05.15.2007
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Don says:
I've been trying to fight off an upper-respiratory infection since November of last year, my mother has the worst case of Shingles most of our area health care workers have ever seen and we seem to be plagued by errant minutia; didn't pay the car insurance bill we were sure we'd paid, the mower deck fell off our riding mower and there's nowhere we can get service locally, the manually powered (i.e. push type) gas mower needs a new blade and our weed whacker burned up the first time we tried to use it this spring. After days and days with wildflowers exploding all around us I decided to take some pictures (I "inherited" Lisa's old digital camera when she got a new one) but the batteries "went south" right in the middle of the attempt and I didn't bring spares. Isn't that just the way life goes? I recall an occasion when I was driving home from an out of town gig in mom's Oldsmobile mini-van (I borrowed it because my pickup was in the shop) and had a flat. The van had one of those funny looking little "doughnut" spare tires which had never been used. When I let the jack down the doughnut blew out. Minutes later, amazingly enough, two young circuit-riding preachers stopped in a Pontiac mini-van. The fellow driving insisted that he didn't trust those darn doughnuts anyway and could get a "real" spare from his brother, who owned a car lot, so he gave me the doughnut from his mini-van, preached a brief sermon, blessed me and drove off. As I lowered the jack, a second time, on the graciously gifted doughnut, with a subdued fizzling sound, it went completely flat. Well, I made it home (but that's another story) and before long I found a wheel and tire in a junkyard which became the "new" spare for the mini-van and has served honorably since. There's nothing amazing or complicated about it, we just keep on doing whatever we have to do until whatever needs doing finally gets done.As Lisa was proofreading the paragraph above she commented, "It's been a long week" to which I can only reply, "Yeah, it has".
I did get a photo taken before the batteries gave out on the camera though it's not a very good one but at least it'll give you an idea of what the roadsides look like in our part of the world right now.
see ya next time,
Don
Lisa says:
In my search for a gardening style, I've decided that probably my style in the very near future will be "no-work, no-till". The most fascinating advice I've read so far are the works of Ruth Stout and Masanobu Fukuoka. They come closest to what I'd like to accomplish, natural beauty without backbreaking work. I'm redoing the front of the house in flowerbeds, walkways and mulch. That's such a nice change from trees sticking out of thin grass. I have done one rather labor-intensive project, a gravel garden, but that's going to be about it. It's featured in the last Personal News page.So, what did I do? Got mulch, lots and lots of mulch. When the local tree service works in this area they'd much rather dump a load of their chipped trimmings in someone's yard than burn gas and pay fees to transport and dump it somewhere "approved". If you have a need for some very rough mulch a telephone call or two should do the job. One unexpected benefit I've discovered is that animals do not like to walk through it, remember they're barefoot, and it cuts way down on potty visits to your plants.
Mulch Mountains
