On Friday morning the sun came up and was bright. One could tell we are real close to the Equinox. My kitchen is a mess with all the root cellar stuff but the sun hit the center of the counter.
If I stood at the counter, the sun ran the length of the kitchen, and hit the fridge in the clean room.
Can’t see much besides the light, but left to right are: the sun hitting the back wall of kitchen on the mirror, then center, hitting the fridge in the clean room, then last, hitting the shade on the far wall of the office. When the Equinox arrives on March 20th, the sun will be solidly on the fridge and lighting up the back wall of the office.
Daylight Savings, supposedly the last one ever, is Sunday night. No more time changes after that!! Yay!
My helper friend did arrive at 8AM but is on light duty. So I had him get the beef corning in the fridge and then we found a meal for him to cook. He had found Pork Noodle Soup with Ginger and Toasted Garlic. As usual we had to adapt it to what I had on hand. He found it on his phone, so I don’t have the source info.
The original called for fish sauce, chilis, and some other things I didn’t have.
So he had a good time cooking this while I sat and wrote more plant notes.
He’d forgotten the pepper and not used enough celery salt, so I added those and it was great! This was lunch and supper.
My general helper arrived at 10:30 and went down to tackle the old root cellar. She found a space near the wood stove (we aren’t using it) and started building this canning jar box mountain. She’d spray and wipe each box before adding it to the pile.
Then she sprayed each shelf lightly after sweeping it off.
Next she took the top inch or so of sand off the sand box and swept the floor. It was all done except moving the sandbox. I’ll try to get my son and tenant to do that this weekend.
Once my helper friend finished the cooking and cleanup, I sat him down to put the hooks into the supports for the onion racks. Now I just need to get my tenant to hang them up.
I had continued to work on garden notes.
Just as my general helper finished the root cellar, the shelf liners were delivered. It was then I realized I’d forgotten to order thumbtacks to make them lay flat.
It took 2 of us to lay them down and we needed something to anchor them.
So we used the now clean small boxes to flatten them until the thumbtacks arrive on Monday. These mats are lovely heavy sheets just the width of the shelves. Where there are supports, sometimes we can slip the mat under, but others will need cut out. These will stay so much cleaner!
Just waiting for thumbtacks, and my tenant to do his jobs…
For now, the onions are still in the old root cellar along with the garlic.
She still had 40 minutes left, so she started washing the trays and covers we’d need for next week. So that job is done.
Just when she left, my tenant and his fiancée and her 4 month old husky mix puppy arrived. We were going to take the extra root cellar pipe back in the truck.
We cleared a place for the puppy in the king cab seat and the 3 of us headed out. Wellll…., the truck didn’t seem to want to run. It kept coughing and stalling. We made it to where it had died with Tom last week.
So we got out to see if there was anything obviously wrong and my tenant noticed the gas filter seemed to have water in it. We never go anywhere in the truck without the full tool box, so he got the filter off and drained it.
It started okay then started the coughing again. I suggested to try to make it to the gas station, fill the tank (which we had to do anyways) and add some dry gas. That helped some, so we hit the highway.
We soon discovered if we could keep the rpm’s up, it ran fine, but seemed to suddenly start hating hills. We made it down to Lowes, they did accept the very late pipe back for store credit, and we headed back with minimal slowdown on hills. Whew! I could do with less excitement in my life…
When I went up to the barn for chores, I did a little on farm shopping for more wild blueberries and some ground beef. I love shopping right on the farm!
Friday night I stayed up far too late watching videos so I expect Saturday will be a slow day. I hope to get a bit more done on garden notes transcription but I expect that will be it.