Big storm coming this afternoon and on into tonight with strong – hurricane strength – straight line winds and even tornadoes. Lot’s of rain and just generally nasty. I’m ok with the rain but the wind, not so much. I’ll be tying down all the dock furniture and anything loose.
I frequently mention how good my garden soil is and this week I got a first hand reminder of just how bad it was when I started. Garret’s wife, Ginny, has decided she wants a garden and got started on it yesterday. I was there working on the new plumbing and she asked me to give her some advice on locating the garden. She had a great sunny location picked. It had previously been a large patch of black berry bushes – aka a dense bramble patch that put out mini wild blackberries. They had mowed it to ground level a month or so back but it was starting to sprout back. She wants to save a few and cultivate them to produce berries. I have my doubts about that but it’s worth a try. She started digging out the unwanted plants and found it was like digging into concrete. It looked like simple sand but when you went dig in – rock solid. The small sand particles are very dense and pack tightly. It brought back memories – actually nightmares. If you try to poke your finger into the ground it will bottom out about an inch in. Contrasting that to the garden, I can push my whole hand in wrist deep and even deeper than that in some places. With any kind of garden implement such as a hand shovel, it’s easy digging 18” deep and has the texture and color of chocolate cake dough. When I use the small electric tiller it sinks immediately down to the body of the machine. If we try that at Garret’s, it will be tough going getting a bite of even an inch or two so it will have to be turned initially with something like a pick. Most folks give up pretty quickly or elect to do raised beds with store bought soil and compost. That’s exactly what Joey did. It costs money but it gets instant results.
Nancy made the creamed New Zealand Spinach using a recipe she got from her South Carolina niece. She had emphasized how much shrinkage there would be so I cut a full grocery bag full, which I estimate to be about 5 gallons. I picked the leaves off the stems which yielded about 2.5 gallons; stems to the compost pile. We split the leaves into 3 one gallon zip lock’s. I weighed the bags and they were 10 oz each. That, plus I now have a good feeling for how much we’re giving someone when we provide a full grocery bag. Last week we gave 6 grocery bags to the bridge ladies and I know that will hold them for a while.
I did the measurement only because the recipe called for 8 oz of spinach and wanted to be sure we were following the program. There was plenty of other food so if I didn’t like the spinach, no great loss. Surprise! It was quite good. The way the garden is producing the NZ spinach, we could virtually live on it and all the bridge ladies too. And as diligent as I’ve been in pulling out the renegade seedlings, more pop up randomly every day.
If I’m Trump, I’m introducing the idea of repealing the 19th.