Cleanup, plant life, normalcy

With much of the ground and sidewalk covered with snow that has now been thawed and refrozen into sheets of ice, I elected Saturday to reclaim the garage space that had become cluttered with multiple items set in the once open space for no apparent reason. I knew we would have at least a truck load of trash and junk when all the unnecessary clutter had been set aside and loaded up for disposal. That turned out to be true. Many months ago, Mama had hauled home a cabinet style bathroom sink that needed a lot of work.

Her idea was to use it in the hall bathroom. In my opinion, it was too far gone to rehabilitate but I was waiting for Mama to agree to dispose of it. That agreement came Saturday as I moved things around to rearrange items we wanted to keep into more compact, more organized, more accessible settings. In all we had six large trash bags of junk and trash, two totes full of small items that would not do well in a trash bag – glass, broken picture frames, rocks (yes, rocks), small pieces of wood, etc. I threw out a stool type wicker chair that Mama had hauled home, but we had never placed for use in the house because the stand for that chair had no padding on the feet.

I was debating loading the accumulated mass into the truck because we did not know if our little dump was open due to the ice that we still had lying on roadways, but Victoria went to work in the early afternoon and swung by the small satellite dump to see if it was open. It was, so Trace and I stuffed the bed of the truck, putting the overflow in the back seat of the truck and we took the entire load to the dump. The attendant there is someone who also lives close by, and we have had several lengthy conversations in past trips to throw away our household garbage, and he charged us $20 for the load. I was very pleased with that price. I was even more pleased with the renewed empty space in the garage that the effort brought. Mama was quite pleased as well since we went through all the totes and boxes of her stored items and located some craft items she had been searching for over the past few weeks.

By late Saturday afternoon the goats had begun to venture out of their barn for the first time since the snow started falling Wednesday night. The temperatures got into the high forties by late afternoon. I had put a tank warmer into their water trough, but they had been licking snow at the edge of the barn to slack their thirst versus getting their feet cold in the snow. Today temperatures will be in the sixties and by midweek, the seventies. The nights are still at or near freezing, but the very cold days are past for now. I fully expect we will have at least one more stretch of blue cold before the month runs out but for the most part, we are seeing more warm days than cold days. That is a blessing to me and Mama – and our animals.

The snow we did get is watering the ground well as it slowly melts away. There was not enough of an accumulation to produce any runoff, rather, the slow thawing has allowed the moisture to pierce the previously dry ground more deeply than any topical application of water could have provided in any other form. We will see the benefit of that soaking veery quickly as the warm afternoons spur the grass to grow.

In preparation for the coming planting season, Mama and I (mostly me) are starting some seeds in a variety of methods from ideas we are borrowing from something we saw online. Right now, I have some tomato seeds that have begun to sprout in the teabags I am starting them in. I did not plant too many seeds because I did not know if the method would actually work. Now, I am seeing the results and since Mama and I have a lot of used teabags available, it is something I will continue to do.

So far, I have started strawberries and Echinacea flowers in addition to the tomato seeds, but the tomatoes are a week ahead of the others. I am putting the teabags on a paper plate and putting that paper plate in a gallon Ziplock bag. That creates a little greenhouse for the initial sprouting of the seeds. If this really does work, it will save me a lot of money we normally spend on vegetable plants at the nursery. Especially since many of those purchased plants do not survive being transplanted into our garden. Maybe this method will have greater success. Time will tell. At the very least, I will be able to provide a lot of plants to be set in the garden at a very low price.

Services were great yesterday although we are still down in attendance somewhat. I have not been able to restart the choir because many of my normal choir members are still hesitant to attend services. That will change over time. I just have to be patient. Pastor announced last night that he will start passing the offering plates as we did in the past.

That is a big step toward normalcy.