Christi's Creative Corner: Babysitting the Grandcat!

Day 1

Well Sarah is on her first solo vacation this week. She flew to Huntsville, AL yesterday to visit her college roomie. They are heading to Disney tomorrow. This means that Dory is spending the week with us. We met Sarah halfway to pick up this lady and bring her back home with us on Saturday. Dory was not in favor of this "vacation". Here she is curled up on a dirty sweaty t-shirt of Sarah's (this is somehow supposed to be comforting) on Sarah's bed. We are required to send "proof of life" photos everyday.

Of course, with the price of gas, I made sure to make the most of the trip. We loaded up the back of the car with a bunch of things that had accumulated in the basement and dropped them off at Goodwill in Columbia. I also cleaned up the "treasury" of boxes that had accumulated and committed about half to the recycling. And then we stopped at Hy-Vee (David now has .65 off per gallon on his gas), and since we had a gift card to a BBQ place that still had a little left on it, I suggested we pick up some pulled pork to take home for supper (in order to use up the gift card, of course!). It was just a day to get rid of stuff......gift cards, boxes, Goodwill donations............and we gained a cat!

Sunday was beautiful, if a bit chilly. Here are the new flower boxes my dad made. I filled them with red and white geraniums. Leia was enjoying some sunshine on the bench seat.

I tilled the rest of the garden. You can see the rows of peas that are poking thru in this photo.

My neighbor gave me 2 watermelon and 2 cantaloupe plants, and even thought we never have any luck with them, I planted them. I also planted the cinnamon basil plant he brought. It smelled wonderful. And, I planted tomatoes. I like to plant roma tomatoes because they make such great sauce and salsa. I have some really good recipes for tomato sauce and salsa. I normally plant 2-4 plants. At the produce market, I found 4-packs of romas, but they didn't look very good, so I picked up 2 packs and thought I'd try to make a deal of buy 1 get 1 since they didn't look great and probably less than half would make it. Before I got the chance to make my offer, the gal working said, "Oh, I have some much better ones over here. You just take those free and I'll sell you these better looking ones." So, I ended up with 16 plants. And I planted them all, fertilized them, and gave them a little drink. I can hear my mom saying, "What in the world are you doing with all those tomato plants? You don't even like to eat fresh tomatoes!" We'll see what happens. I mean, half of them were FREE! Of course this means we are experiencing a great shortage of tomato cages. It will be feast of famine on the tomatoes this year.

Here are the potatoes and onions that were planted early. The potatoes are just over a foot tall, but seem to be mainly a stalk. We think that when the adjacent field was sprayed, they were at just the right stage and the spray drift caused all the leaves to curl up. We're hoping that they can still grow some potatoes.

The truly amazing thing about these photos is the lack of weeds! If you know me, you know that I am an equal opportunity gardener...........weeds get the same lack of attention that everything else does! My dad was recently telling me about his grandparents and he mentioned that his grandfather always had a garden that never had any weeds. Somehow, that hereditary trait must have skipped me. Of course, he also said that his grandmother was always working on a quilt, so maybe I just got double of that to make up for the lack of gardening gene.

And the sweet corn is up! All 12 rows that have 205 seeds per row (the hubster counted.......it kept him occupied while he was waiting for it to dry up enough to plant his crops). It's planted just to the west of the backyard at the edge of the cornfield. Hopefully, we can beat the wildlife to it. I am not responsible for the weeds in this one..............it was round-up ready sweet corn, so the weeds should be taken care of when they spray the field.