Lawn Commander

As much as I love road trips, there is much to be said for coming home and settling back into my usual daily routine. The husband got the John Deere tractor and the push mower ready for me yesterday morning, so I worked on beating the yard into shape. Our lawn is no more manicured than my nails; I am satisfied just keeping the dandelions down to a dull roar. Given the choice between a magazine-worthy lawn chock full of chemicals and the barely-controlled chaos of a happy ecosystem, I will choose the happy ecosystem every time.

The pear trees in the front orchard look awful, which is odd considering the apple trees look great. One tree is dead and needs to come out. The other two are barely hanging on. I am trying to decide if we take them out and replace them with apple trees or give them a season to see if they recover. I may consult with Susan and see what she thinks. We aren’t huge fans of pears, so I’m not overly upset about this. Susan likely will be overjoyed as it will give her a reason to graft more apple trees for me.

I will mow the grass around the perimeter of the garden this morning as it’s getting to be quite a jungle out there. The potatoes are up:

Peas are going in this week, which means it’s also time to implement anti-ground squirrel measures.

The metal raised bed system for the herb garden was delivered on Monday. I’m waiting on the weed barrier material. Once that is down and the beds assembled, the husband will arrange for delivery of gravel to cover the weed barrier and dirt for the beds.

We are down to one bunny. We had two, but the husband said he found parts of one in the yard and thinks one of the feral cats might have gotten it. (Or coyotes, or a mountain lion—who knows?) The remaining bunny is living under the porch and is completely brown now. Mama robin is still sitting on eggs. The hummingbirds are here and two males fight daily over control of one of the feeders. The female eats from the other feeder.

********

On my way through Spokane last week, I stopped in at the small quilt store where I’ve taught a couple of times. The owner downsized to half the space, sold off most of her quilt fabric, and has chosen to concentrate on custom longarming, embroidery, and continuing as a Juki dealer. She would like me to teach serger classes for her. While I was there, I bought this:

The package contains a piece of fabric printed with small embroidery designs. After embroidering the designs, you cut out the individual motifs and use them as the centers of hexie flowers. I think this will be next winter’s embroidery project.

Now that the chicks are out of the old garage, I’m going to clean up that area and get back to sewing on the Juki 1541. Thanks to help from some people on one of the Facebook sewing groups, I was able to obtain understandable instructions for adjusting the speed of the servo motor on that machine. The original instructions had been translated—badly—from Japanese and made no sense. I can sew on that machine, but it would be nice to slow it down so I have better control. One very unhelpful person told me I needed to learn how to control the speed by using the foot pedal, which would be good advice if the machine didn’t take off at top speed by depressing the foot pedal a mere half an inch . . . I’ll play around with some adjustments this afternoon and see what I can do.