November 25th

The last mowing of the year! Hooray!

At the beginning of the spring, all of the garden catalogs arrive, and getting outside to plant flowers, etc., just seems so great after a long messy winter. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm doesn't last. This summer was very rainy and the grass just leaped out of the ground, the weeds sprouted and grew while my back was turned, and keeping up with everything made me want (every year) to pave the whole thing over and paint it green.

It always tickles me when people come to get horse manure for their garden. It is rarely in demand in the fall, which is when it should be applied, just top dressed and let it rot through the winter, then come springtime, till it under. But no, everyone wants it in the spring when the gardening bug bites, and they always take the top-most part of the pile, when the really good pure stuff, no oat or corn seeds in it, is down under the top-most layer, but you gotta dig for it. The very best of it is way at the back edge, against a big rock basin where it has been curing for 10 or so years, since the last guy with a backhoe came and took every bit of it. There it looks like black earth, all composted and rich.

One of our neighbors came by while we were outside and commented on the two nice little pine trees we have in the flower bed right next to the house. I didn't let on that they are artificial, because everything we plant in there dies, it either gets flooded out when the gutters overflow after a hard rain, or dies from lack of water when we forget to water them. These two artificial ones look very real even close up, and I look forward to admiring them for a long while. And also won't worry that they will get too big, like a couple of (live Christmas trees) evergreen trees we planted many years ago at what seemed like a good distance from the house, but which are now 40 feet tall and 20 feet across at the bottom, right against the house now. Of course, we have lived here for 31 years, and things do grow well, where we have used some of that good manure ourselves over the years...

Refrigerator magnet of the day: "Many people have eaten my cooking and gone on to live normal lives."