Work delays, looking ahead

Mama’s appointment was a bit of a let down for us both. The appointment was only a consultation. The oral surgeon outlined a plan of action to remove the tooth the dentist had identified but the main reason for the visit was to schedule the extraction for a future date and collect the fee for that work in advance. Mama and I were required to pay almost $600 in order for the office to put the procedure on their schedule. We were both a little disappointed by the outcome. I do not have a problem with the price for the dental work, I just found it a bit manipulative to have us pay in advance of any work being done. Anyway, the first available date was in early March overlapping a day I have a class scheduled.

Fortunately, it is one of the classes that has been repeatedly cancelled, so it remains to be seen if I am available to Mama on that day. I will be required to go with Mama since most of the fee for the removal was to cover the anesthesia recommended by the surgeon and having undergone anesthesia, Mama will require help to get home. Since nothing was done yesterday, we shopped our way out of Denton and got back home a little before 4 pm. It was not a complete waste of the vacation hours I took, but it proved an unnecessary secondary cost for that dental visit since I will have to use more hours when the actual procedure is done.

Mama is meeting up with a frustrated Bro. Plumley today to take him to see if there are any seed potatoes available for him to plant in his raised bed garden at the Assisted Living facility where he lives. Many of the nurseries in our area are not well stocked yet. It is a little too early to have vegetable plants ready for purchase, but one of them should have seeds and seed potatoes available for purchase. Mr. Plumley lives by a schedule for gardening and according to his schedule the due dates are passing for the planting of potatoes. If I remember right, we planted in West Virginia by St Patrick’s day which comes in the middle of March. Any later than that and the potatoes would not make before the summer heat burned up the plants. So, here we try to get our potatoes in the ground in mid-February. Hopefully, Mama and Plumley can get the potatoes for him before he really gets agitated about the late calendar date.

For me and Mama, I took a potato from our pantry that had gone to seed and planted pieces in several pots. In the past, we have not done well with potatoes planted directly in the ground of the garden. Maybe we started too late, maybe the ground is not fertile enough for the plants to produce, but we have had two years of very poor yields, so this year I am going with pots for most of our vegetables – potatoes included. Squash, beans, peas, pumpkins, etc. do well enough as long as we water thoroughly through the early Summer. Flowers also do well in the garden, but we do not have a lot of success with tubers. Maybe pots will solve that issue. I also want to move our nectarine tree from the garden into the back yard to keep the raccoons from stripping it before the fruit even ripens. That has happened for two years in a row, and it is very frustrating.

I have trimmed back all the fruiting trees and bushes through the cold weeks so we should be ready for the Spring. I even was able to cut a peach sprout from the base of our peach tree and plant it in the back yard as well. I will know in a couple weeks whether or not the cutting will survive. The pecan trees I started from seeds should be coming to life a few weeks from now. They are the last of the trees to leaf out in our area. This year they will be two years old – still about three years from producing any pecans, but it has been a fun experiment. Mama and I found out a couple weeks ago that one of the older couples that has recently joined our church have a commercial scale pecan grove so I will be able to get advice from him with my little pecan project.

I will be teaching a class tomorrow. My only class this week. I am looking forward to the class. Next week there are three classes on the docket, but I am pretty sure one of them will not make. If it does, it is only a half-day class and one of the more fun classes I get to present. We are zooming through February. 2022 will be over before we know it. It may seem early to say that, but Mama are planned out through August this year and if we are not looking ahead, those dates will come up on us before we have adequately prepared. Holding onto the required vacation time, setting aside the necessary finances, planning for backup on the farm, coordinating our breeding programs, harvesting honey, etc. All need to be well-planned in order to ensure we can follow through with those plans. That planning happens now and in the days to come. I like planning ahead when we are able, and for the moment, it seems we are able. That can change very unexpectedly so we are bathing all our plans in prayer.

After all, the outcomes are in God’s hands, and we can trust him with our lives.