Staggering Through The Garden

Actually, it was just my usual walk through the garden tonight, but I may have been staggering a wee bit since I'm fairly well p-double-ooped.

Yesterday we hit the wood working really hard.  We put in a very full day of running the splitter and stacking the wood in the wood shed.  After dinner (can't even remember what I made) and a long shower, I was ready for bed shortly after nine.

Along with the wood work, I did manage to strip our bed, wash and dry the sheets and get them put back on.  I did this mainly because my better half had asked me to take the down comforter off the bed and replace it with a light-weight blanket.  Seems Old Hot Body (as I refer to him) has been getting way too warm at night and declared the down comforter had to go.

The result of this change in our bed clothes was that even though I was bone weary from my day of hard labor (anyone feel sorry for me?), I slept very poorly because I was C-O-L-D all night!  I had thoughts of going up into the attic and getting the comforter from where I had packed it away, grabbing a quilt and snuggling under both of them on the couch so I could sleep comfortably.  (There was no way I could convince myself to do that in the middle of the night, of course.)

So today I managed to stall getting out to the wood working area until almost 11 a.m., and we quit right around 4:30 p.m. because of yours truly threatening to collapse if we didn't.

But back to the topic of this post.  The garden.

This morning before the wood working began, I had Papa Pea help me remove the Wall O' Waters from the cherry tomato plants and the two eggplants.

Even though our weather is still too cool for successful tomato growing, you can see the poor plants were getting too tall and spindly to stay in the wall O' Water protection.

Same with the eggplants that need room to spread out and look bushy.

Something else:  For two days now, I've noticed those little lovely (NOT ), attractive (NOT) white butterflies flitting about the garden.  They are the white cabbage moths that lay their eggs (from which worms hatch) in brassicas.  Although I've experimenting planting my cabbage and broccoli late this year to hopefully miss that cycle of the dratted insect, I couldn't do that with the Brussels sprouts.  They need such a long growing period in order to mature that they are prime right now for the moths.

With Papa Pea's help, I covered them with Agribon hoping it will protect them while the moths are in their egg-laying cycle.  Keep your fingers crossed this works.

The last thing I have to report on is the development of our haskap berries.  You can tell in the picture above that the berries are not large.  That's my little finger under the clump for comparison.  Each of our three bushes had a hay of a lot more blossoms than berries that have developed.  I'm not sure as to what to attribute that.  BUT we have noticed several crows in the garden lately (hopping around the haskap bushes) and upon close examination found several berries under the bushes that have big holes in them that could be from the crows pulling the berries off the bushes and having a taste.  Why didn't they eat the whole berry?  I think I know.

We picked a couple of the ripe looking berries for the first time today and tasted them.  Ugh.  Mine was so SOUR I spit it out.  I mean really sour.  Not just a little sour but so sour you couldn't help but make a puckery, eeuuuw-type face.  Even though they're dark blue, are they not ripe?  I suppose we'll give them another taste test in a couple of days (weeks?) to see if they've changed for the better.  If the crows have left any, that is.

Now I'm off to get ready for bed again tonight.  You can be sure I'll be armed with an extra quilt for my side of the bed.

If I can forget about that awful taste of the haskap berries, I think I'll sleep better tonight.