Here Today... Gone To Hell!

And it all starts over again.  :D

I already have onions, leaks and pansies under the lights we started late December.  I'm growing for plant sales.  Starting the seeds in groups to be transplanted later into their selling containers.  The onions and leeks are on their second cut back.  It makes them stronger to cut them back and keep them around 3 to 4 inches.  I'm running 14 flats already.  Could add another 3.  The new lights are working well.  So much lighter fixtures and the plants under them do much better.  I'm liking my rearranged growing room.  It's just nice back there with the lights and the radio going.

This one ornamental fringed kale has a weird germination process.  Soak the seeds for 12 hours, changing the water every 4 hours.  Then they go in the frig for 24 hours, dry to the touch and then planted on top of the soil with light.  The other, orn kale, looks like a rose on a stem,  just needs dark germination.  First time growing these.

My plans for what goes into each of the 12 pantry beds went over pretty well with just a few changes.  Need to redraw my lay out plans for each bed but I have to wait for the seed packets to be finalized so I can figure out what area they need.  I'm ready to go with the sign ups to adopt the beds.  I have 7 already adopted so I'm pretty confident I won't end up taking a bed.  Damn it I wanted one but really I don't have the time.  I don't think I like squashes but there are some pretty interesting looking ones and growing them vertically can look pretty cool too.

I'm treating it like it's a big demonstration.  It all goes in at one time and it all gets terminated whether it's finished or not to make room for the next display and then that all goes it.  It kills me to do that, terminate a plant.  I'm done at the end of summer but if someone wants to grow a fall crop, have at it, we have seeds.  Otherwise I'm cleaning up the mess.

I have to set up the watering and group harvest schedules.  Those poor folks who take the cherry tomato and bean beds can't harvest all that by themselves.

This is fun.  I'm a little on edge.  :hihi: 

The ground hasn't frozen here so I'm back out in the drain basin throwing out seeds.  Today I seeded American Beauty Bush.  One of my favorites.  I like how the berries circle around the stem.
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Woohoo!  I have only 5 of the 12 pantry beds left to get adopted and I think I have somebody who wants the sweet potato bed.  I've only sent the email to a few people and I haven't put it out to the whole group.  I don't think I'm going to get a bed for myself.  Once again I'm so busy managing the work to be done I can't get to learning how to grow veggies.  It's good though, once I have the management all laid out anybody can take over and I can go back to managing the rest of the garden and put the educational programing into place.  I'll got that production line thing going in my head all the fucking time.

The onions and leeks need cut back again.   :hihi:  I'm seeding up the ornamental kale today.  The rose looking one I've never seen before.  If it times out right, it's headed for the flower show.  I'm going to use it in our breast cancer planter at the hospital.  And a couple of planters right outside the plant sale.  Our members are going to freak because I know they've never seen it.  It's meant to say, oh yeah I run this place, spend your volunteer time with me, I do cool shit.  Bunches of a few different colored lettuces in our show case bed last year has everybody wanting to do that this year.  It got me two new people to take over that bed this year. 

Anyway, here's the rose looking kale.
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Woohoo, I'm down to 3 pantry beds needing people to adopt them.  The announcement for adoptees goes out in the Monday news this week so hopefully they are all adopted by next week.  But now what do I do with plan B?  The University wants us to grow up 300 fruit trees if they get a research grant.  They would have taken 4 pantry beds for that.  We'll have to break ground for a new place for them if they get it. 

And then there's plan C, downsize that garden.  That was never going to happen under my watch.  There's a few top people that's going to disappoint.  Sure I agreed to no new gardens but that is a University research project, not a garden sponsored by us.  See the difference?  Yeah it's only on paper, we'd have a new garden.  It's baby trees.  How much work is that?  They grow like weeds only slower.  We just have to keep the deer off them.  I think plan C is going to fail and maybe morph into a whole new plan.   :hihi:

I think I'm about to have some fun.

The fringed ornamental kale had to be germinated in the dark like the pansies.  Today I noticed little white seedlings coming up.  Took off the black out cloth and set them to the side of the lights.  Tonight, the cotyledons are turning green as is the stem.  We had this problem with the pansies last year, we were waiting for all of the seeds to germinate and killing off the ones that came up first because they didn't get any light.  This method worked really well this year with the pansies.

I also took the rose kale out of the refrigerator today.   :hihi:  Glad nobody thought that was a tray of brownies.

Get a phone message from Marsha that starts with a series of fucks.   :hihi:  Sounding like a chicken there sweetheart.  The Pro-Mix is on back order and they don't know when it will come in.  Lack of a growing medium can shut us down.  My fault, I reminded her to check on it.  We don't need it for a couple of weeks yet.  Calm down, the box store has 189 bails in something similar.  We only need 40.  Then again, we may be competing with all those other folks who are on back order with us.  You want to snatch it up now or just limp by on it until/hoping our regular order comes in?  We've got piles of soil, compost and leaf litter out there.  I can mix us up a growing medium real quick.  Not real sure that will work well but it's an option.

Anyway, the kales are popping up really well.  There's a warning on transplanting them.  They don't do well but they will go to the greenhouse when I do that and not into the ground so I'm still hopeful I'll have a batch of them.

Screw it, I need to move onto other projects.  I adopted the last two pantry beds.  If I have to manage it all season I need to be in there with my folks.  I have squash.  The last time I grew that the plant was going strong and the next day completely dead!  Squash bugs.  But I'll get to play with the cattle panel as a trellis so that's fun.  And I've got Okra.  It looks disgusting.  What does that taste like?

I really want to play with those fruit trees.  And Marsh is kicking the baby Paw Paw trees out of the Orchard so I need to find a new place to grow trees.

Was over at the pot plantation today.  He was taking cuttings off his plants.  Wondered how he was keeping going if his buds didn't produce seeds.  I'm a 70's grower, seeds sucked and you went for the leaves.  He just put the leaves in the trash.  I no longer know how to grow pot.  I'm going to learn.  I have to plant sit in March.  They get fed twice a day.  Excuse me but isn't this a weed?   :hihi:

Pro-mix is in!  But while we were moving it into the greenhouse, we found henbit growing.  That will give a home to aphids.  We had a big problem with that last year.  We have a big transplanting party on Saturday and the greenhouse opens up.  Watering crews in place and I have the first shift.  Always take the Sunday morning shift.  Straighten it up and get it ready for the next week.  Usually the plants have been so over watered by then, I don't do much of that.  :hihi:

We lost the fruit trees to a research facility in Illinois.  They are better able to keep the deer off of them.

I took in 13 flats for transplanting and came home with 17 flats of seeds.  I'm starting broccoli, lettuce, bok choy, swiss chard, cabbage and kohlrabi.

I also walked out of there with a new pantry lead in training, the two pantry beds I took adopted by two other people and two new growers.  :D  Then I had to get to work transplanting.  :hihi:

Fuck.  They walked out of the greenhouse this afternoon and discovered aphids eggs starting to hatch in the weeds in the gravel.  They are only at the stage where they crawl, mate and lay more eggs.  They won't start flying for a couple more generations unless we have a warm spring.  For now we'll pull the weeds and are going to wrap some sticky tape around the legs of the growing tables so we can stop them from crawling up.  Mulling over how we can build something around the plants to keep the flying ones out when the time comes.

This is kind of my fault.  I stopped weeding around the greenhouse few years ago because it's not my job.  I was helping them out and it turned into letting me just do it.  The stopping idea was the folks whose job it was would be forced to do it.  They didn't.  We had a minor problem two years ago and a big problem last year.  I spent significant time giving plants a bath.

Anyway, Marsha had called at midnight last night ranting about the greenhouse was not set up to receive the plants.  Also not my job or hers but my crew was going to be the first ones in there today.  We're the Sunday morning crew, we've been putting that greenhouse back together every week for years.  The plants are generally so over watered by Sunday, we have the time to straighten up what they've messed up all week.  :hihi:  By the time she walked in at 11, it was fully functional and set up for the week ahead.  All plants, about a 1000 of them, happy little campers.  She didn't find a thing that needed to be done.  :D And then she found the aphids when she was leaving.  :hihi:

Val texts us.  She's got a friend selling a greenhouse like ours real cheap.  "It will go quickly."  I see that and think I'm not going to be the first one to say hell no and offend her.  Marsha politely replies and side steps, the three of us can't fit it on our personal property.  Val comes back with, for the Demo Gardens.  "It will go quickly."   Joe replies, "I was thinking that she was joking."  Yeah, that's going to upset her.  I'm just going to keep pretending I'm dead.  :hihi:

All the cool season crops have come up and are headed for the greenhouse tomorrow.  Except the romaine, it's coming up slow.  I'm slated for 12 flats of annuals to come home with me Wednesday.

They did some weird cold stratification with the Sneeze Weed.  They made log ice cubes, put the logs on top of the soil and the seeds on top of the log, let it melt into place.  Left some really rough soil.  I was wondering who seeded that up or if the cat had got into it.  Nothing is happening yet.  If they didn't do it this way, the seeds would have had to been in the refrigerator for 3 months.

First pantry team meeting tomorrow.  I can already tell by the questions folks were only half listening if that.  We're going to pull it together.  Marsha is already telling me where we are short in our greenhouse order.  Apparently we had trouble getting the lettuce to come up or whoever took it home killed it or haven't brought it in yet.  It's okay, that can be direct sowed.  Just means I'll have more to water.  I was trying to avoid that.  And the greenhouse is too busy to issue the plants when the group is there so everybody is coming home with me to get harden off.  Hope they fit in the car on one trip.

In the mean time, no aphids on the pansies.  Three weeks until they are out of there.

They say the meeting went well.  We'll see if we're all on the same page as this rolls out.  It's really not that complicated, just get the plants in the ground and the rest will fall in place. 

My spring ephemerals are coming up every where.  Nice to see they have multiplied.  All those annual, weed, ground covers can stay.  It's food for the early pollinators and green mulch.  I need to be out there pruning the crepe myrtle and mowing down the liriope later in the month.  The ornamental kale is taking off in the greenhouse.  They need to be a more substantial plant before they go into containers but they can go in ground in the middle of the month.  New plant for me and it's working out.

I'm down to 9 beds at the gardens from 11 but I picked up pantry team management.  Finished up spring clean up at the garden and at home.  Basically it was some pruning and running the lawn mower over everything.  Couldn't be easier.

Somebody brought in the Flirty Skirt pansies from home cover in aphids!  They were in the greenhouse for a few hours before getting tossed outside.  Marsha put onion clippings all over them hoping the aphids will abandon the pansies and go for other plants outside.

I fucked up with the ornamental kale.  The one that looks like a rose is actually a summer kale.  There goes my design using them.  And as it turns out there is leaves all the way up the stem.  The stem had the leaves cut off.  They are actually a three foot towering plant.  I'm thinking just at the edge of the leaves on the elephant ears.  Maybe but I'm also thinking they might look better with a skinnier, grassy plant to off set the tower.  They could either be the thrill or the fill but I still need a spill.  The elephant ear bed is more of a wall of very tall plants.

There is a world onion crisis.  https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/onion-shortage-philippines-turkey-kazakhstan-morrocco-world-food-crisis-inflation-12201522.html

What is with the lettuce this year?  We got poor germination in the first round, reseeded, they came home with me and I'm not getting very good results.  Normally I have more lettuce then I need.  Tom Thumb is the only one that took off.  We get our seeds from several companies so they can't all be bad seed.

Oh Greg.   :hihi:  He mistakenly walked in to my leads meeting this morning as a bed lead, didn't have to be there, and walked out a garden lead.  He's a newbie and does not have my number yet.  The rest of them know, you talk to her and if she's not putting you to work now, she's making plans for you later.  He's my new turf lead.  And, I got him and the new pantry garden lead with the same thing, leave those weeds alone.  It's a shocker when I challenge them on picture perfect vs what's good for the environment.  When I ask why they are getting rid of weeds and come back with all the reasons why they stay.

First quarterly leads meeting this morning.  Went well.  Went two hours.  Would have went an hour if a few people would just let me do it and stop trying to run my meeting!  I hate that, the rest of the team hates that but if you don't let them have their time to put in their 2 cents they just keep trying to get it.  Anyway, I walked out fully staffed, staying under budget and a team ready to go.

We have to get rid of the snow before I can think about flowers. lol about 10 iches this week. Birds are all coming back and thinking what the fuck? lol

Mother nature is screwing me too.  Wednesday we were going to plant all the cool season crops.  The soil temp is too far below 50 and we have a cold snap for 4 days in a row, Friday through Monday.  Told Kevin it's his call, gave him all the data.  We're going with a covid call, do what the science tells you to do.  He's working on the report for the education part of the pantry garden but the only thing going in is the onions and leeks on Wednesday.  Everything else is being held until the following week.

Kick the pantry plants outside for hardening off.  They came home with me yesterday.  Wait a minute, where are the leeks?  I swear I just saw them.  They are not at my house.  Call Marsha to see if they were some place other than where we had all the pantry plants in the greenhouse.  Run up there and they are no where in the greenhouse.  Call Karen to see if she took them home with her.  No. Get back in the car.  The last time I lost a flat, it was behind my driver's seat on the floor.  It had been there a couple of days running around all over St Louis with me.  Tell me I didn't do this again.  I've been driving all over the place this morning.  So I look.  Yep, there they are.   :hihi:  You want to hide something from me, put it behind my seat.

First pantry team workday.  I'm pleased.  Three fourth's of them showed up and a couple of volunteers.  The beds all look good and they seemed to have a pretty good time.  I'm worried about the low temps this weekend even with frost cloth on the onions.  No, some of them didn't read the start up instructions or research their plants.  There's a lot of wiggle room in gardening.  Just get the plant in the ground and don't over/underwater it.

Kevin and I are in the tool shed.  He's in charge of it.  I'm telling him all the shit that can get stored in the big tool shed that we just put in there.  He says, "I'm not very organized".  I know sweetie, I'm on it.  It's been on my to do list since last year.  One day in May.  He'll probably go WTF where's my shit.  :hihi:

What is business casual for a gardener?  Dinner with the politicians who fund us tonight.  I have playing in the dirt clothes.  I don't even know what business casual looks like for a gardener.   :hihi:

Low tonight of 27.  I'm covering the onions.  They just got planted.  They should be okay according to the other folks but I don't do they should with the babies.

Good thing I figured it out.  I got a leadership and service award.  Total surprise.

The picture they have of me I'm wearing the white shirt I took the kids to throw paint at each other in.  It's now one of my gardening shirts.  :hihi:

Pretty good plant sale today on the cool season crops.  The good news is half the greenhouse is empty.  Less watering tomorrow.  Bad news, all those empty flats came home with me for washing.

We are bitterly cold all weekend but I can start putting stuff in the ground come Wednesday and we should be good to go after that.  My other group has a planted pink planter at the hospital for breast cancer.  I have a bunch of plants for that.  This will be the first time it gets planted with spring plants.  Hope I do good.  It's getting lemon grass, ornamental kale, lettuce and pansies.  It will be colorful if anything.  Think I have too many plants for that.  Might kick out the lettuce.

They didn't know if the zinnia seeds were any good so they seeded up 500 seeds, of several varieties.  They were good.  :hihi:  They only want 36 plants of each for the sale.  It's going to be the year of the zinnias around the gardens and the park, the school, the boys and girls club and a few other places.

I'm plugging away at the garden dishes.  They are due back by Wednesday for another round of seeding and transplanting.  I've got all the containers from the last plant up and the plant sale.  I keep them up to date until the last plant sale and then let the group clean them.

Lovely morning in the greenhouse.  Half the plants left for the plant sale and because everybody was there yesterday, the plants were all over watered.  So what did we do, zinnias.   :D  And you know who has to plant all those zinnias.  :o

Just waiting for another 10 degree.  Temp is going up quick.  Last frost was last night.  We may get a little more but mostly it's done.  The plants hit the driveway and will stay in the garage at night.  I've got the gardening dishes to deal with today.  There's a mountain of them.  But I'll take care of the chore list today and tomorrow I plant.  Got my spring veggies to get in containers.  I grown salad plants.  And some pansies.

No planting today, probably.  We have rain coming in for three days.  I'm still working on garden dishes.  Ran out of room in the garage for drying yesterday and the bleach water was burning my hands.  Not a pair of rubber gloves to be found around here and the car is in the shop.  It's getting done today but there is no person in the world who has the patience to throw a flat in the tub and watch it sink when you have a several piles of them waiting to go in.  Chemical burn.

I got to plant up.  And we have a flash food watch with possible hail.   :rant:

Darn some of my growing lights are shut off.  Love growing but we are coming to an end of when we can have them ready for the plant sale.  We transplanted and seeded for 3 hours today, about 20 people.  I only brought home 6 flats and I had room for 14.  Then again, I do have all those plants that have to go in and out of the garage every day.  They are all scheduled to be planted next week.

I lived in abasement apartment for about 4 years.  Reminded me of that when I was listening to the storm tonight.  I hated I couldn't hear the thunder or the rain when I lived there.  Vowed if I ever got out of there I would listen to the thunder.  And I do.  I'm frequently sitting on the back porch at the garden just watching it rain.  Took all I had to stay in my chair tonight during the meeting and not fake I was going out for a smoke.  Didn't learn much about the history of pawpaws but we had a couple of good pour downs and some quiet thunder.  I like the kind where can hear it roll or the echo of a big clap.

The Bradford Pears are blossoming out.  They are all over around here.  Highly invasive and on everybody's kill list.  I wake up this morning with my eyes almost swollen shut and in a fog.  Blew off going to the garden for our first general work session of the year.  :hihi:  Yeah, your leader is MIA.  I did go up around dinner time and plant some stuff up.  I'm hanging out there through Wednesday.  They have those days off so thank god, it's just me.  They've been annoying the fuck out of me.  It's getting hard to hide it.  I need a break and a stock pile of allergy pills.

Marsha made an excuse to stop by.  She's been directing all her stress towards me.  Big job coordinating the plant sale.  She's been finding fault or taking the opposite opinion on everything with me when we are in front of others.  Assigning me all kinds of stuff to show she's in charge.  It's to the point other people are asking me what's going on.  She knows she's doing it, can't help herself.  :hihi:  She was checking up on me to see if she's pissed me off.   This happens every year.  Hopefully she's got herself in check after this.  Probably didn't help that I won an award but I reminded her and everybody at the monthly meeting that she is the Master Gardener of the year.  So there you go, you're the queen.  Yeah one of the people annoying the fuck out of me.  :hihi:

Your talking about gardening and we get a foot of snow in a few hours yesterday.  :rofl:

You don't get much of a gardening season up there.  I'm watching for hummingbirds to let you know when they are on their way to you.  It's early yet but it's on my mind.

They say you don't know a plant until you've killed it twice.  I'm on my way to the first time with the ornamental kale.  Yes it is a cool season crop but it really only gets it's color and growth as the weather gets cooler.  Meaning it's a fall cool season crop not a spring one.  Shit!  I planted all of them today.  Not expecting much but I'm learning.

Beautiful day here.  I was at the garden at 7 planting the kale.  Quick water day in the greenhouse and only a few plants to plant up.  Ran over to the Gold Star Memorial, cleaned it up.  Hope to plant up some pansies over there later in the week.  Back at the garden to close the greenhouse windows for the night, drop off some stuff to compost and collect some more garden dishes.  I earned this Reese's Peanut Butter Easter Egg.   :hihi:

Marsha is in trouble.   :hihi:  Walk by the tool shed and what is that black and white fur I see in there?  Oh yeah, it's a cat.  We might have a stray.  Marsha is a bigger sucker for cats then I am.  I'm at the legal limit and she always has room for one more.  Friendly enough but was acting like it was guarding the area.  A tuxedo cat acting like a bar bouncer.  I'm calling it Shakedown.  I can use a guard cat in the tool shed.  It can hang with us but eventually, it's going home with Marsha.   :D

The cat is now in the office in a soft cage.  It's going home with one of the office staff.  She said maybe but it's looking like it.  If not, it's got a spot at a no kill shelter.  It helps to have connections.  Carmen is a retired state animal control officer.  One of those people who investigates puppy mills and animal hoarders.  Poor kitty.  You could tell it didn't know what to do outside.  It found a safe hiding spot and wasn't giving it up.  Very happy to see me this morning.  More happy for someone then getting its food.

Jim was planting his two beds up in the pantry garden this morning.  We only have potatoes to put in and the spring crops will be in.

And she's not going home.  She is home.  They want her for an office cat.  Named her Charlie after our county.  I volunteered to help care for her on the weekends and holidays.  Every office needs a pet.  And I'm sure she'll go home with Deanna on the weekends.  Sorry, leads I don't care if she poops in your garden.

Back to going to Deana's home.   :hihi:  As long as she has people who take her in.  Marsha caved, said if she's feline leukemia positive she'll take her rather than have her put down.  She already has a positive cat. 

They let Charlie out at the garden for a potty break.  She didn't go far from the door and came right back in when called.  She hasn't been an outdoor cat long.  Jim said she kept him company while gardening today but she did look pretty intimating when he first went into the tool shed area.  :hihi:  Her secret name is Shakedown.  Got herself a home and I bet she gets tons of toys and kitty treats.

That was the last seeding party.  No more time to raise seedling for the plant sale.  It's only transplanting parties from here.  I've got all the egg plants at home.  They draw bugs so they are not allowed in the greenhouse until the day before the plant sale.  My lights raise so they can grow up under them.  I'm working on individual plant tags.  We have about 7000 of those to do.  Plant sale is the last weekend in April, getting there.

Planted up the Plant It Pink planter at the hospital today.  First time I've helped with that and I was little bit shocked.  It's in the middle of a very public place and they've never planted it before May before.  Plus they left it with dead plants in it over winter.  Geez, at least pull the sign out of it saying it's us.  :hihi:  I'm happy with the planting.  Needs to grow and bloom before it really shines but it looks nice out there now.  Invites you to come out and take a look.

That's sad.  The Master Naturalist put up two small greenhouses at the garden.  We had strong gusty winds yesterday and today.  This morning the one is twisted metal, pieces in the creek we can't get to.  The other has half of it's panels blown out.  Our group tried to advise them on the project but the guy in charge is still pissed at us for firing him off the building of our greenhouse.  I was betting they wouldn't make it through the winter.  Hoop houses are your best choice, not those cheap greenhouse kits, which he got.

The gardens are fine.  We're built for high winds and flooding.  We have retired Boeing engineers constructing our stuff.  It don't fly.   :hihi:  Or wash away in a flood.  Bet if you hit it with a car, the car would get the worst of it.  Our weather threats are lightening strikes, hail on the plastic coverings and a direct hit by a tornado.

I've cleared out the garage of spring plants.  Round two coming up.  Besides my own stuff from the plant sale at the end of the month, I'll have the pantry plants and various other planting projects.  Greenhouse closes down May 1st.  Why I don't know.  I offered to water it by myself and those folks in charge of it didn't clean it up until September last year.  Guess Marsha wants to wrap the plant sale up.  Can't blame her it's a big project and she needs to move onto other things.

That didn't last long.  Marsha released the pansies with aphids, those little fuckers, that we couldn't put in the plant sale.  I brought home a flat.  They are basically deer food but I'm going to try to put them out at the Gold Star Memorial.  They did find aphids in the greenhouse on the Rock Pink.  I so do not want to spend the next month giving plants a bath.  I'm forbidden from planting anything in the planters in front of the greenhouse until after the plant sale in case they draw bugs.

Shit!  My new pantry lead in training had to quit.  Maybe her life will be slower next year.  I've got it managed for this year but I don't want to be doing it again next year.  Really there wasn't much to it but I don't know shit about growing veggies.  :hihi:  Walked the beds this morning.  Stuff is grabbing hold.  Wouldn't say it's beautiful out there but give it another two weeks.

Ugh.  Marsha has been having stomach troubles for 3 weeks.  She's dragging too.  I ask her today how it's going.  Tell her it's time to call the doctor.  She had, it's not good but they are waiting for the test results.  She's like a sister to me.  I was kind of hoping death and illness around me had passed.

Shit, we are going close to 90 tomorrow followed by a storm, upping our tornado and hail chances.  I'm growing cool season crops.  Don't need the heat and I don't need my crops pounded into the ground. 

Talked to the guys looking at fixing the destroyed greenhouses.  The guy in charge tells me he build houses for 13 years.  I'm thinking for who, 2 of the 3 little pigs.  :hihi:

Yesterday was kill off the seedlings we don't need for the plant sale.  They thought the seeds for zinnias and marigolds might not germinate well because they were old so they dumped packets into the seeding containers.  I came home with 7 flats of seedlings.  I'm going to use them to barter with the parks to drop leaf mulch off to us free.  Out of one flat I transplanted up 4 more flats, 36 plants in each flat.   :hihi:  I'm running through the extra containers I have at home we don't use for the plant sale and the used soil we have from transplanting. I'll need to put a call out for those or it might be easier to just go buy it.  Anyway, at this rate I'll have 28 flats I'm caring for at home until May.  Garage empty of plants lasted one day.  :hihi:

Since I do have so much I contacted the nuns.  Yes I need prays.  :hihi:  They plant the border around the sisters' graveyard.  Sister Mary Matthews is there.  A kinder, more gentler soul would be hard to find.  :)

I'm hardening off all those garage plants  They have to go out for limited time, gradually increased until they can handle the full sun for a day.  I'm a miserable time watcher when I'm into something.  Never know what time it is or how long it took.  If I'm watching the clock, I'm bored.

Hummingbirds showed up in St Louis.  There's very little out there for them.  My columbine needs another two weeks.  The violets are all in bloom so the butterflies should be coming.

The bees swarmed today to a fence right outside of the hives.  They are just hanging out there in a bunch.  Either the hive has been damaged or the hive is splitting.  I've been told this is when they are most docile as they don't have anything to protect.  They just hang out while the scouts look for a new home and they should fly off soon.  We let the beekeepers know.  They should want to come out and collect then, put them in another hive but they may not get there in time.  Really cool and fascinating but a little terrifying too.

Marsha has cancer.  Not sure where.  She can't talk about it without crying.  It's treatable but she's starting chemo.

Fuck the wall we built last year is a few inches too large and the big mower can't get through to mow a large area.

Ovarian cancer.  Chemo starts the Monday before our big plant sale that weekend.  And I have jury duty starting that same Monday.   :rant:

My lettuce in containers is ready.  I don't much feel like a salad this time a year and apparently the lettuce soup recipe sucks.  But it looks good in the container.

We're onto the education part of the pantry team.  Called for the team to meet, made a few announcements and answered questions.  We walked their beds, they explained what they were learning and people shared what they knew.  It's this point I notice we have attracted a small crowd.  They tag along.  We stopped at the asparagus bed and tasted it raw, not bad stuff.  Finished up and some of them hung out to work in the beds.  I checked with everybody and they seemed to like it, thought they learned stuff.  Okay, that's working.  We'll do it periodically.

Kevin and I are in the groove.  Monday I finished up four and a half hours of trimming and hand mowing, heading out and here comes Kevin.  He's up to run the zero turn.  Perfect timing and we hadn't even talked about it.  The regular mowing crew starts up in a couple of weeks.  The garden is coming to life and running smoothly.  Everybody got my message, they have to be show ready by the 29th.  The weather is running hot and we can get to what we need to.  I'm pleased. 

Okay the seedlings have to go.  I'm up to 27 flats and still transplanting.   :hihi:  Each flat either has 36 plants or 72.  I went through my personal stash real fast and had to order an additional 720 cells.  Went through those too.  When the plant sale is over, a lot of the leftovers come home with me until they get dispersed.  I don't know what the hurry is to close down the greenhouse but they have to be removed within 24 hours.  Marsha just wants to be done with plant sale.  Can't blame her for that.  It never really ends but it does slow down for a few months. 

Anyway, I'll hold the park's plants until the first plant sale is over to make sure they don't want some back and then send them out.  Not sure how I'm getting them there.  Hopefully, they have a van.

Isn't Mr Majestic a super hero?  He has a marigold named after him.  What about Super Hero Orange Bee?

Storms rolled through with tornado touch downs and large hail.  Can you imagine what that does to a group that has a full greenhouse just waiting for the plant sale in two weeks that will fund that group for the whole year?   :hihi:  We made it through but I think a touch down happen to one of the major apple production farms, Eckert's.

My last Sunday with a full greenhouse and hoop house to water.  The plants are so big it's hard to get in there to tell if they need water without damaging them.  They are getting crowded in their pots and they drink that water up.  We did not have the aphid problem we had last year.  Nastrums and onions were stationed around the plants that get them and that seemed to help keep the aphids away.  The only thing we had trouble growing was the Dahlia.  They kept getting over watered.  Marsha is hurting from the fluid build up and dragging.  Occasionally reduced to tears when she has to talk to somebody about the cancer.  She's not going to stay away and we are going to take care of it before she has too.   :D  Everybody showed up to help when they heard the news.  Good group of people I hang out with.

Well fuck.  I finally finished up transplanting and catching up everything else I'm drowning in, had a little time to pay attention to the plants I'm growing in the house.  The last flat, aphids on the eggplant.  Into the shower for a soapy bath with them.  They and the 3 other flats by them have to go outside.

Aphids found on two flats of zinnias today in the greenhouse.  We have the first plant sale on Saturday.  Tomorrow we have a hail threat.  Friday the tents go up and plants are on the move.  Everything I had on my to do list for today and tomorrow was done before noon today with so many people showing up to volunteer.  Even the grounds are just about show ready.  It's the same two problem gardens every time.  I'm okay with it this time.  It's the members sale and if they notice, it sends a message we need help out here.  They have till next Friday to pull it together before the public sale.

Marsha is not coming.  She has fluid build up and feels like shit.  There's you've trained us well but then, we don't want you to think your not needed.  The sale is all Marsha.  The woman is amazing.  She'll show up.

All my beds are ready for planting.  Even mom's place is cleaned up.  Home pretty much takes care of its self.

I've kicked my own ass.  :hihi: I'm so tired nothing can happen now that will ruffle my feathers.

Plant sale is set up.  I brought a bunch of plants for my own use and gifts.  They can't go out until mother's day so the garage got fuller.  Plan is to have the parks pick up on Wednesday and that will pretty much clear me out for about a week when the leftover plants from the public sale and the plants for the pantry garden come in.

Got one last round of garden dishes to finish up and I'm done.  Said I would get them up to the plant sale and that was today.  What comes back and it's mountains of stuff, the group can do.

I can turn my attention to the gardens.  Mowing schedule is in place.  All gardens covered.  I'm golden.

We were freezing doing the plant sale today.  Earned enough to cover our costs.  Next weekend is the public sale sale where we make the money.  They were passing around a sympathy card for Marsha.  I write, "you're a tough old bird, stop slacking".  There's only so much of people telling you they are sorry for you that doesn't help you feel better.

Threw the plants on the driveway this morning.  Come home and the eggplant is collapsed.  They do not like cold weather.  They've perked back up after a few hours in the garage.

Fucking eggplant.  Phoebe came over and did my aphid inspection.  5 flats had to get a soap bath.  3 were clean and none of the tomatoes or pepper flats were affected.  They're out of here come Friday and my lights go out.

The parks are getting 22 flats, 912 plants.  Making arrangements for them to go Thursday.  I don't have to plant those.   :D

Incoming is arriving and holding until they go in the ground.  Everybody should be here by the following Tuesday.  Aiming for some where around mother's day to have everybody gone, weather dependent.  I like doing this but I kind of feel like the plants right now, I've got no room in this little space.

Marsha is freaked out.  She starts chemo tomorrow.  Says she is having such bad anxiety she can only text or she'll start crying.  Please cry yourself a river when you need to.  It really helps to let it out.  When you take one to the chest, it's best to let it knock you down.  Lets you focus on getting back up instead of trying to keep standing.  You'll take less time to get steady on your feet.  And once you quit crying, you get pissed.  That gets you moving.

