In the garden, and RAIN!!!!
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Thursday, December 25, 2025 04:27
VIEWED: 1005090
PAGE 438 of 1154
Once upon a time, when we lived in a townhouse, I had a pomegranate in a half-barrel ad it did rather nicely and even bore fruit, but nobody likes pomegranates except for me, so the fruit would be wasted. At least with elderberry the birds will eat it, even if we don't.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
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Really! What did you think if its appearance irl?
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The tree-shrub looks like a willow with fountain form, and the fruit looks like pretty red and cranberry Xmas ornaments hanging from the branches. The flowers are large and very bright orange red, somewhat tubular, not my favorite color but many people find it pretty. I would say overall a pretty addition to a lansdcape, and useful if you and your family and neighbors like pomegranates!
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
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so yesterday was my "fuckit" day, and the only useful thing I did was take dd and puppywuppy for a walk.
Today I broke open my new leaf-shredder and started to process the "compost pile" that our former handyman/landscaper had created, and immediately found a few problems with the "compost pile" (aside from the fact that avocaio leaves were not composting very well
a) The pile, defined by 8' posts driven into the ground and corraled by plastic mesh fencing, is far too big for anyone to effectively manage. It's about 8-9'X 6-7', far too big for anyone to reach across even with a rake, or turn over and (at this point) too tall for anyone to manage.
b) With block wall on two sides and plastic mesh fencing on two sides, there's no way to "wade into" the pile.
c) On top of that, it was made more inaccessible with rubble piled up along one side of the plastic mesh fencing
d) A lot of palm fronds and small branches were tossed in, along with some rubble and trash, which can't be shredded.
I'm going to have to deconstruct the pile and get rid of a lot of the concrete and brick rubble. But I've managed to rake a bunch of leaves off the top and yank a lot of palm fronds out and shred about 10-12 bags-worth of leaves, making a bag's-worth of mulch, and managed to mulch a couple of garden-rows.
So I can see where I can really make this garden work, and do a lot of cleanup at the same time.
YEE HA!
PS, my arthritis is really kicking up. Just assembling the unit (which is very easy, needs no tools) made my fingers and thumbs creak, and my shoulders twinge. Sigh.
PPS KIKI, if you are anywhere near me, just let me know if you need any of my fancy garden toys! Between my string trimmer (with two new spools of string), leaf shredder, hand-pressurized spray pump, weed torch, and trusty spade, dirt rake, leaf/thatch rake, loppers, clippers and weeding fork I have all the tools one needs to make a garden sing!
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
#WEARAMASK
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Great work with the compost pile! I'll bet the shredded leaf mulch will be HUGELY appreciated by all your garden plants!
I went shopping a couple of days ago and stocked up on cheap meats: ground pork, pork shoulder, and pot roast. But since my old brands became unavailable, I had to go with news brands. So I've been cooking them up to see how they do before I use or freeze them. The ground pork: 
I made 24 meatballs out of 4.5lbs and baked them @300F 1.5hrs with a bit of water, covered. (I find it does a better job of rendering out the fat if they're cooked moist.) I removed the meatballs and stored them, and poured off the liquid into a container and chilled it in the frig. I kid you not, I removed over 1.5lbs of fat from the liquid this am, and the cooked meatballs weighed only 2.5lbs. The ground pork lost close to half its weight in cooking, mostly in fat, and a bit in water. Fortunately, my bean and pork stew recipe calls for 2.5lbs of cooked pork, so I did a good job! guesstimating how much raw ground pork I'd need, given the way it looked in the store.
Today it'll be on to trimming, cubing, and cooking the pot roast and pork shoulder, which is rather tedious, but I find one needs to pre-prepare that kind of cut or you end up with a very fatty dish. Plus if you cook your meat ahead of time, it takes up less space in the freezer.
Did you know that the FREEZER plastic bags are specially formulated to not let water pass through (sublimate) and dry your food out in the freezer? At least, according to the inet.
Tonight I'm going to water a tree, so that early tomorrow or perhaps the next day I can weed the area, rake the soil away from the trunk and level it, and mulch the tree. I have clay soil and it's literally hard as a brick when it's dry, but if you water it and wait, it gets past the gummy sticks-to-everything stage and becomes very workable. I'll be using some wood shavings I have as temporary mulch, to be later covered by prettier mulch, perhaps bark nuggets. So my next outdoor work project I HOPE will be tree-by-tree.
I'm looking for ideas on what to plant on either side of the walkway to my front door. I was thinking of planting the same kind of privet I have by the side of my house, but over the years I found it grows HUGE! and makes its own intrusive thicket. Elderberry might be nice, but it also gets rather large. Anything too large looks out of proportion to the house and the city-sized 50' lot. I have a lot of crape myrtle, including 3 smaller varieties, one of which has fuchsia
blooms and delightful pale gold and pale peach fall leaves that look like they glow, but aside from the bloom that bees like, the wildlife value isn't there. So I'm still casting about for ideas.
My ideal solution is
smallish (but tall enuf to walk under)
tree form so I can plant closer to the walkway and have it overhung with canopy
deciduous to keep it from being too dark and dreary in winter
drought tolerant/ low maintenance
wildlife friendly
PRETTY!
But I might be looking for too much.
Still, I'm not nearly ready to redesign to front yard (again, fourth iteration) into final form, so I have time to think on this.
