We had weekend guests and enjoyed every minute of it. My nephew Glenn and his wife, Lynn, moved their son Andrew from Hattiesburg down to Orlando where he’ll be attending Valencia Community College, working at Kay Jewelers and then, if all goes according to plan, transferring to UCF. We didn’t do much of anything but eat, talk, and sit on the dock but it was full time catching up. Grilled a pile of ribs, made a giant garden salad and a big bowl of green beans plus the obligatory pan of Mac and Cheese.
I’m starting the summer garden repairs which is mostly redoing the path’s between the garden rows. It doesn’t sound like much when you put it down in writing but each row takes me an hour or two and pulls about 2 gallons of sweat so when I’m done, I’m really done. Nothing much on the social calendar this week so I should be able to finish the job, weather permitting. In about 2 weeks I’ll start planting seeds indoors getting ready for fall. That will include tomatoes, peppers and egg plant to start. I wasn’t going to do eggplant again but Nancy made an incredible parmesan using a new variety and that changed my mind.
Big garden dilemma – soggy compost piles. We’ve been getting so much rain that the piles are literally too wet to turn. What we need is an old fashion hot, dry week. There’s not much growing in the garden and the beds have been mostly prepared for fall planting so a good solar treatment would roast the nematodes and get the compost piles cooking internally. You want the pile to heat up to kill weed seeds and decompose more thoroughly. If things are right with the pile, internal temps can be 150 degrees. With these soggy piles getting hit with cool water daily, not much decomp can be happening, just your basic rotting.
I read a new report on the penguin situation in Antarctica and it’s thrown my world into a tailspin. I thought it was a given that with this global warming thing, all iceberg critters were seeing the end in sight. For some reason polar bears have managed to increase populations but surely not penguins. But alas, the findings were record populations of both the giant Emperor variety and small Adelaides. Not just a few more but two to three to five times as many as expected. Combine that with recent reports of record numbers of whales and sharks, all endangered, and you have to wonder if maybe this warming thing is actually good for critters; or maybe it isn’t really warming. Another winter like 2014 and there will be another batch of scientists pushing the return to another ice age – and trust me they’ll have plenty of charts and statistics to prove it.
I think the reason soccer fans get so unruly is because they are bored to tears sitting in the stands waiting for something to happen.
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