Dreaming of Spring

...



I've been laid up with bronchitis and laryngitis for about a week. I've been working half-days, and coming home and conking out. I had been a bit worried about getting sick, with the same bad chest cold, over and over again, but it seems that quite a few of the people at the theater have the same complaint, so I'm going to stop fretting that I've somehow ruined my immune system, and get on with my life.

We're due for a week of rain, so Robb and I took advantage of a beautiful Saturday, to do some outside work. I consolidated and moved my compost. It's quite incredible how this pile is digesting garden waste and food scraps. We cook from scratch, every day, which creates a lot of compost fodder. And yet miraculously, we don't have a huge stinkin' heap of rotting vegetables in the back yard. What we've got is a dark brown forest-smelling pile that converts veggie trimmings into food for our garden.

I bought Robb a portable table saw for Christmas, and he worked (outside, next to the lemon tree) on building a box to hold his tools. Things are a bit scattered at the moment, but we're working on getting better organized.

Robb also had his first go at cutting the grass with our push mover. Perhaps it's silly to even mention this, but when I think back to the time that he was moving so slowly, using a walker, being able to mow the lawn seems momentous. (Snow-bound blog readers, please don't hate us.)

I spent quite a bit of time preparing what's going to be a vegetable garden. I'm hoping to have two garden beds this year. We're waiting for the arborist to schedule the removal of our dying mulberry tree, which shades the entire yard. I figure there's no real point in digging up the bed under that tree, until the tree work is done. I feel that would just churn up mud.

And speaking of mud, I laid down the leaves that Robb raked up, in paths around our garden beds. I know that a lot of people use hay or straw for this purpose. I'd previously laid down fine bark mulch, but it wasn't nearly enough, and cost a fair amount of money. I'm hoping that by covering the paths with leaves, we'll reduce the prodigious amounts of mud that's being tracked into our house. Let's just hope the leaves don't become a breeding nursery for slugs. Whoo Boy! Do we have slugs! I think I dislike these even more than snails, because there's no easy (non-slimy) way to pick them up.

Although we got a lot of work done yesterday, neither of us were working at top speed. I'm still dragging from the chest cold, and we took a lot of breaks. It was really nice to be outside in January, working in the sunshine.

The books I've been reading suggest that I could plant warm-weather crops as early as March, so I'm going to start the first of my tomato seedlings this weekend. I'm probably doing this too early, but I'm going to throw caution to the wind. We're really living the Wild Life, here in East Oakland!