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Elderberry doesn't fill the bill? what I looked up said it was about 15' tall... not too tall, is it?
What about feijoa? It might be an everlasting pruning job, but can be pruned up into a single-trunked or multi-trunked tree. Except it isnt deciduous,
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My cooking adventures for the week: I got a little TOd bc after a longish nad painful day I was faced with hours of kitchen-work and no help. Also, people being too picky eaters, plus the fact that I can't smell or taste anything pretty much robs me of the satisfaction of making anything that tastes good to me. So I turned in my one-week's notice and told the family that I quit.
Earlier, I was taking frozen chicken out of the freezer and with my bad hands I lost hold of it and it landed on my toe. It was the equivalent of dropping a 6lb rock on my toe and I have a nice painful bruise to show for it.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
#WEARAMASK
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Elderberry isn't too tall, but the individual trees I've seen growing out in the middle of nowhere are really wide. They seem to branch very low to the ground and all the way up the trunk with lots and lots and lots of branches! Given how adaptable they are to being cut down to the ground, I think they'd do well with pruning, but it just seems like too much work.
This is a somewhat trimmed example.
I truly hope your sense of smell comes back.
I'm sorry for you about your hands ... and your toe. I do think not cooking will be QUITE the load off your schedule!
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Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Well, the rain held off on my walk. Not so far but only the end of May. I am hoping that June and further on will be dry. Wet in spots up the Interior and the Valley, down to where I am and Vancouver Island. Still seeing snow at higher elevations. Suppose to warm up for the mainland next week. I hope so.
ETA Forgot to mention the tornado that happened in Saanich which is on Vancouver Island. No damage done except for some dirt thrown around and a trampoline that it picked up and then dropped further down the road from the house where it belonged.
Hope we get some dry weather soon, Brenda.
4 more days of T-Storms in a row by me here starting today. Here's hoping I luck out and it's just a small amount of rain per day and I'm not spending any of those nights up until 6:00AM mopping. These back to back to back 3" rain storms are killing me this spring.
Did you hear that the Chicago River flooded and knocked out the broadcast tower that sent Channel 2 and about 10 other stations to everyone in the Chicagoland area?
Lake Michigan is breaking dams all over the place and becoming a huge hazard. Naperville, IL must not have been prepared at all for this type of weather since it didn't get much more water than we got here and it put tons of houses several feet underwater. An 18 year old girl was walking her dogs and they all got swept away... they only found one of the dogs later.
Usually I'm the only one I know dealing with water issues on my house, and although they were bad last time, I was able to keep up with mopping up several hundred gallons of water and was fortunate to have a few large containers to keep up with the collection effort when the storm sewer backed up and I wasn't able to dump it anymore. I've always heard of toilets backflowing and dumping water into houses, but never saw it with my own eyes until now. Talk about feeling helpless... My brother and his wife had everything in their basement destroyed and one of my friends has spent the last week cleaning up his and deciding what to throw out and what to try to keep.
Hope you're doing well otherwise. It's times like these where I really envy people who rent apartments.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Well, the rain held off on my walk. Not so far but only the end of May. I am hoping that June and further on will be dry. Wet in spots up the Interior and the Valley, down to where I am and Vancouver Island. Still seeing snow at higher elevations. Suppose to warm up for the mainland next week. I hope so.
ETA Forgot to mention the tornado that happened in Saanich which is on Vancouver Island. No damage done except for some dirt thrown around and a trampoline that it picked up and then dropped further down the road from the house where it belonged.
Hope we get some dry weather soon, Brenda.
4 more days of T-Storms in a row by me here starting today. Here's hoping I luck out and it's just a small amount of rain per day and I'm not spending any of those nights up until 6:00AM mopping. These back to back to back 3" rain storms are killing me this spring.
Did you hear that the Chicago River flooded and knocked out the broadcast tower that sent Channel 2 and about 10 other stations to everyone in the Chicagoland area?
Lake Michigan is breaking dams all over the place and becoming a huge hazard. Naperville, IL must not have been prepared at all for this type of weather since it didn't get much more water than we got here and it put tons of houses several feet underwater. An 18 year old girl was walking her dogs and they all got swept away... they only found one of the dogs later.
Usually I'm the only one I know dealing with water issues on my house, and although they were bad last time, I was able to keep up with mopping up several hundred gallons of water and was fortunate to have a few large containers to keep up with the collection effort when the storm sewer backed up and I wasn't able to dump it anymore. I've always heard of toilets backflowing and dumping water into houses, but never saw it with my own eyes until now. Talk about feeling helpless... My brother and his wife had everything in their basement destroyed and one of my friends has spent the last week cleaning up his and deciding what to throw out and what to try to keep.
Hope you're doing well otherwise. It's times like these where I really envy people who rent apartments.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Rain here right now and suppose to dry out some by Thursday. We shall see.
Didn't hear about Chicago. But I know about the dams that broke in Michigan and have flooded areas and towns.
I would have loved a house when I was younger but yeah, repairs would have been the end of me. So maybe a good thing I could never afford one.
Getting slammed with some depression again weather and other stuff related.
Yeah well. Someone brought in a slight case of bedbugs over the last week. On Saturday I had to be very careful how I did my laundry. The manager did bring in the pest guy and had it sprayed. Hope he got them all but I didn't see anything.
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