The annual team wants to add more soil to their garden.  Okay, you raise it up and it's going to dry out faster.  I know it's a low area.  I had the garden in front of that one.  Rarely watered it.  Not down with their planting plan this year.  They have two beds, side by side, a center piece in the garden.  They are doing one side all in sunflowers and the other a mix of stuff.  Doesn't go with my symmetry.  Don't think it's going to look good but they are suppose to be learning.  And sunflowers don't do well out there because of the cut worms.  Not too worried.  Those beds are so full of annual seeds, if we didn't plant them, they would be full.  Hard to keep up with what's popping up.

Leslie shows up and I'm on my hands and knees weeding her garden.  She's been really busy with the plant sale and thankful I'm on it.  Other Kevin comes by and decides to join us.  Judy shows up.  She just got stung by a bee.  Not going to help but we all feel sorry for her.  :hihi:

I cleaned up that garden last year and dumped a bunch of leaf mulch on it.  Tore right through those weeds and I see the one evasive weed got knocked back.  Still there but not as much.  Two more of her beds to go.  I'm leaving the leaf mulch for her to do.  Just needs a top dressing if that.  More just to cover up the plant parts we left behind.  It's nitrogen going back in the soil so only the big stuff comes out.  I use a Chinese hoe.  I can move through that stuff pretty quick.

I started at 7:30 and got home at 6:30.  :hihi:  In addition to gardens I have mom's house.  Finally she is letting me put down mulch instead of large wood chips.  And she's letting me plant something besides hostas.  When you live in the woods, those are just deer food.

Last night for the 22 flats for the parks.  I've schedule tomorrow to work on my own yard and finish the garden dishes.  So, of course, it's going to rain.  Might be able to plant the warm season plants next week.

No word from Marsha.  Today is the day chemo effects should hit her.

Marsha joined the meeting by zoom, camera off but it was good to hear her voice.  And telling us we we're doing it wrong.  :hihi:  That's our girl.  She will try to join us tomorrow for a little while during plant sale set up.

Having said that, PLANT SALE!  It's the big one.  All the zinnias got the boot from the greenhouse and the hose for having aphids.  They are not blooming so we won't sell many of them.  I'll send them off to the parks.  Donna announced she is not over summering the natives and perennials that don't sell.  I've got a bed I want to redo and an area we don't want to mow any more.  May be the year I attend to that.  All plants have to be out of the greenhouse by Monday night or they complete their life cycle, they will compost them i.e. kill them, on Tuesday.  At least the perennials gave me two weeks.  I have in coming just when I got down to 10 flats in the garage.  Next week is pretty much hardening off and then we plant, weather dependent.

Plant sale is going really well.  It was a nice day and shoppers are buying us out.

But I am so screwed.  They forgot to fill the pantry garden order for plants when they were transplanting and threw away any extra plants.  Rather than just fill the order from the plants we had for sale, they wanted to wait and fill it from the leftover plants.  No, I want very specific plants because I'm demonstrating all the kinds we sell, not just growing something for the food pantry.  But they wouldn't agree.  Actually I got blamed for the order not getting filled, I should have reminded them.  I have pictures of the tomatoes cut open to stick by every plant for the educational piece and we planned a taste testing session when we harvest.  Does it make any sense to sell the plants at one price only to have to buy them for twice the price some where else?  At the end of the sale today we only had 22 tomato plants leftover and the peppers were down to a few varieties.  I can ask around for enough plants to fill the beds but the education piece I spent all winter working on is trash.  What we have is eggplants.  I'm switching the cherry tomato bed to all eggplants.  That will be left because nobody likes eggplant!  Why did they save the extras of those and not the tomato and peppers?!

We just about sold out of everything!  $25,000 total sales.  $5,000 more than last year but we did raise our prices.  There's only two tables of leftover plants in the greenhouse.  We could have sold all those marigolds we sent to the parks.

Not one fucking tomato.   :hihi:  I'll contact some of our veggie people and see if they grew extra plants.  I'm thinking instead of three beds of tomatoes, we'll kill the bed for cherry tomatoes and do eggplant.  Lots of that left over.  Not that I don't like eggplant but the plant itself is a pain in the ass.  It doesn't like it too cold or too hot, or too wet or too dry.  Not sure if the people at the food pantry like it but it is pretty sitting there.  Maybe they will give it a try.

Hey, I'm growing lettuce.  I can have tacos!  Mom's still commenting on what I took her.

I only came home with 10 additional flats.  I'm up to 15 in the garage and three still under the lights.  I like my new lights that all plug into each other.  I can pull one plug and turn off the row.  The new flats are all greenhouse plants so they have to be harden off.  I'm going to take the week off from plants and plant up next week or maybe Saturday.  The guys assure me they have mowing covered this week.  Yeah, what day are you doing it?   ;D  I had that on my to do list but I'll let them take it.  Found out Craig has been sick.  Explains why he hasn't called to come give me a bid on the work I want done at the house.

I have two garden tours this week.  One is with the people who fund the place.  I have a garden outfit for that.  There's not much to see out there but I have a lot to say that will show them what we are teaching the community with the gardens.  If they've been around a while, they'll know my name from a different area they concern themselves with.  This is what I'm doing now.  You know my work ethic.  Should get us some points.  The other group is Vision Leadership.  Not sure who they are but they will not walk out of the Native Gardens without a vision.  

Forgot, the regional bigwigs from all over the state had a meeting while we were setting up for the plant sale.  They were impressed to see the small army of volunteers we had out there and the whole set up.  We know our shit when it comes to this even with Marsha out sick.  We do a conga line getting the plants out of the greenhouse and it goes on forever.  Flat after flat going down the line of people.  Gives you a chance to see what we have for sale.  Everyone knows when the basil is going by.  :hihi:

Anyway, I'm tired.  Want to clean the car and get all these garden dishes out of here.  Hopefully tomorrow, it warms up later in the week.

Don't hate on me.  Got all the leftover plants watered in the greenhouse, cleaned all the garden dishes and got the car vacuumed all before 1.  Would have finished the car but I had grandma duty.

They wanted all the leftover plants out of the greenhouse tonight or they would be compost.  When I left at 7:30 there was only a half flat of lemon grass in there.  :hihi:  Craig was just finishing mowing and I dumped all the annuals on him.  And scheduled the bid on work at my house.  The herbs and peppers were sent over to the food pantry garden.  I only brought home two more flats.

Our winds have been gusting pretty strong.  I've kept the plants in the garage the last two days and they aren't going out tomorrow.  Putting my hardening off behind.

So I brought home the shade coleus.  They never prune these things back in the green house and they end up kind of scraggily and a foot tall.  I cut them back and made myself a coleus bouquet.  They will root and I will have a bunch more plants.  The cool thing about a coleus is you can put it in a pot and move it around your garden when you don't have anything blooming in that area.  They come in many colors and are very colorful.  They do suck up the water and in full sun all day they will collapse in the hot afternoon sun.

I have Black Dragon.  It's almost a black purple.  Really stands out against your lighter green plants like hostas.  And I have Wizard Coral Sunrise.  A coral orange that lightening out  all over the leaf.  I guess that's wizards lightening.  It stands out as a bright spot in the darker places of your garden.

I feel kind of bad for the coleus.  Usually I'm in the room that has that and I can sell that plant out.  There was a lot left.  I was down in the greenhouse with the veggies trying to learn something.  They stuck me on the check out table, math!  I have forgot my times tables starting with the sixs.  I cheat and do it by half and then double it.  550 tomato plants sold.

The tour went really well.  The gardens can be impressive even when they aren't in full bloom.  Maureen brought some milkweed with monarch eggs on it.  One hatching out as we watched.  Everybody was interested in that.

2nd thing this morning I threw the apple baskets in the car.  Had to vacuum again.   :hihi:  Wussed out and ran the car through the car wash.  All the garden dishes are back in the greenhouse.  Found a home for the lemon grass.  They will walk in there tomorrow to kill plants and there aren't any.   ;)  Potheads are hanging out at the greenhouse.  They stay in the apple baskets during the winter.

These are potheads.  Mine aren't painted.  I'm not talented like that nor do I really like them painted but if somebody wants to, I'll let them.
(https://www.fabartdiy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/How-to-DIY-Clay-Pot-Planter-People-F-e1468293534522.jpg)

I do have one that is kind of painted.  It's very Rastafarian looking, complete with the dreads.  Love that one.

Shoot myself in the foot.  Get me away from the plants and taking care of the place, I come up with educational shit.  For the month of June I'm setting up garden tours for the public.  General tours and 7 speciality tours they can sign up for.  I've already set this up last year through the library but the heat came on and their staff fucked up the advertising so it went belly up.  This time they are going to let me access the 1700 names we have on our email list for the plant sale.  This could be really busy or a total flop.  They can't fire me so no need to stress about the success.

Woohoo, my scheduled just got cleared for tomorrow.  I'm planting!

Kevin keeps telling me he has the tomatoes we need and the next time I see him, he's telling me he doesn't.  I'm just buying them if he doesn't come up with them.  Rural King has 4 for 3 bucks.  Cheaper than we sold them.  I need 30 plants.  $25 or this headache.  I'm shopping tomorrow.  Forget it Kevin. 

Not sure what happen.  Might have been all that sugar they feed us at the plant sale.  Not only did we have donuts but some guy brought us some.  I was sick of sugar by the end of that.  Or it might just be my physical active is way up there.  Or maybe the tree pollen has settled down.  But my mood is out of the dark and it's blue skies.  You know when I have to struggle to write humor that I don't even laugh at I'm stumbling around in the dark.

Up and on my feet.  Got the side of the building and in front of the greenhouse planted.  Plus did a garden tour.  Going back for a meeting and will get some seeds in the ground before hand.  Doesn't look like we are going to get that rain they were expecting.  We are dry out there.  2 inches short of rain for April.  I'll have to arm myself with a hose.

Marsha called today.   :D  The chemo messed with her legs and she can't walk well but it's getting better.  She will try to come to the garden Saturday.  I didn't ask about the chemo.  Stuck to I'm sitting here for 15 minutes after getting my 4th covid shot and straight into garden business.  Let her say about her condition what she wanted to.  Good to hear her voice and she didn't choke up once.

I forget about plants I put behind my driver's seat.  Third time this year and one fell over so third time vacuuming the car this week.   ::)

Spent all morning printing out and laminating the educational signage.  They did a really good job on these.  Was going to go out and put in the cannas and elephant ear but the sun came out.  Might go back up tonight and do that but I will be up there tomorrow morning.  We jump into the 80's next week.  92 on Sunday.  We're planting in my daughter's yard then.  Not ready for the heat to come on.

Damn it, we are out of leaf mulch.  Did get the cannas and elephant ears in and their bed mulched.  Easy enough, dig a hole and drop them in.

That tree branch I hear squeaking in the wind is in my neighbor's yard.  That needs to get cut off before it falls.  Sounds like a large sized branch that can hit my living room if it comes down just right.  There's enough trees and branches in there to slow it down.  Hopefully it doesn't bring the whole tree down with it.

Told Jim he would be getting 15 eggplants and we would be cutting back on the peppers.  Said he's never grown eggplant before.  His face said eww.  Geez people, they're purple.  How pretty is that?

Worked my ass off today.  Helped Greg get all his educational signage up.  Looks good.  Propagation gave me a bunch of perennials.  Doona and I walked the property putting them out.  Got some help and they all got planted.  The one area we don't want to mow got 7 prairie dock.  If they take hold, they will take over that area and shoot up yellow daisies 8 feet tall in the fall.  My one problem area got shrubs.

Marsha came up as we were done for the day.  She is mellow, sounds tired. 

Came home put out all my veggies and most of my summer plants.  Got my patio lights back up.  Looks like Disneyland out there.  Checked the 10 day forecast and started putting the houseplants out.

Then something told me to check radar.  We need rain bad but it's been drying up before it gets to us.  Radar shows storms coming through at 2 for a couple of hours.  Okay, stop with the houseplants.  Listen to the 10 o'clock news.  The storm heading for us has a history of producing tornadoes for two hours with hail.  I need a new roof but fuck me, die out fucker!

It died and we didn't get a drop of rain.  Not good we need it bad.  Got up to 91 today.  I need to water all the stuff I've been putting in.  I have a 100 foot collapsible hose.  I can connect all over the garden and get to what I need.  A lot better than dragging one of our heavy duty hoses and then having to wind it back up.

Planted up my daughter's yard today.  They need a scoop of mulch we'll have to put out.

That's it for the lights in my growing room.  The tomatoes and peppers go outside tomorrow to start hardening off.  I've got the tomatoes up to 46 out of the 48 we planned for.  Not the varieties I wanted but enough plants.  But I got to thinking, do we have that many tomato cages?   :hihi:  Not on me, Kevin was in charge of planning the beds.

So the girl on some of the educational signage poked holes through the lamination and the paper inside.  Means it leaks and now the paper is moldy.  And the girl who was putting the sticky tabs on only put one tab on one side.  That will never hold up in the wind.  Fixing all of that.  Otherwise, the educational signage is coming out better than my vision.

The girl in the office doesn't know how to make labels from an excel spreadsheet.  She's been doing them manually.  Explains why those aren't getting done timely.  I can send her the labels just have to hit print.  The guy in the office missed hitting print on a few signs.  We're getting there.

And the native team continues to run rogue.  They however, did get in the description of their speciality tour on time.  The other 4 haven't gotten to it yet.

Folks you're tripping me up and making more work for me.  They're volunteers, lucky to have them and can't fire them.  I'll pull it together.

And Del's back.  The former Pantry Garden lead, retired gynecologist.  He wants to know all about Marsha's cancer.  He needed a nurse to keep him organized in the pantry garden.  He's going to see what I have done and he may ask for his job back.  I'm pretty sure half the pantry team would quit if he came back.  He's very good at getting production out of those beds, good at all of it but the people skills.  I'd like to turn him into a teacher but he's boring as all get out.  :hihi:  Lets hope he's into his new thing, president of his golf club.

We're running hot and humid.  I don't do that well.  I'll switch my schedule to sleeping in the afternoons and hitting the gardens at the crack of dawn and the evenings.  That's the plan anyway.

Coming together.   :D  Turns out most the people I was looking to talk with were coming out of a meeting.  Kevin eludged me but I'll get him tomorrow.  Got another donut out of it, a big one.  Damn it I can't talk and eat a donut and I hate trying to juggle that sticky mess when I'm trying to work.  Knowing that I still took the donut and it took me a half hour to eat it.

Phebe and I walked the pantry garden.  Some of the brassicas have cabbage worms.  And while we were discussing worms, we got onto squash bores and tomato worms.  Learned more than I wanted to.  I was done with my donut by then.  Not so much the worms but how the chemicals kill them and how they kill the plants.

I went from just a few tomatoes to the 48 we planned for and now I'm at 50.   :hihi:  We'll figure it out.  Took over a lettuce harvest, a whole trunk load, along with the pantry team to tour the food pantry we supply.  And we took them some eggplant they were all excited about.   :hihi:  They were amazed by us and we were amazed by them.  I just kind of rock back and am amazed what I'm doing is working and people like what I'm doing.  Phebe even gave a 10 minute training on how to grow eggplant.  I of course only had an ear towards it because I was busy loading up the lettuce and keeping us on time.  I never get to focus on veggies because I'm too busy working the gardens.

Got all my speciality tour people except one and I'll get her Friday.  Only need two more of the tours to lock in their dates.  Garden tours in June is coming together before its deadline.  I'm either in early or freaking out which is kind of like my "on it" when I'm working on a project except now I'm doing the stuff myself.

Marsha stayed several hours.  I didn't see much of her.  She's tired but she keeps doing just one more thing.  I think the tired is more the shock of coming to terms she has cancer.  I'd be tired of that too.  She looks good except you can tell she's freaked out.  And every right to be.

Called Marsha with a "I need your expertise" question.  She called me right back.  Talking through it, there's our girl.  Energized talk, even laughing.  The cancer came up but it was how to work around it and follow up with plans for the garden.  I think that helps.  Not denying what's going on with her but acknowledging she's more than her cancer.

I had the day off from gardening, sort of, still making some plans and following up but it wasn't all about the garden today.  Maybe things are starting to slow down a bit.  Morning meeting tomorrow, hopefully no donuts, but I have the afternoon off.  And I have the weekend off for family things. One of which is planting flowers at moms.  Doesn't involve garden management team but it does involve mom.  She follows me around coming up with more shit I can do.  It's like let me complete one thing before you come up with something else!  Keep that to myself.  She's almost 90.  I'm not losing my shit with her.  Hope she likes her flowers.  Everybody is blooming.  Got her a mailbox cover, has flowers too.

Panicked when they said hail and I could see it coming on radar.  Brought all the plants back in and covered what I couldn't.  Barely rained.   :hihi:

The pantry team gets their plants this week, tomatoes, peppers and eggplant.  My garage will be empty!  Decided we would wait on the seeds until next week.  It will be a whole new freak out for me with squash plants in the ground.  Del says they don't do well out there with the squash beetles.  We may have to sign up for bug patrol.

I have 5 people signed up for a tour of the gardens for new trainees and tour guides.  Phebe said something about reworking the tour scripts.  No, you're not doing that.  Each garden wrote what they wanted to say about their garden and I went in and underlined the important points to make there.  Nobody is memorizing a script.  We're teaching how to garden and I need her to make sure I didn't leave out any major points to make.  The scripts are on a sign to each garden.

The coleus bouquets have rooted and are ready to be planted.  I think I'm going to put them right in the ground.

To earn your Master Gardener certification, you have to volunteer 20 hours.  The new girl had 5 spine surgeries in December.  She can't bend over.  She's great at making signs so that's what I've been having her do.  She's really good at it.  Membership though wants to count it as administrative and not count it towards her 20 hours.  We've been allowing this for years for disabled people.  We're not changing it now and we aren't arguing about it.  I just bumped it to the state guy.  Spells liability to me.

We had a cooking class today.  Pick stuff right out of the garden and throw together lunch for the crew for the day.  Worked out really well.  And, shouldn't talk to me, talked Joann into doing a class on making salsa.  She got carried away and went into dips too.  Her idea, can't blame me there.   :hihi:  Locked her into the afternoon of our monthly meeting in August so everyone can sample the stuff at the meeting.  Maybe have them bring in what they make.  We'll just eat our way through that meeting.   :D

Two in ground native bee nest were found in the bird garden.  The lead says they aren't bothering her weeders.  They don't bother her, visitors or the mowers, they can stay.  The first person they sting and I'll be out there in the dark nuking their asses!  After the ones at my house last year, the yellow jackets, I'm getting them before they get me.

I left the house with 5 flats of plants this morning.  None left in the garage.  And came home with 5 flats.   :hihi:  It was from the tomato round up.  Everybody was bringing me extra tomatoes for the pantry beds.  Mark dropped off with no tags on his plants.  Can't use those if I don't know what they are.  I'll hold them and give them away at the monthly meeting.  And he was suppose to give me squash seeds, instead he started them.  Shit, we still have the cool season crops in.  We can put them in but they are going to be bigger then what we want while we're finishing up the onions.  We did get a nice variety of tomatoes.  Some I'm not real sure about.  People were growing them because of the name.  These rainbow ones don't look very appetizing, fucking hippies.  8)

How could I forget, I'm tending the pot plantation this weekend.  I start my training tomorrow morning at 7.  Apparently that's when they get watered.  They are on a schedule.  This was a lot easier when pot was just a weed.

The parks department went to pick up our free leaf mulch for us and them.  The place sold it to a contractor!  Can't get any more until the fall.  Can't blame them.  They usually have mountains of it but I guess the word is out and somebody is making a business out of it.  Just tell me who, we're buying. 

I'm not babysitting the pot plantation this weekend.  He found out I have aphids at my house (as does everyone) and he doesn't want to risk his crop.  Lets see, I can't inspect hundreds of plants in the greenhouse because I can't see the eggs.  And now I don't have to get up at 6 to water the pot plants because I've been around aphids.  Handy little bug to have around.  ;)

Like herding cats.   :hihi:  Lots of confusion over what mulch we are getting next.  A couple of key people didn't want to call a meeting to discuss this so it went out on email.  And now I'm having to explain a bunch of stuff.  What we all want is more chain emails.   :no:

I don't want anything with wood chips for our beds.  There's the whole argument about them depleting the nitrogen in the soil, might not be true.  Aside from that, they look like shit when they dry up.  Don't mix up in the soil well, we are always digging in it.  You can get splinters in your hands when working around it.  And if they get out in the grass, they become projectiles if the lawn mower hits them just right.  I'm a big fan of leaf litter.  It breaks down a lot quicker and isn't noticeable in the soil.  Looks pretty natural out there.  Really good at holding in the moisture as it doesn't absorb it like wood chips.  Move that stuff around with your hands.

Okay, I just made the decision and the cats just let me and are merrily going about their business.  Problem is now we are buying leaf mulch, we not longer get to take it home.  That's going to piss some folks off.  Not my decision there.

On top of all the business of actually running and maintaining the gardens, I have the task of making it more educational and get more people coming to see it.  It's really the task of the education committee but they weren't doing it so I just joined that group.  Brought in on myself and I'm a little bit of a control freak.   :hihi:  Anywho, I'm pulling together public tours in June on the fly.  I've got 20 tours set up, working on the social media announcements to get people to come.  "Hot as a pistol but cool inside."  Too busy to freak out.   :hihi:

Woohoo, the educational signage I was working on went up today (most of it).  I got in the office first thing and printed, laminated everything I was waiting on the office to do.  We've been working on these 5x7 education cards for some of the veggies.  Double sided taped them to the faceplate of a plastic stake.  Stuck them in the ground next to the plant.  They look really good.  Not sure how they are going to look when the plants grow up or rather, if you can see them.  A visitor yesterday mentioned she read through my tomato flip charts and found them really helpful.  They tell you what's wrong with your tomato.  So far they haven't been good enough to steal but then gardeners are pretty cool people.  Or maybe because most of them have farmer mentality, leave it where it lays.  :hihi:

Spent 6 hours at the garden yesterday getting ready for the mulch and chipping one of my paths.  Forgot my hat and have a red face.  Don't know how that happens when I'm looking down all the time.  Had to report broken tools to Kevin.  We're hard on that stuff.  Two of the 3 wheelbarrows were out of commission yesterday.  And one of the trimmers was having a hard time running.  Craig was already there and almost done mowing when I got there at 8.  He agreed to run a tree tour this fall.  Was going home to work up the bid for work he's doing at my place.

Mulch is in!  And it's fucking hot out there.  My beds are done but I need to go back tonight and do a couple of things.

People were checking out the signage I put up in the veggie garden.  They liked it.  I even got a wow.  But I came home with more signs to make and yes, some more plants.

Phebe is on the garden tours.  Finished up the signup genius and polishing up the social media.  All that goes up tomorrow.  And then we go to education committee and tell them what we did.  Not ask for their input or suggestions.  It's done.  :hihi:  It would have been next year before I got everyone on the committee on the same page.  As it is, people are not following my instructions fully.  No I wanted it my way for a reason but it's done and I can work around what they did wrong.  Let them feel like they contributed.  Love helpful people but they can really screw up your flow.

Roll out started early, has a few glitches.  It's okay, they can be fixed real quick.  Got a link not working.  Can't fix the glitch in somebody else's program but I can live with it.

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064615452884  That's me and the pantry team taking over our first harvest.  Lady up front on the left.

https://www.facebook.com/MUExtStCharlesCo/?eid=ARCX0O6vW8HbZU3KjbL03GZv7vgadOcZk9XtogRGa6Y3BnIwPVCilwIEEN9SxooYKLcWL_gsxAcNqADZ  Scroll down to the pepper signs.  That's what I've been working on.  Didn't know this was on there.  It's all those plant I grew for the parks.
(https://scontent-ord5-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/345044510_241736592062252_7100730854386074733_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_p600x600&_nc_cat=103&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=730e14&_nc_ohc=ccakbXhEd2EAX_-aH6u&_nc_ht=scontent-ord5-2.xx&oh=00_AfCIYNLnwCX8rAXnj-IU_Uo4g_qmFDfqSuiLOu8wHODwaQ&oe=6473BA40)

My SIL doesn't believe in me.  He wants his nephew and brother to come over and move mulch at his house.  First off, I paid for that 2 yards.  Takes no time to move that, at least in my world.  I put it down, I won't burry the new plants we put in.  He forgets the piss poor job that nephew did mowing his grass.  I also won't damage the trees and bushes with the wheelbarrow.  He's afraid he would have to get involved if I do it.  No, stay out of my way.  With his brother and nephew, yeah he has to.  At least clean up the mess.  I've backed off.  I busy when they plan to do it.

When I say I garden, people have no idea the physical labor involved.  I'm not strong but I've got endurance.  That is until the heat comes on.  Ran me out of the garden at noon today.  Back when the sun started to go down.  Mosquitoes are abundant and my bug spray clogged up.  Tomorrow is a scheduled sleep till I wake up but I have a tour at 3 and meetings there until about 9.  We're having a pizza party!

Roll out of the garden tours in their final run, perfect!  It's only been out a few hours but 44 of the 180 slots are filled.  Excited to see that but it's not great.  I need a little patience, give it a few days.  The announcement was made to the group to share the facebook post.  They were excited we had this all planned out.  When I'm doing something like this I like to keep it quiet.  Too many cooks in the kitchen not working when you tell folks and I am the head chef so we're doing it my way and getting it done.   :hihi:  Presented it to the committee it's coming out of as a done deal.  Reminded the committee it's something I said I didn't have time to set up, pulled it off at the last minute.  It's why all bases weren't covered but I've got a game going on.  Really I only missed on getting it in public news and maybe some TV coverage.  We'll see how sign ups go over the weekend.  May have to do some of that other stuff.

Gave a tour for the Ladies of Leisure today.  The one woman explained they were a group for widows.  Obviously, older women but she leaned in after saying that and said something about they really could drink.  :hihi:  Wasn't sure if she was joking but they had went to lunch and didn't show up to me until 3.  I would say they floated around the gardens.  :hihi: 

I left the house with all the plants I had on the driveway heading to the monthly meeting.  People added to the freebies and what was left went to the picnic tables for giveaways next week.  But yeah, somebody brought me more plants to put in the garden.  They are still in the trunk.   :hihi:  I'm taking them back tomorrow and planting them.  I'm done taking care of plants not in the ground.  I don't start growing again until August.

Up to 56, patience.  And stop looking, "line of cars go down real slow".  :hihi:  Twenty shares on Facebook and that's half the people who were at the meeting last night.

Home today working my own yard.  Pulled all my lettuce.  It was starting to bolt with the heat coming on.  Got up at 4 and started working on the plant sale containers.  My last group and they are out of here.  How badly did I want to be done with that?  4 o'clock.   :hihi:

State asked us if we would consider hosting the state convention in 2026.  Really can't say no.  We are the third largest chapter.  Turns out they narrowed it down to St Louis and somewhere down south.  Oh, thank god for that.

57, almost a third of the way there.  My damn it point is on Monday with the numbers.  As with anything I do, I'm expecting it to turn out better than I thought.  Generally does although this failed last year because the library had staffing issues and it didn't get advertise.  Didn't really care because June turned out to be extremely hot.

My white garden chairs were pretty dirty covered with some little growing something that is gray.  Maybe algie?  Sprayed them with diluted pool shock and sprayed them off, byond clean enough.  Those chairs are 25 years old.  Decorated the yard for Memorial Day.  I have Grateful Dead bear yard signs.  Put a flag in each of their hands.  Call it, 'letting my freak flag fly".   :hihi:  You have to be really old to get that joke.

77, native tour sold out.

I'm not liking the new triple grinned leaf mulch.  It's too fine.  Bugs aren't going to make homes in it, no air/water flow spaces and it's going to wash away with the first flood.  It's so fine, it's going to break down really fast.  It's not going down very thick so if something tries to grow in there it's not a very long way to get to the soil and get its roots in.  With leaf mulch you should be able to see parts of leaves in it.

82

Marsha stopped by.  A week and a half after her chemo treatment and she felt like leaving the house today.  She lost her hair.  Came out fighting.   :hihi:  Arguing with something somebody else is doing.  Doesn't concern me.  But that's more of her being her.  She plans to come work her garden and make the leads meeting.  Must mean her shell shock over all of this is wearing off.

Mulched all the trees and the rose beds tonight.  Prettying up the place for the tours.  The beekeeper stopped in to trim the stuff growing in front of the hives.  When that grows up the bees are more protective of the backside where we are.  Two of my beds look like shit.  The one the mowers mowed down my milkweed and I don't think it's coming back.  The other I adopted out and they didn't take care of it and it's been a mess ever since.  Really need to redo the whole bed.  I'll work on them tomorrow morning.

Overdid it on the purple on my patio.  I have some yellow coming up but I need a bunch of white out there.

90, half way.  Why aren't the bird garden ones filling?  That was our most popular class at the library.  We're setting out the bird nest display for that.  We have a hummingbird nest.  It looks like a dirty cotton ball.  Really tiny.

Look down in the shower at my knees.  They are really dirty.  No, they are really tan.  :hihi:  I've gone through both the knees in my jeans.

I'm getting into my next gardening project for public education.  I feel like my group deals mostly with homeowners and they want design information for their yards.  Here's the list of classes I'm considering getting developed.  Would any of these classes interest you?

Designing with Foliage:  Some topics to cover:  color, plant form, contrasting textures

Gardening for a changing climate:  Firescaping, flood & excessive rain, resiliency

Gardens for Peace of Mind:  mental health support, sensory connections, water features, lighting

Creating Organic Barriers:  reduce noise and air pollution, create privacy

Vertical Gardening:  maximum use of space, enhancing outdoor living

Reducing Lawns:  Benefits, how to, design,  what to use like clover

Still sitting at 90.  The 40 slots for the Bird Garden only have 4 taken.  Changed the wording to say we have a hummingbird nest to show them.  I'm going to send a flier to the Audubon Society.  See if that helps.

We going into the 90's.  Got the hand mowing done tonight and hitting up the trimmer tomorrow.  Then hopefully the grass quits growing!  I need to get out the killing stuff.  I have bitch weed and a wild grape vine growing in a couple of my bushes.  Plus the Prairie Dock is taking over a place.  Bitch Weed if you don't know is a vine that is nothing but a few leaves and all thorns.  It has to die!

94, the first part of June is doing well and the second part is lagging.  Maybe people are waiting to sign up.

Trimmed the whole garden.  The one trimmer won't start after you turn it off.  The other trimmer throws it's string.  You have to cut your own string for the trimmers.  I need 6 sets of 3 to get around the gardens.  And then I have to blow off all the hard surfaces.  Yes, I read what I said but I couldn't think of another way to say it.   :hihi:

Turned around to look at one of the beds I weeded and trimmed and there was one wild onion sticking up.  How did I miss that?!  Two of my smaller beds to whip into shape before the tours start.  Tomorrow all the summer seeds go into the pantry beds.  Temps in the 90's and no rain in sight for the next 10 days, I'm going to have to water them every other day.

The heat is catching up with me.  They say it's accumulative.  Plus I feel like I need a big bowl of carbs!  Pasta with alfredo sauce.  I'm guzzling drinks for electrolytes.

Just need to mulch two of my beds and somebody else's little bed tomorrow and water the seeds.  Everybody put in their summer seeds today.  Kevin says water everyday, shit.  Just have some beets and cabbage left of the spring crops.  Sweet potatoes should go in next week.  The good news is, I went to the gardens with some seedlings and came home with none.  :D  I have one unidentified plan at home still waiting to go in ground.  I've narrowed now to two choices it could be but one is a shade plant and one is full sun.  So I'm going for part sun.

I didn't notice but one of the tours got put as the May day which in June is the night of the Dead concert.  Fortunately two other people can cover.  No movement on the numbers signed up.  Did manage to get all the fliers put together for it.  Or I should say the first 50.  More of those to print, fold and staple together.  I'm getting very familiar with the copier, paper cutter and laminator at the office.

