cancellation

st. louis children's had a cancellation. they moved our appointment to tomorrow. we are leaving today for the "big city"--as tristan would say. if gardening weren't looming we'd have left early this morning and every attempt to go to the zoo would have been made. the zoo will have to wait until another time. we'll probably afford it better later anyway.


before we leave we must finish planting onions and some beets. i tilled part of the garden last night after work. unbelievably i ran into another huge "rock of gibraltar." i have a heavy steel rod that i use for these type of rock extractions--it weighs thirty pounds. when i struck the offending rock it didn't budge. the ground shook. i thought "crap i have finally hit ledge rock." after several spiraling probes if finally shot past it. i pried against the soil and the rock held steady. "crap i have really finally hit ledge rock." after working around it with many deep probing lunges i leveraged between two huge rocks and a point of leverage. the monster rock finally gave up the ghost. it took all of my effort to roll it from it's crater. over three hundred pounds of conglomerate flint rock. with great effort i rolled it to the edge of the garden--that is where it will live for now. i extracted it's much smaller friend and proceeded to deal with the wheel barrow sized hole they left. compost and top soil were shoveled and raked until normalcy finally returned to the garden plane.

the job of placing soaker hoses started. our collection of tattered soaker hoses makes this job difficult at best. we laid them so a quadruple double row of onions could make a single garden row.

reaching to weed the center of the row will be a bit tricky with a big pregnant belly but our garden space is at a premium. we'll finish planting the rest of the onions this morning. the moon signs are right for root crops. we'll plant some beets to finish out the rest of vacant space in this next row.

once again tristan was really helpful picking rocks from the garden after i tilled it. of course he and kassi played plenty. they invented a garden communication device from one of the old hoses. they were saying the cutest stuff to each other over the garden-O-phone. toly wasn't particularly tolerant of gardening but he'll get used to it--especially when he starts to feel better.


here is our surviving swiss chard sewn in the late fall. we have had several salads from here. just to the left is arugula also good salad fodder.