Well, you can’t always eat healthy. In her defense, we just handed her something covered in chocolate. Who could blame her for getting a little over-zealous?
Part I is here.
garden
Who needs a gnome?
Lloyd the gnome is currently guarding our garden, and doing a decent job at it. So far this year, no poachers. However, I think Lloyd is about to be superseded. Gnomes aren’t really that scary. But zombies are.
That’s right, a garden zombie from (who else?) ThinkGeek. It’s a little pricey at $90, but who hasn’t wanted to have their own garden zombie?
Yeesh, never mind, that thing’s too scary.
The garden is dead! Long live the garden!
Now that the new garden is really getting into the swing of things, I have to say, I’m liking it a lot better than the old garden. Note that this is very specific to me, because my reasons are rather selfish ones. I believe I have put them here before, but I’ll reiterate:
- It is SO NICE having the garden across the street from our house. You’d be amazed at how much easier it is to keep up on it, even though it was only a few blocks away before.
- A garden is much nicer than an abandoned lot.
- We have met nice, friendly people. There were nice, friendly people at the old garden (some of the same nice, friendly people I might add), but for whatever reason, we never met them there. This is probably due to #1.
- We only gardened at the old place for a couple of years, so we weren’t unduly attached to it, the way we might have been if we were there longer.
Certainly, the new garden is looking a lot better than the old garden site is looking right now:
What's left of our old garden (the red arrow is where our garden used to be)
I should mention that it is actually a lot worse than that; I took this picture some time ago, before all of the construction equipment and temporary construction trailers moved in.
The new garden, meanwhile, is looking pretty stellar. Our gnome, Lloyd, finally has a garden to keep watch over.
Lloyd keeps a look out
People always have all kinds of things in the garden, so we felt a little left out. I wanted to gnome to face inward, but Evie insisted that he face directly toward the plot that has a plastic shark, to keep an eye on it. A laser wouldn’t have made a straighter line from Lloyd’s eyes to that shark than Evie did when she positioned him.
We got our first strawberries of the year! Three strawberries were ripe all at the same time, so Sara, Evie and I all got to try them simultaneously. We’ve gotten a few strawberries since then, but not more than a handful. The strawberries are sending out runners like crazy though, and it’s clear we’ll have 5 times as many strawberry plants next year. It’s very clear that the strawberry box was necessary, as the plants have already made several attempts to escape its confinement.
I don’t know if we have green thumbs or what, but at first our tomatoes always seems like they are a little smaller than everyone else’s. Walking around I’m always like, “Whoah, look at this guy’s tomatoes!” But then at some point I take another look and realize that ours are now as big or bigger than everyone else in the garden. I don’t know if there’s something we do particularly right, the variety of tomatoes we have, or what, but they look extremely large.
We didn’t plant quite as much this year, so there’s nothing that we’ve really been able to harvest yet, but I am already looking forward to some delicious veggies!
Garden 2.0
It’s that time of year again…garden time!
The fate of the old garden has been discussed before, so I will not belabor the point. The excellent people of the new garden have been working nonstop to get things ready to go. Evie and I put in a little work, but not nearly as much as some of the folks. And the result looks mighty fine, I might add:
Over the weekend we planted 6 tomato plants, peppers, an eggplant, carrots, chives, basil, and, new this year, some strawberries. I’m already anticipating some delicious produce.
Of course, this being a story involving me, it couldn’t go off without a hitch.
In order to plant our strawberries, we needed to build a box to put them in. Strawberries, left unchecked, will keep coming back every year and expanding, until they take over your garden. So you want to put them in something, so they are contained.
Me, being the handy man around town, went over to Home Depot to get some supplies. This turned out to be beyond me in several ways. It was immediately clear to everyone that I was way out of my element. Let me give you some examples:
Me: “I want to buy some wood to make a strawberry box. Do you guys cut the wood to specification?”
Guy: “You don’t want this wood!”
Me: “I don’t? Why not?”
Guy: “Are you going to eat these strawberries?”
Me, catching on very fast: “This is treated lumber, isn’t it.”
Me: “Is this untreated wood?”
Guy: “Yes. What size are you looking for.”
Me: “…”
Me: “About this big?”
(Note that this conversation was repeated many, many times.”)
Finally I got a piece that looked good. We wanted each side of the box to be 3 feet, so I picked out a board that looked like it was about 12 feet.
Me: “Is this 12 feet?”
Guy: “That’s 10 feet.”
Me: “Let me go get another one.”
Guy: “How do you want this cut?”
Me: “We want 4 pieces.”
Guy: “So, how long?”
