‘Dig’ The Earth

After a month of no rain and no energy on my part the yard looks terrible.  My husband has either been working or had plans every weekend so he hasn’t been much help either.  So, even with my 6 month pregnant belly I decided to tackle some much needed yard clean up tasks.

We have an apple tree in the backyard that until this year I was sure would never produce much fruit to speak of.  Well, it must have gotten enough rain to produce some very nice, medium sized, sweet-sour apples that will be great in pie.  The only problem is that many of the apples have fallen into the yard and started to rot.  Our back yard was starting to smell like an apple cider vinegar factory and look like a compost heap.  I used a garden rake with tines pointed up and a snow shovel as my “broom and dust pan” to pick up the fallen apples.  It worked pretty well.  I dumped them in a wheelbarrow and carted them over to my actual compost bin.  There was one bag of composted manure left from earlier in the season that got dumped on top of them to keep my layering consistant.  I don’t want the compost bin to reek.

Then it was time to tackle some mowing.  It would take forever to push mow our lawn so even though I ended up in some pain from the jarring of the mower last time I tried it again anyway.  Surprisingly, it vibrations and jarring didn’t hurt me as bad this time and I was able to get the front yard and a small portion of the back yard mowed.  Then I realized one of the small front tires on the mower had gone completely flat.  OOoops!  God only knows when I must have run over, but that ended that.  Tomorrow I’ll look into what I need to do to fix it.  Blah!

So my tasks for tomorrow and probably the rest of the week will be to finish mowing the lawn – back yard and side yard, pull weeds (this could take a long while), clean up the garden, and possibly plant some cold hardy crops.  I need to get some knee pads for this weed pulling work.  My little foam mat is OK but I have so much area to cover it’s a pain to have to move it every 18″.

If you have any suggestions about what quick growing cold hardy crops would be good for zone 5a please leave a comment.
Happy Gardening (and cleaning up )

Most of the month of August and the first half of September were unbearably hot and dry during the days.  As September approached you could feel the air cool nicely in the evenings which made it comfortable to sit outside by a fire.  Talk about good camping weather.

Over Labor Day weekend we spent some time with my brother and parents and he made a bonfire.  OH, what a bonfire it was!  The flames shot what looked like 50 feet in the air and made baked apples of the apples still hanging on the trees nearby.   The leaves and branches that faced the fire were completely scorched.  We’ll have to see in the spring if the little guys make it.  We were afraid that we’d have to call the fire department.  Gladly, the fire was far enough away from anything large and flamable, aka, house, car, field full of dry crops.  Also, surprisingly there was enough moisture in the surrounding trees to keep them from catching fire.

My brother had no idea that the pile of brush would catch so readily.  It had been sitting there for at least a year and my parents had bugged him to just burn it.  He wanted to have a party though and so he invited us and my husband’s niece with her husband to join us.   There weren’t a lot of people but it was a nice excuse to relax, roast marshmallows (and apple trees) and camp out.  At six months pregnant – and never having “camped” before – the experience was a bit awkward.  But it was fun.

About a week and a half ago it rained before Ike hit the coast full force.  It only gave our region of the Midwest about 1/10″ of rain.  The ground was so incredibly dry that after a few hours you couldn’t even notice that it had rained.  There was not a trace of mud and the soil was still hard as a rock.  Needless to say our plants have suffered the worst.  Many if not all have died back to the ground already.  I’ve not had the energy or strength to go out and water them by hand.  Though I have babied the plants that are in containers near the house, like my tomatoes, basil and few annual plants.

Finally, this week we got some much needed rain – about 2″.  Sadly, this comes at the expense of our neighbors along the Gulf Coast.  They get too much water just so we can get a little.