Friday morning I looked out to the south and the tops of the trees at the neighbors were golden. It took a minute to realize it was the sun hitting them as it came up, not odd autumn foliage.
I didn’t get up until 5:15AM and had a lot of photos to edit. My #2 intern was arriving at 6:30AM and I didn’t get my post done. I got the house closed up just as she arrived. I got dressed and we headed into the New Herb garden.
I started weeding the rows I had been tying up or deadheaded and she picked up where she left off on Row 5. As I hit the end of each row I’d clean out the walkway along the wall. Eventually I’d cleaned it out almost to the end at the bottom of photo. But because the land rises at the end, it was too hard for me to bend over the fence, so my intern finished it.
She took the photo on the right, and I got the rest of them. The New Herb garden was finished by 9:30AM! So we moved onto the next project: the garden shed.
As she was in the walkway by the wall and I was standing about 6’ from her in the garden walkway, a kestrel flew right between us and landed in the forsythia in the 5th Fence garden. It sat there and watched us as we watched it. She moved to go get the camera, and it flew away. It was quite surprise to have a bird of that size zoom between us as we were talking.
We cleared off the messy part of the shelf and she sat and tested plastic containers. They had sat in the sun for decades and were sun damaged so she was testing them to see if they cracked. There were about half that were discarded along with lids.
First Fence garden – New England aster starting to flower
I sorted through the various collections of plant markers and saved the good ones. Once that was done I pulled everything off the upper shelf and sorted it into containers. She cleaned the shelves and I put things back.
Then I remembered I wanted to wash the window, so we did that. We still had ½ hour left, so we tackled the pea fences. We went over by 15 minutes, but she wanted to finish that job. So 2 more projects were done!
She left and I helped my brother on the computer. But he had to go to work, so we didn’t finish. I worked on the post for a while then I got some lunch and started getting ready for my helper friend to arrive at noon.
Our first project was to clean up the rotting squashes in the squash cages. That was nasty. Then he carried them outside and scrubbed them down and brought them around to the south side to dry in the sun.
I finally got my post written and up while he did the cages.
Then he went to the Big garden and got an enormous cabbage. But when he got it inside, he realized it had split. He salvaged what he could and went to see if there was another split one so we’d make the weight for 2 batches.
The second one was more badly damaged but we were over by almost 2 lbs. I had separated some to make 10 lbs but he forgot I had and processed all of it. When we weighed the bowls we were still over. So it took a while but we figured out the salt for the weight. I hope we got it right and it won’t be salty.
The brine rose even faster than last time and we had the stones in the jars in 15 minutes.
Back 40 mid afternoon
We had 2 more hours to do so we went over the big list of things needing done. We settled ongoing to the barn to do a couple things.
We hope to build the grape trellis in the next month so we went up to find materials for doing that. I was looking for cable clamps I’d seen but we couldn’t find them. So he went up into the loft to find the heavy wire for the trellis. He spooked a possum that was living up there. But he found several batches of the wire and tossed it down.
The other job was to finish the inventory on stuff stored in the barn. We found an empty trash can and brought it back to the garden shed.
Weedwacked shelter area
On consulting the list to fill the last hour, we settled on cleaning up the wire tossed behind the woodshed. There was a lot of good steel wire we disentangled and some aluminum wire beyond salvage. There was also a coated wire that ran along the siding of the shed. That was badly sun damaged so he took it all down.
So another project was finished. He left and I made leftovers for supper. Then I started editing all the photos I’d taken. I finished them and headed to bed.
My helper friend arrives at 8AM on Friday and we will take the squash cages back to the root cellar if they are dry. Then we head into the Big garden to weed and clean it up. This is the last project needing to be done, besides harvesting. Once it’s done, I can start work in the disaster that is the Fence gardens. It’s to be a cool cloudy day, so I’m hoping we can finish the Big garden.