LilyPond of Bloom

Well, on Sunday, I successfully did almost nothing at all. I have not been feeling good, but I can't figure out why. Things hurt, my stomach is upset, and I move very slowly. Yesterday I went so far as to dispose of the remains of the soil mix--loading up pots with most of it and dumping the rest onto the raised beds--so I could clean the tarp and put it away. I poked a bunch of pea seeds into the ground. It's too late to plant peas. They like cold weather. So I am behind the game as usual. And then I was too tired to get to the next step. Today I planted six of my little tomato seedlings in some of the pots. My experiment is that I cut the bottoms out of those pots and placed them in the corners of the raised beds so the tomatoes can send their roots all the way down. I don't know if they will even survive, because they are pretty little, or if that will make them happy, but I thought I'd try it. I also planted the Dragon's Egg cucumbers, which are looking pretty healthy.

The next problem was that everything had to be fenced so deer and rabbits won't destroy it all.The Sparrowhawk put up the fence panels from last year, still in pretty good shape, around the original two beds. I thought I had a roll of fencing that would do to protect the two new beds. Sadly, no. I had a piece of fence and three of those green metal stakes. The rest I had to compose from found materials, which was no easy task. I had another roll of wire screen that had been cut into sections for some other purpose, and I had a bundle of wooden stakes that turned up in the back of the yard, presumably dumped there by a former resident, when I was cutting buckthorn last year. They're in okay shape, considering they've been under the ivy for years. So then the job was to hammer wooden stakes into the ground and piece the bits of screen together with wire, also fixing them to the stakes. They'd been rolled up, so they were completely unwieldy. I was wearing my work gloves, but my arms have an interesting pattern of scratches from the wire ends. Oh my heavens, it was a complete PITA and the completed thing is a horrid kluge. (As described by Wikipedia: "A kludge or kluge (/klʌdʒ, kluːdʒ/) is a workaround or quick-and-dirty solution that is clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain." Quite so. I don't even know if it will keep out rabbits, but I had to make an effort.

Somewhere in the middle of that, I took a break because I really felt like crap. I actually took a nap. Then I cooked dinner. Then the Sparrowhawk and I went back outside in the cool of the evening and finished the job just before it got dark. The lengths to which one will go in hopes of someday obtaining a tomato . . . .