Enjoying Nancy’s birthday

Brush clippers one, Joe’s little finger Zero.

It’s been Nancy’s birthday week which means we’ve been eating high on the hog. On Saturday Tom and Tina took us to the International Food and Wine Festival at EPCOT. That’s an annual event where kiosks representing different countries set up and sell samples of their local food. I would guess there are 20 plus such kiosks and it took us almost 3 hours to make the rounds. In addition to taking us and picking up the tabs, they bought us a pass that lets us into EPCOT after 4 PM on an unlimited basis for a year so I imagine we’ll be hitting a couple more such events before the passes expire.

On Monday Eileen came over and took us out to lunch at a new place in downtown Deland and on Wednesday, we’re being taken out to one of our favorite spots in Port Orange by Joey and Mark. So all in all this has been a good week for us. I’m traveling to North Carolina the end of the week with Tom where he has a speaking engagement at Duke. Nancy will make a tour of more quilt shops with her quilt buddies here.

I’ve sure learned my lesson this year about using old seed. With many vegetables, a seed pack contains literally hundreds of seeds and there’s no way you can use them all. A typical pack of lettuce seed, for example, will have 500 seeds. So I use what I need and put them away for next season. Turns out two seasons are fine, three, not so fine. In the case of my lettuce seed, where I had half a dozen different varieties, they fell off the cliff in terms of germination. From nearly 100% last year to approximately zero this year. I did read the fine print on one of the packs and sure enough it said good for three years max.

How’s this for ultimate recycling – I’m recycling dirt. When I decide to plant in an older section of the garden, I dig shovel loads of dirt out of the garden and spread it on a working compost pile. Then refill the hole with 100% compost from the cooked and ready pile. In building a compost pile, it’s normal to add a layer of soil every now and again so that’s the justification for my recycle.