[Homestead] OMG haven't laughed so hard in a month
Leslie
cayadopi at yahoo.com
Wed Apr 1 21:54:15 EDT 2009
I don't know where time is slipping to these days.......
Partly I've met some locals thru free-cycle and that has been interesting. They are all about 15-20 years older, but at least interesting.
My daughter has been out of work for months, and calling me quite a bit, which put me really behind because she talks for hours and hours at a time.
Then my satellite for the internet was down for over a week, further messing things up for me. But that gave me a great opportunity to get out and build a fence around one of the gardens - fortunately the weather was perfect. That's the one that has potatoes planted.
I have another larger garden to fence to keep rabbits out - but the very day I started to drag the poles over there - the wind started, and the temps dropped. Today we've been at 45 mph pretty much sustained the whole day, and even thought the temp during the day wasn't too bad - the wind chill makes it too cold to work outside.
And then there have been the 200 mile round trips getting supplies, which just kills a whole day.
I did finally find a feed store 100 miles from here that has two different rabbit breeders that supply both Californians & Australians.......... They bring some in every week, so I left my card and will be building rabbit cages as soon as the wind and temp is better for my hands.
I'm thinking 1 male 3 females should be a good start. I'm hoping they can do well on locally grown alfalfa, fresh grass and some of the kitchen scraps like carrot peelings...
Built the poles for the pole beans which will double as providing me shade on the east side of my east windows to keep the inside temps cooler for at least an hour or so longer in the summer scorcher time. The yucca cactus are a real blessing for that as they supply perfect poles for so many uses. I've been able to stretch out my metal fencing posts much further by using yucca branches inbetween as supports for the wire fencing... something that I noticed other locals doing.
I had to repair a lot of irrigation lines, and did a lot of work in the mini-pecan grove too.
We had a lot of some unusual weed bloom last year, and I've spent countless hours raking and making fire breaks from the surrounding properties, as spontaneous fires can be a problem. Glad I purchased an .mp3 player as it makes the time go by fast doing those kinds of chores... And I'm sure glad there are no neighbors close, because while doing those chores sometimes it is fun to dance to the music ---- and an onlooker might think I'd gone off my rocker...........
I discovered that as long as I keep moving, I can now stand on my bad knee (the one that needs a partial knee replacement) for up to 6 hours,,,, but if I stand still for more than 10 mins, I'm out of commission for a day or so (pain/swelling etc).
One thing I had success with, seed wise,,,, is on the 2nd attempt to sprout the tomatoes, I started them indoors. Way too many seeds sprouted, so I gently pulled up the extras, and transplanted them into the first set of starter cups that failed.... and the news ones nearly all survived. :-) Of course now I have too many......... but I'd rather have too many at this point.
I built 2 flower gardens for mom - who for some reason lately can't hardly get around and I'm taking her to the doc tomorrow. Why is it that I had a 200% success rate on starting flower for her from seed.......... and so many of the veggies didn't do anything?????
Failures: broccoli, califlower, green, red, yellow purple jalapeno pimento habanero peppers........(supposedly easy...), celery and on and on.
I do have tomatoes, one jalpeno (at the seed leaf stage), and maybe some cilantro, and a few sunflowers.
Will start again.... as I'm determined to figure it out.
Hope all have been well.
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