One week while Robyn was away, we took off school and planted the garden. It was a long and tiring week, but the good kind of tired that leaves you feeling happy and contented.
Each day started out the same. After breakfast dishes were done, the children and I headed out to the garden. I had a list of things to get done each day in order to finish by Friday. On Monday, we did mostly soil prep, turning the dirt and removing the weeds from winter. Percy and Lucrecia jumped in to help a bit at evening chore time. We don’t have a tiller, so all the tilling is done by hand with shovels, picks, and azadones, which are a sort of hoe.
It was hot and sunny all week, so most of us ended up browner or redder than we started. We worked until about 10:00, took a break to cool off, then worked until lunch. After lunch, we took a nap in the heat of the day before putting in another hour or two before chores.
With that schedule, we were able to get everything into the ground by Friday. We planted sweet corn (seed courtesy of Caleb), summer, butternut, zucchini, and spaghetti squash, potatoes, peas, onion, garlic, beets, and a bed of salad that includes three lettuces, spinach, chard, and kale. I also planted a small patch of ginger for the first time; I don’t know if it will be warm enough here for it to survive.
Besides the vegetables, we moved some flowers around and split the lemon verbena tree. The tree had been cut off accidentally a couple years ago, and when it grew back, it had two distinct stems. When we went to transplant it, I found some seedlings growing at the base, so we ended up with four trees. Three of them have survived; our dog Gem killed the fourth. We use the leaves of this tree (called cedrón here) in tea.
The fig tree survived its second winter and is putting out leaves now. We heavily pruned the honeysuckle and stuck a bunch of the prunings in the ground along the fence row to see if they’ll take; a few of them are still green, so they might survive. My one amaryllis bulb from five years ago has now become twelve plants this year; so far, one of the plants flowered. The irises and tulips came up this year (thank you to whoever sent them last year), but Gem dug up the tulips. Gem and I are becoming enemies.
The weeks since planting have been filled with intense nightly thunderstorms. Many of the plants have sprouted. The corn is doing especially well, and the salad patch is right behind. This week, we’ve been doing weed maintenance, but there isn’t as much to do because we have mulched the whole garden heavily with barley straw.
As we worked in the garden, the children kept encouraging each other with “how excited Aunt China will be” to see this or that in the garden. Konrad and China plan to visit us the end of this month, Lord willing, and will be with us for about three weeks. Steph is hoping the baby waits to come until after China arrives, but there have been signs that make us wonder if the baby thinks maybe next week would be a good time to arrive. Out of our nine babies, we’ve not had an experience anything like this time, so in some ways, we don’t know what’s what. But if there had been contractions like this with our others, we would have been prepping the birthing bag.
Which is what Steph has been doing in some ways. Pretty well everything is ready for the baby’s arrival. Usually, I would be prepping my birthing kit, but with a plan to go to the hospital instead of being at home, I don’t have much to do this time. That’s a little sad for me in a way, but we’re thankful to have a doctor this time around, and we’re thankful that he really seems to know his stuff. We’re comfortable with him.
Juan David 