Another New Resident

Presenting Sasha.

Vacation Day One

Here's a thing.  (Thing from the OED:  A matter of debate before the thingen, the Scandinavian Parliament.)

Why would I much rather weed than harvest?  Both produce obvious results -- great results! But the weeding, I guess, is, in fact, instant.  The pea picking takes more time.  It feels like work.

But weeding is work too!  

Moving on, here we have peas grown on a support:

And here are the same kind of peas growing unsupported:

Which are easier to pick?  I'm not sure.  I have to bend over for both.  With the unsupported row I can flip them over and back to find the hidden pods.  With the supported row I can see most of the pods more clearly.  Conclusion:  no real advantage to either, at least in re. harvesting.

Here is an hour's labor:

Pickin' Peas

Yum.

Another Cutie!

Lots of these live in our sewer pond -- and they're growing quickly.  Owen got to watch a mamma laying her eggs up the hill near the pigpen!  He's hoping to be around for the hatching as well, but that might be hard to time. They're painted turtles.

More Heat

I'm hiding in the house and grading papers.  Outside it's very hot and very windy.  Ugh. But now we have the new computer, so here is a lovely picture from early spring.  Hooray!

Too Hot!

No work is getting done today because it's somewhere close to 100 degrees.  Ugh.

Overcast and Warm

A good day for getting a few things done--mostly overcast with a kind of a haze.  The sun would come out and I'd realize that it really was a hot day, and then the haze would reassert itself, and it was bearable again.

I got a second bed of peppers planted and figured out how to deal with the lack of milk jugs.  I put a thick layer of lightweight, dry hay over the bed that had the peppers covered with jugs.  Using the jugs, I shaped a shelter around each plant, and then removed each jug and put it over a plant in the new bed. So the plants have shelter from the wind, but not, unfortunately, from the heat.  The forecast is for 99 degrees on Monday.

And here I am planting peppers that the guide says do best at 70-80 degree ranges.  Oh, well.

Week's End

I visited three different recycling bin stations in town.  All of them had been recently emptied, so no milk jugs.  Hmmph.

Mulching

I'm not getting the rest of the peppers in because it's ninety degrees today and tomorrow -- too hot for transplants, I figure.  Plus I'm out of milk jugs for protecting them, and those "cloches" really do help plants deal with the wind.

So I mulched around half of the new grapes.

And Rain Again

A thunderstorm.  Before it arrived I didn't get much done.