Gardening Time

Hello everyone! I’m making great strides in the garden but not so much in the house. Gardening is a good excuse for me to NOT attempt to do the things that I find scary or hard. I’ve got hydroponic Rutgers tomatoes that I grew from seed, now they are in ½ gallon jars with roots 18” long! But they’re starting to fade. I’ve changed their nutrient water and am hoping for the best. They have blossoms!  The hydroponic ones are huge compared to the ones in little pots of dirt so I hope they live.

I’ve also got several organic bell pepper plants in pots and 5 gallon buckets and have planted organic green beans and some cosmos, marigold and vinca flower seeds. Pots everywhere! I hope being in fairly large/tall pots mean the mice, rabbits & packrats won’t be able to get them. I planted some pretty petunias in one small garden with snapdragons and the petunias got eaten right down to the ground. My other garden with zinnias in it has not been touched.  There are some clusters of really cute tiny white daisy-type flowers growing wild so I dug some up, thinking they obviously were not attractive to mice. They had a taproots and are not very happy today (the day after transplanting). I hope they revive, as they’d be nice perennials, assuming they don’t take over the whole garden! 

 

Here’s my little bitty bicycle planter, isn’t it the cutest?! I bought it for $4 at a thrift shop two years ago and have been storing it ever since. I love that it’s still got the training wheels, handlebar streamers and a bell! It’s got petunias that are doing fine, I guess because the critters can’t climb up there. It sure is heartbreaking when stuff gets decimated like that, especially since I really HATE getting my hands dirty. That dirt under my fingernails, ugh!! 

 

The Face Flies are back. I’m sure they have a REAL name but that’s what I call them. They get right up in my eyes & nose in a cloud, trying to suck the moisture. UGH! They don’t bite but they sure are annoying, especially when they get between my eyes and my glasses. 

And my big Snaky is back too. We both scared the crap out of each other last week when I was heading to the camper and he was slithering out from underneath it!  He’s about 5′ long. He’s marked like a rattler but is harmless.

I’ve made a startling discovery. I’m COLD! I never used to be cold. It had to be below 65 degrees in order for me to sleep, and when everyone else was wearing sweatshirts and jackets, I was comfortable in a tee shirt. And I suffered horribly in summertime temperatures. Well all that’s changed! The other night I was FREEZING with two blankets on the bed, so I got up and turned on the heater. When I climbed back up into bed I looked at the thermometer and it was 72 degrees! I guess that’s the price for losing all that nice insulating body fat. I hope this means I won’t be as sensitive to the summer’s heat. NOTE: Two days later it’s 90 degrees and I’m plenty hot, so I guess it doesn’t work that way. 

90# lost as of today. I’m 137#!!  I’m thinking about just keeping on and get down to 127#, that would be 100 pounds lost! Amazing. But I think it’ll be way too skinny for me. I guess that would be about a size 6. And I’m tired of buying new (thrift store) clothes all the time. Plus it would probably mean a zillion more wrinkles in my face. It’s really awful, all the loose skin and wrinkles. I even have wrinkles on my ankles!! 

I had some visitors from Phoenix last week, my old camping buddies Jeanne & Joanne, and Joanne’s two adult Grands! They camped in a beautiful dispersed site in the national forest only about 5 miles from Show Low. I wish I’d known about those campsites when I was here looking for land. They got here on Monday and on Tuesday we went for a two mile hike!! That’s farther than I’ve hiked since 2001. And nothing hurt!  We used hiking poles, I guess that makes a difference though it doesn’t FEEL like it does.  I am so ready to go camping myself, but the camper isn’t. It needs new tires. I thought I’d get tires with the Stimulus money but that was the fastest spending spree ever! I had a long list of “wants” so of course it didn’t stretch far enough. I did get a new (refurbished) propane stovetop though, it’s only 12” wide compared to my present stove’s 25”. (Has front & back burners) When you only have less than 6’ of countertop space, that extra 13” will make a huge difference. I’ll keep the present stove/oven in the cabinet underneath the counter and just bring it out when I need to use the oven. 

I’m hoping to go on a mini road trip in the Fall, maybe late October or early November, to visit Deb in Pahrump, NV and go to Valley of Fire State Park & Death Valley.  Since I don’t have thermostatic heat in the house, I’ll have to go before the freezing temperatures hit so everything in the house doesn’t freeze. Keeping my fingers crossed that gas prices will stay low and I can save up some gas money. 

I’ve figured out how to “fix” the refrigerator being up too high, without spending any money. I just need to remove the piece of siding that’s got the present vents in it, cut about 10” off the bottom, reinstall the siding lower and put the cut-off piece on top! Easy-Peasy, only it isn’t. I started to remove the screws holding the siding on the other day and it’s difficult where I’ve used silicone caulk to cover the holes where the screws went in (prep for painting, which I never got done in back). It’s really hard to get that caulk out of the screw heads. But I still think it’s possible. That’s one of the jobs I’m avoiding. I’ll have to get help lifting down the siding panel, but I could have most of the screws out in advance…….

I’ve been very upset this week, because I lost two pairs of shorts. There’s just not that many places to put things around here, so it was really puzzling and quite scary. I looked everywhere about ten times! I even looked in the unused refrigerator and the pressure cooker, just in case my brain tumor was getting frisky or I was starting to get demented. Thank GOD I didn’t find them there!! After three days of stressing over these lost shorts, I woke up in the middle of the night and remembered a place I hadn’t looked yet…..a box under the camper bed for out of season clothes. Voila!! Boy was I relieved; I’m NOT CRAZY!  (Well I guess it was kinda crazy to put them there, but hey, at least they were in a reasonable place, not in the refrigerator or pressure cooker)  

I found some real goodies in 3 boxes that Jeanne and Patricia had stored for me for 5 years! It was like Christmas, opening those boxes. One is my cute fairy door that friend Tam gave me. I love it!

Also in one of those boxes was this fabric, which I also really love. I can’t figure out what to do with it though, it’s only one yard. I wish I had enough for curtains. Funny to think that I must have had this color scheme in my mind as long as 5 years ago!

 

Someone requested photos of my land and views, so here they are. Except for looking over the valley, everywhere else looks about the same. Lots of cedar trees, small and large. And lots of rocks in about 2/3 of the acreage. (1.05 acres, 150′ x 600′)