We had planned on going to a tractor show at Adrian yesterday (Saturday), but the forecast didn't seem too promising, with rain chances popping up all through the day. It was the one tractor show I really hate to miss, but as Cliff says, the grounds would have been so muddy from rain that fell the previous days, we would have had to wear our Muck boots to walk around; that would have made for a miserable day. I had been looking forward to time out of the house doing something different, however, and spent the day mostly moping and watching Netflix, which is a sure road to depression for me, but sometimes one must take time out to feel sorry for her spoiled self.
I think there are enough green beans in the garden to pick the first ones now. Yesterday I cooked some beets from the garden and made Harvard beets, a favorite of mine. Today I might cook some more beets and pickle a few of them for the coming week; I hope to make borscht before long, too.
No tomatoes have turned ripe, not even the cherry tomatoes, but there is no sign of blight on the plants! The only things I did differently this year? Normally I put cages around the tomatoes, then mulch them deeply with straw. After a comment about blight from fellow blogger Ed, of Riverbend Journal, a while back, I decided to mulch them with straw as soon as I set the plants out in the garden instead of waiting to cage them. I also decided to forget about the cages and let the plants crawl over the mulched ground, the way my mother and grandmother did theirs. Maybe it's coincidence, but I've not gone this long without seeing blight on my tomato plants in many years. Another annual failure of mine is zucchini: squash bugs usually destroy the plants so quickly, I'm doing well if I harvest two zucchinis before bugs kill the plant. I only put out one plant this year, but so far, no squash bugs. Of course, now that I've mentioned these things, I've probably jinxed myself and the plants will all be dead by tomorrow.
There is still some rain in the forecast for every day this week, but the chances of it happening on any given day are much less. We've received four inches of rain over the past three days, so the garden isn't hurting for moisture. There was flash-flooding around our area, but nothing that affected our home on this wind-blown river bluff.
I'll leave you with a picture of my two guardian angels (devils?) this morning. I had to convince Gabe to lay there awhile with his partner in crime; he doesn't enjoy the cat's presence in his chair nearly as much as the cat enjoys his. I finally gave him permission to move to his bed on the floor beside my own chair, so everybody is happy now.
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| Do you see the look I'm getting from Gabe? "How humiliating," he's thinking. |
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| After I give Gabe permission to leave, Blue stretches out and gloats: "This was my plan all the time," he says, grinning. "That dog needs to be put in his place." |