I've met a bunch of people out at the gardens this week.  "I never knew this was here."  They almost always say that.  We're a work in progress but we grow every year.

Marsha came out for the work session today and stayed the whole time.  She brought in a load of minus for her stone path.  Nice to see everybody run to help and she sat around talking to people about her treatments without being reduced to a puddle of tears.  Stopped by my place to compose an email and talk leads meeting.  She wasn't drained.  Feels like she's getting to know the body rhythm with her reactions to the treatments.  She clogged up the vacuum with her hair that fell out. 

I hear thunder!  Only a chance for spot showers.  Heat and 15 days without rain with none in sight.

I'm out there before staff arrives for work.  Ran a couple of wheelbarrows and watered and it whipped me out.  Of course I did it to myself, a church group wants to schedule a private tour on my birthday.  I'll see if somebody else can cover it.  I'm suppose to be at a birthday breakfast.  Love doing the tours, they are fun but we are a full sun garden!  No tours in July or August.  Fortunately, we have great water pressure and I can play in the hose.

Yeah nothing but the garden might have got a quick shower.

Marsha called and it was after 10.  That's kind of our normal time to wrap things up.  She's on a toot about the damn kiosk.  I couldn't give a flying fuck about it but they've dragged me in on it.  The University now wants to come down and talk about where it goes.  Don't care but here's an opportunity to show off the gardens.  Suggest they give me an intern.  Good training ground for one.   :hihi:  Yeah don't talk to me, I will put you to work.

First tour happens tomorrow.  Private one for the Troy Garden Club.  They maintain a native planting along the highway.  Okay, so they know about chiggers.  Stay in the middle of the path when we go through the native area.  Did I mention we may have a bunch of pissed off people after these tours?   :hihi:

Only 4 people from the club showed up so I let Mary take them out.  They seemed to enjoy it.  It was hot out there at 10 already.  I got there about 8 and did some watering.  I have those cooling towels.  One wrapped around my head and the other around my neck.  :hihi:  I could see we got a spot shower yesterday but it wasn't much.  The gardens look great but we need rain.  I have to remind myself we are built for this but it's pretty early in the season and there's no humidity.

My eggplant is blooming.  My ex gave me more plants for Mother's Day.  Beautiful but I do not need any more plants.  And I'm out of potting soil.

We did a restored prairie tour about an hour from here.  The 900 acres was donated by Edward Jones.  Yeah the investment guy or rather his son.  Along with a pretty hefty endowment fund to maintain it.  One of my co gardeners made the comment some rich by yachts and other toys and some buy this.  Got me to thinking, most of the places like this, gardening places were donated by the rich.

Anyway, they are a work in progress.  Learned more about the mistakes they've made than the progress.  It's a big research area for the University, visits by appointment and guide only.  This land had been put to the plow.  They had ground cord samples from here and a prairie that had never seen a plow.  They went down 60 feet.  Big difference in the soil.  Basically the plowed field had more rocks, still suffering from the glacier pushing all the good soil off.  The other had made it's own fertile soil.  I did not know there was cray fish that lived in the prairie.  Our guide wasn't into the plants as much as explaining the history of the place and what they are doing with it.  Said part of the dust bowl was caused by the US thinking they could feed the world around WWI and they put too much land to the plow making it easy when the drought hit for a breeze to blow away the top soil.

I had to send out one of those nit picking emails to the leads team.  Get the hoses off the grass and turn the watering cans upside down so they don't breed mosquitoes.  They aren't doing it but their teams members are.  And it's probably the new people just needing to know better.  But it gave me a chance to tell them, wow, those gardens are so well maintained.  Not just that, they are interesting.  The botanical gardens here added artwork to make them interesting.  I walk around there and I see green and structures.  I walk around our place and I see color, bugs, butterflies and informational signage.  I see creativity that is beating out those large displays that are best taken in from a distance.  We're more like Disneyland, each small space is packed with interest.  I'm impressed with our little garden.  The only thing we need is more shade.  :hihi:

Tours jumped up to 96 people but I added 5 more slots for the native tour.  Just over half filled.

And now state has asked us to be the host county for the 2026 convention.  It's kind of a have to situation.  I'm supportive but I'm not stepping up to lead it.  My focus is the demo gardens.  Got the gardening down but I'm still working on the education part of it.

So I had to talk over that comparison to the botanical gardens and us with Marsha.  I don't have a big head about it, I just prefer us.  Funny, she agreed with me, we're more like Disneyland than the botanical gardens.  I would really like to see the botanical gardens use our place for teaching classes.  And then maybe buy the property next door and turn us into one of their satellite sights.  I worry who is going to take over the lead when I go.  Marsha has her hands full with the plant sale and she's not going to last forever either.  But maybe we don't want a partnership with them.

Oh yeah, that wasn't good.  :hihi:  Four of our trainees went to work in the native beds wearing shorts.  Poison Ivy and chigger bites, they quit that garden.  They admit they should have known better but the lead should have stopped them.  You get in those tall grasses and you're in for it.

We have a thing or two going on over there in the native beds.  The lead wants to be all natural although she does spray for chiggers.  She doesn't want to kill the Poison Ivy, the birds like it and she doesn't want to use chemicals.  Her Poison Ivy keeps creeping over into the Perennial bed so when she's not around the Perennial lead slips over and nukes it.  I put a cage around and a sign on the Poison Ivy so people know what it looks like which of course identifies a patch that can be killed.  I'm waiting for the Native lead to catch on to what's happening because she has to keep moving the cage for me as it "disappears".  Did I mention both of these leads first names are Leslie?

I'm an idiot.  Had to back out of a project for the garden group.  There's so much in this group that gets my attention that I end up trying to do everything.  Have to keep telling myself, stop that, your focus is the actual gardens.  Just they hit my passion for so many things.

Marsha is back up to speed.  She's waiting for yesterday's chemo treatment to hit and put her back in bed.  I don't know much about this but her cancer number was at 1800 and after two treatments she's down to 200.  That's a very good response.  We were talking about working the gardens.  She'll drag her chemo sick body up there.  I'll drag my kicked ass body back there.  It's our passion and where we feel our mental best no matter how bad we physically feel getting there.

Anyway, Thornless Blackberry, great plant.  No thorns to begin with.  Grows mostly upright.  Grows like a weed.  :D  Fruit is tasty.  Downside, mostly upright but it does bush out and needs room.  Reproduces like a bunny.  :hihi:

I heard that pour down coming.  It had been raining off and on but didn't last long so I just jumped under a tree.  Well it did, last a good long time, and I ended up with a water bra.  :hihi:

I'm turning into a cranky bitch.  People are failing to follow instructions and I'm getting tripped up.  Not going off as planned and that always pisses me off.  I need to chill, it's happening.  I move at a lot faster pace and juggle more when it's just me. Need to move at the pace of my team.  And god damn it, Brian showed up today.  He's the eagle photograph.  Made a point of looking for me and I was kind of involved in managing something.  Should have stopped and spent a little more time with him.  He drives an old beater truck.  And he shaved off most of that ZZ Top beard.  He always flies into my radar.  Didn't seem to care I was going to the Dead concert tonight.  Not even a light in his eye.  Shit.

Pull up at the gardens and there is a beater truck with a camouflage hunting tent in the back and Brain sitting in his camp chair.  He's there photographing a blue crane gnatcatcher nest.  Generally annoys the hell out of me when people treat our wildlife like it's a zoo.  He was going to great care not to freak the mama bird out.  There's babies in there.  He was getting some great shots but losing the light.  Staying around a few more days, will be gone a few weeks and then will be back.  I guess I need to know that being the garden lead and all but he's not one of my staff.  Have to stop that, make poor choices in men here.  :hihi:  My last date people wanted to make a sitcom out of it.

101 slots out of 185 filled.  Not getting a real good turn out on the actual tours but that's to be expected.  Still it's good.  We had a family from New Jersey stop in for a tour.  Kept commenting how clean our air was.  Not really we have orange warnings.

People keep telling me the pantry gardens are dry as a bone and my moisture meter says wet.  So the one guy is digging in it, points and says dry.  I put my hand in it and the soil is moist to the touch.  Made him feel it too.  The leaf mulch on top is really dark and fertil looking, the soil is light brown making it look dry.  The problem, besides over watering, is if you keep feeding the top roots, there is no reason for the plant to send roots deeper.  When we do get to the point where we can't keep the top from drying out the plant has no deep roots to get the moisture down there.  And naturally, roots grow down so you aren't encouraging to the plant to grow more roots to overall support itself with lots of food and water uptake sources.

I have eggplant.   :D  Patio Baby, they are a miniature eggplant.  Never really sure when these get harvested because they are so small.  According to phebe they get harvested before the purple loses it shine.  No idea how to cook these.  Hope mom likes eggplant.  It's pretty good at Olive Garden.

Still in "you're annoying the living fuck out of me".   :hihi:  No, I'm justified, believe me.  I've stepped in front of cranky bitch but she's beating on my backside.  :hihi:

The new tree signs are great.  They have more information than just the name of the tree on it.  They will be in the fall tour, Meet Our Trees.  Teach people how to plant a tree and then introduce them to the 15 native trees we have on property.  I'm wondering why the Paw Paw trees have no name plate or not dedicated to anyone.  We're out of the signs that we use for the trees so maybe that's it.  Totally missed Bill's tree when I was mulching.  He's down in the weeds by the creek.  Need to get him out of there, pretty him up and feature him.  He's become the forgotten tree.  I have a thing for the trees.  They don't need that much attention but I look out for them.

Darn, we had to cancel a tour due to rain.  We need it bad.  The plants are loving it.  It was my turn too to get to take out a group.  Love showing the place off, even when the grass needs cut.   :hihi:  Guess I'll be on weed wacker next week.

Hate to cut back stuff when it's blooming but petunias get long and lanky.  I cut back one of my pots just to see.  It worked, it bounced back, is fuller, blooming again.  Did the same thing with common milkweed and it did branch off.  They get so tall and the flower is big so they fall over.  Tricky business knowing which natives can be cut back.  I figure they all can.  Should be use to animals eating on them but when?  I still want flowers.  Usually the cut back ones bloom a little bit later than the non cut ones.

Beka has the best ideas!  I have a bed I need renovated.  It never had a plan just plants thrown in there and now the wild strawberries have taken over.  Great little plant if you want to choke out other stuff and the turtles like it.

Beka came up with Bee Bar, plants that bees like.  My bed along the side of the shed and the backside would be perfect for that.  Looks like a bar and it's off the main path.  She also came up with a Moon Garden, plants that bloom at night, moths like them.  And the other bed I have in mind is pretty close to a street light which attracts moths.  It would be kind of dark but still viewable by the public who is up there for meets at night or I can do a few night tours for the general public.

Both of these are great class projects for our trainees.  Renovate the beds and very educational.  Beka will draw up the plans, I'll grow the plants we need.  Out of the trainees I will get somebody who wants to maintain the beds.  Okay, I'm done with cranky bitch and people annoying me, inspiration has hit.  I'm so happy.  :D

We found a turtle nest in the Iris garden.  A big turtle.  Several spots she tried out but then settled on the one spot.  You can see where her foot prints are and where her head was in the mud.  In the back there is a deep hole where we assume the eggs are.  There was one egg on the open ground.

Marsha is coming tonight, only a week after chemo.  We have a leads meeting.  Not much to discuss.  A couple of approvals of things to install and some updates to inform people of.  We do leads stroll around the gardens.  We're all so busy working our garden spot, we don't get to see what the other gardens are doing.  I treat everybody to ice cream.

So it takes about 80 days for the turtles to hatch.  We have a protective cage around it so the racoons can't dig it up.  Not a very good one and racoons are smart so, we'll see.  Emailed Brian so he can come and take some pictures of it.  No I had to google him to find his email.  Okay so I did a court records check on him.   :hihi:  DWI in 85, 60 days in the hole.  Turns out he's my age.  But it finally dawns on me who he reminds me of.  Bobbie Weir from the Grateful Dead.  Bobbie can be a bit of a bastard.  Nothing wrong with the guy, I just don't care for his presence on stage.  The Dead is about the music, not really about the band.  Hunter/Garcia were the writing team I most favored, not to say I didn't love some of the other stuff.

Leads meeting went okay.  Marsha showed up and was in decent health.  We had to decide where to put a kiosk.  Sore spot for me from a few years back, washed my hands of it and now somehow I have to write a 5 page report on where it should go and nobody even really wants it!  Nothing much to go over, staff is happy campers.  Between the walking around to look at the gardens and the business part, we were done in two hours, right on time.  Tours are working out.  I'm already planning some for the fall.  Air quality and allergies are kicking my ass.  My eyes burn and I just want to close them and sleep.  Problem is I have very visual dreams about the gardens.  Wake up and I don't know where I am, what time it is or what day it is and what I'm suppose to be doing.  Very hard to keep stuff in my head.  And when don't I have a slight headache?

That was fun.  Nobody showed up from my other gardening club, yeah I'm in 3, to judge the gardening and landscaping contest.  All my picks.  :D  No way you're winning for lots of flowers you bought at the big hardware stores especially if they are still in the white plastic containers you got them in.  I went for landscaping on my first two picks.  Third got it for tastefully done and you took those bought flowers and put them in the ground or fancy containers.

It was at a trailer park so I'm looking at small spaces.  Love my first place winner.  They installed a bench along the road for neighbors to sit on, how nice.  Their patio area was very inviting.  I wanted to come spend time there.  Plus they actually installed hardscape and plants in the ground.  A few pots of flowers but they did really well with the ornamental plants with texture and different shades of green or variegated.  The second place winner had blue russian sage.  That plant is always a stand out.

The trailer park does it so people keep up their yards.  Works because the whole place is park like.  We get paid $200 for judging.  The winners get: $250, $150 and $75.  Good prizes from your landlord if you ask me.  The owner spends a lot of money on landscaping.  No white, trash trailer park here.  My winners were all new people we hadn't selected before.  Not swayed by those store bought flowers or those fake ones.   :hihi:  The landscape judge did this one.

Was over in the drain basin.  It's loaded with blooming Fleabane, small white daisy, and Black Eyed Susans, yellow daisy with dark center.  The Black Locust tree has stayed on the top of the ridge.  It has grown so tall you only see the rooftops of the neighboring subdivision.  There's some kind of water plant growing along the creek.  It looks really nice for a weed patch.

(https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/719udEdgs+L._AC_UX679_.jpg)
I'm going to give these a try.  I want to keep the sun off my arms and I'm always pushing my long sleeves up.

The report on the Kiosk came out to 6 pages!  We decided the best place for it is the middle of the yard.  The problem is what to construct the path out of for wheelchair accessibility but not cost too much.  We're looking at Grass Matts.  Basically a plastic weave matt that the grass can grow through and can be mowed over.  The complete plastic matt is more expensive.  Thing is, it doesn't belong to my group.  We're just giving opinions on where to place it on the property.  The other group keeps sucking us into research on the path material for them.  And I can tell you they will want us to install it.  We're gardeners not construction people.  I can tell you we'll be looking at youtube videos.   :hihi:  And we've already got a bunch of projects on our to do list.

Really like those sleeves.  They are barely wet and my arms are nice and cool.  Doesn't say to wet them but it was raining.  Pruning some bushes and no skin tears.  Probably just pruned all the blooms on the crepe myrtle but they were looking like shit.  Best part, I didn't feel like I needed to push my sleeves up.

Cut off the Columbine seed heads.  Sounds like it's raining when you do that.  Get seeds in between my toes and in my hair.   :hihi:  I'm collecting them to throw out in the drain basin.

Last week for garden tours, 4 to go.  68 people so far but that includes the private tours.  Little over half the people who reserved a spot don't show up.  Might be a problem with registering too far in advance.  Drop off happen further into the tour dates.  I've already got the tours lined up for the fall.  Haven't set the dates yet.  I'm thinking maybe just over a two week period.

Get through this week and I slow way down until September.  I've been going at this now since we started growing in February.  Ready for a break.

This is working out well.  Beka is going to take the lead on the trainee renovation project.  I'll still be involved but she'll be doing the teaching and I'll be pushing the organization.  I hope they pick the moon garden.  I like moths.

We have a name for the project:  From the Ground Up  They will be doing all kinds of stuff including learning how to map out a garden, how to select plants and install them.  They will also be learning how to be a garden lead and keep a garden log.  Works well for me.  My beds get renovated and I have people prepared to become leads over gardens.  I'm also training Beka, it's a secret, to take over for me as the overall lead of the gardens.  She knows more than I do, more talented and could take us to the next level.  Draw backs:  She's pretty young.  This job doesn't pay and it takes a lot of time.  She has her whole life ahead of her.  I've put the bug in several key people's ear about getting the botanical gardens involved on the property and we are university connected.  One of those could develop into a career path for her.  I'll see what I can get to cross her path and what takes.

First time I found a tick crawling on me at the gardens.  Probably shouldn't have mentioned that during the tour.   :hihi:  With one tour left to go we're sitting at 99 people.

Marsha came today and we even went out to lunch afterwards.  She's in the third week after chemo.  She gets another round Monday.  She's a country girl, you can take them down but you can't take them out.  Tough woman.  My other friend, the kid, has to stop chemo as it's causing liver damage.

Really liking these sleeves.  Comfortable enough I forget I have them on.  I'd say they are neutral, not hot, not cold on my arms.

Told ya that girl is good.  Beka found a cluster of dead honey bees on the parking lot.  Somebody probably used a pesticide but the beehives are not to far from that location.  We're going to send the dead bodies to the university to see if they can figure out what happen.  Only she would notice dead bees on the parking lot.

Maureen came into the meeting tonight and said she found dead bees on her flowers.  She's wondering if it has anything to do with the poor air quality we've been having.  It just so happen we had a professor there tonight from another university talking about bees.  She took one of the dead bees and will look at it in her lab tomorrow.

Cool lecture tonight on how bees choose flowers.  They are really a complicated little creature.  They don't see the color red.  They see ultraviolet light.  Prefer bright blues and purples but will chose a bright color, especially yellow, over a muted blue or purple.  They can taste with their atena, mouths and feet.

Visited a lavender farm today except it was more of a tourist place.  Pick your own lavender for an expensive price.  Place was really cute hence the cost of lavender.  Hot, long line to get lunch, lots of people and strong lavender smells.  Same people I've been spending the last 4 years with, talking the same shit we've been talking about.  My heart says, head west girl.  It's cool and quiet in the Rockies.  Yeah but you've got to cross Kansas.  :hihi:

Papa Smurf, Marsha's husband Bob, showed up today with his chainsaw.   : ok:  I've had my eye on our wood pile area for sometime and today was the day.  Oh yeah, it went down and almost bye bye.  There's only so much I can put in the dumpster at one time.  I have a couple more wheelbarrows to go but they are already cut up and in a pile.  Gave fair warning, I'm not living with that mess much longer.  Apparently several other people were of the same mind set, pitched in and it took no time at all.  Not sure what Kevin is going to say.  It was his responsibility.  Whatever he says, my response is the tool shed is next on my list.  :hihi:  We only kept about 7 boards out of what would be a full dumpster of wood.  Kim and I think a like when it comes to cleaning up, it's out of here.

Massive storm coming down from the northwest.  Looked like it was going to pound Illinois and I would just get clipped.  But down it's shifting back to the east.  That's never good when it passes us by and turns around to come back at us.

Went up to the garden to see if I could get the rest of the wood in the dumpster.  The renters yesterday put 2 large pallets across the top of the dumpster!

That large storm evaporated before it got here.  Not even a drop.  Chicago and Indiana got the brunt of it.  We're in the 90's and I'm in the house.

Right at your door Kevin.   :hihi:  I cleaned up the area outside the tool shed today.  Mostly left everything where it normally is.  We don't need 30 weed buckets.  Stacked part of them out of the way and established a new spot for the remainers so they don't have to be nested.  They are a bitch to get apart when you stack them together.  If the hose isn't out in the gardens by now, it's extra.  Only need so many of those.  Threw a few kinked up ones out.  Already had the poles, stakes and rebar separated and organized from last year.

Kevin did say last year that he wasn't very organized when we talk about doing this together.  I've seen men totally lose their shit when somebody has messed with their tools.  Then again, he might have gotten over that with all the volunteers moving shit around in the tool shed.  He does try.  He has everything labeled but nobody reads signs any more.  Too many of them.  And actually, I'm the one bothered by the lack of organization in there.  Kevin just ignores it.   :hihi:

Gave Beka free rein over the design for the chocolate box garden. Her brain went right to work on it.  So far 3 people have signed up for the From the Ground Up Project.  Most of the new people work so I don't expected them to see the sign up until tonight.

I think our president is freaking over the budget.  We're going to host the state convention in '26 and we have to start saving up for that.  He was giving me shit over $500, wanted it back if I didn't spend it on what I originally said.  Sorry, you have no authority to say that.  What we say the funds are for at the start of the year isn't where it always went by the end of the year.  The leads team decides where the priorities are in the garden, not the executive committee.  And after I offered to assume the cost of something membership committee was going to have to ask for funds for.  Don't really care, take it.  The gardens never spend their full budget.  Volunteer labor and things don't always get done.

That didn't take all that long.  Got the worst side of the shed and most stuff off the floor, back on the shelves.  All those lose nuts and bolts, screws, shit like that I just dumped into two buckets.  Work on that later, like after I die.  Texted Kevin pictures.  He was happy at first but then said something about seeing how he felt about it Wednesday.   :hihi:  There's still time for him to grab it back out of the dumpster.

I found his little work space and put everything of his right back there.  Somewhere in a big mess people put the stuff they use the most or don't want to lose.  It keeps narrowing in on them but there's a stash.  Kevin's is the top shelf, left corner, hidden behind the lost and found bucket.  Has his little mixing tools, little speciality tools and his orange duct tape.  Did not find his marker though.

So Marsha called concerned about the hand tools I kicked out of the shed.  Ones we never use are in a box outside of the shed with a note either carry them back in if you think we need them or they are leaving.  No I kept those.  Put out those little side scissors people use to trim their grass with and some aluminum claw things.  Tools that people don't use have a way of making it to our tool shed.  The Garden Weasel, the most useless tool ever.  And how many of the same tool do we need.  Only shovels and rakes get to make a presence.  There's tools in there I have no idea what they do.

The Patio Baby eggplant confuses me on when to harvest it.  They only get 2 to 3 inches long.  Harvest when a nice purple, the skin bounces back when squeezed but it's firm.  Maybe the skin caved in a little but that's firm.   :hihi:  You have to look real close.

I'm safe from vampires.  Brought home all the softneck garlic to cure.  Takes about 6 weeks.  They are spread out all over my growing room.

Got everybody and we hauled all the metal we didn't want out for the scrap guy.  Said he'd come get it today for free.  Nobody is really impressed with my clean up job.  It's more of an okay thing.

John, Extension Counsel, came out.  He wants to know more about putting all our watering on a separate meter so we don't have to pay the sewer part of the bill which is more than the cost of water.  Would cut their bill in half.  Also heard we needed to replace the zero turn.  No we don't.  Don't know how that rumor got started.  They are working on next year's budget.  He had no idea we had two wood piles.  :hihi:  Counsel has no idea what we do out there.

This is the stone path Marsha's group is working on.  It's back in the Fruit Arboretum.   Ar bore tum is you're trying to spell it.  :hihi:  Doesn't fit on any of my spreadsheet either.  Even she aberrates it Arbor.

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The dumpster was empty and I wanted to finish up the wood.  So done.

The old place where we got our leaf mulch says we can keep getting it there.  They weren't happy with the parks for not making an appointment so apparently told them a lie and turned them away.  Probably more to that but the parks can work it out with them.

I'm done with major outdoor garden projects until the fall.  Just need to water for the next two months.  I'll be working the trainee project and the fall tours, all indoor!

Damn it.  Storms reaked havoc all over St Louis and not even a drop of rain at my house.  The garden got a brief downpour.  We have more rain coming but it's evaporating before it can get to me.

Got it last night at 4:45 according to the neighbor.  I only noticed because the electric tried to come back on a few times.  Plenty of tree damage in the neighborhood.  My front tree dropped a branch and there's a bigger one stuck in the tree.  I might be able to pull it out if I get a ladder.  It's not a very good climbing tree.  I've been up there a couple of times.  The branch through is caught in the outer branches, can't get out there.  Back trees are fine.  They are probably over 100 years old and pretty strong.  The front tree is only about 30 years.  It was pretty small when I moved in.  It frequently drops branches.  The gardens are fine.  Don't think they got the wind I did.  More storms this afternoon.  We need the rain.

Okay, not doing that.  The only way I can get to it involves me standing on the ladder directly underneath it and pulling it down on me.  The end of it is campfire size log.  It will fall out of there eventually.  Hopefully not when I'm mowing under it.   :hihi:

We've had waves of rain storms passing through.  Do a little tree damage, knock out the electric and rain too fast to get soaked in.  We got a flash flood watch at the gardens yesterday.  Now that would be good.  We'd get a nice soaking.  :D  But with several days of that everything is good and wet.  The shade cloth over the greenhouse needs reset.  One side is completely covered and the other completely exposed.  Should be half and half.  We'll take care of that Wednesday.

I did talk to the Master Naturalist about their door placement on their greenhouses.  Turns out Amy did bring it up at their meeting.  In their reconstruction of their second greenhouse, they have the doors opening to the side of the first greenhouse.  Wanted wind protection except the distance between the two is barely a yard.  Not going to be functional.  And I did ask why they were putting native plants that have to experience cold in basically a cold frame.  They aren't going to bring them in until January.  That's good but maybe March 1st is better in my mind.  Work is going pretty slow over there.  He says none of his group wants to work with Tom.  Yeah Tom is the one causing all the shit between the two groups.  One person isn't going to ruin this for all of this.  If they don't have that done by November, I'm bringing my group over to help.  Not taking over, just setting you back on your feet and pushing you to the starting line.

Emailed Marsha to tell her about the conversation.  This is her chemo week.  Haven't heard back from her.  That was her last chemo until surgery later in July.

Home today working my own yard.  Didn't get enough wind to blow that branch out of the tree.  There's one branch kind of holding it up there.  Bet if I cut that the weight would cause it to fall out.  Once again can't do that without it hitting me.  A grappling hook and I could pull it out but I don't think I could work one of those without seriously hurting myself.  I throw like a girl.   :hihi:  All the Hosta are in bloom.  Purple flowers on spikes.  Planted the Swamp Milkweed seedlings in pots on the patio.  Since they are natives, they need their roots to go deep.  I'm going to have to dig one big hole to get them in the ground.  You plant milkweed for the monarchs.  These are slated for the drain basin.  Planted in two big groups.  I need plant groupings to attract the monarch.  A single plant doesn't help them.

Rather liking these wind spinners, wish they were bigger.  The wind chime isn't sitting in the right spot.  Have to find it a new home so I can hear it and it lights up.  Suppose to look like this at night:
(https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71C6tWqKzzL._AC_SX522_.jpg)

Shit, they put a white light bulb in it.  Doesn't look like the sun or fire.  Maybe I can paint it orange.

Brian can't stand that branch in the tree.   :hihi:  Asked if he could try to get it down tomorrow.  Have at it.

Brian got the branch down.  My brush pile has doubled.  He says that rubbling around noise I heard in my brush pile the other night is probably the armadillo he caught on camera in his backyard.   :o  We're not use to them here.  They have been making their way here since climate change.  I think they are a little creepy.

Joey should be coming over tomorrow for the parade.  I think I need my canopy raised again.  I can almost jump up and grab some of the ones hanging down and I have some branches touching the house.  That's how the mice got in here the last time!  Looked at those chainsaws on a pole but I think I'm too short and my canopy is too high to feel safe using one of those.  You aren't supposed to use a ladder with those.  Joey just straps in and moves around in the canopy like a monkey.

I'm cutting out of the GNR concert tomorrow for class:  The Nature of Things: Botany, Ecology, and Medieval Art, learn how artists of the Middle Ages drew inspiration from trees and other plants, capitalizing on their distinct properties to create extraordinary sculptures, cloth, and books.

I couldn't stay awake for most of the class.  :hihi:  They carved out the center of wood sculptures because the wood drys at different times and it can cause cracking.  Spain imported silk caterpillars and mulberry trees and made a business out of it.  They had these books called herbalist, actually listed a mandrake, Harry Potter movie, and said it would kill you because of the scream when you up rooted it.

A little help and Kevin wanted to organize the tool shed.  Still working on it but he was more than happy to throw shit out.

10 people have signed up for the From the Ground Up project.  Where the trainees renovate one to three of my beds.  Beka's really excited about teaching these.  You know, I may just do most my beds this way and adopt them out.  I'm kind of over planting and maintaining and more into growing plus I'm swamped in administrative, education projects with the gardens.  Not suppose to carry beds when you're the overall lead.  I've got 9, containers, on the pantry management team and helping out the mowers.  It would be okay except it's hot and I've got grandma duty going on.

Kicked fall tours to the front burner.  Social media and newspaper stuff ready to go out.  Adding a lawn class and tree tour to the program.  I've got till the end of the month to put it all together.

Talked to Marsha.  She's going up to the Mayo Clinic for a second opinion.  Feeling guilty she's not at the gardens and making plans for fall work.  Shit, that adds to what I'm doing.  She's going to make tomorrow nights meeting with the Extension Counsel.  Hate going to those meetings.  Can I just go first and not sit through all their stuff?

This is a good class on cover crops.  It's only up until the end of July.
https://umsystem.zoom.us/rec/play/ae0Rl6uln7J1CXWfD6Zd2mgRzi-aNR45eFhOadlfOQPqZDZkVMYGcfSfHGxDN0XI16uFMrBBhqrIJv0o.tckx66OHlglPJCn5?canPlayFromShare=true&from=share_recording_detail&continueMode=true&componentName=rec-play&originRequestUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fumsystem.zoom.us%2Frec%2Fshare%2FOUnYtC9HhonGwLH3CaimKT1GQ514qhT6vNmNYwJjxPUGVJSE7gLhXXILdB-uJnnT.E-U64XtNImRMDXX3

I did not know that spring annual weeds need to be exposed to fall light to know to germinate the following spring.  I generally mulch my beds in the fall so I don't have to do it in the spring and I have very few weeds.  Wonder if that's why.  I'm going to have to research that more.  I'm asking Justin what about how we plant veggies.  We do a spring, summer and fall plantings all in the same bed.  Don't know how we get a cover crop in there.  I did like that field radish for keeping your weeds from getting light to germinate.

Fay was delighted with our dedication of a tree to her.  Turns out she has a connection to Pawpaw trees.  She teared up and we all teared up.  She needs a cane to walk but she wanted to go see her tree out on the property.  The Counsel approved the location of the kiosk.  Don't think anybody even read my 6 page report.   :hihi:  We did a quick oral presentation.  Don't think they care, just wanted a decision on where it went and trusted us to make it.

Okay where did the grasshopper go?  It's missing off the top of our main sign.  Marsha reported it.  She's hated it since it went up and she is up there with a drill driver.  I had asked Ken to do something to fancy the sign up.  My idea, some butterflies and vines but he's the artist so he gets creative licence, thus the grasshopper.  We don't have any particular connection to the grasshopper.  Don't know that I've even noticed them up there.  But he was really proud of it.  I didn't hate it and it gives me a chance to go into my speech about every bug has a place in the food chain.

Had her check and see if he installed the new pantry bed sign.  The grasshopper could have been blocking his latest artwork.  Also not what I had in mind when I commissioned the work but once again creative licence.  No new pantry sign.  Maybe he took it home to touch it up.  It's been up there a while but I hadn't noticed it looking poorly.  Don't really notice it now since it's been up there so long.  I was there last night but didn't look at it.  Who would steal that?  It's pretty big and kind of freaky looking.  You have to have a drill driver to get it off.  I'll have to check his other works we have around the garden.  Hope they aren't missing.  They are pretty big pieces and installed in the ground.

Not going to say anything for now.  Could check tape but not sure what day it went missing.  Not going to spend hours doing that when we wouldn't do anything about it anyway.

