Ah, weekends! How do I loathe them? Let me count the ways...
After two uninterrupted days of work-related stress, I was able to relax and "unwind" a bit in the garden yesterday. Watering restrictions still haven't been lifted, and Sunday being my day to water, I hit the back forty and did so (after making a few practice casts with the spear-thrower), lamenting the deleterious effects of the lack of precipitation upon my root crops all the while. How's that for a cumbersome, pompously worded sentence? Makes A.E. Waite look like Mickey Spillane, doesn't it? Don't y'all just hate me sometimes?
I was able to harvest some very nice radishes (various cultivars) and turnips ("Purple Top White Globe" and "Tokyo Cross"), mind you, but the beets and kohlrabi are lagging behind, and their ultimate fate is "up in the air" at present.
I don't suppose it's every guy who sits in a chair at the edge of the garden, wearing a black leather jacket, faded jeans and jungle boots, a beer in one hand and a hose in the other (at my age, it's probably downright indecent to do so), but the lack of complaints and/or sniper fire from the neighbors indicates that if nothing else, they've become accustomed to the sight.
They've managed to become accustomed to the Irish and Scottish music, the constant smoke from the grill, and the incessant noise of tiller, chainsaw and other tools, after all, so I suppose the visuals have become less disturbing as well.
After watering, I checked on a few of the Korean ("Rumbo Hybrid") and Japanese ("Hokkaido" and "Tetsukabuto") winter squash, to see how their curing fared. Not badly at all, I'm pleased to report. Tempura might very well be on tonight's menu, depending on how much I care to spend on seafood. I'd had a craving for catfish (dredged in my homegrown, home-ground cornmeal and pan-fried) yesterday, but to my acute disappointment, the store in which I work doesn’t carry it, so obtaining some would have required a fairly long drive into Alpharetta, and I was too tired to bother with it.
After watering the garden (a thrill-a-minute undertaking, to be sure), I broke out the gas-powered, Ryobi “weedeater on steroids” and “got all agent orange” on the ass of a few overgrown sections of Green Hell.
While butchering unwanted plant-life, I noticed a fairly straight sapling some 3” or so in diameter, so I cut it down with my bow saw and -- inspired by an article in the latest issue of Primitive Archer -- set to dressing it for use as a bowstave. Judging by the appearance of the foliage, the tree is/was some relative of the apple, only with pyracantha-like thorns at the tips of its branches. I’ve never seen the likes of it before, and after nearly poking myself in the gonads a time or two while lopping the branches off, I hope never to see its like again.
In retrospect, I might have waited for winter to arrive so that the sap would be down, but when I develop a burst of enthusiasm for a given project, I’ve found it best to “strike while the iron is hot” as it were, and to avoid procrastination like the plague, so down went the tree and off went the branches and bark.
Sap or no sap, and whatever kind of tree it is, the wood is dense and extremely heavy , so if it doesn’t make a suitable bow, it’ll make a fine shillelagh. As there are a few inconsiderate individuals on the periphery of my life who could benefit greatly from the liberal application of said Celtic cudgel about the head and shoulders, making one has a certain appeal of its own. “We shall see“, as a wise friend of mine is inclined to say.
Following this, it was more of my all-time favorite undertaking, tree removal.
The offending tree is an almost thirty-foot holly that’s taken to dropping bushels of leaves into the rain gutters. Yes, you read that correctly. Nearly thirty feet in height. Keep those hollies pruned, folks. If you don’t, they’ll grow into actual trees. The close quarters at which I was working meant that approaching it with the chainsaw was as likely to result in me losing a limb or two as the tree, so I opted to approach it with a hatchet, as this particular trunk is only five or six inches in diameter.
The hatchet -- being a cheap, Chinese affair I bought at a long-since closed Richway store for a camping trip back in ’89 -- needed to be re-edged, and with much grumbling and profanity and little grace, I attended to the task. The Wolfcraft rig I bought a week or two ago served the purpose nicely, as I simply turned it sideways, put a grinding wheel in the chuck of my electric drill, and took care of business that way.
By the time I’d made it a little less than a third of the way through the trunk, it was dusk, and the noise-related complaints I received actually seemed to have some merit. I’ll have to finish the project today, while everyone is at work. I also need to fill one of the new raised beds, stain the spear-thrower, obtain an enameled crock, winnow the now-dry yellow corn (oh, I didn’t grow Indian corn only) and make a few quarts of hominy.
So many tasks, so little time.
Half a steak, a small serving of mashed potatoes, an ice-cold beer and a volume of T.S. Eliot brought the day to a close, as the darkness -- in his words -- “…seeing that it was a soft, October night/ Curled once about the house and fell asleep”. I followed suit shortly thereafter.
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