Gardening Time, and a Few Memories

 According to what everyone else around us has been doing we are a bit late in getting anything out into the garden.  Many, if not most, local gardeners have had lettuce, onions and other cool weather things planted for a few weeks.  Gary's Aunt Kathy has had lettuce growing in a little planter in her front yard for a month or more.  We usually wait 'til the end of March to get going.  So all day yesterday was dedicated to gardening.

I got the weed eater out and sheered off the garden beds here by the house.  Then I got out Little Brother, my rototiller, and tilled them up.  Later in the evening I planted every onion slip and bulb I'd bought in the second garden bed.  I am going to head to Greasy Creek this morning and get more.

Gary was feeling much better yesterday; he's on the recovery end of this bout with COVID, so he did quite a bit of stuff, too.  He got the mower going, and mowed the lawn where it's been getting shaggy.  He spread some dairy dirt on the big garden, got the tiller hooked to the tractor and tilled both our garden and Gail's.  He helped me with the garden beds; raking behind me as I was tilling.

As I was getting the weed clumps and rocks out of the dirt I thought quite a bit about my dad.  Pretty much every whiteish/gray lump you see down there is a rock. 

 I am sure I have written about this before, but well do I remember how my dad would have an absolute fit if he saw a rock in the garden.  One of the cardinal rules we kids had when we were growing up was "no throwing rocks," especially near the garden.  He would raise the roof, as it were, if he ever saw us throwing rocks around near the garden.  I always wonder what he'd think of the soil condition we have here.  He'd never believe we could go much gardening with so many rocks. 

 A few other outdoor rules: 

NO playing with fire at all.  (When my cousins stayed with us for a while they defied this order, unbeknownst to him of course.  Dad would have had a stroke if he'd known they started small fires out in little holes in the woods behind the house.)  

NO driving nails, or anything else, into the trees on the place.  

NO thistles.   Now this wasn't something that would happen deliberately, but occasionally a thistle seed would drift over to our place and have the temerity to sprout and grow.  On occasion he would miss it and one would actually bloom!  Yikes!  I remember, more than once, crawling around picking up every single thistle seed I could find near a rogue plant that had managed to bloom.  Usually this was in the taller grass in the orchard.  Sometimes there'd be a thistle plant in the neighbor's pasture next to us.  I think Dad would slip over the fence and get it.  Haha...  The neighbors were of the same mind as he, so I don't think there would have been any repercussions had he been caught. 

NO climbing trees.  This wasn't strictly enforced, because I remember back behind the house was a large Douglas Fir, I believe it was, that had low sloping limbs.  Siblings Dan, Leslie and Teresa could climb that tree way up to the top; at least Dan would go all the way to the top, as far as he could anyway.  We all called it the Monkey Tree.  Dad tolerated it for a while for some reason.  I think both Dan and Leslie were in their teens at that time.  This is really a vague memory because I would have been still in the lower to middle single digits of age.  I remember that when I got up older, like closer to ten-ish, Dad took a chainsaw to the the limbs, probably up 10-15 feet or more, and that was the end of climbing the Monkey Tree.