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Now that I'm looking at it, that grasshopper would block his latest creation.  The sign is going to block it too.  I bet he came up to install it and saw the problem.  Wonder what he is going to do about that?  I have a feeling what I thought I was getting isn't going to be that.  And where is he going to put the grasshopper now?  I paid for that and it's going some where up there.

So Marsha calls to tell me one last thing before she leaves town.  I tell her my theory about the grasshopper.  She goes off that he can't just take that away, I paid for it.  And finally she came to the conclusion it could go on her fence in the Fruit Arboretum.    I did not say but you hate it!  Okay seemed to be the best way to deal with that.  :hihi:

The trainees decided to renovate all three of my beds yesterday!  Weather has cooled off for a few days and I want to be out there.  Busy, busy, busy.  Except the slightest turn of my back and pain all across the middle it.  Not a spot I normally over do.  Doesn't yoga out, trying drugs.  See if those work before I get to mom's to get her place in shape.

So nice I did a few extra things at mom's.  Five hours worth.  My sister hates me.  :hihi:  She was determined to help, ie get in my way.  She's a neat person, wants to clean up as we go.  I'm good with that but the area I'm working is the whole front yard and I have not begun to mess it up.  They kept wanting me to take a break and eat something.  I don't eat when I'm working, no appetite.  I stop long enough to light a smoke, take a swig of coffee and assess what I'm doing next.  Cig in hand and I go back at it.

Mom has bitch weed.  If you're not familiar with it, it's a vine with lots of thorns.  You cut it at the bottom and put poison on it to get rid of.  Generally involves you rummaging around through the bottom of a bush to find it.

My sister says it will take her days to recover.  I was thinking I got my muscles warmed up, the back is feeling fine, I'm going home and getting the grass mowed.  I did and cleaned house.  If it wasn't dark outside I'd be up at the gardens working on my beds.  Tomorrow at 7.  This weather isn't going to last.

I did get up there my 7 and got one bed done and half of another.  I'll go back tonight and finish it off.  Full sun and I got run out of there at noon.

Beka showed up.  Good thing, I was going to call her.  Thought about the chocolate box garden design.  With the shelves for the wood cleaned out, I could store the large pots there.  There's no reason for me to keep the same storage structure that is there.  It's rotted and has to be replaced any way.  We could use the whole area.  We discussed using individual boxes for plants, putting a chocolate fountain in the middle (double tiered bird bath with the chocolate vine planted in it), maybe french it up to look like a chocolate cafe with a little table and chairs.  Apparently there is chocolate shrubs.

Oh god damn it.  The city put up a violation sign on the drain basin for weeds over 8 inches.  They fucking approved that seed mixture!  And told us to mow it once per year in the winter.  Probably just one department not knowing what the other department is doing.  I sent a long ass, rather nice, email to code enforcement basically saying they are wrong.

Heat is back.  I got the bed done.  Then we get a good rain for 3 days and I can tackle the other side of the building.  The wild violets were starting to look like shit.  They've gotten out of control so I wanted to dig them out is why it took so long.  Normally that one bed I just mow down when it looks like shit, throw layer of leaf mulch on it and let it grow back.  I'm hoping with all this rain we don't flood like we did last July and lose all the produce in the pantry beds due to contamination.  That would suck.

Still no grasshopper.

I was over at the pot plantation helping trim the buds, look down and there is a leaf attached to my foot.  Further inspection, the bottoms of my feet are covered in pot clippings.  Won't come off either.  It's like glued there.  Slipped on my flip flops to come home and my shoe was kind of stuck to my foot.  :hihi:

Trying to fall asleep last night and I realize my hand is moving.  Check in with the brain and it thinks it's pulling dead daylily leaves.  Go back to sleep and realize my hand is moving again.  :hihi:

Looks like rain isn't coming till tomorrow afternoon but we've got cloud cover!  Have lots to do in the gardens.

No rain, not even a cloud.  Doesn't look like we are getting any this afternoon either.  They've had us hyped up for days that this would be a big storm day.  Maybe tomorrow.

Asked Jim if he brought his drill driver with him.  No but he wanted to see where I was going to use it.  Oh, he'll take care of that.  :hihi:  I kind of wanted to do that.  It's mostly rotted wood and I was looking forward to kicking it down.  It's the structure where the Chocolate bed is going.  It's a sand pile there and Jim wants to know what to do with the sand.  He's going to dig it out too.  Kevin comes along and he's fine with removing all that.  He doesn't want to mow between there and the back of the tool shed any more.  Increases the size of the chocolate bed to the side and all down the front.  Sssh, wait for the plan to be developed.  Wouldn't want anyone to know my bed renovation is about to grow into a new garden.

Really too hot out there to do much so I ran around lining up the fall projects.  Got Kevin to take charge of the brick project and a few people to help him.  Got everyone to agree the later part of October, on a Wednesday, we were taking everything out of the big tool shed and reorganizing it.  Reminded my fall tour people I needed shit from them.  Kevin declined to build back the 4 pantry beds that we turned into berms.  Good I need the money but he agreed some of the wood out there needs replaced.  I need the money to finish up Marsha's project.  Warned all the leads the money is about to dry up for a few years since we are doing the convention so get their projects done this year.  That's enough for now.

Heard back from the city on the drain basin.  Basically, the guy threaten us that we needed to set up an HOA or bad things could happen.  I responded, nicely, that I knew he was talking bullshit.   :hihi:  The city already told us the responsibility fell back on the developer and he was dead with his will long since settled.  Didn't address this.  Gives them the advantage to do whatever they want as long as we don't form an HOA but also makes them responsible although they can bill us.  Leaves it wide open that we could sue them if they fuck up, like we'd ever do that but it's a possibility.  I made it clear, I was happy with the area and was not doing anything about an HOA.  According to the other neighbors it's that other subdivision that's not happy with our weed patch out there.  The guy said something about it was made clear to the other subdivision 2 feet of that was there responsibility.  We'll see what happens.  Connie is going to contact them.  They are suppose to do something after 10 days if we don't comply.

I just didn't think about the Bulb Garden being on the fall tour.  I thought I would approach them next year for the spring tour, that's when they really shine.  But I also didn't think they had that much to say and was thinking who I could match them up with.  Oh no, the lead approached me.  She can take up an hour and has lots to say in the fall.  Okay, the little garden that could, you can be a special interest garden tour.

Could the leads be getting jealous over the gardens that get featured?  I always feel like I'm begging people to do shit.  So far nobody has said no and they don't half ass it either.  They really put a lot of effort into their tours.  I think I can relax about that and let them run with it.  But now the pressure is on me to get the word out about the tours.  Maureen was so disappointed when she had 8 people sign up for her tour and then nobody showed up. 

On the average 50 percent of the people who sign up, show up.  If I increase the number of slots, I run the risk of too many people showing up.  Guess I could give the lead the option of how they want to handle that, make a few suggestions, it's doable.  My only real limit is parking spots.

And I got Marsha.  :hihi:  You know, we talk so much about stuff sometimes I'm only half listening.  She was talking about who on her team could talk for 10 minutes and who would do what and who had a problem with public speaking.  Wait, what, tune back in, when are they going to be doing this?  Don't want her to know you weren't really paying attention so I just faked in and said the nervous person could practice during a public tour and Marsha agreed.  Okay so, she didn't want to do a public tour of her garden but she just agreed.  Was she talking about that in the beginning or teaching a public class?  I'm a little confused but not busted on only half ass listening.   :hihi:

I'm still amazed the senior leads are coming on board with all this shit I'm trying to do.  It was a ignore me in the beginning.  The new leads followed right along.  The senior leads found all kinds of reasons not to but I did it anyway.  Now I hear them parroting things I was saying back to me.  Totally forgot that was my idea and now they think it's theirs.  They even contribute to the plans, good stuff too.  I'm really loving the team development that has happen.  Such a change from in the beginning when they pissed me off and made me feel like I wanted to walk away from the whole thing.  Now, they want to play with me.  :hihi:

So apparently when I took a shower, that didn't wash all the little pieces of pot off the bottom of my feet.  I pulled my bed covers back tonight and there are little pieces of pot all over my sheets.   :hihi:

Son of a bitch.  Someone came out and mowed down the ridge in the drain basin including the new tree line that was growing back.  My experience last year, the more you tried to mow that tree down the more seedling it sent up all over the place.  It had settled down when I quit trying to mow it down.  They scalped it down pretty good.  We'll see what happens.  The bowl is still standing.

Walked around with the new maintenance guy at the gardens and pointed out the drainage problem areas.  Says he had to drain 3 feet of water out from the crawl space under the building.  He thinks the vents for the AC are messed up down there and they have been cooling the crawl space.  I just thought the cool air that came out from behind the roses was ground air being pushed out from there.   :hihi:  There goes my secret AC spot.  Nice guy, he's retiring next year and if Craig doesn't get around to doing some work at my place, he says he can do it.  His full time job is insurance.  Not sure how that qualifies him as a handyman, must be more on his resume.

It was the city who mowed it.  Connie talked to the storm water management people and they are not happy they had to do it.  It's because of complaints from the neighboring subdivision.  They aren't going to cut in the bowl.  In the process of cutting the rim they went on Connie's property and cut her internet service.  Apparently got several house's cable/internet.  This problem just keeps getting bigger.  Connie is going to ask the city to set up a meeting with those of us who are interested.

I'm allergic to tree pollen.  Found this interesting:  Ogren points out that perfectly flowered trees, which are generally insect-pollinated, pose few problems, allergy-wise. However, many monoecious and most dioecious species are wind-pollinated, and it's their light, wind-blown pollen that triggers allergic responses. Male cultivars of dioecious trees are the worst offenders.

Never occured to me.  The Cottage Garden lead suddenly developed this skin problem or autoimmune thing.  She's been sick for months and they can't figure out what's going on.  We had another lead a few years back who always had poison ivy and even a case of shingles who worked that area for several years.  I know my allergies just keep getting worse.  Something about being in an area with three rivers your allergies are just worse and keep getting worse in my opinion.  I leave the state and the water bags under my eyes totally go away.

The area where that garden is has poison ivy in the woods.  It's basically a hole with a bog at the bottom.  We garden the top and middle of it, big garden.  Could it be she's allergic to her garden?  She's had that garden about three years now.  The first lady installed it and worked it about the same amount of time before these skin issues basically drove her inside.  In between the two leads that garden has not had a regular lead.  Is that area kind of a toxic allergy spot?  Air flow would be a problem in the hole plus mold issues.  Wonder how you test for that?  I guess I better read that guy's book.  I'm not opposed to moving that garden elsewhere besides it's a lot of fucking work.  The hole, my nickname for it, has other issues like the path through it that is going to cost big bucks to stabilize.

There's so much more to gardening than just the plants.

I was home an hour before I realized Jim removed the structure where the chocolate garden is going.   :hihi:  I even walked over there and put trash in the trash bucket.  He put the saved lattice behind the bucket, didn't see it.  Stood in the middle of the former structure and dug to see how deep the sand was.  Even looked at it to see where the plants were.  Just didn't take in the whole area to realize the structure was missing.

Okay, not entirely a space cadet moment.  I was covered in mud, sweat and my glasses were steamed up.  I dug all the wild strawberries out of the soon to be bee garden.  We took a picture of my mud covered pants.  It's an ad: Come play in the dirt with us.  Master Gardener classes starting soon.

I need to go back and take in the view from the bottom of the hill to see that structure is gone and get some vision for what should go there.

Walk into my SIL house and tell him I brought my own lunch.  I have a big eggplant.  :hihi:  He hates veggies to begin with.  It was okay, nothing real strong in flavor.  Probably over cooked it.  Jim kept saying it was poisonous if not cooked.  Normally I like my veggies raw.  Hate mushy ones.

Finished weeding the beds the trainees are renovating.  Marsha is really concerned about cleaning out the big tool shed.  Not opposed but her plant sale shit is in there and she has it organized her way.  I said I was taking everything out of there, failed to mention not taking that out.  I'm only taking out all that shit that has been buried in there for years.  What she doesn't know is Extension isn't planning on putting anything in there any more.  We're likely to end up with the whole shed.  All that room, she's going to be back in there un piling all her plant sale stuff we had to squeeze into the corner.  I kind of mentioned it to her, that she may have more space.  Don't want to promise anything.  But she did start making plans.  Okay by me, just sweep if you move that shit around.

Cleaning stuff up must be influencing other people.  Mentioned to my SIL today my scrap guy would probably come get the bow flex for like the hundredth time.  He was agreeable.  Texted the scrap guy and he will take it.  Told SIL and he's going to get it out of the house tonight.  Love my scrap guy.  Text him a picture and the address and comes gets it within 24 hours for free.

Got all the fall tour dates set up.  We're doing 16 public tours.  Sent off for the graphics for the website and fliers.  I'm ahead of all my deadlines.  I have 325 slots available.  :hihi:  Only had 91 people during the last round.  On average only 50 percent of the people who sign up, show up.  I'm counting on the tree tour and the lawn class to pull in a lot of people.  And I have a magazine and a newspaper ads this time.  Also fliers to pass out.  I don't really have anything upcoming to promote.  We have winter classes for a fee and the plant sales in the spring, kind of far off.

I did find a couple of gardens to rehome some of my plants that won't be staying in the renovated beds.  Don't want to but I have to start thinking about that.  I will find them all good homes.  I don't give up my plants without a little heartache.

What's going on Steve?   :hihi:  He trimmed the brush back that was growing out of the woods.  Looked good but today I go out there and he's taken all the underbrush out five feet back.  Anger management?  I really don't want to see under there.  It will grow back, no big deal.

The electric company sent notice they are coming through with the brush hog and herbicides to clean out under their lines and easement.   :nervous:  Don't think they are going to like Leslie's dead Christmas tree fence.  Works to keep the deer out.  You don't see it once the weeds grow up through it.  Some of our fruit trees might be within their easement but they haven't bothered them before.  We have a fence around them and the area is well maintained.  They can't get in there unless we let them.  They dropped all those trees and left the bodies so a brush hog isn't going to help in that one spot.  Shouldn't be an issue for us but you never know.  Two sides of the gardens have big electric lines running to the side of them.

Collected a cute, little, triangular trellis for maybe the chocolate garden.  The native coral honeysuckle needs a new one but it needs a really big one.

Did the hand mowing at the garden.  Feels really good to get my sweat on. 

Hot out there today but we had cloud cover at the garden this morning.  Got a lot done.  I cleaned out and organized all the pantry tubs with all the stuff they had in them.  I'm still on a cleaning kick.  The electricity is out at the Extension.  One of the boxes was sizzling.  Hopefully fixed today and I can post some pictures later.

Ken showed up which is unusual for him.  He had my new Pantry Garden sign!  Really cute, really classy.  Not at all close to what I commissioned and I'm going to have to stain and paint the sign I wanted him to replace.  :hihi:  Love this one though.  He has the grasshopper.  Says it needs touching up.  Marsha was thrilled, not.  :rofl:

Since we cooled off, I started pushing the fall projects to start.  Got David to start removing the rock from where we are putting our award bricks in.  He got almost half of them out of there.  He's going on vacation for two weeks so I'll probably have the rest of it out of there by the time he gets back.  Maybe he and Kevin will get inspired.

There's shade in the back of the building in the morning.  Found Melanie back there dreaming about the Chocolate bed.  We were talking about design and I said Beka would come up with something.  She said something about no, it was hers and another person's to design.  I like when people take ownership but really they don't have it.  I'm the lead over the Foundation Beds which this is a part of.  Beka is my pro designer and the leader of this project.  We have the final say.  It will be okay though.  Beka will gently guide them along.  We'll come up with something we all like.  And if they walk around saying it's theirs, as long as they keep it up and follow my directions, it is.  I'm pretty easy going but I give up no land.  :hihi:  Keep your fucking gun, I want property.

Steve did another section.  He's slowing down but I'm still wondering what's behind that destructive energy he's got going on.

When the electric box sizzled it blew out the copy machine, shit.

We had temps in the low 80's and cloud cover.  Got out there and removed most of the rest of the rock.  I ran out of buckets to put them in but I got the rest of them in a pile.  The clean rock can go right to it's new home but the ones that had to be dug out need a bath.  Does no good as a weed block if it has dirt in it.  Put glyphosate on the weeds at the water station where we need more rock.  Bitch Weed had started to grow in there.  Not sure where I'm putting the rest of the rock.  Need Kevin to tell me what I'm doing there next to move the project forward.

We're about to go back in the 90's for a couple of weeks.  I'll slow down to just watering, early in the morning.  Moving the plants at home under the trees.  Grass doesn't grow at these temps, the weeds still do.  :hihi:

No I didn't go a day without gardening in my world.   :hihi:  I had the rare day off from a work session at the garden.  The potatoes got harvested.  They got the area mowed down so the electric company would spray and drift bad stuff over into our area.  Marsha is taking care of the sapling so hopefully the property is just a bypass when the electric company comes through.  Only got one text and my answer was throw it away.  The trainees had their second meeting on renovating my beds.  They were to take a soil sample and take measurements on the beds.  I know they talked plants.  Hard to hold the reins on that but get the design down.  Opposite of what most of us do.  We get the plants and the design or lack of it just happens.

Marsha has her surgery on Tuesday.  Sucks to be put back down again.  Her brain is out of the chemo fog but something has changed in her.  She's now thinking of how to say stuff without pissing people off.   :hihi:  Yeah, I live with that too.  Never one to not say it, eventually, and it comes out a little more blunt then I want it too even when I think it over.  But if you make it a fight, it becomes all about the fight, not the solution.

Anyway, came home and got my yard mowed.  I see why my neighbor likes looking over into my yard.  He's not just checking me out.  :hihi:  From his view, my yard is cool and inviting.  All the shade and greens.  Who wouldn't want to walk into that?  It immediately draws you in and relaxes you.

Only a five foot section of grass left to mow and I could not do it.  Fortunately Steve came along and offered to finish it and clean up the mower.  It was either get in the AC now or puke.  :hihi:  As it is I don't remember walking from the greenhouse to the tool shed.  Should have got there at 7 instead of closer to 8.  Two hours of hand mowing in full sun and I'm trashed.  Fuck the trimming.  I might be able to get that Wednesday morning if I get there at the crack of dawn.  At least the guys driving the big mowers get a breeze if they drive fast enough.

Several people showed up to get somethings done before the heat comes on but they didn't stay long.  Eli wanted a garden update.  Walked him around and showed him all the projects going on, new shit, etc.  He's so impressed with us.  We make him look good when he reports to the university.

Peeling Patio Eggplant with a potato peeler is dangerous!  Once it's peeled it browns over like an apple that has been exposed to air.  The more finely chopped herbs work better but still eggplant is just like a chip for the dip.

Marsha is down at the hospital asking for thoughts and prayers tomorrow.  Really she's just sending out a group text so her husband can text when she's out of surgery.  I know what's going on there.  :hihi:

Was able to move the fall tours forward to contacting the newspaper and the magazine, whoohoo.  Bringing it in a little early.  I can relax until the next deadline for the email and facebook posts.  Really hoping the magazine runs a story.  Not sure if we are in time for that but it will go under events.

So this heat thing with me.  We were coming back from New Jersey on the bikes.  It was 105 and we were out on the interstate for three days.  It got so bad in the afternoons we would try to get back on the highway only to take the next exit to find AC.  The last night out my legs were like stumps, elephant legs.  Could barely get my boots off.  Since then I can't cool off when the temps get above 90.  I'm sure I had heat exhaustion.  I was in my early 30's.  Been dealing with this a long time.  My outdoor temperature preference is in the 50's in full sun, no wind.  I'll work my ass off in that.

A little shower and it's like a sauna out there.  The plan for tomorrow is get to the garden at 7, start the water and harvest some bush beans.  Out of there by 10.

My pants almost came clean.  No more wild strawberries.
(https://scontent-ord5-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/362632254_754110613383368_2524101416287822795_n.jpg?_nc_cat=103&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=730e14&_nc_ohc=r8r7tPNkK6gAX-eZuFe&_nc_ht=scontent-ord5-2.xx&oh=00_AfB_l4CyAmbe90guIDOBwHW3Y_IV0e8dmQCA8Y0P-D3JYw&oe=64C669C1)

A little before 7 and out at 10:01.   :hihi:  I had a medical test so it was a have too.  We had the harvest done and then I remembered we might have some blackberries, we did.  Harvested beans, leeks, eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers, okra and zucchini.  I think it took me an hour just on a half a bed of beans.  You think you've got them all only to find more.  Hot but we had cloud cover most of the morning.  Happy pantry team this morning.  Put in some more beans.  Greg order turnip seeds.  When I called him Scarlet, went over his head.  Isn't that what they had to eat after the war and she said her famous line about not being hungry again?

By the time I got back at 11:15 everybody had cleared out but Kevin.  He was working on the seat of the zero turn.  They got in the poles for the pantry sign in but forgot the brackets and he didn't have any zip ties.  You are not using zip ties!  That is something I would do.  :hihi:  Marsha would think we were idiots.  No update on her.

We got a little rain after noon but by 3 it was full sun, open oven door.  I'll go back Friday morning to water the pots.  I've got the garlic tops to cut off and get ready for storage but I can do that in the house.  Miserably hot out there.

I had already eaten two of the brownies before Phebe said they were made from eggplant.  Her cooking class in a couple of weeks is all on eggplant.  I need that.  :hihi:

Marsha went home from the hospital today.

Gardens survived the wind storm just fine.  The parking lot was green from all the leaves.  Making mental notes of what I needed to do while I was blowing it off.  Not mowing the grass for you this week guys.  Was thinking I would crank it out in the morning but forgot I have Saturdays harvest to run over to the food pantry.  Guess I could get up there early and come back to the house for coffee and get the harvest.  Then again I kind of wanted to start the brush fire.  Is any of this under gardening?  Especially the part where I just flat out stink.  You'd think all the sweat would wash that away.

Cloud cover!  Worked my ass off.  Really don't care for the new battery operated weed trimmer everybody at the garden wanted, except me and Kevin.  I swear it's heavier or maybe not as well balanced as the gas trimmer.  Not as powerful.  Might be fine for your home grass but not the garden grass.  Not sure what we have for grass but it's not what you have in your yard.  Got my bush trimmed, more coffee and the harvest over to the church right when they opened at 9.  Stopped by and got my groceries and came home and started burning the brush in the drain basin.  Got about 3/4th's of it burned up.  Had too much ash in the firepit to finish.  I tried to light the pile on fire with the hot ash floating around in the air but it never caught.  :hihi:

And since I was up and running, the neighbors had a nice brush pile going so why don't we just trim your bushes I've had my eye on?  While he was in the shower, she and I took them down.  I need to dig out some honeysuckle bushes that have got in there and trim it way back but we'll do that this winter.  Looks better from the street but I butchered it cutting the honeysuckle out.  And then I came home and mowed the grass.  I was napping on the couch by 2.  :D

WTF, we have a flood threat for Wednesday.

When you do a brush fire, you only do brush!  I look over and he is throwing a log on the fire.  No, you're taking up space and access to the coals.  Then he starts throwing leaves on it.  No, they are wet, in a clump and smothering the fire.  Eventually though, we burned up all the brush, larger pieces of wood and leaves.  Tim said he would cut up the trees when he gets back from the lake if Brian doesn't get to it.

Harvest has been postponed to 11 tomorrow to let the rain pass.  Eggplant cooking class moved to the 16th.  Dropped 5 buckets of rock around the propagation water station.  Had to duct tape the door to the greenhouse to keep the trim on the door.  Guess we can't put that off any longer.

They changed the forecast to "extreme rain event" over the next two days.  Shit.  Ran up and got everything off the floor of the greenhouse and the hoop house.

Fire pit still giving off heat at 10 at night.  Has about 6 inches of ash.

That was a nice compliment.  I was talking to JoAnn.  Kevin told her I was a wonderful supervisor.  Had him doing things he never thought of doing.  That's really good considering he had my job for about 5 years.  And really I'm not a supervisor, I'm a facilitator according to our bylaws.  They treat me like a supervisor but truth be told I'm just really good at facilitating.  Yes, I'm a gardener enabler.   :hihi:

We're all panicked about the rain tonight.  As soon as the weather cleared today, we were out there harvesting everything we could.  Last year at the end of July we lost all crops due to flooding.  The group seems pretty psyched about the cooking classes.  I wonder if I can get Phebe to cook up some okra?  It looks disgusting to me but I'm trying to be adventurous with my veggies.  And damn it, I'm not doing this alone, everybody must try it.  Except for the ghost peppers.  If you haven't had experience with hot peppers, don't reinvent the wheel, they are fucking hot!

The worst of the rain went south.  We have a storm coming in around two but it's no threat.  I did notice today some of the tomatoes split.  Caused by the heavy rain.  The skin didn't grow fast enough for the incoming water.

Got in a plan for the chocolate garden.  She did a good job.  I don't really like the layout.  She's got some hard scape I don't think we can afford and uses too many annual plants you have to buy, grow and replant every year.  It's not very accessible for public viewing but wasn't going to be.  They can really only look at it from the bottom.  It's the maintenance path that makes it look like you're looking at the garden from the side.  And she needs to pack some more plants in there or she will be weeding all the time.  It's not the final plan although, it's going to be her bed, if she likes it, I can live with it.  Not my thing, it's her thing and Beka's job to go over it with her.

Okay I offered the creamer up to the group but if they don't take it, I'm taking it.  I've been reluctant to take it because it weighs like a 100 pounds and it's going to take moving it around the yard to find just the right spot.  Below is what it was new. It's rusted up cast iron now but I like that.  Room for 3 places to put pots.  I've been attracted to this piece since I first saw it, interesting, not sure if I love it but it's in my head.
(https://p1.liveauctioneers.com/266/13895/4304963_1_x.jpg?version=1191464303&width=1600&format=pjpg&auto=webp)

Update:  One of them is interested.  Just when I decide it's mine, of course.  It will be better displayed at the gardens and I will appreciate it there but I will be thinking it could have been mine.  Have to share, god damn it.  Marsha will freak.  I offered her this piece years ago and she barely glanced at it before turning up her nose.  She did get my cast iron bell with a pig on top of it.  I wanted that for myself too but nowhere to put it.  I have a thing for cast iron.  She did take the cast iron apple press for under the apple trees but come to think of it, I haven't seen that in a while.  It was pretty beat up maybe she pitched it.

Update again:  All three of them like it.  They haven't seen it in person yet but Beka was ready to go get it sight unseen.  Interesting piece.  It's got a home, took me a few years.  Haven't mentioned the sheets of tin from an old roof I happen to know about.  I was saving that for another project I may someday work on.  We could use that to make the decorative chocolate boxes.  Not real sure how we would deal with the sharp edges, public safety thing.

I can't tell you how fucked this is.  Usually the gardens order their plants from the plant sale.  The plant sale coordinator doesn't want to have to keep track of those orders any more.  I get it, it's a lot of work to keep track of those orders, make sure they order enough seeds for the garden and the sale, and then make sure the garden plants get separated from the sale plants.  But if you have both groups ordering seeds, that's a lot of wasted seeds and more shipping costs.  Thing is all those plant sale people who order seeds are all garden leads.  You going to have them to do it twice?  And isn't the point of using the same plants on display in the gardens to show off what we sell?

I'm hoping the seed orderers talk some sense into the coordinator.  And I can just be a bitch about this.  We get to buy plants before the public.  I can have my leads go in and buy the plants they want and turn in the receipts for reimbursement.   :hihi:  It would throw off their numbers for what they want available to the public and effectively null those sales as money makers for us.

Plus they want the leads to seed up their own seeds.  Okay but those people work those seed parties, handing out what needs to get seeded.  Who's going to do that job while they are seeding up their own plants and for other leads who can't be there?  And were going to be germinating more seeds so we're taking up more of the growers lights.  You increased the number of containers and use of growing medium.

Did I say the coordinator is Marsha?  Believe me she is damn good at plant sale but this is fucked up.  Maybe it's chemo brain.  Maybe she's just tired.  We'll do it her way.  We'll make it work.

Holy shit!  Went to scratch my neck and one of those big katydids was in my hair and now it flew behind my desk.  Scared the shit out of me.  Where's Terrapin?  She was just playing with one of them in the garage.  Those things creep me out.

Woohoo, I'm going junking tomorrow for the gardens.  Susan's church is having their annual garage sale.  Beka says text her pictures if I find stuff we can use for the new bed renovations.  She's in charge of the work session tomorrow.  Wouldn't you know it, I take the day off and all my other senior leads are too.  Hopefully, nobody comes because we are expecting rain and I'm just a text away.  Beka can handle it but she has the trainees in class.

This is kind of cool.  There is cocoa mulch.  It's made from the shells of the cocoa bean and it smells like chocolate!  Hershey use to sell it and apparently had them using it around town.  I'll have to find some of that for the Chocolate garden.  There's a warning it's toxic to dogs.  We're not a dog park so I'm using it.  We'll just put up a warning sign.  Wonder how long that smell lasts?

Really didn't find any good junk for the gardens.  A couple of aluminum plates for the side of the tool shed to decorate that up in the moon garden.  3 pairs of binoculars for the bird walk tour.  A pair of garden jeans for me.  I need to get my shopping list and go to the flea markets on Sunday.

They finished the plans and plant selections for all 3 bed renovations.  I should be getting them soon.  What worries me out of all of this is Beka said total cost around $500.  Normally not a problem but they are cutting the budget back to put on that convention.  The garden budget is always the first to get cut.  Always under funded.

Marsha has rethought how we will do the seeds.  Basically after the plant sale people plant up what they need, the garden people will plant what we need in a separate container out of the leftover seeds.  This works except you know who's going to have to coordinate that.   :hihi:  It's okay, I'm at all the seeding events.  Instead of working it, I'll be sitting there seeding.  And I have the option of seeding at home.

She sounded good today.  Still at home and can't drive but she's feeling good enough to want to leave the house.  She's digging into the manual for how to run the convention.  Give her a minute, I bet she takes over the lead on that.  I'm not stepping up for that job but I'll work my ass off for her is she takes it on.

Anyway, quarterly leads meeting coming up.  Same day as the GNR concert.  :hihi:  It all happens at once.  This is the one where I see how much money people aren't going to spend.  I still have $7,000 in the budget but fall is when we do all our big projects.  We've got some bricks to install, a long path to dig out, wood to replace in the pantry beds and plant markers to order.  Historically, the gardens have returned good size chunks of money at the end of the year.  We kind of run out of steam in the fall.  I know they would like me to return some of that money but I'm on a roll and they are indicating the budget will be cut next year.  I have tours schedule for September and October and we're tearing the place up.   :hihi:  We'll make it work.  I have a feeling I'm going to be saying that a lot.

Texting me at 4 in the morning is just fucking rude.  I would have ignored it but I was annoyed with myself for leaving the phone in the living room and not putting it on the charger.  Yeah I'm going to respond.  Didn't even apologize for waking me up.  Actually a disturbing dream had me half awake.  Wasn't real but it sure felt like it.

Anyway, I'd be out the door at the garden but it's sprinkling a little.  Today's to do list:  Weed my beds, run the trimmer and if I don't run out of steam mow the grass.  I may put digging out where the bricks are going to go on my list for after my nap.  I'll see where I crash.  Moved Wednesday harvesting to Tuesday morning due to a likely rain out.  E-mailed the team.  I'll text them at a more appropriate time.  They come close enough to me to kill me for texting them at 4.   :hihi:

10 hours.  :hihi:  It only took an hour to be weed all my beds and then I got rained out.  And then David panicked thinking we had to harvest the tomatoes today.  Thought he was starting on that but then I get there and no David.  He came back.  Got the trimming done and the hand mowing.  If you trim with holes in the knees of your pants, you might as well have been wearing shorts.

WTH Jim?  This man shows up to the garden freshly showered, smelling good and in his good clothes.  He's the cleanest guy I've ever seen and he stays that way!  I'm in my work clothes, covered in shit and sweat, hair all over the place.  And it's not like he doesn't work!

