I don't garden the way I used to

 We had a lovely visit with our daughter, her husband, and granddaughter Natalie with her son, Ivan.  I went out and got my short row of spinach planted.  I've only planted cool-weather crops, which can usually survive even a frost or light snow.  Every year I check the Missouri Extension service guide that tells when to plant various vegetables in central Missouri (THIS LINK).  Some things, like lettuce, spinach, and peas, won't do well at any other time of year; You have to plant them early.

I used to have huge gardens, canning and freezing huge amounts of food.  No more!  Two old people don't really eat enough to worry about doing all that work.  Last year at the beginning of the pandemic I saw an ad on Facebook Marketplace, someone wanting to buy some fruit jars.  I contacted them and told them I'd give them mine, free.  Oh, I held back a few in case the urge to can something hit me (unlikely); I even gave them my big pressure canner, but kept the smaller one... again, just in case.  As I tell Cliff often when I'm starting another garden, "I don't even know if I'll keep up with the garden, or whether it might be my last one."

I've learned to allow myself to change horses in midstream.  

My tomatoes always get blight.  I've seen all the things you can do to keep blight away, but I don't have enough energy for that, so I plant three or four plants that don't die as fast as the older strains, and hope for the best.  Some years we have tomatoes for the table for three weeks, then blight kills them.  The last couple of years we've had tomatoes to eat fresh most of the summer, although they got pretty ugly at the end of season.  I still remember the first year I dealt with tomato blight:  It was 1980, we were renting out the house here and living at Oak Grove (long story) and I didn't know what was wrong with my poor plants.  Before that, any tomatoes I grew were perfect!  Where did it come from?  One year in the 70's I had so many tomatoes I was hauling them to work in five-gallon buckets for people who wanted some to can.  Those were the days. I do put the tomatoes in a different place every year; I don't even plant peppers where tomatoes were the previous year, because peppers will die from blight too.  

These days I make no plans to can tomatoes, although last year I had some to freeze, which was nice when I made chili.  One or two plants would keep us eating fresh tomatoes daily if it weren't for blight, but since it's out there, I usually plant three or four.  I'm trying to plant small amounts of most things at different times.  For instance, I'm only planting two cabbages now, but in three weeks or so, I'll plant a couple more.  I plant one small row of green beans, then three or four weeks later, another row.  I like to be eating fresh things from the garden all summer.

In this business of getting old, a lot depends on keeping up my strength and keeping down the arthritis pain as much as possible.  Arthritis is a strange bird.  The same knees that have me limping through a week sometimes, will for no reason at all quit hurting as much for weeks at a time.  There's always pain, but sometimes it isn't so bad.  On the days when it's worse, Tylenol helps.  I appreciate that I can do as much as I do, because my husband suffers a lot more arthritis pain than I do, and there's the asthma he developed in his old age that slows him down.  He is much more limited than I.  

However, he has had a project going for three days out in the shop:  He a took a set of forks for three-point hitch and changed it to a quick-attach hitch for his biggest John Deere, which is a category 2.  That might sound simple, but he has spent about 8 hours a day out there messing with it.  He said he's almost done with it.  When he loads up the bucket in front of the tractor, the back-end of the tractor comes up, even though there's fluid in the tires; so he needs weight on the back end for ballast.  The reason it has taken him so long is that he doesn't buy material to build this sort of thing; he goes to his scrap-metal pile and finds something that might work.  We've lived paycheck to paycheck all our lives, so we have had to adopt the old Depression motto:  "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without." 

It's been wonderful!  I love my husband dearly, but I also like having the house to myself sometimes.  He knows that very well, after living with me for almost 55 years.  I'm not sure, but that may be the real reason for his project.

The light wasn't too good with the shop closed up this morning, so I used a flash.  Cliff will toss the weights below on there

And that's what's happening in my neck of the woods.

Peace.