only have a little bit of cilantro this year, and no parsnips. The problem is that a feral garden produces a LOT of weeds. I need to figure out some kind of compromise.

I did buy a new tool. There is a long backstory to this, so buckle up.

The husband has a system for plowing and likes to put piles of snow in specific places in the yard. Our driveway is gravel. The result is that an awful lot of gravel ends up in the grass, and it’s an awful lot of work to rake it back into the driveway. This has been an ongoing problem for years. I don’t like mowing when there is gravel in the grass because the gravel gets thrown around.

At the end of last year, I ran across this:

It’s a Stihl Yard Boss and it comes as a small cultivator in its stock configuration. I don’t need a cultivator. We already have a Roto-Tiller—sized for the husband, naturally—although we try not to till too much. However, the Yard Boss has some optional attachments, one of which is rubber paddles designed for sweeping gravel out of lawns. Yay! Unfortunately, I decided to wait until this spring to buy one, and by the time I started looking, they were scarcer than hens’ teeth.

Our local Ace Hardware is a Stihl dealer. I asked them to order one for me at the beginning of May. And then never heard anything. I looked at all the Ace Hardware stores in Spokane. Nobody had any in stock. I assumed these were another victim of the supply chain disruptions.

The phone rang at lunchtime yesterday. It was an employee at our Ace Hardware store. He said that they had unearthed a box in their storage area that had my name on it and a note saying they tried to call me on May 23 but no one was home. Did I still want this Stihl Yard Boss that they had ordered for me?

[We have a device on our phone called a Sentry that will intercept an unknown number and play a message. The message says something to the effect of, “If you’re a telemarketer, hang up now. If you want to speak to someone, press 0.” If the caller presses 0, the number rings through and I know to pick it up (or it goes to the answering machine). Once it rings through, it gets added to the white list and all future calls from that number bypass the Sentry. Some people have no trouble figuring out that they need to press 0, but some people hear that message and just hang up.]

I said that yes, I very much wanted the Yard Boss and that I would be there in an hour to pick it up. This is a lovely, locally-owned hardware store, but it’s somewhat disorganized with a lot of people working at cross purposes. I am not surprised that they misplaced the box. This would have been more useful a month or two ago, before the grass grew up over the gravel, but at least we have it. I can use the cultivator to spot till the garden. The husband asked me to buy the broom attachment, too, so he can clean off concrete slabs. And next spring, we can sweep all the gravel out of the grass and back onto the driveway.

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Update on the laser printer: I once again have a functional printer, but it was a slog to get there. To be thorough, I ordered a new drum. However, the Brother Gen-u-ine Toner Cartridge still didn’t work, even with the new drum, so I went to the local toner place in town and bought a remanufactured toner cartridge. The guy there said that the printer reads a chip on the toner cartridge and that the chip likely was bad on that cartridge. (That right there was more useful information than I got out of talking to the person on the other end of the Brother customer service line.) He said that if the remanufactured cartridge didn’t work, I should bring it back, and that he would also be happy to look at the machine for me. I’ll be buying my cartridges there from now on. The remanufactured cartridge and new drum combo did the trick and now the printer prints again.

And lo and behold, I got a call yesterday afternoon from a Brother representative. I had filled out a survey after my attempts to get help from their support line failed. I gave them a “would not recommend” rating, which apparently kicked my complaint further up the chain. They said that if I sent them a copy of the receipt showing where and when I bought the cartridge that didn’t work, they would reimburse me for it. I had the Staples receipt on my computer, so that was a simple matter to take care of.

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That serger itch has been scratched thoroughly. I am going to meet with the class coordinator at the quilt store today and drop off my class samples for display. I was able to work all the bugs out of the rolled edge scarf project and now I want to do something else, not on the serger. It is probably time to finish the Slabtown backpack. I’d also like to make the Firefly Tote.