Never got to digging out the dirt for the bricks and I was there 5 hours.  Marsha's area really needed a mow and trim.  Half way through it the trimmer broke.  Karen showed up and she had hers.  She had the same thing in mind.  It looked good when we got through with it, I could do some more weeding.  Jim did give me a few tips for digging the dirt out.  It's now on my hit list for tomorrow if it doesn't rain or on for Thursday.  I was going to go back this afternoon after I did my yard but then I got on emails and now I have to go to pinball and contemplate how the hell Jim always looks so damn clean!   :hihi:

Yea, got one hole dug before I got rained out.  Didn't take that long.  The ground is really soft from the rain.  I can get the other one tomorrow.

22 people came to the pesto and salsa class.  My kind of cooking, a little of this and a little of that, and damn that's good.  Loved the walnut pesto.

And then Mary and I went to look at the bricks.  There's a whole box of fundraiser bricks and she's doing another fundraiser.  Hole number 3 can wait until the fall or next spring.   :hihi:

I think we are rain the rest of the day.  If not, Tim is ready with the chainsaw.  We still have those two trees in the drain basin.  Turns out Tim has a brush hog at his lake property.  He's willing to bring it up and mow the basin down this winter.  All this luck going to gardening and I can't do shit on the lottery tickets.  :hihi:

Break in the rain and you know where I was.  Connie texted it was raining at the house just as I was putting away my tools.  Kevin's response was you don't mess around.  Yes I do, what do you think I was doing?  :hihi:  He hasn't responded to my text if we can finish it up next Wednesday.   

Still no response from Kevin.   :hihi:  The next text from me will be I'm at the store.  What kind of rock do you want?  I'm a pushy bitch.  :D

I was going to go up and start washing the rock but the sun came out.  I'm not putting muddy rock back on the sides only to have it grow weeds.  I have no idea how to wash the rock and not make a mess.  No clue how I'm going to lift a bucket of rock up and put it on the cart.  I kind of did the lift and swing it ahead to the next spot routine to get it over to where I have it stored, walking a bucket.

I'm off today or so I think.  Gardens just come up.  :D

Shit, Tim's chainsaw isn't working.  Really need to get those trees cut up.

Yeah, no.   :hihi:  In the past our fruit area hasn't produced enough fruit to send to the pantry.  This year the blackberries are going gangbusters.  Normally they were just candy for those out there working.  So my veggie group started going over there and harvesting to take it to the pantry with permission from the lead of that area.  The person taking care of the blackberries and another busy body got upset we were coming over to harvest.  I apologized, said we had permission from the person over her, Marsha.  Said we thought we were helping her out and that I was fine with just letting her harvest and take it to the food pantry.  If she harvested on Wednesdays and got it to us by 11, we could take it over with our stuff.  Knowing full well she wasn't harvesting and taking to the food pantry.  She caught me the next day, said she was fine with us harvesting.  Sure you are.  :hihi:

In all these conversations, the other fruit came up because it is starting to produce.  They are busy and under construction over there.  Marsha says to me they are they are too busy to harvest.  "We can try to help you out this year."  No, not happening.  The veggie team is not responsible for harvesting the fruit area too.  That's their job.   :hihi:  Bitched yourself into you responsibility.  Welcome to the world of harvesting.

Marsha can drive!  She sounded real good tonight.  You know until she realized where that conversation was leading.  Growing pains.  I did throw in cooking classes for apple pie and apple sauce.  The veggie team harvests and does cooking classes.

Geez, we're in steering committee and I bring up something.  Marsha immediately returns to old behavior, has to disagree with me.  Thing is, it's something she is for.  Took her a minute and then she realized.  I worked into a conversation later.  I almost skipped this meeting.  They look to me for leadership and then shoot me down for doing it.

And the shit disturber approached Marsha saying somebody took some of the pears.  Her evidence, there was no fruit on the ground and there should have been between when she was there on Saturday and showed up on Wednesday.  She thinks the lock should be changed.  Er, there's no fruit on the ground, including what has been there for weeks under any of the trees if you look because Karen and I cleaned up the whole area on Tuesday!  9 hours between the two of us.

You know, I've had a sinus headache for days now after being out there so much and I'm going to punch back today.  :hihi:

The cantaloupe is ready.  I hate that smell and you get a bunch of them together, eww.  Somebody else take those to the food pantry.

Told Marsha I was checking the security tape on the pears.  Keep it low key but start it through the grapevine.  Let's make sure everybody knows we have that ability.  Fortunately, it wasn't one of those days where I was dropping drawers behind a bush.   :hihi:  Earl and I live in fear of that.

The sand goes down 15 inches.  The area where the chocolate garden is going use to be the sand pile.  We have to dig all that out.

Not that I want to deal with the fruit incident but I did get inspired from the bitching.  Developed the "Fruits of Our Labor" sessions.  In addition to our "Cooking What We Grow" classes we'll do these short sessions.  Before the general membership meeting we'll be taste testing a few different tomato varieties, the cantaloupe, maybe the pears and something from the herb group.  The growers can speak on stuff and answer questions.  Jim's going to do the peppers at a separate session.  We can do separate sessions in the garden whenever produce is ready.  Testing it out this year on us but I can open it up to the public next year.  Call it a "Taste of the Gardens".

Maybe it was a good thing I got stuck managing the Pantry Garden.  I'm tired, hurt everywhere and the inspiration, creativity just keeps flowing from the gardens.  Okay, the secret, Grateful Dead, nickname for the gardens is Terrapin Station.  I found it, "only just a few miles down the road".  Another artist, but it all works so much better with music.  :smoking:

The three bed plans are in!  Beka does such a great job on these.  She has the beds packed, mostly perennials.  A few shrubs, keep my pruning to a minimum.  Enough annuals to let you plant but not to overwhelm you.  My only real comment was move the bee watering station from the full sun in front of the bed to the back where it will stay in the shade longer and have plants around it to shade it.  But there may be a reason she has it there. 

From here the plans go to the Safety and Design Committee for comment.  The team works on how to get the plants.  We'll grow some, get some from our own gardens or already in the bed and hopefully only have to buy a few.  I am going to ask that over the winter, they document the maintenance needs of each plant so they know who to deadhead and who they need to keep in their spot.  Some of these plants are real good at spreading out.  I hope to hell these beds are getting adopted out, they are high maintenance.

There's not a lot of hardscape in these beds.  Tomorrow we go get the cream separator for the chocolate fountain.  I hope that works out.

The plans still have a lot of steps to go through before approval.  We dig everything out this fall and plant in the spring.  Everybody has to get settled and nursed in.  The first year, you can see it coming but it's the second and third year where your work really shows.

What?  So this whole idea of the trainees having a class project has been my idea and ran by me for years.  With Beka's expertise this year we really expanded the program.  I had her give an update on it at steering committee.  I've only been promoting it for months now but Joe our president finally took interest in it.  He was talking with Marsha and mentioned it was really cool.  He's been talking with our rose lead about taking those out.  He's wondering if we could get the trainees to redo that area next year.  Marsha tells him I was already looking at that side of the building for the next project, didn't include the roses.  And she's talked to me about doing the pantry beds after that.  Okay, folks steal my idea and my expert but understand this if you want it, you head it up.   :hihi:  And did you two forget you're the ones wanting to cut the garden budget to the bone?

The security camera doesn't reach back to the fruit area.  I can only see whose cars are in the parking lot and the front 12 feet of the garden.  It only takes pictures at intervals and not video.  I still don't think anybody took the pears.  Now they are going on about the pear trees not producing well and they want to cut them down.  No, we don't use the pears anyway and you folks need to finish up construction in there.  You have enough to do.

OMG  :hihi:  We went over to pick up the creamer.  Got a few other things that we can make into trellises.  The DJ goes, you want the frog?  Hell yes I want the frog.  He's about 24 inches top to bottom, front to back, multicolored.  Stuck him in the native area and texted them a picture.  They called as soon as they saw it.  'Say hello to your little friend.'  This is so going to energize that team.

Eggplant cooking class today.  Ratatouille, really good.  Seen the movie but never had it.  Eggplant meatballs, so good!  And you can dump the ratatouille on it too.  Might have been so good because Phebe is a really good cook.  She's been cooking from gardens all her life.  I, of course, was busy working the gardens.  She had enough help in class so I didn't have the excuse she needed me in there.

Really bad mood here.   :hihi:  The shit disturber bitched the whole morning.  And bought a baggie with her so she could collect blackberries for herself.  They didn't send a damn thing over to the pantry.  And brought up they were cutting the pear trees down this fall.  There's a reason for that but you guys need to get this area together not create more work for yourselves.  They can stay another year.  I could tell Marsha was annoyed too but she had to cut out and go home and puke in private.  She's pushing herself.

And Joe wants to work on the budget.  He wants to know what the bare bones needs are of the gardens.  I have no defense for them cutting the garden budget.  I love what we've been able to do with an increased budget.  There's been years where we had no money and we keep growing.  Granted I'm working on the public education the gardens provide, it's all free.  The gardens product no income.  I keep pushing that association with the botanical gardens but the people who would do that don't follow through.

I need to go junking.  I love finding that shit and repurpose it for the garden.  Marsha asked if I found that frog along the side of the road.   :hihi:  She's not into that.

Never a day without gardening.  :D

Went up and glyphosated the orchard ground.  You know that stuff as Round Up.  I don't know why the ground in the orchard has to be bare.  Marsha explained it to me once, made no sense to me.  We were discussing the minimum budget for the gardens.  We need a few chemicals for weeds and pests, some leaf mulch and some seeds and we can get through a year.  Things wouldn't improve and we couldn't replace what falls apart.  That's the holding zone.  We can hold on for a few years.  We've done it before. 

I'm not really built for that.  Neither is Marsha.  We'll get bored and move onto something else.  I don't think the rest of the group is either.  I've caution our president our resources need to go where the membership likes to go.  It's a long story I've been preaching for years.  Tonight though he parroted it back to me.  Not like it was my idea to begin with  :hihi:, more like something he was lecturing me about.  I swear people don't hear what I say but I have a brainwashing effect on them.  Careful around me, I will put you to work and you'll start thinking my ideas are your ideas.  And you might just start eating eggplant too.  ;D

Forgot, Kevin text me at 7:30 this morning.  He fixed the trimmers then went on to bitch about the new battery operated trimmer.  "Can we take that back?"  :hihi:  It's just a piece of crap but the people who wanted it love it.  It's going to be broke all the time.  I gave him permission to take his time about fixing it when it breaks down.  There's a reason the good stuff cost so much.  Don't waste your money on a hundred dollar tool.  Tools like knives are no time to get the cheap stuff.

Wait a minute.  Kevin mowed with the zero turn yesterday.  I took out the hand mower today and was admiring his work.  Made it easy on me.  Steve cut off a low hanging branch that allowed Kevin to mow all across the backside of the daylilies.  I kind of wondered why he didn't get the area in front of the bee hives better.  He could have only went one way.  Tell me he did not ride that mower down that steep hill and into the creek.  I left there at 12:30 and he called me at 5 to say he was done mowing.  I thought that was odd, it doesn't take that long to run the big mower.  I'm going to walk over there tomorrow and check that out.  He's a wild man on that thing.  Not the first time somebody had slid it into the creek.

He did fucking drive the zero turn down that slope and made the curve.  Plus he went across the slope once.  He had to back it up on that angle.  Maybe he came up it instead of tried to go down it.  Still he could have tipped it and nobody was around.  Old people thinking they are teenagers.   :rofl:

Well damn it.  Just a few guilty parties but I'm going to have to put my foot down for everybody.  I'll discuss it with the leads but no produce is leaving that garden unless it's headed to the food pantry.  I don't even want to tell you some of the shit people are pulling and taking it home for themselves.  I'm always conscious that even though you think some people may have money for food, they don't.  Well if you're too embarrassed to ask for help you better get a lot better at stealing!   :hihi:

Anyway, the people working on the beds met.  Things are going well.  Beka liked the couple of other things I picked up for hardscape.  She's got them moving.  They are tearing plants out in September.  I would have waited a month.  We can be pretty hot then.  We're starting to look for plants.

Texting with the guys on the mowing crew.  Oh yeah Kevin I am ratting you out.  I know what you did.   :hihi:  They get so little attention, it's fun to fuck with them a little bit.  I appreciate you and I notice what you do, that's the message.  We're going to hover around 100 for a few days.  Grass don't grow and nobody is coming to the gardens.  You're on break.

Got up there at 6:15 and that's only because the sun wasn't up.  It was really muggy already.  Radio is playing Walk Me Out in the Morning Dew, yeah that's right.  :hihi:  High humidity and I'm worried about the fungus among us.  Extra water for the pantry beds.  They will go to every other day through this heat.  Broke up the ground where the liriope is being moved to before it turns into baked clay.  The code to the tool shed lock got changed, figured it out but Kevin is going to have to change that back.  Was out of there by 8:15.  Had to wait till 8 to send some texts out to a few gardeners.

On the home front, the windows are so covered with dew I can't see if the cats want back in.   :hihi:  Believe me they do, nobody wants to be out there.  My cool spider is back.  Haven't seen it in years.  It's a little bit bigger than a half dollar, black and yellow, building a web on the patio.  Has a very distinct web, funnel type.  I'm freezing in a sweet covered shirt in the house.  Quick trip to the grocery store, not going through this heat wave without ice cream, and I'm going back to bed.   :hihi:

Oh damn and it's only day one.  11:00 and it's still 93 heat indice.  Humidity is way up there.  I'm saving my outdoor plants for in the morning watering.  Another wake up at 5:30 day coming up.  Looks like I'm doing that all week.

Marsha is doing so well she can start her chemo early.  She wants to dig out a path rather than rent the equipment.  Yeah we kind of have to spare that money.  I need it dug out so I have a place to go with the sand.  I already told her no digging.  You just got through surgery and I don't care what her doctor said.  I assigned her to supervision and driving the zero turn with the pull along cart.  I control the shovels and she isn't getting one.  :hihi:  I'm only talking all this stuff with her to keep her mind busy.  Don't push it lady.

We had the harvest done and on the way to the food pantry at 9:15.  :D  Besides the pantry people nobody showed up to work today.

Kevin tried to act like he didn't know what I was talking about with the mower and then decided to act like it was no big deal.  :hihi:  Got him to inspect my work on the holes for the bricks, I passed, and then to check out the rocks we had saved for the project.  From there he filled up the holes with rock without me even asking.  We sort of transferred possession of the rest of the rock we used.  :-X  We left the bag of what we possessed on top of the rock in case somebody asks, did they?   :hihi:  Kevin's better at this sort of thing then other people.  Anyway, one step closer to getting that project done.

Lets see how tomorrow goes.  I have a meeting with Marsha and the new demo garden plant sale coordinator.  This was my idea over a year ago and Marsha shot it down, now she is using the term and declaring the person is part of her team, not the demo gardens.  She recruited the person.  I don't have to be the coordinator and I'm not responsible for the person who is?   :hihi:  Why would I fight about that!  We just have to work out the procedure for the leads to order their plants from the plant sale and get them to them.  Marsha that's all on you.  I just take orders and march out with the plants.  How we get to that point, I'm not arguing with the pro on that.

Next meeting tomorrow is education committee.  I'm the only one doing education at the moment.  Quick update and I'm out the door to my next appointment.  The chair is a little upset with me.  I asked that the approval for their $1000 projector and computer be rescinded.  It's been delayed for further discussion.  Does it make sense to spend $1000 on the off chance they may have to turn down teaching one $50 class?  And you have no plan on how to sell these classes.  If it wasn't for my connection to another garden club, they wouldn't have sold any classes.  I had the classes sold before they even put them up on the website that nobody goes to.

Then I am hosting the tomato, cantaloupe and pear taste testing before the general membership meeting.  I hope I don't get there tomorrow and David took all the cherry tomatoes that were in the frig to the food pantry.  Maureen showed up with a bag of veggies from home after we left with the harvest.  Just put them in the frig and I will take them over to the pantry Friday with the leftovers from the meeting.  David found another zucchini and I told him to just put it in Maureen's bag and what the plan was for that.  But 5 minutes later when he got into Marsha's meeting, they informed him of Maureen's donation and somehow it totally forgot everything I told him and decided he would run it over today.  So where both groups told him a bag, there was two extra bags of tomatoes in there I've been talking about for two weeks now.  Did he think those were Maureen's too or did realize people were saying a bag as in one.  I'll see tomorrow.

Yeah, that was long winded but as soon as Marsha told me, I went, fuck.  I deal with David, Kevin and a whole other handful of people like that everyday.   :hihi:  I keep my guard up.  In this case, Tom has the big tomatoes home with him, Kristine has the pears and I have the cantaloupe.  The cherry tomatoes were just extras.

Busy day tomorrow but I'm planning on smooth sailing, look how wrong you can be.  :hihi:

So the tomatoes were there, Maureen's bag gone and the zucchini that David found was sitting in the frig.   :hihi:  I can not explain these people.

Everything ran nice and smoothly.  The taste testing was a big hit.  I recruited a new tree and shrub lead.  Phoebe is almost at the point of taking over lead for the pantry.  And I got Daniel assigned to Marsha with the goal of don't let her pick up a shovel.  I told the whole group we were going to do this big work session at one point, dig out dirt here and sand there, take it over to here.  They sounded like they would come help.  Marsha said maybe she and I might get it done before then.  No Daniel and I will try to crank it out while you're recovering from chemo.  If we can't I'm calling on the group and you're supervising.

One more day of excessive heat.  We're still a full sun garden, harvest and water people.

Couldn't end my night without giving Marsha one more call.  Forgot something and I won't be there Saturday.  Then we got talking.

The president asked how many people read the handbook for the convention.  Not many and I'm not reading it.  You handed me the hand book for how I would do a motorcycle convention for 500 people.  They are only doing 150 people.  This gets striped down now.  I'm not paying for buses to take people on tours.  Not paying for dinners with speakers.  Not blocking off hotel rooms.  All that costs big bucks.  No way to make your deposits back with that number of people.  I will spare you the details but the whole thing is getting downsized, offers the one thing people want to buy, advanced training, and for folks who don't want to come, you can zoom into class for a cheaper ticket.  Our group has experience in the money making part of this and the rest don't cost us.  Even Marsha was impressed with what we came up with and moved into we can do this.  And then both of us said, I'm not chairing this!   :hihi:  But then we were both going, I can take care of this piece and we were throwing all the pieces together.  I'm thinking we'll cave and we're going to head this up.   :hihi:

Wasn't even 9:00 and Marsha is saying, you and I could head this up.   :hihi:  We are crazy women.  Thing is we both are already incredibly busy in this group.  We got it running our way and now we are getting bored and ready to turn our projects over to other people.  We need new projects all the time to keep our interest.  Yeah, I use to do that but now I'm doing this and somewhere down the road I won't be this but something entirely new.  I'm not here for a lifetime.

Shit, I've got 3 eggplants on my counter and I'd rather look at them than eat them.

Oh good, Greg cancelled turf aeration.  Way too early for that.  I know September seems like fall.  It's not, it's the end of summer.  It's more of an October thing.

And he changed his mind.   :hihi:  I got updates all day long on the turf grass treatment.  I guess my little lecture about perfect grass is nothing but a dessert to mother nature didn't take.  Aeration in my opinion is for heavy traffic and just a waste of your money.  Fortunately we get it free.  Greg is paying for his yard to be done.  Really, you're 72, are you driving up to your front door?

Soil test is back for the Bee Bar bed.  It's fine, as I thought, but we did it as a learning tool for the trainees.  We're at 9% organic matter.  A little high.  The native plants get drunk on good soil, they flop over.  Our P and K is high.  I can never remember what that stands for.  One of them, maybe P, can cause plants not to take up nutrients if it's really high.  I've been dumping leaf mulch on that bed for years which is why it's up from our normal 2 to 3 organic matter.  The plants in there now grow really well so unless we have a problem, there is no need to add additives.

I sent out warning Thursday one of the wood trellis in the pantry bed was about to fall over and to leave it alone until we could remove it Saturday.  It fell Friday, fortunately in the bed.  Unfortunately the guy who had the bed jerry rigged it and put it back up.  Please just, take it out, fix it right and put it back up.  We don't fix things the way I do it.   :hihi:

No, that's just going overboard.  The Bee Bar is leaving a small open ground for nesting ground bees because that is what most of our native bees do.  The Safety and Design Committee is concerned kids will go up and dig in it.  They want a protective box with a lid that has a lock on it.  First off it's in the middle of a bed.  Kids can do that anywhere in the garden.  If they are attracted to the spot by an educational sign then they can read the word bees.  These bees are pretty docile unless provoked.  And it's not like there isn't bee hives 25 feet from there.  You're more in danger of getting stung by them if you're being obnoxious in that area.

And they are worried mean wasps will use it and how would we deal with that.  Same as anywhere else in the garden, wait til it's dark, fill the nest with killing foam and run!

The biggest risk is to the gardeners if they stand on it too long.  Then again you aren't supposed to be working a bed unless the lead, who would remind you, tells you to work in that bed.

7 hours on the daylilies and nowhere near done.  There's over 100 of them.  Normally it takes me 16 hours to weed the whole thing but it's going to take more this time.  The lead has let the grass grow in from the sides and I have to pull that all back.  I don't think he's weeded them all year.

I refer to them as the party bus.  When we aren't protecting them from the deer, they need weeding.  They all bloom at one time.  They are my problem child in the garden.  I enjoy weeding them.  They've never been my garden but I've been working them since 08.  You want to be alone in the garden, tell people you are weeding the daylilies.   :hihi:  It's a pretty easy weed.  I've had them heavily mulched for years and the weeds come right out.  There's just so many of them!  This time they need their mulch too.

The lead is suppose to be getting a new border for them.  I've held out long enough waiting for him to weed.  He's got two weeks to get the border before he loses funding.  If he gets it, I want to be ready to install it the moment he pulls them out of the car.

Marsha didn't get where she wants the path marked off on Saturday so now I can't do that while she's out with chemo the next two weeks.  Talked to her husband Sunday.  He's worried about her picking up a shovel too.  Appreciates I'm looking out for her.  Him too.  He's gone with her to every medical appointment.  I can see the fear in his eyes he will lose her.  Marsha is a lucky woman to be so well loved.  We had a lot of fun Sunday.  Chemo started today.

Marsha texted me at 1:30 so she wouldn't forget.  Yeah I heard that.  She wants to move the one grapevine trellis over a foot.  Not my decision, hers but fuck.  Stop coming up with new shit to do when you haven't finished what you started.  This going to throw off the schedule to dig out the path and bring over the sand.

Back at the garden around 7 till noon, mostly daylilies.  No where close to done on that.  Kevin says he's mowing on Thursday.  I need to get the outer boundary back in place by then.  There's no shade out there until 11 and then it's only about 7 daylilies.  It will be all shade later in the day so I can get on them tomorrow evening for a while.  Kevin thinks they look great so far.  Commented on my pretty good for eyeballing it edge.  Gave him a list of what to get at the hardware store when he gets done there.  We really need to replace that wheelbarrow we trashed earlier in the year.  And I want the new pantry garden sign up.  We'll see if he shows up tomorrow with them.  He's all excited I have the date of the big tool shed clean out.   :hihi:

I had to leave and go babysit at the pot plantation.  Caleb took one look at me and said I should have took a shower before I came over.  I can't go downstairs.    Something about contamination.  He sprays down my jeans.  Er, I've been on my hands and knees in the daylilies.  Start at the top of my head and work your way down.   :hihi:  My knees are stained green.  No way my manicure was going to make it through that even with gloves on.  Dirt is going to be under those nails a good long time.

The day lilies are kicking my ass.   :hihi:  I was barely able to get out of bed this morning my hips and butt hurt so bad.

Pretty good session at the gardens today.  I think everybody showed up.  Jim did a class on peppers with samples.  And when your mouth gets too hot, he had chocolate.  I'm a wuss when it comes to hot peppers.  Worked a little on the daylilies but I introduced a new person to the Japanese hoe.  She got 7 of them and wants to come back and do more.  Anytime is good with me. The daylily lead could not answer my question about when the last time he weeded was.  Yeah you can't even come up with a good lie.   :hihi:  He made some comment about my nails.  When I told him just that one side took 10 hours, he said he owed me.  Yeah a manicure.   Marsha even showed up for a minute.  Says they didn't give her one med and she wasn't puking her guts out today.  And in the end, Kevin pulled up with our new wheelbarrow.

Got back to the garden at 4.  I'm getting those daylilies.  Got the other long side with the edge back to where I want the grass line, about a foot.  17 more daylilies to clean up and then I can mulch that side.  The plan is to crank that out tomorrow before my 1:00 meeting.  I'll hit the short side up tomorrow night and hopefully have that done by Saturday night.  I still need to get to my beds but they will have to wait until next Thursday.

We're starting to see the down side of the veggies.  It's hot enough but we are losing the light and they are shutting down.  As the beds get cleaned out, it's still too hot to cover them with black plastic.  Anybody who wants can put in a fall crop but nobody is doing it.  We're tired.  They are going into cover crops.  Tours and fall projects are coming up.  Not sure how that's going to go, we're tearing the place up.   :hihi:  But the daylilies will look nice.  Wait, they are getting a new border.  I again encouraged the daylily lead to go buy that this weekend.  We'll see.

Kind of went out of order on approval of the 3 bed renovations.  I already got approval from our horticultural specialist and from the office.  Once it passed Marsha, it's a go, the rest of them just follow along.  Damn, we have a lot to do this fall.

Long side of the path done.  Got up there at 6:46, home for lunch.  If I can get out of my meeting by 3 that gives me 4 hours, spend a few more there in the morning, I may finish up.  Haven't really looked at the condition they are in.  The long side is beautiful minus the path needs work.

Brian is up there in the mornings hunting bugs with his camera and waiting to see if the turtles hatch.  Nice to have somebody else around.  Then again I haven't had enough coffee yet to be social.   :hihi:

Need two wheelbarrows of mulch and the daylilies are finished.  I'm not sure if I could have cranked that out at the end of the day.   :hihi:  I have to be there in the morning to water anyway so I gave it up.

The fall garden tours made the magazine in the events section, no story.  And the email invite went out to 1100 people.  Facebook posts about to go up.  36 people signed up before the media stuff started.  325 slots in total.  Not a great presale.   :hihi:  Tonight I'm asking myself what did I do?   :hihi:  Besides tours and projects, we have new trainees coming in.

Talked to Marsha.  She just has a bad case of heartburn.  Smoke some pot!  She's backed up to wanting to try from planning to do.  She's starting to feel like shit.  She wants me to be with her in case she can't do it.  Agreeable but I'm out of the garden until next Thursday.  She seemed relieved she had more time before she would force herself to try.  That will be her third week.  In other treatments the third week has been okay for her.  Her cancer numbers are showing she is responding very well.

The daylilies are done!   :D  Man did I feel like shit this morning.   :hihi:  But a couple wheelbarrows later the body was warmed up and ready to go.

I forgot, cats are coming to the garden.  Lots of us are cat people especially Marsha.  I found this cheap stuff from China and am having a good time.  Each one is silently dedicated to certain people but Marsha and I aren't saying who.
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My favorite.  :D  Not secretly named for Marsha or me.   :hihi:

It probably warrants a full blown psychiatric diagnosis but we're going to call it hyper sensitivity to food waste.  I've mentioned some of his quirks about the blackberries and tomatoes before.  I know he was raised on a farm in one of the poorer sections of the state.  He's done missionary work in some of the poorer countries.  But when they sold the family farm, if he didn't have money, he now does.  He's pretty fit and trim, runs marathons.  So what is this obsession with food?  Jim calls me with his latest food quirk.  After the pepper class Jim offers him the leftover bag of chips.  He accepts and then leans over the trash bucket and begins pulling out chips in there and throwing them in the bag.   :o 

He could have taken them home and thrown them to the birds.  All evidence points to that probably didn't happen.   :hihi:  I hope he knows better than to donate those somewhere.  I'm not sure what this is all about?

The daylily lead called me.  He was on his way to pick up the border for the garden, yea!  He wanted to buy me a gift certificate for a manicure.  :hihi:  No, nails are over with until we get through the fall.  Way too many projects going on to have decent nails.

I'd like to say all was quiet while I was away from the garden but those people were blowing my phone and email up.   :hihi:  My mother says what is that all about, you're just weeding up there.  One would think that.  I am retired and this is all volunteer work.  What I have is a second career with a staff of 35 and part of the management team of a small business.  We got a little carried away.

I need a minute.  I'm getting ready to run at full force.  The mold count is way high.  My eyes are burning and I'm dragging.  I've had way too much food.  I'm pretending to be interested but I just want to sleep.  The only cure for this is I have to get off my ass and work.  I've got nothing but meetings for a few days.

Leads meeting coming up Saturday.  It's all about the budget and the fall projects.  We've got a lot going on. 

My minute is over.  Took me 4 hours of mowing and trimming to break it.  All that kicking my own ass last week followed by 3 days of downtime and eating out pushed my mood and energy level into a hole.  I've got to manage my high exercise level better.  The crash when I stop just sucks.  Plus I'm too old to be going at it like that.  Something is going to give out.  I say that after I overloaded the wheelbarrow with sand today.  I did stop and rest once halfway across the garden.  And have Steven muscle it through a ditch.  I would have got it into the ditch but there was no way I was getting it out.  I used a smaller one for the second load.  :hihi:

Steering committee tomorrow.  Sitting on my ass for 3 hours, like I do that so well, then I have to empty those wheelbarrows.

And I forgot the other side of all that activity.  Not sure if it's an upside or a down side.  Got myself all revved up and I'm up at 5 in the morning.  The sun isn't even up for another hour and a half.   :hihi:

Mums are out.  So far I've put in 8.  6 purples at mom's to pair with the orange marigolds, looks good.  Need one more for the garden or maybe a few more depending on how many plants I pull out.  Why yes, they do sell Reese's Peanut Butter cups at the same place they sell mums.  Wonder how many of those I would have to plant to burn off a bag of Halloween peanut butter cups?   :hihi:

Steering committee under 2 hours!   :o  But then everyone wanted to go to lunch.  Marsha and I were kind of late doing the garden shopping.  She got more planks for the boardwalk and I got ground cloth.  Guess I'm digging out the main path this fall too.  She's doing well.  She wants to do a lot.  Got a week before her next chemo.  Weather is cooling off next week so maybe we can work on some things.

Leads meeting, I got everything I wanted plus more!  First off, Phebe, the lady who can make eggplant taste good, is going to be the new pantry lead.  Besides I don't have to cover it any more, she is perfect.  Phebe has been gardening all her life and knows how to cook with it.  She's already got plans for the pantry beds.  I can let her just run with it.  Greg agreed to take over maintenance of the paths.  I know, he's too heavy handed on the chemical spraying but that is the one place where we need it.

The budget, I still have $3500 that hasn't been allocated so we can give that back when the main budget really needs it.  Everyone seems to understand the need to take better control of the budget and to cut back spending.  The long list of fall projects is maned and scheduled.  During break California David showed up, he's been gone for years, looked at our emergency project (right after we complete fall projects) and will take care of it for under $100.  And next year's, as soon as we have money project, is scheduled to start next week, also for under $100.  They cleared my to do list!

The 3 renovation beds all passed.  With crowdsourcing almost everything we need, plants and cinder blocks, was covered.  The only thing we need is a little soil and I think I just scored that.

For a day where I lost out on a GNR concert, it couldn't have gotten any better.  We'll see what I'm saying before the next concert in November.  I could be sitting in my seat with my feet up and big smile on my face.  Might have a little trouble getting back out of it but the band will help me out with that.   :D

One minute please to take care of my own house.   :hihi:  Marsha is on a roll.  Ran up to help them with the delivery of screenings.  She wasn't going to bring that till Wednesday.  I'm going back tonight to work on my own beds because work starts first thing Monday morning on the edging for the daylily path.  Marsha wants Tuesday to dig out in her area, all day!  Pray for cloud cover.  It's cool all week.  I'm anxious to start on the dig out of the main path.  85 feet long and 6 feet wide.  She has chemo again the following Monday so I should be able to take that week to do it.  I would really like to finish her first round of dig outs this week.

