It is lonely at the top!

   Late winter saw me hauling compost to the garden spots.  This was necessary from two points...one,  the compost pile needed cleaning and...two, the garden needed prepping for the spring gardens.  There must have been thirty wheelbarrows of the compost so it took me several days to complete the job but finally, the gardens looked nice!  They still do even though I am waiting to pull the last few broccoli and cabbage plants so the tomatoes and peppers can be set in the ground.  Hopefully, that will happen by this weekend...weather permitting.

  There is one lovely plant that sprouted from a seed in the compost.  Since all scraps go to the bin, hundreds of seeds (food scraps) wind up there, too.  Obviously, a pumpkin seed was among those hundreds.  That seed was the top of its game and now one lone pumpkin plant has taken up residence in the garden.  It is sad and lonely as there are no others.  I fully had expected the late freeze of a few weeks back to kill the plant but, somehow, it survived!  While the bees are working the blooms of this plant, the pollination is not happening.  I wish there were two or more but this sole seed sprouted and grew.  Poor, lonely pumpkin plant!  

  My intentions may be late but tomorrow will find me planting a few more pumpkin seeds along side this one.  I doubt that those plants will grow fast enough to bloom before this one withers away but maybe?  Oh, well, I had not even planned to plant pumpkins.  I guess, now I am.  Poor, lonely pumpkin plant.

Making Lemonade?

   The old saying "When life hands you a basket of lemons, make lemonade" holds true for my chores of the day.  After enduring the stifling "don't do that" woes for months, I was just about resigned to the idea of staying "Queen of the Small Gardens" for the rest of my days.  Then, a doctor visit and a hurricane visit changed that drastically.  Just days prior Hurricane Zeta slammed us, I received the "ok" to resume a somewhat normal schedule.  Life was good.  Wham!  Hurricane Zeta.  Life is hard.

  With the mountains of debris left behind when Zeta left, there was nothing else to do other than push up the shirt sleeves and get to work.  I found that if I sorted a section of debris, cleared out anything large and spread it thinly, I could use the lawnmower to cut it to a fine mulch.  Great!  With a burn ban initiated, the mulching helped to eliminate a good bit of debris.  At least now I had huge mounds of powdery fine mulch instead of unsightly mounds of rough debris!  Still...what do you do with about two tons (yes, that is what I have cut already) of mulch?  Well, you take those lemons and make lemonade!  

  I took a few days to clear the limbs and roofing from the vegetable plot and found that the cabbages still looked relatively in good shape.  A brilliant idea popped in the head (the second...the first being transforming a lawnmower into a mulch grinder)!  Use a good bit of that mulch in the garden!  So...28 loads in a wheelbarrow were pushed up the hill and into the garden area.  Using some of the salvaged planks, a pathway was laid out and the garden started receiving the mulch.  It worked perfectly in the garden and I started seeing the mounds growing smaller and smaller. 

  Now the idea of mulching all the pathways is starting to run around in the brain.  Clearing the gardens is my "playtime" after doing debris cleanup.  Moving the loads of mulch and seeing the progress is good for the morale.  We still have tons of trees down that need to be cut for firewood, a roof and windows to be replaced in one of the out buildings and the entire pier to be rebuilt but progress is progress no matter how slow.  A glass of lemonade sounds good right about now.