Nancy had an emergency sewing job yesterday. A while back she made her great nieces and their young daughters, Grace and Allie, matching aprons. Yesterday she got a picture of Allie, wearing the apron, making cookies with her mom. A few minutes later the phone rings and it’s her saying that she really needed a cook’s hat. That puts Nancy into action mode and a bit of a panic trying to determine what kind of material she can make it from etc etc etc. She calls Allie’s grandmother (who watches her during the day) and requests head measurements. Then to the shed to search out material. She’s back quickly and absolutely ecstatic because she found enough of the “chicken” material that she used for the aprons to make the hat. An hour later the hat is made and it’s in a priority mail envelope for it’s trip to South Carolina. Crisis averted.
Today’s another big cover up the garden day. We have a 4-5 day stretch of near freezing cold weather projected. We usually stay a few degrees above the forecast temps but you never know and at the freezing point, a few degrees make a large difference, literally a life death difference for the plants. I’ll pick enough goodies to cover us for the period and then wrap it up. The trick to doing this easily is to get it done before it gets windy. The worst is when the cold weather is led by a wet, windy day and I’m trying to deal with 20‘x40’ sheeting. It’s like dealing with a large umbrella or parachute in a wind storm.
As part of the picking before covering project, the cherry tomato plant still remains the big star of the garden. I pick several pounds of cherry tomatoes daily. That’s pounds. The plant is starting to wind down with fewer and fewer new blossoms but there’s probably still thousands of green ones that will ripen over the next couple of weeks, weather notwithstanding. Many of the greens ones we picked before the last freeze are ripening and Nancy made another large batch of spaghetti sauce today. I think this is the first January where we’re actually adding to our stocks. And consider this – I will be starting new plants from seeds in the next week or so. Ditto green peppers – still picking beautiful green bell peppers and starting new seedlings at the same time.
The lake level is high for this time of the year, so far into the dry season. Usually by mid January the lake will be down a foot or so from the October peak but we’ve had above average rain and no nursery pull downs either for irrigation or freeze protection. So mentally I’m switching over from concern that there’s not enough water in the lake to concern that there will be too much water if we have only a typical wet season. A wet spring could be a problem.
I mentioned that Aaron and Ali had a fun day catching specs last week. Here’s proof. About an hour after taking the pic, we were eating fried specs. Yeah, I know the fish are small but they sure were good. 
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