Lazy Days in the Country

The past few days have been mostly hot, dusty and very windy at times. So windy that I run into the house every few minutes even though the biggest trees have been cut down. But it still sounds pretty scary and there is a stand of old, tall eucalyptus near the garden on the side in the back that could conceivably fall down on me where I was working. So, after diligently putting on my garden gloves and pulled out very large stinging nettle plants growing to maximum size, I run away. The weeds are intermingled with mostly flowering plants that I do want that are also self-planted. But these are in the way of our walking as they’re in the pathways and so I dug them out or lifted them gently and put them in an old roasting pan I used to use for Thanksgiving turkeys with plenty of cool water to tide them over until I can plunk them into a little pot or bare spot in the garden. The thing is though, that we’re running out of bare spots. This is the overgrown version of our maturing garden that is going a bit berserk. One almost has to bring a machete to navigate some of these paths.
Yes, everything here is overgrown and underwatered and barely weeded. Thus, our task this week was to work on one area at a time to make some progress. And we did. John even enriched the soil of one of the overgrown and unused beds so I could finally get those 30 lettuce seedlings in the ground, fertilized and watered. But first I hunched over the bed to reach the fence line and yanked out some pretty pesky old man’s beard. That sounds strange but it wasn’t a real guy’s facial hair, just a weed that wraps itself around anything growing and suffocates it for a while--quite a long while actually and it grows very tall as it latches on in a twirling fashion to anything in its path.
In the meantime, we had a moth visitor that looked more like a butterfly the day after the fantail came inside and three more hungry chicks in the henhouse lived through hatching. These lazy days in the late summer are passing quickly and I’ve been in a lazy daze, trying my hardest to keep up with it despite the heat we finally have gotten.
Lucky my cat, Domino, decided to take a nap on the hot tarp on this hot day, exactly where we were putting the pruned discards and even a few chickens thought we needed a hand, actually a claw or two, but the hens scurried away when they saw me with my camera and only three roosters were left for the shot. When those plants were in the ground the flock never looked at them but when we’re digging anything up their interest level increases exponentially. They were most helpful as you might imagine, kicking up more dirt and nuzzling the greenery looking for a tasty morsel. I doubt that any appeared and so eventually they lost interest, especially when we covered the pile of cuttings with the other side of the blue tarp and then put the rake on it for good measure.
There are so many things to fix that are broken and this is such a huge garden for two struggling oldies, who can barely keep up like we used to. But help is on the way. Something is incubating in the near future and we are finally actually ready for it.