Doin's and Stuff

Wow! Doesn't seem like it's been 9 days since Easter, which was just a couple of days ago.

Last Wednesday, J got hurt during some training at work and has been on the injured list this past week.
Nothing serious, he got hung up during some Confined Space drills and pulled/strained/or otherwise injured his left chest wall.
As long as he kept his left arm down, he wasn't in pain. But lifting it, or anything else, hurt him a lot for a few days.

The first day he was home he rested/slept a lot.
The next day he rested some, but felt like he could ride the riding mower and cut the front left quadrant of the front yard.

I don't know if it's because it's West facing and doesn't get as much sun (I have a terrible time growing anything up there) or if it was because it was an old home place (the house burnt down years ago) but it is more grassy and less flowering "weeds" up there, so I thought it would be okay to go ahead and mow it.

I pushed around the edges with the push mower, and cut me a little trail through the backyard down to the tater bins where I decided to try another, different kind of garden this year.

It's called a Three Sisters garden (aka companion gardening). From ancient Native American legend, the Three Sisters are Corn, Beans, and Squash. Corn and beans are planted in every other mound, staggered with squash/pumpkin planted in the other mounds.

Eventually this will be 3 rows of 5 mounds, but since we were only planting corn right now, we mainly concentrated on the corn mounds. The one row has some empty mounds which will be for the squash/pumpkin, but they were just made to help with the spacing for now.

Since J wasn't able to till up the area, I put down newspapers to try to hold down the grass/weeds growing up through the mounds, but I expect I'll have to do a good bit of weeding.

I soaked my corn seed for a couple days before planting, but didn't germinate them like I did the tomatoes and peppers, so I'm hoping they will grow, as they were fairly old seeds.

When the corn grows about 4 inches tall, I'll plant the beans and squash/pumpkin. (And try to save out any potato plants the might grow, since that's the same dirt that was used for these.)

We had this pile of brush and stuff that we'd been piling up to burn off for about the past year (before we learned about Hugelkultur, but didn't feel like dragging it all to somewhere else in the yard and try to cover with soil, because 1) it wasn't staying there, and 2) we don't have that much dirt anywhere in the yard. Trust me, there will be plenty more brush/sticks/limbs to do any Hugelkulturing with).

J lit it up while I stood off to the side nearly in tears. Fire scares me a lot. I thought the tree was going to catch fire, then the shed, then the house, then the neighbors', then the neighborhood....

He did a pretty good job keeping it controlled down so I wouldn't be so nervous - even though he'd have rather watch it rage big and hot.

Eventually I went in and grabbed the makings for an impromptu picnic. Ham sandwiches, chips, and fudge striped cookies. For some reason, food just tastes so much better outside.

He heated our ham in a tin pie plate, on the rake, over the fire, haha. #RedneckCookin'

This particular area of the yard is centered between three really large trees, and is just so peaceful. I've thought about making it into an actual camping area with a fire ring and something maybe like the hanging trampolines turned into beds, or hanging pallet beds, or tent shelters.

We got a good bit of project work done on the new kitchen, too, but not as much as we could have. The plumbing just did not want to cooperate at. all.  He glued the pipes together, and they leaked. He did it again, and they leaked. The hardware store sold him some putty stuff to wrap around the leaking area, but it still leaked. He cut them all off and started over, and it still leaked. He squirted on some Goo glue stuff, and it still leaks. We're beyond knowing what to do at this point.

With help, we were able to get the sink installed, and the drains in and the dishwasher hooked up. Everything would be great if the one water pipe wouldn't leak.

A couple of days back I scored a large Freecycle haul (which I'll do a separate post about later), and brought a lot of stuff into the house. Which made me feel the need to get rid of some stuff in trade.
Not a lot of it was from inside the house, but I loaded up a truckload of cardboard and plastics from the carport to carry off to the convenience center.

I've been sorting through the Freecycle items the past couple of days, keeping what I wanted and donating the rest. I ended up getting rid of at least half the stuff if not more.

J went back to the Doctor this morning, who said he was good and was released to go back to work. He's not scheduled to work until tomorrow night, so hopefully I can get two more small(ish) projects from my list done tomorrow. Then I can start a new list.