Me: “Well, if the board is 12 feet, so if we want 4 pieces, we’d need them to be 4 feet long.”
Now I would like to point out here, that this was really the critical error of the day. However, that guy had every opportunity to see that I was an idiot right there, and stop me. But he didn’t. He cut me 3 pieces 4 feet long. After some very tense conversation with Sara in which I explained what I had just done, we had to go get another board and cut it. We debated having them cut a foot off of each piece, but we were really pushing the limits on what the Home Depot guy was going to put up with from us. Plus we would have had to pay for all the extra cuts (to say nothing of the extra wood we were going to have to buy). Finally, in my mortal embarrassment, I managed to convince Sara to buy the wood as-is, without having the extra cuts, so I could just get out of there as fast as possible. And the Home Depot guy, seeing that I was as clueless as they come and in need of major help, decided not to charge me for the extra piece of wood. (Thank you!)
About this time, Oliver started wailing, which was not helping my stress level. So Sara took the kids out to the car, which should have signaled to me immediately that I had more humiliation in store.
Me: “I can’t find a bar code on the wood.”
Checkout guy, looking at all the boards and not finding a bar code: “What size is it?”
Me: “…”
Me: “I think 1×8”
Checkout guy, sighing: “Can you [hold up the entire line and] run back and get a bar code from some other piece of wood?”
Guy behind us in line: “There is a bar code right there.”
Me: “He’s right!”
Checkout guy: “Oh, I was just taking your word for it that it wasn’t there.”
Okay jerk face, you looked at the wood too and didn’t see it! Man. We finally made our escape and the next morning I cut a foot off each board with a handsaw. Since we didn’t have to pay for the extra wood, and since it only took me about 30 minutes to saw up the wood and assemble the box, we weren’t really out anything. I would say the most embarrassment really could be traced back to this conversation:
Me: “Should I write a blog post about this?”
Sara: “Why not? You embarrass everybody else on there.”
Well, I’m nothing if not fair.
Mother’s day and the splinter
Evie and I picked out a Mother’s Day present and card for Sara last weekend (Some lovely Pyrex containers for keeping leftovers, in case you were wondering. Nothing says love like BPA-free food), so Evie had to keep the secret for the whole week. She was struggling a little bit, but she managed to do it…at least right up until Saturday night. I felt so bad for her, I was getting out some of the old containers to clean up some leftovers, and Evie was like, “Oh, we’re using the ones we bought for mommy at Target?” Like, she didn’t mean to spill the beans, she was just commenting on what she saw. In fact, I think she thought, “Oh shoot, we already gave them to her and I missed it!” I don’t even know how she remembered what we got; it wasn’t exactly the most exciting thing in the world. I felt bad for her, but it certainly did nothing to diminish the pure glee she had on her face when she gave her mommy the card and gift the next morning. She was jumping up and down, it was really great. As hard as it is to believe, I think that her excitement might have been a gift even better than left over containers.
After a trip to the grocery store, in which Evie, Uncle Nathan and I managed to get all the right things without any help (okay, that sounds funny, but this was a major restocking mission with a $200 price tag!). After dropping Uncle Nathan off at the bus station, we hit up Mother’s Day brunch in the new garden! The food was really good and we got to meet and talk to some extremely nice neighbors. I’m really hoping we can get to know them better. It was a beautiful day and it was really nice to have a place to go outside. As usual, Evie was a big hit, especially with her garden shoes. Afterwards I felt a little guilty, because everybody went to work on the garden, and I just played with Evie. So I felt a little guilty since I was the only adult not doing anything. But Evie and I helped a little bit, stomping down the wood chips on the path.
Evie had some trouble walking on the wood chips in her garden shoes, so it was most likely during one of her many spills that she got the splinter. It wasn’t until much later, after we were home, that she came over and said, “Something is on my finger.” It was a pretty bad one too, and completely inside, without any part sticking out. It took quite a while to dig it out, including using a sewing needle to dig out one end. And through it all, Evie made not one little peep. I was so proud of her! I thought she would get upset as soon as she saw us coming at her with tweezers. She did have one small request though. In order for us to dig out the splinter, she insisted that we make a cave for her out of pillows and blankets, so that she could thrust only her arm out, and the rest of her would be covered. This was very odd, but it was a small request and it seemed to work, so who am I to complain? I tried to keep her talking so she wouldn’t get upset, but I’m not sure even that was necessary.
I’ll have to think about other situations where “making a cave” could help out. Could we make a nap-taking cave? A vegetable-eating cave? Who knows. But a pain cave works for splinters, so that’s what counts.
Shane Halbach 