The weather has been perfect for the garden – cool evenings, mild afternoons, loads of sunshine and an occasional light rain. The plants are under no stress and the bugs are mostly gone. We’re picking turnips, lettuce and herbs – rosemary, basil and parsley. A few wild cilantro plants popped up and are now residing in the herb section. I grew some cilantro from seed a couple years ago and they have propagated on their own ever since. Before Christmas we should be harvesting greens including spinach, swiss chard, and Kale. The tomato and pepper plants are loading up with fruit but it’s always a game with the weather – will it freeze, how deep a freeze???
Still no spec’s to amount to anything from the dock. I hit it a couple times a day just to make sure and have several rods complete with spec gear ready to go on a moments notice.
After repairing the dock, (thanks Mark) replacing rotten planks with new ones, I decided it was looking strange with so many generations of planks side by side. It needed a paint job so I decided to attack that one on my own. The first step was to scrub it down with strong soap and bleach to kill off any mildew. That’s a down on your hands and knees with a scrub brush kind of job. Sounds easy enough but I forgot how caustic the mix was and really burned my hand. It started blistering, with blood and swelling. What a mess. I called Olivia in Knoxville for an emergency consult. She was in a class but answered immediately. She prescribed putting it in an ice bath and coating it with hydro cortisone. Two days later the swelling is way down but still painful. I added raw aloe to the treatment and plan to tough it out for a couple days. I checked with the pharmacist at Publix and he said the same thing as Olivia. I wasn’t checking on her, rather checking on him.
I bought a gallon of deck paint – not the cheapest- and dedicated most of the day to painting. I got it about 90% complete before running out of paint but that’s easily corrected and it looks so good that I’ll just continue on and do the outside swim decking as well. It’ll take another gallon to do all that. I decided to jump on the job because the weather is absolutely perfect – mid 70’s, 50% humidity and no rain in the forecast.
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