Le jardin potager

I'm making progress in the vegetable garden. The first of three successive plantings of snow peas is producing now. They're planted against the supports in the back of the garden. The zucchini are taking hold and starting to blossom, although these early blossoms probably won't produce anything. The first row of green beans has sprouted, and I planted another row on Tuesday.

I was out at 6:30 a.m. planting the last fifteen tomato seedlings. The bushy stuff on the right is oregano.

The largest part of the garden is taken up by tomatoes. I planted the seeds in late March and raised them in the greenhouse. Now, thirty tomato plants are in the garden. There are six varieties: roma, brandywine, yellow jubilee, cœur de bœuf, beefsteak, and fireball. I kept five plants of each variety. Here's hoping the blight fungus stays away. I still have eggplant and chili peppers to plant out, but the hardest work is done now.

Tasha Tuesday

Tasha was not interested in having her photo taken over the weekend. At least not by me. Ken was more successful. She, like most puppies, is a bundle of energy. She actually took a flying leap at Callie's head to give her a kiss on Monday. Callie just stood there, dumbfounded. She loves Bert the cat, too, and runs circles around him. They lie on the floor together and trade face licks. She still won't go down stairs, so we have to carry her. When we get to the bottom she tries to wriggle free and often takes a short dive, rolls over, and bounces back up to run out the door.

Tish-Tash.

This morning she woke me up around 03h30 to go outside. I got up, dressed, and carried her down the two flights of stairs. We got into the utility room and there was Bert. Tasha got all excited and I had to carry her outside to separate the two. Bert meowed and Tasha ran back into the house, having not done her business. So we went back upstairs and back to bed. An hour later, Tasha woke me up again. Dressed again, downstairs again, and this time no cat. Tasha pooped. Then back to bed. After a half-hour, at 05h00, the garbage truck roared up the hill. Tasha was up for good, and so were we.

Sunrise on our street

This is our street, looking east toward the sunrise early one recent morning. Just beyond where the street disappears behind the trees, it goes down a relatively steep hill into the valley toward the river. Just behind where I'm standing, the street becomes a dirt road through the vineyards.

We and our neighbors try to keep the grass cut along our portions of the road.

Sunday was a hot day, but today should be a little cooler. Still feels like summer, though, and that's nice. I will be harvesting the first of our snow peas today. I was surprised to see so many on the plants yesterday. We'll stir-fry them with some shrimp for lunch.

A fungus among us

I've probably used that line before, but what the heck. I was surprised to see these ink cap mushrooms poking up through a gravel road (it's the artsy organized neighbor's road to nowhere). I've seen them here before, of course, but normally in the fall, not in the spring. The morning sun shone through the trees and lit up the one whole mushroom in the bunch. The others were past their prime and dying back.

Shaggy ink cap mushrooms.

On Saturday I got to the market and, in addition to strawberries, got a cucumber, a head of lettuce, and a bunch of radishes. We ate radishes as an appetizer, the French way, with baguette, butter, and salt. Yum!

Tool time

As planned, I went to the hardware store early on Friday morning to find something for hanging tools in the garden shed. I found a product that looked promising and took two of them. I decided to put one on each end of the shed where the roof is highest. That means that one hanger is just inside the door and the other faces it on the opposite wall.

Callie and Tasha supervised my work in the garden shed.

Installing the hangers meant drilling holes in the masonry walls of the shed. That requires electricity, and the shed is about as far away from the house as you can get on our lot. Back when I was doing my own hedge-trimming, I got two very long spooled extension cords that I could connect together to power the electric trimmer. They came in handy for powering the drill in the shed.

One of the tool hangers installed and loaded up with rakes and things.

The first hanger went up pretty easily. I had a minor problem with the second one: the drill moved a little and one of the three holes was not exactly where it should have been. But it was only off by a little and I got it to work without having to drill another hole.

This is the hanger just inside the shed door. More rakes and things.

The only other "problem" is that there aren't enough hangers for all the things I want to hang. So I decided that the tools with closed handles can hang on nails on the back wall of the shed. There are some existing nails, but I think I'll add a few more so that everything can hang.

Spades and forks hanging on nails along the shed's back wall.

Everything is still not back inside the shed, but I'm getting there. And I have to make a trip to the dump soon to get rid of the junk and the chemicals. The dump has a special collecting point for hazardous materials like old paint, used motor oil, and other things that need special treatment.

Webz

We wore ourselves out on Thursday morning. First, we emptied the garden shed. The lawnmower, rototiller, and wheel barrows were easy. Then came all the tools like rakes, shovels, hoes, and other long-handled things. The tomato stakes, both metal and wooden, and the collection of various and sundry poles and sticks. Hundreds of little seedling pots and trays in every condition. Odds and ends. And garden chemicals (way-too-old herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, etc., from the previous owner).

These outdoor spider webs are tame compared to what I cleaned out of the garden shed on Thursday.

When the shed was empty, I swept the floor and walls. Then I used the shop-vac to clean the walls, ceilings, and the floor of the hundreds of spider webs, spider eggs, spider bodies, and actual live spiders. Yuck. We boxed and bagged a lot of junk for the dump, including all those old chemicals. I originally kept them when we first moved here thinking they might come in handy, but I've never used them; they're just too old.

This is probably the third time I've emptied the shed in fourteen years. The first time, that first year, was the worst. The shed was an unorganized repository for stuff that hadn't been used in years and I could hardly get inside, it was so crammed with junk. And the rotted door was patched with plywood. After a few months we had a new, lockable, door installed. As with all storage space, it quickly got re-filled with junk and less and less organized, so periodic clean-outs are more than necessary.

Now we start the process of putting it back together. I'm going to the hardware store to look for those things that I can hang rakes and shovels and other long-handled tools on so they're no longer leaning up against the wall (and falling over every time I take a tool out). Of course, I have no photos of the process, but I'll try to remember to take some of the result.

Misty morning

When the conditions are right, fog forms in the river valley as the sun rises. Sometimes it's a very shallow layer, and sometimes it gets thick enough to rise up over the heights. And sometimes, like on this recent morning, it's in between, just coming up to our house without engulfing us.

The small building with the white door (behind the hedge) is our garden shed.

The weather right now is very pleasant. The mornings are cool, but not cold (I go out with Tasha in shorts and a tee-shirt in the early hours before sunrise). The days are warm, but not hot. We're making progress in the yard and garden and I've started planting the vegetable seedlings outdoors.

Today is a holiday in France (Ascension Day), so we're restricted to not making noise with lawnmowers or chainsaws. Friday or Saturday will be the grass-cutting day. I may get started on cleaning out the garden shed this morning.