Anyway, it's mum season and I want some more.

Oh yeah, Greg had no idea he was the new path lead.  He just wants to spray the chemicals.   :hihi:

I can always tell when people come across that big frog I got for the garden.  You can hear the gasp.   :hihi:  Ran out of daylight and only got two of my beds.  That side of the building can only be worked early in the morning or late afternoon when the sun gets off of it.  I forgot I need to wash the mud off the rocks where the bricks are going.  I think I've got 9 buckets of rock.  Still not sure how to do that exactly but I better not get the mud on Greg's grass.  Marsha wants to take away his playtime with the chemicals if he won't agree to be lead.   :hihi:  No.

They only had 3 yellow mums.  I like the yellow or the dark burgandy.  I could use a couple more or maybe a dozen.   :hihi:

I got up there at 6:30 and got home at 5, no lunch.  We had cool weather and cloud cover and I wasn't going to waste it.  Kevin seriously underestimated the amount of edging he needed.  Another $500.  We only got the two long sides done.  I got to cut 10 landscape timbers with a handsaw.  Fortunately most of them were rotten.  We'll finish it off Wednesday.  Beka scored a chocolate vine out of it.  Not sure if we can move it or if there is a way to propagate it.  Moved from that to 3 hours of washing rocks.   :hihi:  Kevin better be ready to put in the bricks.  I'm taking up a lot of the weed buckets.  Worked with Marsha for a little while on her stone path.  We're just about to connect it to the rest of the path.  Tomorrow we dig all day on her paths where the boardwalk goes.

Marsha's white blood cells are off.  Says it's normal for chemo but she has to be careful not to catch anything.  She was very excited how far the stone path got.  :D

6.5 hours of digging out the paths for the boardwalk in Marsha's area.  She hung in there for 4 hours.  "I'm not use to this kind of work."  You're going through cancer treatments, you're strong enough.  Wet clay is heavier than your normal dirt but it is easier to dig when it's wet.  I didn't even try to keep track of the number of wheelbarrows.  We are filling up a slope we have behind the hoop house.

Marsha brought me a bag of Reese's Peanut Butter cups in Halloween shapes.  We shared with a few folks in the office.  Kind of had to since they were starting to melt and I needed to put them in the frig.  I saved two for tomorrow.

I don't think I'm digging out the main path next week.  We are nice and cool this week but next week we go back into the 80's.

Daylily path completed.  California Dave on it, should be able to finish up on Saturday.  Catherine set to start her project Saturday and do it in two work sessions.  Lawn class a go on Saturday.  Donna started dig and divide.

Marsha's crew, all 7 of them, really, that's all they got done?  Kevin says he'll get to the bricks in October.   :rant:  Phebe told Kevin she was taking out two of the pantry beds.  I couldn't walk away quick enough from that conversation.   :hihi:

So sore last night I couldn't lay down.  :hihi:  Got up feeling okay, just not enough sleep.  I think I will start on that path on Friday.

Marsha had a little episode of her former abusive self.  I try not to get to far into that because it makes everybody uncomfortable but I'm not being treated like that.  I kind of wondered what happen to that side of her during this whole cancer treatment.  Turns out she was on antidepressants.  She recently told me she had taken herself off them.  I'm thinking she needs those.  If she brings up today's incident, I'll broach the subject, otherwise, no way in hell am I suggesting she take her fucking meds.   :hihi:

I'm in a rush, lots of projects going on and to finish by the end of October.

That was lovely.  I'm having my trees trimmed Sunday.  To make room for more, I worked on burning my brush pile tonight.  I am so lucky to be able to have a firepit in the backyard.

So Marsha called, sort of admitted I was right once she thought about it.  She does that too.  Her way of apologizing.  Man, lets do not go back to this behavior.  Marsha and I actually physically work well together.  We have a rhythm, not in each others way and can anticipate what the other needs.  We can crank some shit out without tripping over each other.  But Kevin was pissed about taking out two of the pantry beds.  We all got a text about the proper way to store the lawnmower.  Yeah we have to talk about that.  Nobody uses the bagger so it doesn't need to sit on the mower.  And the trimmer battery plugged in charging doesn't need to sit on top of the engine when most of us put it away hot and there is a gas tank right there.  We'll just leave that alone for now and address it when we clean out the machine shed.

I did score some pink veronica (speedwell) today.  I'm rather fond of the purple but pink will do.  It's a good little ground cover with spiked flowers poking out of it.  Only blooms till it starts getting really hot but it gives your taller, heat loving plants in the back time to get going.  Well behaved.  It's foliage can look a little weedy so remember where you plant it.

I have a problem with the main path.  A lot of water comes off the parking lot and washes down that path.  You can see the washout in about the first 30 feet.  I dig all that out I'm going to have an 85 foot slip and slide.  I'm thinking about leaving the middle of the thirty feet and angling it so it gradually spreads the water off to the sides.  If I do that will all those wood chips just wash off into the grass and create a bigger problem?  Paths isn't something people know about.  It's more of a trial and error thing based on experience.  I'm not really into that, do it right the first time.  I'll see if Jim has an opinion but I'm thinking if you don't know what to do, do no harm and I'm not going to do anything with that first 30 feet.  If I can get cloud cover Saturday, I'll start the dig out in the afternoon.  If I do mornings I should be able to avoid the heat.

I'm going to delay digging out the path.  We have a lot of projects going on and that path is getting use.

Not really sure about the chocolate bed.  They built up the area to put the building there and I'm going 15 to 18 inches down in that sand.  Where is the sand and where is the dirt under there and how far to the sides does it go?  Maybe we should just dig out some of the sand and drop a foot of soil on it.  I don't know.  Beka wanted to build a retaining wall for the slope but you've got to get down to the ground.  If the slope is too much she'll have to terrace it but the Bird ZGarden is there next to it and she didn't have that much sand in that.  The other side is the tool shed.  Doesn't make sense they would have had that deep of a dip in that small area.

We connected the stone path in Marsha's area to the other one but her crew didn't get that in there right so she wants to relay about a 3 foot area.  Should finish tomorrow but then the whole thing has to sit a little bit before she can put the screening in between the stones.  She brought in another load of screening and has another coming tomorrow.  We're filling in the paths and Jim has agreed to help build the planks.  Hopefully all the dugout paths can be finished by the time she gets back from this round of chemo.

Somebody went dumpster diving.  They left us several hanging baskets.  It's well known the big box stores start dumping leftover plants this time of year.  Put some in our containers that were looking bad and the rest out for people to take as houseplants.  I may dig out a few I planted before the frost and over winter them.  That one plant is pretty expensive.  I like it but lord knows I don't need another plant in this house.  I always say I'm not bringing a lot of those plants back in the house but I always end up with more than I put out for the summer.

Tired of hearing my neighbor complain about the native plants I have between our driveways.  Told him I would dig them out this fall and put in grass.  We can look like every place on the street.  Just shut up.   What I'd really like to say is there any chance some day you could make room in your garage for your cars so your driveway doesn't look like a fucking parking lot all the time?  :hihi:

Oh yeah, I've hit the wall.  That path dig out can wait.  Introduced some of the new trainees to the gardens.  Nice group of people.  The fall first tour was the lawn class.  Only 5 people.  It went two hours and they never got out to the turf demo area.  Everybody thought it was great and had a good time so no complaints the.

Marsha was two rocks short of finishing the rock path.  The retaining wall started to be rebuilt in the cottage garden and the block step at the greenhouse is almost rebuilt.  The two are the emergency projects scheduled for next year.  This is great except people keep handing me bills and that $3500 we were giving back this year is taking a hit.  I'd like to be both, ahead of schedule and have extra funds, but truth is they were going to have to give those funds back next year.

The last of my brush pile is burning up.  Joey comes tomorrow to trim my trees and I'll have a new brush pile.  Sandy told me those are illegal.  I've had one for 25 years.  Who knew?

Big new brush pile.  Joey did a good job.  My elm in the front needed a lot of work after it lost part of it in a storm.  Two of the neighbors came over and hired him to do a couple trees in their yards.  Young guy, wife, 2 babies and a house payment, who else wants trees trimmed?   :hihi:  He has all the equipment from when he trimmed trees for the electric company.  The guy has experience.

I'm about to pull into the food pantry with the harvest, Radar Love comes on the radio.  Only one of the best, great driving songs!  Should I take these veggies for a drive or turn in?  Crossed my mind a couple of times.   :hihi:

Not sure what happen.  The woman in the office told me she sent out the fall tour announcement, twice, to 1100 people.  Nobody was signing up from that group which I found hard to believe and a few people told me they never saw it.  So I checked with the head lady Friday to see if something had gone wrong.  She immediately emailed the person who sent them out to ask her to forward the email she sent out.  Jumped right to she suspected the person didn't do their job and lied to me.  This morning I got a copy of the email and people started signing up for the tours.  I got forwarded a couple of questions from the person who sent out the emails from people.  One of them from 9:18 tonight.  Why is she checking her office email after hours?  Is she in trouble?

One of Marsha's cancer numbers isn't as low as the doctor hoped to see it.  He added two more chemo treatments.  She had her treatment today.  She's got a couple of days until the sickness kicks in but plans to be at the garden Saturday.  She did get good news.  Her cancer has a very low risk of mutating to other cells.  Honestly, I don't know if I could keep standing if something happen to her.  We have a bunch of stuff going on Saturday.  I need her to stay home, get better and not push it.  She's been working way to hard, probably why that number isn't as low as the doc wants it.

We got a lot done today.  The sandpit was half dugout and one of the boardwalk paths got done.  The wall for the cottage garden got worked on.  The big work session is Saturday for the 3 bed renovations with Sunday if we don't get done.  There's a threat of rain but I think we can crank out the bed renovations on Saturday.  I may take Friday and get them started.  Tomorrow I have tool sharpening class and then we pick flowers for the flower show.  Looks like cloud cover, I'm working. 

Only let down was Kevin saying he would now do the brick project in November.  He thinks I'm worried about getting it done.  No, I'm pissed.  A couple of hours and he could have it done.  I want to wrap up these projects and be done with it.  Yes, so I can squeeze in a few more.   :hihi:  It's okay, Jim is going gangbusters on building planks.  He gets those done, I'll get him to do the brick project.  As soon as Phebe gets back in town I'm turning the pantry beds over to her.  They are almost done for the year.

Marsha is being over controlling.  Probably one of those, I can't control the cancer but I can control this.  I'm being patient but I'm in mid work my ass off, I've got a lot going on and I really don't feel like chatting on the phone.  Says she's not feeling too bad.  Went to the post office today with her husband, all she could handle.  Why did she even push herself to do that?  I know, she's fighting death.

Was at the gardens from 8 to 6.   :hihi:  Leslie and I started cutting flowers for the flower show at noon and still had to make a dash to get them to the show on time.  We only have around 25 entries and they had a lot of entries there.  I don't think we will walk away with that many ribbons.  Our plants were in serious need of rain which I got on the way home and slowed traffic to a crawl.   :rant:

My ornamental kale I was so excited about wasn't ready.  They say you have to kill it twice to learn a plant.  I didn't kill it but I definately planted it at the wrong time and let the bugs have it.  Not sure if I will grow that again.

Pantry donations are a little under 1500 pounds.  We're starting to shut the beds down.  We could have grew into October but we're just ready to wrap it up.  I'd like to say I'm getting ready to slow it down after the fall projects but we need to get the seed orders together to catch the black Friday sales on those.  Who would have thought seeds went on sale on black Friday?  My down time doesn't happen until the second Friday in December.

I did set up the homeschooled kids for Monarch tagging next week.  This could be a pretty good partnership with them teaching plant stuff.

I had to dig out a 3X3 foot area of Purple Shamrocks, Oxalis, to harvest the little bulbs.  They were looking so good too.  Took me 6 hours.  I got a half a bucket full.  Was going to leave it for the trainees to do tomorrow but it's delugate work and I want them moving.

Caught a couple of people running rough on me today.  I appreciate the initiative, reminds me of myself, but no you need to get permission for that.  Not so much they can't do that but did you know this was going on?  Did you know all wheelbarrows are spoken for, we have that already, I'm not paying for that and I can't tell you to do something different when Marsha told you to do that.

Did talk to Marsha.  She sounds tired.  She's coming tomorrow but did agree to sit it out and just supervise.  On top of two major dig out projects we are tagging Monarchs tomorrow too.

Wonder how we did at the flower show.  Was tempted to go see but I have to pick everything up on Sunday.  I'm hoping Earl and Beka got some of the big awards.

On my way to the garden I picked up a toddler bike and an electric car for my grandson out of somebody's front yard.  Yes, they had a free sign on it.   :D

Damn it got hot but the 3 bed renovations got dug out, 13 people showed up for the native tour, 6 monarchs were tagged, more of the wall in the cottage garden got worked on, the step outside of the greenhouse got finished, Marsha almost finished her rock path, Jim cranked out a special plank and two more, and Donna got more plants dug out for the plant sale.  Forgot, the veggies got harvested.   :D  Great work session!  And we're not done yet.

We took two of the three, top prizes at the flower show along with various ribbons.  Donna got a top prize for her Indian Grass and Marsha for Thai Basil.  Two of our hardest working people.  I don't remember if we entered any of my flowers.  We only had 28 bottles so we picked the most interesting ones.  The Dahlias took first and second, first time we've shown them.

Marsha was pretty tired leaving there today.  She got home and the nursery had delivered two of her fruit trees for the gardens.  That plus the ribbon, she was sounding pretty good.   :D

Great day, I'm going to grab a nap.  :D

Happy first day of fall.

Aww, poor little barberry got disqualified for being an invasive.  The color on that was stunning.  I got a third and an honorable mention.  :-\  We did well overall.  28 entries and 27 got ribbons.

I was checking off the repair of the step at the greenhouse from my to do list but then I realized I need to seed up the new slope there.  And if I do that, it makes it easier for Kevin to drive the zero turn up there.  Oh no, not again.  The last time he did that he ran into my pot and broke it beyond repair.  It has a pretty good slope up there too and if he slides it, he'll go into the greenhouse.  It's also one way so he has to back out of there unless he wants to destroy my pot.  Fucker denied hitting it the first time.  :hihi:  I can tell you right now he's going to do it too.  He tears up my new grass I'm going to be pissed.  He breaks my pot, oh well, I'll get another.  I don't have to hand mow it when he does that and I've almost fallen into the greenhouse a couple times myself.  May not be all bad.  :D

Hold on, the Missouri Botanical Garden does not list the barberry as invasive in Missouri:  "This plant is listed as a noxious weed in one or more Midwestern states outside Missouri and should not be moved or grown under conditions that would involve danger of dissemination."  So should we say something to the flower show people?  On the one hand, they think we are idiots for submitting and invasive and on the other hand they picked on our poor little Barberry!

We finally got rain but were still running way above in temps.  Everybody looked pretty beat when we left today.  Lots of digging going on.  The hole we are filling up with all this dirt has attracted bumble bees.  They are trying to make a home in the dirt and we are trying to add to it.  It was easy to stop because they were chasing us but we can't use the excuse much longer.  Mostly prep work done today.  Finished digging out the sand pit and the path for the other boardwalk path.  Marsha and I will go out Friday, clean it up and put in the screenings.  Hopefully they can finish it up Saturday.  In the meantime, they started cutting down one of the fruit trees.

Squash is still going strong and beans in the pantry garden.  Tomatoes are just about played out, waiting on the pumpkins.  My regular eggplant, black beauty, is still flowering.  I haven't got one eggplant off of there.  We're hot still all next week.

This is math I can't even do!  We want to build a planter box on a hill.  The back is going to be higher than the front and the sides are going to be stair stepped.  I should be able to take the slope of the hill and the width of the bed and come up with how high that back wall should be.  One gets divided into the other, not sure which one but I have to remember how to figure out slope before going there.  It's been 40 years since I've taken am algebra class and they never used those formulas to explain it this way!  And to make matters worse, you have to stagger the blocks.  They can't be stacked directly on top of each other.  It's 53 blocks by my figuring, the long way, but how many of those are half blocks?  And where do you put those half blocks to keep your wall strong?  How do we even know if the back wall is going to hold that hill? 

You know there's a reason you pay a professional to build these things.   :hihi:  I do have a Boeing engineer and Marsha.  But I'm wondering why we are even building a box there.  We're planting the whole hillside.   

Oh thank god, we do not have to build a retaining wall just a decorative one.  That cuts out half the stones.

We decided that all plants for the gardens, where possible, will be grown from seed through our plant sale.  This is our first time doing this.  The list of what we are growing was sent out tonight.  They can request different seed packets but the goal is to demonstrate what we sell for the most part.  It saves us money and maximizes the growing space in the greenhouse.  Will take a few times of doing this to perfect it.

Marsha and I were revising the policies and procedures for the demo gardens.  She wrote the majority of it and made a rule about using the gardens for education!  The shift in thinking has happen.  I won the war.  Did I mention Marsha's education signs are on a fuschia background?  :hihi:  I never would have taken her for a fuschia person.  That color won't hold up in our sun but hey, she did it.

More boardwalk digging and prep today.  In the heat, moving wheelbarrows.  Another phone call from my mother, "were you pulling weeds out there?"   :hihi:  One would think.

Ah no, back to a retaining wall.   :hihi:

So hot out there today we had another person over come by the heat.  More work on the boardwalk, stone walk and retaining wall in the Cottage garden.  Two garden tours and dig and divide work with the plants.  We were busy.  I'm beat.  We cool off later next week.  Should make it a little easier on us.  Progress but we still have a long way to go on completing the fall projects.

I'm going to the botanical gardens tonight to see the light show.  I hope that plant that sells like death is gone.  I've already had that smell in my garage.   :hihi:

And we're back to dig all the sand out.   :hihi:  And how are we keeping the center of the fall from collapsing in?  Blocks going lengthwise instead of widthwise on the bottom layer.  Dirt in the front even with dirt in the back.   And we are just not building it that high!  Yes we are because that sand goes down a good 18 inches.  I told ya it was humped up to begin with and take all the sand out.  I don't know shit about building but I do know start with a clean slate.  You just end up doing things many times if you don't.  I can't help but have visions of Axl's retaining wall coming down.  His house has to be built on a pile of sand and rock.  How do they deal with all that?  Not very well the first time but I assume they figured out what went wrong the last time.

Today was spent filling up the holes in the cinder blocks with sand.  You know where that came from.   :hihi:  The wall, we're talking the cottage garden here, is finished.  Now we need to put the caps on the top.  Marsha and I are doing that Tuesday.  They get glued down.  Normally, your tops are one solid piece but Marsha donated the cheaper kind where the middle has the two big holes like a regular cinder block.  This might be better.  This area, the hole as I lovingly call it, fills up with flood water regularly and of course all the rain water runs down the hill.  The reasons the wall was coming down in the first place.  The block below the topper is in ground against the slope.  If water can pass through those holes on the cap, it won't be applying pressure against the cap which is attached to the block below it.  It should stay in place, right?  At least until after I'm dead.   :hihi:  Anyway, while I'm working the wall, I look up and the wall above it needs redone and the one below it too.  They are more outlining walls for the garden beds but they suck.   :hihi:  Next year or the one after for that.   :hihi:

It's still in the 80's out there, summer weather.  Later next week we get fall weather but now I'm in a panic to get all these things done before winter weather gets here.  Marsha's husband was helping us today.  I ask him what he had planned on doing today besides this.  "We're working on our wills."  I had to laugh out loud.  It's not cancer that is going to kill us or any of those other things, it's the garden.  And we'll be doing exactly what we are doing now.  Out here in the heat with shovels and wheelbarrows.  Nobody has died in the garden yet.  I'll probably be the first.   :hihi:

So for the Chocolate garden wall we need one of those black plastic tubes wrapped in fabric.  I'm trying very hard not to spend any more of our budget.  Okay, have some of that black tube I didn't throw away when I was cleaning up an area.  And I bought landscape fabric to do the paths.  Got more of that then we need, we're covered there.  I have a guy bringing me a load of one inch rock and we have the screening.  Got it covered.  Love that I don't have to buy any more stuff but I like it even more that I don't have to make another trip to Menards.

We were at our Botanical Gardens last night.  I'm always so underwhelmed when I see it.  I look around and think there's nothing attractive here.  It's more like a park then Disneyland.  The whole place is mostly shades of green.  There's no pops of color.  They go between dense forest and desert in their designs.  I'm not sure what's missing in their overall design.  I would start with huge spaces of color.  That's expensive and may be why you don't see it.  I would thin out those buildings with tropical plants.  They are using natives but they have a whole other place for that.  They really don't look good in front of the building.

They had the glass light display on last night.  They've had that before and kept a couple of pieces from the last time they did that.  The old ones looked faded and like they hadn't been cleaned in a long time.  The new ones, either too much light or not enough.  There's so much they do with LED lights these days that this just looked old fashioned.  I think it's time has ended.

Our place doesn't look that great right now either.  Lack of rain and the end of the growing season.  I don't think the Botanical Gardens suffers from funding, it's just directed in the wrong place, not for staff.  You see them do big projects with structures but I bet the actual funding for maintenance people is lacking.  We have the same problem.  If we just had more people to take care of the place.

Quarterly count up, 850.5 volunteer hours.  Doesn't include all the phone calls, emails and computer time.

And it changes again.  Back to we're just not going to put that much work into a wall.  Oh thank god.  Two or three more work sessions and the three renovation beds should be ready for spring planting.  I did stop by some stuff set by the side of the road for free.   :hihi:  Got the enclosure cage for the in ground bee area.  It's a small animal crate.  That should work.  Maybe we can grow a small vine on it for shade.  The ground under there should be bare earth, bumble bees and native bees are in ground nesters.

It's still hot but I went ahead and put grass seed around the area where the step at the greenhouse was repaired.  I'll just have to water everyday until we get rain and it cools off.

I'm on my way to babysit at the pot plantation.  It's clean up the flower heads day.  I'm keeping my shoes on this time.   :hihi:

Can't say that didn't hurt.  My SIL went off on me when I showed up today.  Kept saying he wanted me just to be the grandma.  Trying to get to the meaning of that, he was pissed that I invited them to the zoo.  He wants to have that experience with his child without me.  Said I need to find somebody.  Okay, is this because I invited my daughter to a concert in the spring, one in the fall that didn't happen and tried to make up for that by inviting her to the garden light show?  I invited him to the concerts but only had one extra ticket for the light show.  I just tried to make peace.  Didn't mention it to my daughter when she came home.  I'm sure he will tell her all about it.  He didn't know what to say to me after the conversation.  Did say they were both on the same page. 

Okay, you know, I'm just a parent trying to have an experience with my child even though she's all grown up with a family of her own.  I don't think once every 3 or 4 months is out of line especially when I try to include her family.  Can't say I don't deserve that though.  I treated my mother the same way.  Once I got into my adult life I pretty much ignored her and thought she was a pain in the ass when we did get together.  I didn't roll model that relationship very well.

The stone path in the Fruit Arboretum is done!  We just set the top blocks in place on the cottage garden wall.  Decided to wait until the lead gets back to make sure it's how she wants it.  I was glad we could finish Marsha's project.  She has another round of chemo Monday.

Aw, my grandson has a double ear infection and is teething.  Knew he was off his game yesterday.

It was all going so well with Marsha until we came back after lunch.  Then it was some comment about the grasshopper, the sign for the pantry bed, and then some comment about the brick project not being done.  All of this is somehow coming off as my fault.  On the bricks I say I tried to get him started by doing half of it but he keeps delaying it.  Blames that on me too with a you know how you are with pushing people.  Excuse me but the last project he told me he would do, 3 years later he still hadn't done it and I still ended up having to do that.  Plus she complains about him all the time as being a procrastinator.  Try to let that one roll off my back.  I wanted her to look at some construction because I think it needs some glue under the bricks.  She walks up saying I had over did it by putting up caution tape around it.  I had seeded the area is why the tape was up.  Okay so she backed off there but then she's saying she's putting a bench there so we won't have to worry about it.  Why?  It's not that big of an area for a bench and we don't need seating there.  Came back at me, I should move the pothead planters I have sitting on the benches to decorate around the greenhouse during the summer when we don't use it.  I take them away when we are using the greenhouse and there's only one on each bench, plenty of room to still sit there. 

You know, what the fuck?  It ended with a comment about she was getting with Phebe tomorrow when she gets back and making plans to take out two of the pantry beds.  Okay, I don't have a problem with that except the girl just became pantry lead, give her a minute.  But it was more like she was looking for an argument about that.  Yeah, I'm just going home now.  You want to have an argument with someone, you've got a husband, go pick one with him.  Sorry Bob.   :hihi:

Between the SIL yesterday and her today, I'm feeling pretty beat up on.  I'm pretty skilled at not letting things blow up into verbal altercations and calming people down but when it's personal like that it really takes its toll.  You start questioning your own behavior, wondering what you did wrong, where your good intentions went off the rail, are they really right about you.  The double beat up.  They hit you and you hit on yourself.  Miserable place to be.  I just need some quiet time in the garden.  Do something where I see success and not feel like a fuck up.  Mowing grass is good for that.

Phebe is back!  Met with her this morning and turned the pantry garden over to her.  Gave her the leads expectations and assured her I would help with the transition.  I wouldn't say transition.  :hihi:  I'm done.  I'll keep up the watering and want to meet with her and the team to discuss how it went this year.  I guess I should say wrap up my participation.  It wasn't hard doing that but I don't have the knowledge to help the team or the time to look it up.  They need somebody working with them that knows what the plants are doing and need.  Phebe is going to be great!

Garden tours went well today.  Everybody who signed up, showed up.  I did one and Amy did one.  People were very friendly and in no hurry to leave when it was over.  We've had a little rain, enough to run us indoors but not the good drink everybody needs.

Ugh, I might have did it again  I asked my SIL earlier in the week if he was going to need me to babysit.  I'm very busy and trying to babysit for them at the same time so he can work the pot plantation.  He told me he wouldn't need me until next week.  We had already scheduled tomorrow because he was going to pot school all day.  My daughter told me this morning that had been cancelled at the last minute.  I figured I was free and clear and made other plans with Marsha.  So tonight when I mentioned I would bring something over next week to my daughter, she asked if I was still coming over tomorrow.  Apparently he was expecting me to still come.  I hope that didn't cause any friction between them.  You know, I had offered to take the baby overnight since he's sick and keeping them up thinking I was helping out.  They could get a good night's sleep and go to work and school rested.  Otherwise she probably wouldn't have said anything about it.

Talked with a young woman who was on the garden tour yesterday.  She came with her father. She just got out of college with a masters in plant pathology, living back at home with the folks.   :hihi:  Oh yeah that sucks.  Most the time when she was talking, her father was taking little jabs at her.  She was rolling with the punches, just trying to keep the peace.  You could kind of tell she was a sickly kid.  She told us what her health issues were.  Said something about getting all the bad stuff from the genetic pool.   :hihi:  I took an instant liking to her.  You're a trooper kid.

He wasn't hitching.  Marsha and I had passed him walking along the road on our way back to the garden.  He was still walking when I left.  If you are walking the roads around the garden it's generally because your car is broke down.  So I offered him a lift.  Turns out I picked up a restaurant worker from down the street.  His car is broke down and the chain on his bike is busted.  He's a veteran, husband, father of two.  He and his family have been living in the hotel down the street for 3 years.  Just can't afford the high prices for rent around here.  His name is Terry.  Not the sharpest tool in the shed.  I social worked him over.  He has all the services.  Nice guy.  Told him if I saw him out on the road again I'd pick him up.

I scratching the digging out of the path project.  I just don't know if that's the right thing to do.  Marsha's not even sure.  Best to wait until the solution presents itself.

The opportunity presented itself to bring up the SIL issue with my daughter.  He had told her we talked and he didn't want her to say anything.  He had mentioned a few things to her but it sounded to her "it was more about wording".  Told her I wanted to chat with her in more detail about it and maybe set up some boundaries.  Told her I was going to follow up with him next week. 

The Counsel approved our 3 bed renovations.  Not really approved but didn't object and were duly impressed.

I found out the state conference was cancelled due to low registration.  Just what a couple of us have been saying about the event they want us to plan for in 2026.  They are taking the state one virtual for free but no advanced training.  Wonder how much money they lost on that?  I dropped out of our planning committee saying what they were planning I couldn't support.  Wonder how this is going to rock their world now.  We can make money on what Marsha and I came up with.

I am so not ready for this.  It was too hot but now it's too chilly.  I've got all the house plants back in here.  Spent the day working in my own yard and organizing the garage.  Turned on the heater in the car and the house.   :hihi:  If we had been coming at this from spring, it would be a nice day.  As it is I'm putting away the Sloggers and pulling out the hiking boots.  Dressing in layers for the garden tomorrow.  Scheduled mom's yard for Sunday to do fall clean up.

Every year about this time I think I'm not doing this again next year.  I'm tired.  I'm tired of the business side of this.  The politics, the people management and the time it takes.  And every next year I pile on more, get more involved and fight my way through.   :hihi:

We got 3/4 of the cinder block wall done.  Each of those blocks weighs 36 pounds.  And I have this real aversion to getting my fingers crushed!  Once this bed is framed in, just fill it with dirt and it's ready for next spring planting. 

For the moon garden we have to hit the highway.  There's this place where you can get free rock that has fallen from the highway walls, we're going to get us some.  The bed will be lined with it.  Moon garden, moon rocks, following the theme?

We might try to do the hardscape in the three beds but we need to get them covered in cardboard and leaf mulch on top of them.  Time is starting to run out.

I'd say something about the plants but they are all grown up and waiting to die.  I'll start pulling out things next week trying to stay ahead of the weather.  No rush, we have time except I have a lot to do.

I keep forgetting to mention the bald eagle.  I see him, or it might be a her, pretty frequently now.  He fishes in the creek that runs along the garden.  We're about 5 or 7 miles from the river where they nest.  This one looks to be young so maybe we will get a nest by us.  Brian says there is already one to the northwest from us.  There's a lot of building going on in the area so the eagles maybe looking for some quieter spots.  We're in one of those little pockets.

They are something to see but they fly by pretty quickly.  Some of your hunting birds kind of circle around looking for prey or playing in the currents.  These guys seem to always be about their business and dead on for it.  You barely have time to see that white head before they are gone.  He flys about 15/20 feet above the creek, going with the current.

Finally, my Black Beauty eggplant has an eggplant on it.  All summer and nothing, bloomed later than I thought it would too.  Don't know if it has time to produce fruit with the weather changing.

Beka and I are going to try to finish the cinder block wall on Tuesday because it is going to rain on our work day.  I mentioned something about getting started on a cast iron piece, taking the rust off, tomorrow while I'm out there digging up my canna and elephant ears.  And now I guess we are going to paint that Tuesday too.  I was only getting started on that rust.   :hihi:  Guess I'm going to be there awhile tomorrow.

Marsha found a skeleton and fur in the large tool shed.  How does something die in there and we not smell it?  How long has it been there for the gooey to be gone and just the pelt and skeleton be left?  Anybody want to ask again why I have that shed scheduled to be cleaned out on the 25th?  She spent all day working in the greenhouse.  Chemo is tomorrow.  Where's your husband?  Don't you have stuff to do at home?  Questions one would wonder why she's at the garden.  Doesn't surprise me why she's there, just tells me how worried she is.

Carmen is at the Baker seed fall sale.  She sends an email saying everything is two bucks and do I want anything.  I send her a list of 7 seeds all with the word chocolate in it.   :hihi:  Basically if it has the word chocolate in it buy me some.

I ran out of burlap bags before I could finish digging out all the canna and elephant ear bulbs.    I wish that was all there was to it.  They still need to dry, have all the dirt taken off them and roots cut off before they go into storage.

