stubbed toes and mud pies

[flowerbug]

uhg, i hate it when i don't sleep well and then feel like i'm dragging the whole next day. i have work to do outside and feel zero gumption for getting it done. can i get in a few hour nap and then see how i feel? perhaps the best idea because if i go out there feeling like this i'll probably come back in anyways. yeah, that's my excuse... nap time!

 

[flowerbug]

didn't work at all. i do feel a little better but still would like a nap, just not happening...

 

[Shades-of-Oregon]

I have read several science reports about the importance of naps during the day. Naps are a brain healthy system and more productively with napers.
See science reports online.

I am nap happy. It’s always my body that nags at me every day the same time at 2- 3 pm . When I wake I feel refreshed and ready to finish the day. If I don’t stop and rest then I am at risk for accidents and or getting hurt doing the simplest things. So that’s my theory and I’m sticken to it.

 

[flowerbug]

today was garden club meeting and there were the three of us regulars and it was great to get caught up a bit.

i took some beans to shell out while sitting there and got most of them done. and yes, we did talk about gardening and some other things too, but on the whole it was mostly about gardens.

another good aspect was getting some canning jars back along with some other jars being given to us that we can eventually use as we'd come down to almost the last of them here when canning and doing some other things where we also use those jars. so a very nice score for us and it also helped them out to get rid of them to people who'd use and appreciate them.

 

[flowerbug]

i finished up getting the tomato plants cleaned up and buried. it went much more quickly having an inch and a half at least of rain to soften it up. instead of spending four hours to dig a short trench and get things cleaned up and put in the trench and then refilled and raked sort of smooth (i leave extra dirt on the trench with the stuff in it since it will settle through the winter) it only took me about two and a half hours, so not too bad.

since i had a few extra minutes and some energy left for digging i got some weeds out the rocks and then started turning under and weeding the strawberry patch. there was a clump of goldenrod in there that was spreading and some other weeds to dig out. very impressive root system on those goldenrod plants. reminds me of a cross between daisies and milkweed, but the shoots have red/pink on the tips instead of pure white.

 

[flowerbug]

ok, as a followup to the south field plowing and sod grinding with the tiller post in that other thread... that one was getting long and there's more for me to natter on about.

after he was done plowing and tilling and it was warming up enough for me to get outside i decided to right away get back along the edge to do some changes to the end of The River Nile (which is what we've called my long drainage diversion that ran along the berm i put in to deflect water from our gardens and back to the large drainage ditch).

where TRN goes into that large drainage ditch has gradually eroded over the years and i've done various things to try to slow it down and keep it from getting worse. the fact that it goes through nearly solid clay did help for a long time but it was still getting bad. a few years ago i took some chunks of concrete and put them down to take some of the impact of the water as it dropped a level down. that lasted about four years. we really don't get too many hard runoffs each year but when they happen they can scour some of that channel away.

other things i've done is thrown quack grass in there (it's the grass they put down when they put that large drainage ditch in to begin with). however, what i've wanted to do for ever since that went in was to set it up so it could be mowed and more gently sloped. so today i got in the trench and got the chunks of cement out of there and then knocked back the banks and reshaped things and used those big clods of grass to fill in and more gently slope things and then i took some extra dirt and chunks of sod from the plowing and tilling to fill in any empty spots. hopefully this means that in the future when it rains hard enough to flow it will be grass covered enough to prevent the topsoil from washing away plus i'll be able to mow it and that will give me a better idea of how things are going in there. it's currently hard to see at all because the weeds are so tall and thick.

the end of the trench right before the ditch i'd like to put in some bales of straw or hay and stick them down good with some stakes to make sure they won't move and then let them get grown through with quack grass to further stop the flow of water and slow it down, but i think it will take four or six bales to do that. throw some dirt on them and find some extra quack grass to get going right away. it will work well to pin it all down and keep in place and then through the years it will gradually get filled in more and more as i probably can use it as a weed pile for certain root balls and such.

i also have piles of dried out thorn bushes and dried out wild grape vines i can also use to help slow down and capture debris that may be flowing through there. all will do their magic to heal that gully and then eventually we'll have it back to sort of normal.

what needs to happen along most of that large ditch is to dig the stuff that is growing in the middle (mostly quack grass) and pile it along the edges again. groundhogs and trees both have caused problems and any bare spots get exploited by high flow water events to erode the banks... which we really don't want to shift but they have. i don't have the equipment or skills to do that kind of digging (i tried one time to do it manually, um, nope, that stuff is heavy!).

so tomorrow i get the hose back there turned on and squirt things down just to get them started in their recovery from being moved or used as mulch or fill. hopefully it will all be ok by the time we get our next heavy enough flows to go through there.

ages ago i wanted to run some drain tubes along their to channel the water but i ran out of money and other things came up which made me decide that it would have been a waste of effort (not our property). if i had some chunks of drain tubes i'd put them at the end through the straw/hay bales, but i don't have either of those at the moment...

then i got on with cleaning up a garden, which i didn't finish, but those are stories not really all that interesting [ok, the stories above may not be all that interesting either, but... ] and it also gets me going on other topics that aren't really gardening oriented...

 

[flowerbug]

i hadn't checked on the worms and fed them in a while so i really needed to see what was up and to make sure they all had enough water and some topped off bean pods and other veggie scraps to munch on. buried some wet items. i was glad to see that most of the fungus gnat population explosions were now being controlled by the little spiders. in one bucket there was a bigger spider that had been feasting on the little spiders so i did remove that one to restore the system to how i wanted it. also was glad because without all those fungus gnats that means i don't have to take the worm bucket outside to open it up and then bring it back in when i'm done. it is a slow worm time as the populations recover and i'm now keeping only 7 buckets instead of 10 so that is also fewer worms to see. i still have not found a bait source that carries the worms i wanted more to get the populations back up faster. it's not really been on my mind the few times i've been out shopping and then i remember later after i'm already home. it will come around eventually.

after getting the worms taken care of then i went out and watered the moved chunks of sod and other scattered bits of grass this morning to help get them going.

that was all done before starting back on the expanded SE corner garden to get it put up for winter. scrape back and weed the bean plants to make a line i can put the trench down, dig the trench, put all the garden debris in the trench along with whatever else i can find handy to put in there. in this case it was some nearby thyme that was taking over and i chopped a few square feet of that and put it in the trench. it does make a good ground cover but i don't need it to take over yet another garden. removing a few square feet won't solve that problem but it at least made a dent in it.

emptied some sheets for Mom that she'd left for me to haul and that was enough for the day.

had a caramel, chocolate and almond candy that Mom had made (she calls them Frogs because they are like a Turtle but not quite the same ) and then a can of spaghetti-o's. stretched out for a nap and now i'm on the winding down part of the evening where i can write a bit and ponder what the day will be like tomorrow. maybe painting those doors, maybe not, ... then back to putting up another garden inside the fence (the pepper garden).