A Prefectly Uneventful Saturday

I spend quite a bit of time reading these posts and watching their videos, absorbing everything with huge enjoyment. This morning reading Paula's post, I marveled as well.

I just can't seem to grow enough to can. Yes, I give a ton away to my grown kids and what goes bad to the chickens, but even so, with over a hundred tomato plants, we're eating everything. Is it because I'm such a pig? I, alone, eat two dozen or so tomatoes each day. My kids would eat two dozen cucumbers apiece each day if I had that much, necessitating several hundred cukes a day to be grown. With our long growing season we get very accustomed to so much fresh produce that maybe I should ease off of myself, freezing what fire hot pepper sauce I can manage to get done, canning tomatoes, and trying for more fresh greens all year long.

Five of my grandchildren, Carolina's darlings, who're living with us while Big Jose is in San Salvador, are just as impressed with the constant garden variety being hauled into the house. "Abuelita?", Blanca asked me while picking San Marzano Tomatoes, "Will you teach me how to garden?"

"Yep, darling, just plant, weed, haul wood chips, manure, leaves and compost all your life, and you'll have food to eat."

"That's all?" she asked suspiciously.

Yeah, really that's all it takes. I just enjoy it so much that I spend every spare minute I have outside, but even so I'm falling farther and farther behind as my soil is so rich that even in a drought, plants flourish - especially the wild weeds.

When I wrote about not going into Vanessa's trailer the other day, I used the word 'demurred' which provoked guffaws from my neighborly Punctuation Police Officer who is now apparently monitoring my word choice.

"Demurred?" Sarah hooted and hollered. "You didn't politely and primly demur."

Ok, OK, what I really said was, "Are you kidding me? I have two sacks of dog food in the back of my truck that'd get stolen in this scarey trailer park if I went inside."

But hey, ain't that demurring?

Our little three footed dog, the fourth hanging uselessly, Amelia, has fitted in here easily. She's a lap dog, soothing the temperamental children somewhat, scampering off in alarm when someone's fixing to blow, jumping on my bed this morning as I'd slept past daylight. Well jeepers I'm kinda tired from the non-stop turmoil involved in raising children on the edge, but even the dog wants to interfere with my rest?

I couldn't get to yard sales yesterday due to soccer practices, but I'm glad the kids have ballgames again as an outlet. Chuck and Yolie got moved, Tabby was in Hog Heaven as Kortney was here for the weekend, Paloma never raged - she even bathed the dog and made me a plant stand with some wood she'd found outside and the rest of my kids got along for the day.

My mother was hauling wood chips alone when we came home from soccer, so I sent Allen, CW and Paloma to help her, yet I'm convinced that so much very hard garden work keeps my parents young and strong here facing 80. Dad had gone again to Gina's house to work, then they went out dancing (Grandma and Grandpa, not Gina and Grandpa) and today they'll head to church and then off with some friends for the day to some theater for a play. Grandma has a bridge club and some Bridge-A-Rama going on plus she's grown a ton of corn for us.