Jim is going to get me in trouble.  He wants to give the creamer a concrete base to attach it to.  You know how Marsha feels about concrete being used out there.  He's going to do it and ask permission later.  You can't involve me in that!  I'm suppose to set the example around here.  I'm still running it by Marsha.   :hihi:

It would take days and a mountain of sandpaper to get the rust off and smooth out the paint chips on that cast iron piece.  Cleaned it up as best as I could.  It's getting painted tomorrow, just don't look that close and wait for the vine to grow up on it, it will be fine.

My grass seed came up!  Hopefully tomorrow I can close out 3 more projects.  Moving right along, only 6 more projects left and they are wrapping up.  I would have cleared them by the end of October except for Kevin and the brick project.  He wants to do that November 12th.  Jim looked at it today and wanted to know what was taking so long.  Glad that annoys him because first chance I get to get off these other projects I'm going to ask him to help me close that one out.

I swear I'm eating and I've been out to eat almost every other day for the last two weeks.  Lord knows I'm hitting up the chocolate!  But I just keep losing weight.  You need a little weight on you to get that shovel through the dirt.  But the worst part is I have to keep pulling up my pants!  Odd complaint, right?  I can range between 130 and 120.  120 I feel like a wuss.  130 and I can kick ass.   :hihi:  I'm headed for wuss and I need kick ass.

Marsha wasn't out of chemo 5 minutes before she texted me and wasn't even in the car yet when she called.  I don't know why.   :hihi:  Something tells me she's going to be at the garden tomorrow.  Normally the chemo doesn't kick in until Wednesday.  Is this some kind of I'm stronger than cancer thing and she's trying to prove it?  She's wearing me out trying to keep up with her.   :hihi:

Yes!  The cinder block wall is finished.  Still need to glue a couple of blocks together and get the toppers.  No show on Marsha and not returning texts.  She will when she can, must have hit her a day early.

The canna bed is completely down and winterized.  I brought home 8 burlap bags of bulbs.  I swear I only put in a bag of bulbs.

SIL text today.  There's something I need to tell him.  A good parent guides their child towards independence.  It's scary when they want to do things on their own like play outside, go out with friends, drive the car.  Heartbreaking when they move out.  As a parent you have to be supportive and not let it show that you are worried, sad and kind of freaking out.  Okay, you would have thought my daughter died when she moved out.  I told her about it years after because I wanted her to know in case she has a similar reaction when her kid goes.  I won't be there to support her.  She said she didn't know I was freaking out.   :hihi:  Anyway, you would think when your kid gets married, one might have some of those reactions you had to the child's independence but no.  When she married him, it was settling.  She had somebody to go through life with.  It wasn't just me anymore.   :D  And he was going to be there everyday.  Lots of pressure off the old mom here.   :hihi: 

Cooking with green tomatoes today.  Didn't sound appetizing to me but it was okay.  Yes we had fried green tomatoes.  It's alright, nothing I would crave.  Some kind of casserole.  Who knows what's in a casserole to begin with, okay too.  Tomato crisp, just like apple crisp, love anything where the brown sugar is the main taste.  A tomato cake, it wasn't green, taste like any other cake but you know I'm just there for the frosting.   :hihi:

SIL asked me to babysit today.  Didn't bring up any issues, I haven't talked to my daughter yet.  But as I was almost to my car, she asked about going to the zoo next week with the SIL standing right there.  I tried to say I was too busy, which I am, only had Friday and he has a doctor appointment.  My daughter picked up on my reluctance but he jumped in and said we could go with him to his doctor's appointment and leave from there.  I'm babysitting tomorrow so I'll talk to him about it.  I wonder if his grandma always took his family places hoping his parents would be parents and she was just jumping in to make up for his parents not doing it.  I can see a kid wishing his parents would be parents and resenting the grandma doing it when she was only trying to make up for their lack of doing it.  He did say his grandmas raised him but the way he talks he lived with his parents. 

No worries about me wanting the parenting role.  I've done that for my kid and many others.  I turned down a street kid just the other day.  I feel for him but I don't want in the middle of that mess and hopefully his grandmother will have a chance to help him.  Please put that mother in jail.  Charges aren't bad enough to keep her there for any period of time.  She'll get out and take that kid but maybe, he's old enough to say he's staying with grandma and she'll hit the road.  You know, just until she gets settled in a new state and he'll never join her.  The kid already wants to run away from her, smart move on his part but he's only 15 by two weeks.

Canceled the last fall tour we had.  It's going to be cold and wet Saturday morning.  Those folks weren't coming anyway.  Fall tours weren't well attended.  Don't think we'll do those next year.  Instead, I think I'll organize a fall festival for us.  My people need some fun.  They've been working pretty hard.  Wheelbarrow races, name that tool, some demonstrations, a craft, monarch tagging and some food.  We haven't done one of those in a while.

Steering committee tomorrow and then I'm off until next Wednesday.

I am so lost with SIL.  Now he's okay with the zoo trip.  Says he wants to do some family time like that.  But he complained about me buying the Halloween outfit.  Did not say your wife told me to pick up some clothes with my Kohl's cash.  I texted her every outfit before I got it and she wanted the Halloween one.   :hihi:  He did say his family was dysfunctional, again, and that I am a really good grandma.  I really need to have a chat with my daughter although she may be as lost as I am.

Yea, Marsha passed the cinder block wall we built.  We want to go up another cinder block in the back but we can't unless we built it different.  But she did suggest we could use 2 of the 4 inch toppers and raise it that way.  Something about the adhesion of the blocks makes it work as opposed to one 8 inch cinder block.  Don't ask me why that wasn't mentioned in the beginning but we're good to go now.

Looking at it, the front of the cinder block box is a little off and the half wooden box above it is way off.  Don't worry the plants will cover it up.  I just want it known, I worked on the back wall and the two halves of the side wall.  They are fucking perfect!  :D  We've been doing quite a bit of stone laying and wall building lately.  I'm getting a real feel for it.  I like it and I haven't crushed my fingers, yet.  Still a little nervous about that.   :hihi:

Donna got state Master Gardener of the year.  Seems to be some confusion over whether the Native Garden got a project award.  I didn't watch the convention.

I'm two for two on my nominations.  :D  Well deserved for Donna and Marsha last year.  Love when my people win a little recognition for all their hard work.

The native team did win the award for project of the year.   :D  We're still waiting to hear if the pantry garden wins Extension their award.  That's a few months away.

We're getting lots of awards this year.  We haven't really focused on entering us into things and now I'm kind of out of award things to enter us in.  Guess I'll look around at the national level.  I would like the whole demo garden to win an award.  I think we've turned it into something.  I'd like the Botanical Gardens here to take note but then I haven't been real impressed with them.

I'm just sitting in the garage all day getting the canna bulbs and elephant ears ready for winter storage.  It's going to take days.

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That's the new pantry sign.  It's only temporarily up there.  It won't be zip tied to 6' t-posts when it's permanent or outside of a bed or two inches off the ground.   :no:

When I say I have trouble getting Kevin to complete a project, you see what I mean.  :rant:  It gives Marsha and I a moment to share a laugh.  :hihi:

Wait, that's crooked right?   :hihi:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNpsm97SG6U  Good talk on how herbicides are causing tree damage from drift, volatility and rain, ie they weren't any where near where it was sprayed.

I saw on a show where they took a dead tree and drilled holes in it for your cavity nesting bees.  We have a bee sign we were going to attach to a post and put up in the Bee Bar garden but now I'm thinking dead tree.  Like the picture below but we'll  use a smaller trunk and make a pattern with the holes, not all over the place like they naturally do.  At least that is what they did in the show and it looked pretty cool.

(https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-64j8mOFMPtU/WeJl9Ny7ayI/AAAAAAAADoo/Qfo3iYgiepMXoLC8NlB30iYHjDkNxs4SQCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_2624.JPG)

Beka is not too hot on the dead tree.  She's worried about it attracting termites being that close to the building.  Yeah that is a possibility.  I think we could paint it with some kind of deterrent around the ground area.  She may not like the idea too but she did mention doing some circular wood pieces for nesting spots.  Would still have the termite issue.

We're going junking for the garden this morning.  A garden friend is moving from a house to a condo.  We're going to look over what she has.  Stop by the recycling center for cardboard on the way back.

Haven't heard from Marsha, no text, no email either.  We were talking about glueing together Catherine's wall today.  And we need to go raid the highway cliffs for rocks.  I'm in the middle of collecting plant orders from the leads for plants they want out of the greenhouse.  All that involves Marsha.  She may be resting but she has a lot of work coming up.

Nothing exciting in the junk.  Beka did get a pretty nice bird bath out of it.  A couple of trellis for the garden.

Nailed down the Tool Sharpening class for our members on Nov. 11th with Jim.  This is the official closing date of the gardens.  We sharpen all the tools and winterize the place.  We'll play out there until the weather drives us away but no more new projects and the goal is to be wrapped up by then on any projects.  Kind of sad the season is over.  I walk straight into plant sale from here.  I'm not management, just labor in the plant sale.  The rosemary is coming home with me in November so I'll start growing earlier than normally.

Three loads of leaf mulch coming in tomorrow.  It's wheelbarrows till it's gone.

It was good to see Phebe out working with her pantry team.  They seemed to like her and she was right in there with them.

I worked with my bed renovation team unloading soil.  It's not good to stand behind me when I'm in the trunk bed throwing dirt behind me.   :hihi:  Melanie jumped back just in time.

Marsha got a third of the cottage garden wall glued down.  Ran out of the glue stuff but she is tired and she can't risk and bumps or cuts that cause internal bleeding.

Leaf mulch is in.  Saturday is a heavy project day.  We need to speed it up.  Snow storm coming in on the Rockies and will get to us late next week with rain and chilly weather.  I'd like to be almost wrapped up by Wednesday.  We'll get a break in the weather in November but the extra volunteers will quit showing up at the end of October.  Menard's hasn't sent me the rebate money yet and I'm not waiting much longer for it.  Not sure where the garden budget is at the moment.  We're still well into the black but unexpected things are coming up.  On the other hand, we have done really well getting shit for free.

Field trip day.  We went to the Danforth Science Center.  One of their missions is to feed the world.  They've been trying to improve the cassava plant (tapioca).  It produces tubers people in South America and Africa eat.  Important plant for food.  They are trying to develop a fungus resistant variety.  Okay but if you take away the food for the fungus, what does the fungus eat?  Are you creating another problem by fucking with the fungus?  The simple solution is less people to feed in areas not ready to support human life.  A pill simplifies that.

In my mind, everything in nature is exactly as it should be at the time it is in.  It is always under development.  It's only when man comes in and interrupts the natural process where things get thrown off.  Man always thinks the goal of any planet should be to support life.  Is that the universe's goal?  Seems to me there are a lot of planets with different functions.  Maybe the ultimate goal for the universe for this planet is total rock.  Might not give a shit about the fungus in the long run.  But those of us who are concerned about supporting life should be thinking about the fungus too.  It has its place in the food chain as does everything else.

Geez, I swear that phone call with Marsha went for more than an hour.  She's trying to tell me how to behave, what to say and what not to say and disagreeing with what I say.  How many other people has she called tonight before she got to me?  I know the meeting was this morning and they went to lunch afterwards.  She had many hours between then and me.  Can we revisit that antidepressant situation?   :hihi:  Wasn't the only garden person I heard from all a buzz today.  They're probably wondering why I'm so calm and not feeding into it.  Don't know.  Just told them, can't call me tomorrow, I'm going to the zoo.  That is the real zoo, not this one.  :hihi:  Geez people calm the fuck down.

Beautiful day.  I got there at 8 and left at 4.  The greenhouse got cleaned without me.  :D  I've done it for years so it was okay I was over running wheelbarrows.  Freely let them borrow my team members when they needed more help for something.  They got done first, sat around chatting, watching us run wheelbarrows.  Yeah I noticed but they brought donuts so it's okay they were out of our way.

We were on the bed renovations.  Extra soil added, wood chipped skirt on the end of the chocolate garden and all three beds got leaf mulch.  Half the hardscape got installed.  They are really starting to come to life.  Beka and I ran over and got the toppers for the cinder block walls.  She was dragging, "we still have to haul all this over to the wall".  Hell no, I'm driving through the yard and pulling right up to it.  And we did.  :hihi:  One block short and we have to cut a few before we can start glueing down.  Beka's surprised we got this far.  She thought it would be next spring.  All my projects come in ahead of schedule.  I'm pushing it until all we have to do is plant next spring.

Really not sure what got done in the rest of the garden.  It was pretty clear if you talked to me, you were going to end up running wheelbarrows.   :hihi:  I'll check it out tomorrow.  I'm working some of my own stuff.  We need to get some stuff done on Monday and Tuesday before it rains.  A little highway robbery.  Supposedly everybody does it.  Sounds like something I heard in high school.  I guess we've got Marsha's husband to bail us out if everybody's wrong.   :hihi:

Compliment of the day, "you're stronger than you look".  Hate to give it up.  I'm in such good shape at the end of the season and have to drag my ass through it every spring.  Now if I can just get my hands to stop gripping wheelbarrow handles when there's no handle in them.   :hihi:

Done!  20 pages of plants.  Don't know how many plants on each page.  21 gardens placing orders and I'm compiling the master list.  My list will get added to Marsha's master plant sale list.  On black Friday this year I'm sitting down with her and ordering seeds because that's when some of the dozen of companies we order from have a sale.  She says we order about $2,000 worth of seeds.  I say, holy fuck!   :rofl:  Can we get the company credit card?

Update, Tom is coming Monday to cut our stones and we'll be glueing them down.  Looks like first hard frost could hit next week.  Kevin is going to be looking to blow out our water systems.  We can still get water from the frost freeze pumps but it's all hoses that have to be drained every time you use them after that.

Maybe I'm not in that good of shape.   :hihi:  Shouldn't have stopped but it was hot out there.

Got all the Crepe Myrtle trimmed back.  It's not the right time of year to do it but I had to get them off the windows.  Would have made staff nuts if they were banging against the windows all winter.  I didn't plant those.  Never plant a bush in front of a window. 

We're a go for tomorrow.  Not sure if we will glue the blocks down because Marsha is coming to take us to pick up rocks along the highway bluffs.  Told her our goal is to not get Beka arrested.  :hihi:  Marsha has chemo again next Monday so the push is on to get things done with her.  The chemo build up is really starting to get to her.  If we have working weather next Saturday, I need to focus on finishing up her area.  They still have boardwalks to lay and trees to plant.  We'll see what they get done on Wednesday.

Done!  We got the blocks and toppers glued down on the chocolate bed.  Beka's too pure to break the law so we bought the stone instead of picking it up off the side of the highway.  I am not going to be the one to start her off on a life of sin.  :hihi:

Okay, I am no stranger to the caulk gun but I need a minute to remember how to do it.  So I fucked up the first tube and the gun.  I forgot to punch a hole in the inside seal.  Kept using the trigger wondering why the push part was so far into the tube.  It couldn't go out the front so it went through the back.  Gave it that one more pull and a piece of metal flew off the gun.  Oh yeah, I forgot to punch a hole in the seal in the front.  Scraped out all the adhesive I could get, threw away the gun and tube before Marsha got there.   :hihi:  Nobody tell on me!  I just have to get the adhesive off my fingers before I see her tomorrow.

We have a few plants to put in on Wednesday.  Otherwise, the bed renovations are done until the spring.  I'm still looking for two wrought iron porch pillars for a trellis in the moon garden and need a post for the bee garden.  I did get to smell the chocolate mint plant.  Smells like Girl Scout cookies.  :D

Kevin totally forgot about the tool shed.  He scheduled a garlic planting work session at the same time through our Monday newsletter.   :rant:

We're done, killing frost coming Halloween night.  I'm not ready for that.  The next night goes even lower.

Working on the master list for our greenhouse order.  Marsha added how to grow the seeds to the information I needed.  Took me all night.  Most the growing information is for starting the seeds in the ground.  And she needs to know what date to start the seeds so all of the plants can leave the greenhouse by the third week in April.  That team meets at my house tomorrow to go over everything.  How long is that going to take?  I have a feeling I'm going to be playing pissed off pinball for real tomorrow night.  :hihi:

6.5 hours they were here!  I have no idea why that took so long.  :hihi:  And because they were here so long, we broke into my Halloween candy.  Don't worry I bought more.  :D

The big shed is cleaned out!  Filled up the dumpster and had a pile for the metal guy to come pick up.  The shed was loaded with brown recluse spiders and ants.  Marsha is very leery of those spiders.  I feel something in my shirt, lift it up and Marsha sees one of them on my bra.  Don't move!  I feel one in my bra.   :nervous:  Yeah unhook that and see if there's one there.  Thank god she's a good friend and a brave woman.   :hihi:  Fortunately none of the guys were around or we would have been screaming at them to get out.   :hihi:  Not for my benefit but that shirt was coming off, didn't want to embarrass them.  Getting the shit out of the shed was my job, organizing it is on Marsha and Kevin.  I had Tom back his truck up to the shed and pitched everything in there, backed it up to the dumpster.

Beka got our perennials that were ready from the plant sale planted in the renovated beds.  Phebe was out working the pantry bed project.  They didn't get the garlic in but we can do that Saturday.  Catherine got her stones cut for the Cottage garden wall and is getting close to having it done.  No Menards rebate money sent back yet so it's all been hitting my budget.  That extra $3500 is taking a hit.  We're getting shit done and I'm not giving all that money back.

Kevin again said he was doing the bricks on the fourth.  Reminded him the office is closed on Saturdays and he need to get the bricks out of there.  Yeah, he didn't think of that.  With the shed cleaned out, we can have the tool sharpening class in there on the 11th if the weather is yucky.  That will end the projects I'm responsible, get the tools sharpen and cleaned for the winter.

I have no more projects for the Menards rebate money so it leaves it for Marsha for the boardwalk.  I check today and one of the checks is coming.  She wants to dig out another path.  I'm not real happy about adding to our to do list but she and I are doing that Friday.  She has her team scheduled to get everything done to where she is planting her fruit trees at the end of the month.

Killing frost moved up to Sunday night and we will have night time lows in the 20's for 5 days.  Get those hoses disconnected folks and leave a spigot open on the manifold.  Kevin has to come around and blow out the pipes

All fall projects are being checked off or scheduled to be checked off.  Love my crew!   :D  Got a little hop, skip and jump in my walk going on.  It's been a good year.

 :hihi:  The other Kevin, you're so not going to win this argument, tells me it's okay to leave the collapsible hose outside during the winter.  I told them to get them in the shed or take them home for the winter.  Says he does it at his house all the time and it's fine.  Okay, first off your lazy and a procrastinator.   :hihi:  I did not say that.  These hoses aren't made of your hard plastic, it's a material type, can't be dragged over rock, stuff like that.   So I say back to him, "anything, no matter what the weather, deteriorates faster when exposed to the elements.  Don't you agree?"  I believe that's a win.

Really you shouldn't leave your hard plastic hoses in the hot sun but we do that.  And we do leave those outside during the winter.  They are a pain in the ass.  Heavy and you have to coil them up.  Collapsible hoses just go in a bucket and don't weigh shit.  They cost more and I love using them.  We're taking care of those.   :hihi:  The sooner the hard plastic ones die, the sooner I can replace them.  Unfortunately they don't deteriorate that fast.

And the truth comes out.   :hihi:  The manufacturer does recommend inside storage to extend the life of the hose.  He thinks it's because of the washers.  Er, no.  Life of the hose, not the washers.  And here it comes, "My garage is full enough so I leave mine out and take my chances. It hasn't been a problem so far."  Lazy and a procrastinator.   :hihi:  Clean out your fucking garage!  Really, you don't have room for a hose in there?  You can't spare a minute to take care of your equipment? 

I did two tool sheds this year.  The big one has probably never been done.  I showed up on 08 and I know it hadn't been done since then.  I found horse show ribbons from 06 in there.

Wait, I did comment on Axl's garage one time.   :hihi:  Would have taken two dumpster to clean out his garage.  Bet some of that was from the previous owner.  Wonder if he ever did do that?

Alright!  Marsha's team got all of her trees in but one.  They have to finish building a berm before the last one can go in.  Kevin told the whole group he was doing the bricks on the 4th.  We're going to be out of the garden by Thanksgiving.

Last beautiful day.  I got the rest of my elephant ears out of the ground, ran over to will call and picked up the pots so we can keep digging up plants for the plant sale, unloaded a yard of compost and helped get the new greenhouse doors unloaded.  And that's enough.   :hihi:

I'm just not taking any shit.  :hihi:  The neighbor, Mike, started giving it to me over some plants in the island between our driveways and the drain basin.  Look buddy, you don't even want your father in your car.  He can walk his ass to the end of the driveway maybe once per month when you do let him in your car.  By the way, do I say shit to you that your driveway is loaded with cars, all the time, or that you had your spray paint booth up for two years?  Yes you can cut paths through drain basin if you think it would look better.  But do you really want to mow that every week, invite people and their dogs to use that as a walking path and you understand it is loaded with chiggers?  Stop talking to me!   :hihi:  Yeah, he just didn't know how to get out of that conversation.  Stop finding something to complain to me about is where he should have stopped.

And Marsha started in.  I said something about offering to help Catherine.  I know she's sick, that's why I'm offering to help.  Marsha cuts me off and says I'm pushy.  I was going to let it go but the girl with us starts to tell me how I should say things.  I just lean over and say that's Marsha's perception.  Marsha comes back with some examples, straightened her out on what really happen and the both of them just shut up.   :hihi:  Sounds like I was being an aggressive bitch there but no, I'm actually pretty cool and calm when I'm straightening your ass out.  Later I'm like WTF but pat myself on the back for not letting it just roll off my back.

Beka loves the idea.  I have a cow tea pot that's starting to rust.  What if we put it in a white plant stand and put it in the moon garden?  It can be the cow that jumped over the moon.   :hihi:

40 degree tenpature drop this afternoon.  Surprisenly, I don't have a headache.  Not really ready for the cold but it will warm up again next week.

The headache didn't hit until 3 in the morning.  Way colder out there this morning.  We did finish up the cottage garden wall.  :D  Kevin got in the garlic and we reviewed the supplies he needs for the bricks.  Getting there.  Not quite ready to get my nails done but I can clean up my hands a bit.   :hihi:  I did vacuum out the car, probably not the last time before we are done but might be.  With the cold I'm ready to wrap it up.  It gets warm again at least one more time next weekend but for now, I've got a couple of days of a break.  :)  So tired but in a good way, job well done.

Killing frost coming tonight.  Singing to my gardens.  :-*

Lay down my dear Brother, lay down and take your rest
I want to lay your head upon your Savior's breast
I love you, but Jesus loves you best
I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight
I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight

Nothing you can do in the garden, there is always tool sharpening.  I clean mine up and sharpen the edges until you can see shiny metal.  Squirt a little 3 in 1 oil on the pruners.  None of us seem to have used motor oil any more.

My newest lead, Eleanor, who has the smallest garden, the Entrance Sign, is going at it.  Dug everything out of the bed and rearranged it.  I didn't have the heart to tell her the sign might be getting updated but I did.  Turns out she knew.  The University changed their logo.  She thinks we will get a whole new sign.  Probably didn't notice they had something taped on it.  :hihi:  If they do anything, they will probably paint over what's there or put a sticker over the old logo.  I don't think she's getting new.  Anyway, I like her, good worker, takes ownership and asks me if it's okay before she does something.

I put that picture on my frame, Catherine and Peggy when they finished the Cottage Garden wall.  They are holding up their caulking guns and each other, big smiles on their faces.  Makes me smile to look at it.

Can't really tell that was a killing frost.  Maybe it didn't get that cold last night.

I finished up the Elephant Ears in the garage.  They just need to dry out a bit more before going into a burlap bag.  Dug out all my flowers between Mike and my driveway.  His dad is going to till it up and check into if we can put down sod now or have to wait until the spring.  DJ said she would take some plants if I can over and planted them.  ::)  Connie took most of them, told her I would help her put them in later in the week.

I've been a bad girl with my shovel.  It as rust on it.  I'll see if the sandpaper takes it off.

Over at DJ's.  She treated me to dinner for helping her with her native plant order.  She'll just pay for the 5 plants I ordered, I have to come over and help her plant the 150 she ordered.  I owed 6.35.   :hihi:  What a deal, right?   ::)  And I'm going over Friday to help her plant the plants I gave her.  I better get another root beer float out of that.

Yippee, Marsha called while I was there.  This was probably her last chemo treatment.  :D  Her numbers are good.  I had connected her up with DJ as it's been 9 years since DJ had the same cancer.  DJ goes in two weeks for another check to see if it's come back. 

And while I was at DJ's, we signed her up for the Master Gardener program.  Both she and Marsha like to do that thing where they always want to tell you how to say, behave and do things.  Wonder how that's going to go between them?   :hihi:  My plan is to stay on the other side of the building in the 3 renovated beds and hope to hell I'm not a topic of conversation!  Geez I've got a garden sister and adding a garden mother.  Look I am older than both you girls, WTF?!

Oh cool getting closer to that finish line.  Kevin blew out the pipes and winterized our water systems today.

And I had to review pages of documents, Memo of Understanding between us, the university and the extension counsel.  And the revision of policies and procedures for the demo gardens.  Please let this be the last of these.  Nobody reads them until they want to prove you fucked up.   :hihi:  These are suppose to be the rules but I'm going to go with more like those user agreements you see on websites.   :D  Guess I could have said "more like guidelines" but I'm not a pirate.

Hey for a minute there my hands were noticeably clean.  I took a scrub brush to them and then I got my hands back in the dirt today.  The car is still clean though.

Lights on.  Start of the seedling growing season for me.  The growing room, formerly my daughter's bedroom.  7 double, long growing lights, a short light and two spot lights.  Always room for one more flat.  :D

I have incoming later in the month and December, lavender and rosemary.  Turned them on for the houseplants.  Not soon enough for the asparagus fern.  It dropped little leaves all over the place.  It will go back outside later this week when it warms up for a haircut.  Surprised how well organized the room is.  Nothing for me to do in there at the moment, darn. 

Also start of being indoors, at home.  Happy to be here this year.   :hihi:  Still have things to wrap up outdoors but I'm looking forward to being snug in the house, in the plant room.  I've got music back there, my work table and the cat bed to keep me company.  It's bright and white when all the lights are up and going.  A little humid, small breeze from the fan.  Highly recommended if you are a plant person.  And if you're not, come in here, you might want to be.  :D

Kevin is so excited about his tool sheds being cleaned.  He's already started putting up hooks for the tools.  Found out he could get rid of this stack of flooring, told him he could wait until it was warmer but he put it right in his truck, ran it over to Habitat for Humanity.  Told me he was coming back to take the bricks out of the building for Saturday's project.  :D

Catherine got the last few toppers in place so the cottage garden wall is done.  Eleanor approached me about resetting the stones in her new bed.   :-\  I told her she could wait till spring but no, she wants to do it now.  Don't add to the project list people.   :hihi:  She's so excited about that bed.  I have no doubt she'll get it done.

The celosia got hit hard with the frost, total collapse.  It's on my to do list for tomorrow along with taking out the rest of my plants that didn't survive the frost.  Damn cold out there first thing this morning but once the sun cleared the tree line, you weren't freezing.  I'll have to check my list but I think we are down to 3 final projects:  the bricks, the boardwalk and install the new greenhouse doors.  Two of them are scheduled for Saturday.

 :hihi:  Just got a call from Kevin.  He can't find our bricks.  "You took them out two months ago, you need 25 blank ones."  "Oh yeah, senior moment."  I may have to start checking his truck for beer.  That mini stroke only explains so much.  You know he is the hardest guy to find at that garden and he does drive that zero turn like a daring teenager somedays.  And I've seen the evidence before.

Well shit.  Was over watching the grandbaby.  My daughter wants her husband to get a real job, at least part time.  My gardening days may be slowing down.  The baby is starting to pull up on things so he'll be walking soon.  He'll be one here in a few weeks.  He likes his grandma.  And she likes him.  :D

Kevin is out getting the supplies for the bricks!  And where he told me it wouldn't cost anything to put them in he now wants $100.  And he doesn't want to shop at Menards where I have money.   :hihi:  It's okay, we have it in the budget.  He told Mary he wasn't doing her bricks, just ours this weekend.

Helped Connie put in the plants I dug out between Mike's and my driveway.  And collected up all my dead plants in containers.  I'll let them dry a few more days before they hit the garage.  The big ones will get trash bags over them and sit out there all winter.  Home front looking good.  Halloween lights are down and I'm doing Christmas lights on Sunday.

The leaves haven't come down yet.  That's kind of weird.  Maybe I'm just ahead this year and that's normal.  The killing frost was early.

Talked to Marsha.  Chemo hit her yesterday.  She'll try to come tomorrow.  They are working on the greenhouse doors.  No rush imo.  If I walk away with the bricks done tomorrow, I'm golden.

Well, progress.  Kevin only got half of the bricks installed.  It's a little high on the left and drops on the rear right.  Two of the guys say it will settle and one says good for drainage.  I say good enough but I'm thinking Marsha and I will be fixing it next year.  :hihi:  Marsha wasn't feeling well enough to join us today.  Couldn't get Kevin to commit to when he would finish the project.

The Herb girls harvested the horseradish and processed it.  I have a container to try.  A nice number of trainees showed up to help dig up the perennials for the plant sale.  Beka got some extra plants for the bed renovations. Phebe worked on the pantry beds and Nancy and Earl dug out the bulb garden.  Good work session.  Weather is looking good for the next week, two work sessions.

Delay on wrapping the fig trees.  Too many leaves on them.  Guess I'm not the only one thinking the leaves are behind.

What is happening to me?  I spend all my time at the garden.  Hang out at the pot plantation and now Phebe wants me to keep mushroom spores in my frig.  New Beatles and Stones music.  I'm being thrown back to the 60's.   :hihi:

Didn't plan on doing that but I'm pruning the Crepe Myrtle behind the greenhouse.  Normally do that in March.  I'm hoping cleaning them up reduces some of our aphid problems in the greenhouse.  Cleaned out the Prairie Dock bed in front of the greenhouse and my containers around back.  Moved 4 wheelbarrows of sand.  Cheated on the last two.  Instead of dumping them in our hole we are trying to fill up, the creek was closer.  I'll finish up the Crepe Myrtle tomorrow and maybe the bed Jim adopted.  Get that done and I only have a couple of vines to take down.  Too hot to get on the roof and put up the Christmas lights, maybe Thursday.

The gardens look nice today despite all the plants getting winter kill.  People are getting their beds cleaned up.  The grass could use one more mowing.  A big hunting bird flew out of the tree line when I showed up.  I really hope we become a place for them to build nests and hang out.

I didn't do any gardening today but somebody did.  Actually it was the drunks.  They dug out the whole area between the two driveways.  Mike's dad said he was going to put down rock.  I already told him no to that.  Dirt blows in and it just becomes a weed patch.  And then you have rock all over the place.

Talked to Marsha yesterday.  She resigned from her job.  She's not going back.  Yeah, life is too short.  She's pretty tired.  I hope this was the last chemo for her.  She has a lot of neuropathy setting in.  She plans to be at the work session tomorrow.  It's going to be hot.  Let it go back in the 50's.  I can get a lot of work done out there when it's cool.  Thursday we are suppose to go back to normal temps.

I sent out the request for the leads budgets for 2024.  The girlfriend of our president comes back with we have plenty of money in the treasury.  She wants $100 to plant "some plants" in her garden.  First off we don't have plenty of money and we are not paying for some plants just because you want to go shopping.  Do that with your own dime.   :hihi:  I told her she had to have specific plants in mind, check to see if we could supply them either from the plant sale, home gardens or already on property.  She had to justify the need for the plant such as not present on property, educational value, use of displaced plants when installing new ones.   :hihi:  We'll see what the president says about that. 

