Spring!!! Gardening obsession!!!

The view of our yard from the road on Oct. 2. Notice the many many many leaves on the poplars!

The birds made such a racket this morning that I found myself touring the grounds with my faithful entourage, leaving behind a husband who mumbled "King of the bed, I'm king of the bed," his expression of joy at my leaving the bed before him.

Never mind him. Spring has exploded, everything is chirping or budding, and the sun comes up at around 6 or 6:10 AM. If only I had already installed my pool heating solar panels... but I'm not lamenting too much, because I am obsessed with gardening. It's not the first time. Any of my friends during my Jersey City gardening phase may remember as I forced them to pay attention to every single blade of grass, every new leaf on every new shrub as toll when they visited me. Now I mostly torture my husband when he comes back from work.

"Did you see the trays with the seeds? No, I mean, did you really look at the purple basil? It's like one inch tall now!"


Mustard on the right, in the herbs box. The left one is peppers and tomatos...


How many times a day do I go on gardening breaks? Good thing that the spring makes me productive, because otherwise the 85k word edit job would not get done in 4 days... I spray my seedlings every couple of hours, go visit my seedlings outside, go visit the fledgling vegetable patch, with all of 10 plants (3 green peas doing swell, 3 red peppers borderline dead, one oregano, two thyme, one mint all doing just fine), I try to thin the trays of oversown seedlings, etc., etc., etc.

Tomatos! Peppers!


Every couple of days there's a new batch of cut-off plastic bottles, a new bag of fertilized topsoil, new tools (those baby tools for seedlings made me scream at the supermarket) and I now am the proud owner of a probably China-made gardening stool, fully loaded with a gazillion pouches and pockets to store all the tools and a very handy handle for carrying it around like a purse. All for about $15.

Lunes curses the electric fence that keeps her from destroying my veg patch.

The ants needless to say have discovered the changes going on here, and have taken aim at my yard. I couldn't suppress a scream yesterday when I saw them having one of my oleanders for lunch... Good thing there's William, from Greenes del Este (with the "e" in greenes) ready for my 911 call. Containing the ants is part of our contract.

As for the dogs, they watch me in wonderment but in general welcome my increased time outside around them. Lunes the Destructor still tries to have her way with my precious seedlings (she got to one this morning, dumped a pot with topsoil a few days ago) but in general there have been no casualties.

William was shocked today to see the stairway nursery, after just two weeks of showing me how to do it, and declared there will be no room in the patch for all those plants. "I guess I will have to give them away" I told him. So I have to start potting tomato and pepper plants. So I need pots and I should order another truckload of topsoil to have handy for the patch expansion, which I'm planning to triple in size.


The stairway nursery has expanded.

Yeah, I know, all a bit manic, but that's the good thing about having such a big yard after all, having tons of dogs and tons of shrubs and trees and tons of own-grown vegetables and fruits, right?

Which brings me to the new additions: we have planted 5 guava trees on the new lot, because they are indigenous and beautiful and I loooove guava in various forms. And also because the new lot has a tiny "monte criollo" or indigenous forest (with a bit of wishful thinking on my part). It has two indigenous trees (a tala and a canelon) and a lot of espina de la cruz (a thorny bush with cross-like foliage) and now, 5 guava trees.

In addition, I have planted two quince trees and two pomegranate trees in two different spots of our yard (hedging my investment). Greatest problem may be that the strong winds may blow off the blooms in the spring and I may have no fruit, according to William, but if so, I will wrap them in something to protect them from the wind next year... this year it's no use.

The lady at the nursery, Frida, smartly refuses to close my tab because she knows I will be adding on to it...

The fierce guardians

The dogs are getting big, and a little bit fat too. We neutered/spayed Lunes and Tulu, and experienced none of the "one week of convalescence" I had been warned about. They were back to their crazy selves the day after. Oso weighs as much as a cow, impossible to lift him now. They all bark in unison, very threateningly, at any car slowing down, motorcycle approaching or, the worst offenders, bicycle or horseback riders. Very impressive until you notice their tails wagging...

Happy hunting days, Lunes always dying to trespass into La Carolina

We did a lot of long walks into the fields around here in the past couple of months, but I'm afraid that will have to stop now as the nasty snakes are waking up all stressed out, and these dummies want to eat them. They have brought me a dead eel, a dead snake and a dead field mouse in the last two weeks, so their sniffing expeditions are off for a while. Only the beach, which involves less risky terrain and mostly dead seafood, which they chomp on with great gusto and later puke.


The will be house that Barbi built for Lunes and Tulu. Tulu doesn't allow Oso to sleep with them, he growls nastily and sends him away.

But they all nap together