Relentless Inquiry

<lj-cut text=”the soggy saga continues…”
I finally finished mulching all the garden beds at around 10:30pm this evening, after a break to chat work-stuff with a friend and then another break for dinner with .

Also planted the 4-inch pots each of lemongrass, dill, and a Golden Jenny melon that I got at Squirrel Foods this evening. I have seeds for Golden Jenny, but couldn't resist a well-started seedling (a pair, in fact) with two sets of true-leaves. No more chocolate mint, alas. I should have bought some of the leggy ugly stuff when I could, and tried to pinch it back to bushiness. Now it's completely scarce. Ah well.

Earlier today I did a lot of tomato maintenance, pinching back suckers, making sure branches go over the next rung of the tomato cage while they are still limber, etc. I also *finally* finished burying the soaker hose that's been sitting for a couple of weeks. It was dicey threading it through mature and seedling plants without trashing anything, but I finally managed. The extra coils are up around the grapevine, where they'll be welcome, and can be extended out if I put a zinnia bed at the edge there.

I'd been waiting, in fact, to mulch until I laid out the soaker hose, since the mulch is to hold water and goes OVER the hose, not under it. Next year I think I will merely *bury* the sucker about 4 inches under the ground and put chalkline to mark it. Gah.

My lemon basil has (barely!) a set of true-leaves, and some teensy lettuces were also ready to plant, just big enough to see and in the top of some rockwool. So we'll see how those do– I've got a couple of pairs under hotcaps (the home-made 2-liter bottle with the cap off kind) and a couple by themselves, let's see which do better.

Gotta run the feeder hoses to the soaker hose tomorrow, and run hose down the front, and then I'll have a setup which I'll be confident the cat-sitter folks can run while I'm away and take care of my garden.

Yesterday was an Emergency Preparedness Committee meeting day, a garden day, a get-compost day, a start-the-RV day, and a pack clothes and snorkel gear for vacation day (which somehow necessitated pulling ALL the stuff stacked in the closet out and arranging it so I could FIND stuff).

So much for the 'weekends are for resting' theory. By the time we go on vacation Tuesday afternoon, I will be so overdue for a vacation that I'll have to take one to recover from getting ready for this one.