Hello Everyone!
A long nap, Lots of rain, Ye ole road dust, Spreading white clover & Planting a few black locust seeds!
Alright, I wound up oversleeping during my late day nap... and that of course pushed my writing time back until later in the evening. Part of me wanted to just keep snoozing the evening away... but I had to get up, let Emily the hen indoors, close the door on the chicken coop and get the dogs fed... so continuing to sleep was not truly an option.
Overall the day was (yet again) not a super productive one... but that was more due the weather turning rather chilly than me intentionally wanting to 'take it easy' for the day. It also rained on and off for much of last night... and although I was stoked to collect a lot of rainwater all the moisture made it feel not just cold but also rather clammy outdoors.
The weird thing about getting all that rain, is that the weather forecast had a very low chance of precipitation... but it just kept steadily raining for hours on end. I was a little confused by it all at first, until I brought up the radar... and saw that yup there was indeed a really big slow moving storm on top of the area.
I guess that brief rain (that rinsed all the road dust and pollen off of stuff earlier in the day yesterday) turned out to be a good thing... because I was able to get most of the containers cleaned out before the heavier rain started. That has assuredly been an interesting facet of my rainwater collection endeavors here... because (seasonal pollen aside) keeping the road dust out of the water has been an ongoing challenge.
My best strategy so far, is to do what I allude to doing above... by cleaning the containers out after the 'first' rain washes the road dust off of the studio roof and rain collection tarps... and then saving the water collected off the cleaner surfaces afterwards. Even then, I still wind up with a small amount of road dust in the containers that I just let settle to the bottom... and then do my best not to disturb it again when I scoop water from the bucket later.
Anyways, it took me a few tries to get outdoors this morning... because first I realized that I needed a sweater and then not long after that I realized that I needed a warmer hat! The weather 'seesawing' like that made me want to give up on doing stuff (and stay warm indoors) but I wound up getting a fairly nice clothes line setup as well as getting some more stuff planted.
Aside from planting my remaining pumpkin seeds, I also planted some Kentucky-31 and some black locust seeds all in the same plastic containers together. I only had two such containers or I would have planted the black locust seeds separately... and will most likely have to transplant them later given how crowded they will be.
I also hiked around the place spreading a mixture of white clover and various kinds of fescue seeds (that are coated in starter fertilizer) over a lot of the bare spots. Someone had randomly given me that bag of seeds a while back... and I kept waiting on a decent rain event to occur so that I could spread them... and they would maybe have a slight chance of making it.
Hopefully, that seed mixture will work out well... and some of the bare spots will get filled in before the heavier rains start up over the coming months. There are of course many places where it will take sod (or adding topsoil and grass seed) to get some ground cover established... but thankfully they are not in the main 'thoroughfares' where the dogs or I walk a lot.
Well, the hour has already grown late so I am going to wrap this entry up and get on with the editing and posting. I hope that everyone is doing well. Ciao for now.