Thing is I have 15 plants I need to buy for the bed renovations.  I don't usually spend any money.  I told Marsha depending on the cost I may only ask for keystone plants and save some for the following year.  She said they were only themed beds.  I'm not sure what that means.  All the gardens are themed but it was in that voice saying that it wasn't very important.  Excuse me but you have spent 1000's of dollars on the orchard out there.  I think I can have a couple of hundred.  Then on the other hand, I told her some might be gifted to us.  She thought that was okay.  Doesn't know I meant I'm just going to buy them.   :hihi:  I am not taking years to complete my projects.

Oh yeah, I'm going to blow.   :hihi:  Joe wants to do the convention.  He's manipulating the membership votes to get his way.  Marsha has called him on it.  Last night I asked him to add to the agenda for tomorrow I'm making a motion to add the plant sale coordinator, ie Marsha, as a voting member of the steering committee.  He basically accused me of being her partner in crime.   :hihi:  I can be, we duke this shit out but she doesn't control me.  This morning Marsha sent the rewrite of our financial operating policy to approve at tomorrow's meeting.  I tell the whole group I'm not voting approval until we have that talk about developing a plan for managing our budget for next year and years going forward.  We've been saying we were going to do that all year.

What is with these people?  I retired.  I joined this group to have fun, not run a business and grow it into a big deal.  Our treasure was telling me she wanted to save up enough money to invest some of it!  What the fuck for?  We need enough money in savings to cover greenhouse repairs and the plant sale.  You want to be in the fucking business world, go back to work.  Be in the retired world and have some fun.

Anywho, there's the blow.  I'm in a pretty good mood.  My Bulb Garden lead resigned but her two helpers are going to take it over.  I'm fully staffed.  The place looks great.  Kevin agreed he's putting in the rest of the bricks on Saturday with the help of a new guy.  The tools are getting sharpen Saturday.  Plenty of people said they were coming to do that.  The boardwalk will always be a work in progress for the next few years but a lot was done this year.  We're a wrap on Saturday.  I can play for a few weeks.  The weather is holding.  I rather liked building those walls and it's been too long since I had the trimmer in my hands.

Meeting wasn't so bad and barely went over 2 hours.  We even had donuts.  The icing was applied with the same expertise I applied the adhesive to the cinder blocks.  :hihi:  There's a learning curve there.

Side track issue brought up during the discussion of making the Plant Sale Coordinator a voting member of the steering committee but it passed.  The treasure came prepared with all the information for us make a budget plan and build up our "in the event of a catastrophic event", ie the plant sale gets whipped out and we have no money.  I added $4500 to the treasure's initial assessment of what we had to build up to.  She forgot minimum amount to run the organization and the demo gardens.  ::)  After everything was decided, I reported to the treasure I still had about $500 worth of bills coming in.  Ooops, her information was off because she thought I was done spending money. 

The gardens, the only place they can really cut the budget, got $1500 less than we averagely spend, based on a five year period.  I'm agreeable to that.  We kicked ass out there this year on projects and there's really very little we need to do next year.  Marsha, my assistant, mumbled her agreement.  Does she realize her boardwalk, while I like it, is down to a crawl?  She didn't and I didn't tell her.  I'm reluctant to continue with that.  Some of the boards are already starting to warp.  The frames are only treated wood.  How long before we have to replace that?  How much chemical usage is going to be used to keep the weeds from growing up through them?  Looks great but may not be the best thing for us.  She estimates $2000 to complete it.  No where near fitting into the budget next year.

We'll continue working through the end of November.  Weather looks good.  Final leads meeting first weekend in December and then I'm off duty till March.  I move to plant sale where Marsha is the brains and I'm just the labor.  Do what she tells me and don't say a word.   :hihi:  Says she feels better today.  Blames a lot of stuff on chemo brain.  That is a real thing.  I acknowledge it and say, "I get it, that's why I'm reminding you and not pestering you."  I have learned to put that positive spin to work!  :D

We are done.  All fall projects I'm responsible for completed today.   :D  Plant sale team installs the greenhouse doors next weekend.  Crew scheduled for that.  Damn those folks cranked out a lot of stuff.  A few minor things to fix next year.  We should just be planting plants and weeding.  One would think.  :hihi:

Scathingly brilliant idea!   :hihi:  Phebe is the new Pantry Garden lead.  It is a lot of work!  Lady you are getting ducked.   :hihi:  I have 20 of those hunting duck decoys.  Phebe is a hunter too.  I'm done playing with these ducks and looking to unload them.  Marsha is going to enjoy this too.  Phebe shows up to the garden Wednesday those ducks are going to be everywhere.   :rofl:

Score!  We had went out to lunch and noticed the restaurant had straw bales they were using for decoration.  So I asked if we could have them when they were done with them if they were just going to toss them.  The guy just called and said we could pick them up tomorrow.  Phebe has her growing medium for the mushrooms.

We thought we were getting 3 bales and instead got 6!  We can use all of them.

Tomorrow we are going to talk to Menards about a discount on some damaged composite wood.  The way Marsha stumped through that conversation and went on and on, if I was the guy I would have said lady you can have it for free if you just shut up.   :hihi:  I don't think we will get that lucky but I am looking for a deal.  I just missed out on the porch pillars.  Brian said his employer just threw some out!  I have to talk to more people and fast.  Eventually, this stuff will show up.

My Federation garden club is dissolving.  I was going to drop out but I guess I will go over to the one Maureen is part of.  Got to keep up those network connections and they do take care of the garden at the homeless shelter.  Plus they are taking over our Gold Star Memorial.  Is this my new adventure?  Joining a new garden club?  :hihi:  I should have asked for diversity.

We basically got 75% off the composite.  The stuff was out in their bargain bin.  28, 8' boards.  Made Marsha very happy.  I'm not giving back $3500 in my budget.   :hihi:  We're on a roll and I want this shit done!  This should get Marsha to a stopping place.  We've got about two weeks.  We can crank out that boardwalk.

6 fucking hours again!  And I left them at the house because I had to go babysit.  I am never being anything more than the labor on the plant sale.  I swear it would not have taken me that long if I did it by myself and I had 3 other women.  We did have cheese cake so that's something.   :D

Anyway, all the composite is cut up and ready to assemble.  If the weather holds, we may complete this section of the boardwalk.  We did get Marsha's area really cleaned up so it doesn't look like a construction site any more.  This year it was all about straingtehing up, fixing up.  Hopefully next year it will be all about planting and weeding.  One would think.  :hihi:

I skipped probably our last Saturday workday. Next weekend will be freezing.  Marsha dropped off Rosemary seeds.  I only had to seed up 200 of them.  :o  She's out of screws for the boardwalk.  Okay, we are spending next year's budget.  I wish folks would start turning those in.  I'm anxious to see how much they are asking for next year.  I was told we get $4500 but they forgot to ask what bills I still had coming in.

Bulbs 50% off, you know I'm going to look.  Got Puschkinia, 12 for $2.50.  Cluster of flowers on each stalk, star shaped, white with a blue line in the middle of each petal.  We call them landing strips, directs the bee to the center for the pollen.  Like they need that.   :hihi:  Goes with our Moon Garden theme.  I've got some white asicatic lilies and white tulips I'm putting in there too.  Ran by the garden to put them in between the rain drops but my timing was off.  I'll do it tomorrow if I can steal Beka away for a little bit.  Doesn't hurt to have your designer with you and she's so into it.  She was a little nervous when I said I'd do it without her.  Of course, we may stop by Lowes and grab a few more.  Can't miss out on 50% off.  :hihi:

I did go back to the bulb sale and might again.   :D  Picked up some tulips with ruffled edges, hyacinth, pinks and purples.  Some daffodils, grape hyacinth and small iris.  Highly allergic to all of these.   :hihi:  I put the ones for the moon garden where the annuals will go.  We hadn't planned on these but I think that's a good choice.

I'm reviewing the budget requests from the leads.  Daylilies wanted 10 bottles of Liquid Fence for $196.  He was using ready to use bottles with a hand sprayer!  There's over 100 daylilies.  You don't hand spray those.  I reduced him to $70 for a bottle of concentrate, same sq ft coverage, and a sprayer that attches to the hose.  Cut the cost, saves him time and his fucking hand.  :hihi:

Marsha is doing well.  She is so close to having all that composite installed.  Has ordered seeds from Parks and is working on Bakers.  Probably half way done.  Hasn't decided if she needs me Friday or not.  She's a pretty happy camper.

And I went back again.   :hihi:  Got some more white tulips and paperwhites.  I'm really allergic to them.  Great for forcing indoors but highly fragrant.  These I put on the backside of the shed.  Not sure if those were snake holes or voles I kept running into while I was planting them.

You are suppose to plant in odd numbers so it looks more natural.  So what do you do when they give you 6 tulip bulbs and you want them all in the same spot?  You make an H.  Two on each side and two in the middle on the joining line of the H, not the point where it connects to the side lines.  Or think of it as two triangles pointing at each other.  At least, that's what I do.

Damn it.  I have all the leads sending me their budgets for next year.  We're going bare bones and Marsha sends in one for 1300.  400 for fruit trees and 800 for another leg of the boardwalk.  We have money left from this year but it's really money they are using to fund us for next year.  Right now what she needs for the next leg of the boardwalk is sitting in the bargain bins at Menards and nobody is going to want it at this point.  Next year they may have a new model and then it's trash.  We got the one place way down there.  Going to piss off some folks I'm letting Marsha spend so much but this could be saving big bucks.  I'm going for it.  Her area has been under renovation for 5 years and I want it done!  They can't fire me right?  No blessings there.   :hihi:

I'm not liking the way the rosemary is coming up.  I might have fucked it up.  There's these single, long white hairs on top of the soil at the place I put a seed.  Is that a root?  I've never seen that before.  Or did the plants come up and die off before they formed leaves and that's the stem?  It happen before I expected them to pop up.  They still have a week before they should be showing up.

There was several women who got a kick out of building those retaining walls.  Peggy even said her husband never lets her do stuff like this so she never got to learn.  Marsha needs a strawberry bed.  She's spending a ton of money making the fruit arboretum handicapped accessible.  Okay, they can come look but can they harvest the fruit?  Strawberries lend themselves to vertical gardening, perfect for handicapped people to harvest.  You see where I'm going with this? 

I have people who want to learn and practice building.  I have something that needs building, teachers and did I mention Marsha is replacing her deck, used wood there.  I've got a woman with power tools class!  Okay, I can't be openly sexist while I'm building something for a disadvantaged group.   :hihi:  I'll come up with a better name for the class but you know the nickname, the secret nickname.

Marsha like the idea of a vertical design!

I got my first drilling practice in and a few tips.  I kept getting my gloves caught on the screw when I was trying to hold it.  But we got both planks we made installed and polished off the rest of the screening.  We're going to go ahead and put together 3 more planks next week.  I get my first circular saw lesson then.

All the teams are called off at the garden.  Just the leads and a few people there today although it warmed up nicely.  Kevin gave the place it's last mow.  There's not really much more to do even if the weather holds.  The greenhouse doors are on hold while we wait for an install kit.  I was right, they weren't going to make it another year, beyond repair.  Pieces of it come off every time you open the door and fall off with it just sitting there.  Surprisingly, the Gazinnia are still blooming and some natives.  Rain coming in.  We need it. 

Holiday party Friday and Leads meeting Saturday.  Looks like most everybody is coming in with a reduced budget.  Marsha may get her fruit trees this time.  Menards stopped with their rebates until January so even if we did find composite cheap, we are waiting.  Meet with the trainees Thursday night to discuss what they want for a budget.  They need 15 perennials and coco mulch.  I will cover whatever they don't get funding for.

Just waiting on the Rosemary to come up.  Figured it out.  I use some used promix in the current soil so that probably is dried up roots.  Rosemary should show up on Sunday, fingers crossed.

As I figure it, we spent $5900 on the gardens this year.  That's $100 below our 5 year average of $6000.  We're not using $3200 of what we asked for.  That's $300 less then I projected in September.  What can I say, extra money, I pushed an emergency project forward and got a great sale for an ongoing project.  I'm fucking happy!   :D

Little research and I think we may be able to apply for an ag grant for the Fruit Arborium.  We just need about $600 to finish that off with all the plants.  I put Marsha on it.  That area really is shaping up to be unique and the only place like it except for all the way across the state and you have to walk acres to see it.

There is grants for handicapped accessible that we could try for on the boardwalk and stone paths but there's too much of a need just to make homes and businesses accessible.  I would feel bad asking for that funding.  We don't have that many disabled people visiting the gardens, maybe because we aren't handicapped accessible, so it's still a worthwhile goal for us to aim for.

I should have mentioned, we got a shit load of stuff done out there this year.  I'm on page 3 of our accomplishments besides the normal planting, watering and weeding. 

Not to mention all the freebies we got for the place.  I'm thinking of those 4 straw bales.  We got them for free but god did they make a mess in Bob's car.   :hihi:  I was the one who had to vacuum that car out!  Next year, we pick those up with a truck.  Marsha kept saying he'd never notice what fell behind the set.  I am not pissing Bob off.  Eventually that stuff is going to make its way to somewhere else in that car.  I left enough behind I couldn't get to.  Eventually, he's going to know what we did.

I really thought I was going to piss off my turf lead to the point he would probably quit.   :hihi:  I cut his budget and challenged his use of weed and feed.  I was dreading his email reply but he was fine with all of it.  He doesn't really believe in using weed and feed either.   :D

Budget process went pretty smoothly.  We were aiming for $4000.  We landed on $4100 and Marsha offered to have what they won't fund us for taken out of her budget.  Nice of her to offer considering we pulled out the money this year to complete nexts years boardwalk project.  She's a year ahead.  With the up coming budget she is getting all the wood to complete the boardwalk.  All that money went in at full price.  We get a discount like we did the last time and 24% off in the first week in January from Menards, we're looking at part of the stone path she wants around the strawberry bed.  We get a $600 grant from ag for all the plants she wants, there's the rest of the stone path.  We could be looking at finishing off the Fruit Arboretum next year.

Pantry Garden, another big ticket item, is getting all they want except we forgot the Rhubarb.  I'll gift them a couple and there's alway moving some of that money around.  Each plant is only $6 and I think we're only looking at 5.  The retaining wall in the Cottage Garden is a have too, money for that.  I did say I rather liked building those, right?

My three bed renovations didn't do so well.  Out of a $427 request we agreed to $200 this year for the keystone plants and the rest the following year.  That's what I said.  Again that was a full price estimate on prices we saw on the net.  I'm a better bargain shopper than that, I have three people saying they are will to gift us plants we have to buy and I can substitute some plants we are looking for with plants we have.  I don't like my projects dragging out.  They come on time,if not early, and under budget.  We will be finished in the spring.

Everybody else got pretty much what they wanted once we cut out the fat and supplied them with what they needed from what we could scrounge up.  I'm good with $4100.  A little nervous.  That's $1900 below our average.  I can always go back and ask for more.  I hate that and it may not be there.  I still have the problem of, is what we are spending out there worth it?  Are we getting our educational bang for our buck?  I need more programing and more people coming to the gardens.  It would be nice if the gardens could generate some money too, besides what we do for the plant sale.  I like that the education is free that we are doing and the food gets donated to the pantry.

Okay, I wouldn't read this but I have to wrap my head around it.  Marsha is giving me shit for asking for $200 in plants for the 3 bed renovations.  Says I knew we were short on money when we came up with the project.  We've told the other leads they have to run their plants through the plant sale sourcing because we may getting better pricing.  If not, they can buy a plant if they have a reason for that plant including lack of presence on property and educational value.  But she says a couple of them are mad I'm asking for plants outside of the plant sale when they wanted to but didn't as we have money problems.  And nobody goes over to the backside of the property.

Okay, the project only went over by $50 this year because I had $150 in my budget.  We ran into trouble on the hillside with the slope and built a raised bed.  For the last two years I have had a budget.  Before that I never had a budget for the Foundation Gardens and it's only because the guy who takes care of the front of the building likes artistic displays up there.  I've cut him off this year.   :hihi:  She wants me to give back the money I don't spend if the plant doesn't cost as much as I figured it would.  Yeah but what if another plant cost more?  But that's not what I said at the meeting.  I showed what plants we were looking for, the total estimated price and said I would agree to cut it down for the plant purchase which was even below the plants I said I really needed.

We brought no plants.  We used the plants that were there, got plants from propagation and other beds.  The money we are spending on plants for next year is for plants we can't get through the plant sale.  They are not on property and very specific to the themes.  For example, native bees are usually plant specific, educational.  The beds are theme, again educational.  Lots there for the public but I've also got 17 newbies on the project getting hands on training.

I ask which leads and what they wanted.  She didn't want to tattletail on them.  And couldn't tell me what it is they wanted.  I said they didn't speak up in the meeting when I asked if anybody else thought of something they wanted.  If I don't know they are wanting something, I can't help them get it.  There was other budgets we could have cut more.

I've asked for years for a sign that says we have gardens around back but we don't have the money for it.  We do take people back there on the general garden tour, there is a path all the way around the building, two of our speciality tours go back there and it is on the garden map people can pick up when they visit.

That's taking it non personally.   :hihi:  Justifying it to the rest of the leads if anybody asks.

But I would just like to come back to Marsha with the thousands of dollars she is spending.  She didn't volunteer to reduce any of her budget this year until we made the first run through and discovered we were only over $100.  I let her spend an extra 500 over her budget this year from extra funds and she also got an extra 500 donated to her garden.  She gave her budget at the retail price knowing full well we were getting it wholesale and with a rebate yet, she insists she gets to keep all that.  Not make it available for the whole garden or give it back.  I defend her project all the time from leads who think she's spending too much.  And her garden is locked so visitors have to look at it from the fence.  Why the fuck is she giving me shit?!   :rant:

Alright, the only reason I'm addressing this with her is she is saying it to other people.  I'm sticking with the nonpersonal response, not using her as an example and pushing the positive narrative.  Our basic goals of completing projects in progress is moving forward.  Nothing here for me to worry about or take to heart.  Marsha can deal with her own head and what's she's all about with this. :hihi:

Aw hell, no rosemary.  Today is their day.  I'll give them a little longer.  I soaked the seeds so really they should have come up earlier.

Marsha said not to give up, they could take up to a month to come up.

I'm looking for grants for Marsha's fruit trees.  Contacted the state as they administer federal grant funds.  They referred me to a certain grant.  I'm reading through all the rules wondering if it's really worth $500 for all the paperwork and outcomes record keeping I would have to do.  Really, it be would easier to go back to work and earn the money then all this red tape.  Far more enjoyable I can tell you that.  :hihi:  But I get into the frequently asked questions and it clearly states the produce can not be donated.  We're out of that one.  All the produce is donated to the food pantry.  Really not worth $500 to give up our donations.

Score!  I walked out of there with a donation for the fruit trees and a used projector that looks like it's never been used for our classes!  I wasn't even asking, just putting the word out there.   :D

Give me shit about $200 Marsha.   :hihi:  She's a little taken back.  You know I could have been talking up my bed renovations but fruit trees get the priority in my book.  God I hate asking for money, taking shit off your hands is more my thing.

Okay, did I make my point with the following?  Personally, I can't believe saving for the future isn't evident but some people ....  The whole time I'm typing that up, I'm thinking, I'll be dead by the time the wood rots and if there's money to make improvements, I'll think of something we need and it will probably kill me building it!   :hihi:  One of those shot yourself in the foot moments because if we save money, we don't have money to spend.

"Once we obtain the initial targeted emergency budget the steering committee projects, I think we need to talk about additional savings for structure replacements and improvements to the gardens.  All of our wood structures were built around the same time, over several consecutive years.  Eventually, we will be unable to make repairs to these and they will have to be torn down and replaced.  We can expect this will happen around the same time and be expenses that will happen in consecutives years that we will be unable to manage in a yearly budget, imo.  It's a long way off but eventually, we will be faced with these issues.  There are improvements to the garden that we can't foresee, some we can, like handicapped accessible pathways, that we should start saving for now too.

As I see it, the plant sale is pretty much maxed out on the income it can produce.  Over time expenses will go up for our group while our income will pretty much stay the same.  A savings for the future of the gardens would give us a buffer to the yearly budget when the time comes for replacement of structures and new projects allowing us to complete those projects timely with possibly, a couple of projects needing to happen roughly at the same time, with in a couple of years of each other.  We have time but I think we need to establish a savings for the future."

Marsha is cancer free.   :D

She had a test today.  I could tell when she called and the tears in her voice it was going to be good news.  She may do two more chemos just to make sure it's gone or go straight to maintenance meds.

Okay, that's it for the gardens.  I went and got my nails done.  :hihi:  I've sent the official closing of the gardens statement to our newsletter.  We finished winterizing the gardens.  Good night my little loves, we'll see you in the spring.  :D

Today we loaded in all the supplies for the greenhouse.  Switch gears over to plant sale.  I'm only a grower and helper here.  Marsha's show now.   :D

Tomorrow I'll know my budget for next year.   :nervous:  We'll be operating with one third less than our average, maybe less than that.  My real question is how much did we spend this year?  I know I'm under budget but how close was I to that average?  I'm known for under budget and bringing it in ahead of time.  This year, I want to be known as "damn girl, you got a shit load accomplished out there".  Four years under my leadership, one out for covid, and I'm hitting my stride.  The little garden that could, yeah you are.   :D

Why did I try to put all those noodles through the garbage disposal?  I could have just put them in the trash!  So I blew out my pipes and had a big clog.  So I took the pipes apart and tried blowing air with the shop vac threw it.  Oh yeah, the last time I used that was to vacuum out Bob's car from the straw bales.  Left a little straw in the hose.   :hihi:  But now the pipes all came off and I can't get them back on tight.  You fix one and the other pops off.  Craig's in Colorado, won't be back until Monday.  He says a 10 minute fix.  Told him I'm betting not and I would explain the straw when I saw him.   :hihi:  One thing leads to another and it's just too long to explain in a text.  He wanted to see my Dead tree anyway.

Woohoo, maybe.  We got all the money we asked for.  The whole program is short $1100 going into it and I'm short $1900 from my garden average.  I'm pretty sure that will all be okay.  The whole program will come out of the whole.  The gardens can live on our amount with the donation, Menards rebates, sales and some scrounging.  

I wanted to kill Marsha!  She offered up her garden budget until after the plant sale to account for the $1100.  First off her budget is not hers, it's mine for the garden.  I determine where it goes and when it's spent.  I manage that, not her!  The group agreed she didn't have to do that, probably to stop us from bickering and to keep me in my chair.   :hihi:  But we're not done talking about that.  I have some other cost saving measures I haven't discussed with Marsha.  She's not my assistant until after the plant sale.  She doesn't want to hear that until she comes on board again as the assistant.  I'll keep her updated on the successes, ie I got your plants covered, but she doesn't need to know everything I'm trying.  If I'm good, we will finish off some projects.  If I'm really good we won't use all that budget.  But for god's sake, quit tripping me up!   :hihi:

Oh yeah, and I backed up dirty water into the dishwasher with the clogged pipes.  Maybe I shouldn't be so confident in my abilities.   :hihi:  God I hate those little reminders of fuck ups especially the timing.  I'm already freaked out.  :hihi:  Oh well, moving on.

I have a rosemary!  Just one at the moment.  :hihi:

Maybe my expectations are just off about the pipes.  They are PVC pipes.  No way I was going to leave all that dirty water that backed up into the dishwasher.  So fingers crossed I hadn't clogged the pipe between the disposal and the dishwasher with the noodles, I decided to run it through the rinse cycle to see if I could get it to drain.  Either that or get the shop vac, suck it out and deal with that mess.  Don't worry, this works.   :hihi:  Connected the pipes back up.  Put a bucket under the sink in case it didn't.  Had the trash can standing by in case I needed to dump the bucket.  So it worked, not a drop out of place.

Basically, I can take the pipes apart by hand.  I'm expecting not to be able to do that.  I'm thinking everything should tighten up and it shouldn't be that easy.  But they just won't tighten down any more!  Shouldn't they be glued together if the pipe can be pulled out of the screw thing?  But maybe it's just that way with a washer to keep the pipes from leaking?  You know, unless you shove too much shit in the disposal.  Maybe you don't glue them together so they can come apart in case of a clog?  The bathroom pipes are nice and tight.  Maybe I just need new washers to get them tighter?

Trying to save Craig the trip.  Would love to see him.  He got pissed at the Extension and quit the gardening group so it's been a while.

Wait, why did the fan over the stove stop running?  And it doesn't work on low either.  It's just a switch right?  Fuck!

It could be the motor.  The handyman made a pass at me one time.  When his wife finally died of cancer, I texted him back I was sorry.  He texted me back a cat emoji with heart eyes!  I'm not calling him.  I'm just going to let the motor cool off even though it wasn't running that long and try the switch again.  But why would it be the switch if the fan was running when it stopped?

Sink fixed, along with the tire on my wagon.  Still trying to figure out my range hood fan.  Sondra came over and saved my ass.  Good company too.  Anyway, back to gardening, no more straw in my pipes.

I went to my "ladies" gardening club Christmas party.  My old club has merged with this one.  They are making a big deal about the new officers of the club.  They had a regional representative there doing an induction ceremony.  I turn to our old president and say, we were doing it wrong.   :hihi:  The rep has made each of them a snowflake to signify something and she reads to them the duties of their office to which they have to say I do.   ::)  It's all real formal and at the end she tells them they are snowflakes.  Why yes, they are a bunch of old, fragile white women.  I start giggling, the lady next to me does too and my old president laughs along with us.  Fortunately we were in the back or we might have been kicked out of the club right then and there.

So the talk with Marsha didn't go well about her funds, drop it.  That's the second time she has put her funds in jeopardy.  Maybe she is just looking for an excuse not to do her project next year.  If so, just tell me and I can put the funds elsewhere, no big deal.  And then the write up from the meeting pissed me off.  I've sent an email and brought it up in the meeting how we need to save to replace the wood structures someday in the garden and make possible future improvements.  Not that I haven't brought it up before and been ignored but it was reported in the meeting notes that our horticultural specialist pointed that out.  No, what he said was I was making a really good point!  The nice part of me says, what does it matter as long as the end results is achieved?  But the other side of me is damn pissed!   :hihi:

Score!  We got a wheelbarrow donation.  That's $165 we couldn't cover by being down $1900.  I say $165 because that's what Kevin paid for one last year.  WTF?  No more shopping for you Kevin.  I would have never paid that much.

So that's $475 for the plants and $25 for a sprayer I don't have to cover with the money I'm getting.  And $165 covered that I didn't get money for.  That's $665 towards the $1900 deficit.  A third of that $1900 and the physical year hasn't even started.  I have a pretty good idea where another third of that money is coming from, Menards rebates, but no clue where the last third is coming from.  Probably shouldn't count the $25.  That's not additional funds or funds we didn't have money for.    But I'm off to a good start.  :D

Slow start off the line with the rosemary.  I have a second one, going for 200.  Is that one percent or .01?   :hihi:  It's got to be one percent.  I could write my work out but nobody is interested in that.   :hihi:  Just agree, whatever, I still don't have shit for rosemary plants.

We're seeding up onions today, several hundred of them, probably more.  Not sure how many are coming home with me, maybe all of them.   :hihi:  I'm wearing Welcome to the Jingle for the seeding party.  :D

I'm up to 4 rosemary.  All of them are in the same half flat and the flat that is probably the coldest which is weird as they like heat.

Over 1100 hours volunteer time.  That's a part time job.  Got us up to $729 of the $1900 deficit.  The parks department contacted me about the Gold Star Memorial.  I took the opportunity to also ask them about their rumored wood pile and if I could raid it.  She hasn't answered yet but I've seen some of the wood that has come out it from another group and we can definitely use it in the Fruit Arboretum.  It's got an $825 wood budget.  If I can take a whack at that and I think I know where I can get some cinder blocks, I would be close to clearing the deficit.

On the down side, they aren't selling education classes.  The demo garden budget for 2025 isn't going to be any better.

One of my new leads called.  She has the smallest garden up there and calls me all the time!   :hihi:  She wanted to put some daylilies in the ground.  Really?  It's the end of December, just throw them in the back of the garage.  I'm trying to divert her to plant sale activities but she won't commit.  Stop her from calling me and put her on Marsha.  :hihi:  Anyway I'm telling her some of the onions we seeded up last week are coming up.  She feels like she missed something by not participating but then again says we probably didn't want her around.  She's switching back to being vegan.  "Oh, a little gassy?"  I've never asked a vegan if that's a problem.  Highly suspected it would be and apparently it is.   :hihi:  Okay, helping with plant sale may be a problem, that's all indoors.  I assigned her to walk the gardens once in a while over the winter to make sure everything is copacetic.  You just stay out there.  :hihi:

We put heat mats under the rosemary hoping that helps them come up.  The onions are popping up.  Like growing those because they get a haircut several times before they head to the greenhouse in February.  And my Christmas cactus is blooming right on time.  We've had mild weather so the ornamental kale is purple and the pansies are still looking great at the gardens, not that anybody but my new lead is up there.  :hihi: 

We're going dumpster diving!  The parks department gave me permission to go through their wood pile.  I've seen what another group got out of there and there's some good shit.  I'm working on that $1000 worth of wood we have in the budget.  I'm not going to do the math just yet, we'll see what we get but I'm starting to feel better about the garden budget next year.  My real goal is to get some where I can sit my ass in the Pantry garden.  I'm tired of sitting on a bucket.

Not a huge score but nice.  They had the composite we were looking for.  Saved us about $200 and I had a marvelous time climbing around on the hill of wood.  :hihi:  They just threw the wood on there, no organization so we had to dig and unbury.  I did meet a mouse.  The parks have more than one park.  I may be able to get more.  They had some cinder blocks I have to ask if I can have.  I work on those next.  We need 118 of those.  There was about 20 there, Leslie may have another 20 and I have 10 on hand, around those numbers.  I've got the wiggle room in the garden budget.  Feeling so much better about that.

I'm still smiling.  :D  I was crawling all over that pile.  Throwing boards off of it.  No sooner than I'd climb down, I'd turn around and see some more buried in there.  Then I was crawling around underneath it, going around to the backside and finding more.  When you crawl around on a bunch of cut trees, you're always falling through but this was solid.  Marsha just stood back and collected the boards.  Going on my list of great times this year.  :D

Anyway, rain coming in.  A couple of inches in the next 24 hours and then several days of rain.  We did have our third worst flood in December.  Checked the garden, we are flood ready.  All that wood is in a fenced area.  The new straw bales could float away.  Phebe did leave one of those hunting decoys on it.  That would be kind of funny but doubt I'd see that.  And we did just pack in the greenhouse supplies which are sitting on the floor.  Highly unlikely we'll have a problem.

Heat mats don't seem to be helping the rosemary but I do have a 5th one coming up.  Onions continue to pop up.

First day of winter.  Longest night and then we can start adding daylight hours.  :)

Oh shit, giving myself a little nightmare before Christmas.   :hihi:  With the cataract surgery in March I won't be able to bend at the waist or lift.  I normally clean the mountains of flats and containers after each seeding party and get them back in time for the next party.  We need the supplies and the room in the greenhouse, those can sit.  People have no idea how much work that is.  It's all bending and lifting.  I'm on it, I'll put together a cleaning crew.  I'm going to miss that though it's one of those brainless tasks that keep you busy.

Marsha is doing much better.  She's getting a shot every few weeks instead of the day long chemo treatments.  Her numbers are getting better and it looks like the cancer is all gone.  My other friend, Sondra got the results of her CT scan this week and she remains cancer free.  She still has all the plastic surgery ahead of her to restore her face.  Two of the strongest women I know.

Another rosemary coming up!  It's in a different flat so maybe the heat mat is helping.

The onions have already grown into the lights.  They got their first hair cut today.  Some of them grew right out of their soil.  Marsha said they weren't planted deep enough.  Could be but I'm not so sure about that.  They get that little elbow like kale gets.  Wish somebody would explain that to me.