A Winterlude

Ok, so I stole that term.  I heard it on NPR to describe Saturday when they were reviewing the weather.

So I took an interlude of my own.  We had awakened to a half inch of new snow and 40+ mph wind gusts.  Not the sort of weather you want for climbing up in trees to work with a chain saw.
We took the kids to the MoA for a few hours at the Nicolodeon Theme Park, which is not my real idea of fun, but they enjoyed it.   While at the MoA my parents called to see if they could make a trip up from Red Wing, take the kids out to a movie, and then all of out to Tino’s for pizza (really, the best place in the Twin Cities for a real New York style pizza) which then gave me time to do some more potting up.  172 plants broken out of starter trays and now in individual cells.  Terhune Tomatoes, Broccoli, and cabbages.  More to go, but you do what you can.

Sunday awoke cold and clear.  I was awake before 6 and had most of a pot of coffee in me by the time the sun crested the horizon.  I figured I would clean the pond out by hand.  That is how I usually do it anyway, although the sump pump a neighbor has hooked up to a pole that you can lower into the pond goes much faster.  The pond water in the spring though is as nasty, once you get close to the bottom, as what you would find in any nasty swamp, and I like to use it as a general fertilizer in my gardens here, especially where I have planted garlic and onions.

125 five gallon buckets later, I smelled like a swamp, the kids were all up, the pond was being refilled, and we could get on with the rest of the day.  Just to see how they would do I grabbed 5 of last year’s baby goldfish (now all 2-3″ long) and dropped them in.  I do like how hardy goldfish are.  They showed no shock at all to the icy water after spending the winter in my kid’s bedroom and happily explored the area Patti removed them from late last fall.  The cats were happy to see that their outside water dish/reflecting pool was cleaned and refilled.  Even a dragonfly (first I have seen this year) came and flitted around.

We were all packed in the Explorer by noon and headed out to the Ness farm.  We were greeted by a happy surprise: Lance had not just tilled it.  He had tilled, retilled, and tilled again a large area, though not the square we had planned on, a huge area maybe even a bit bigger than the original 125X125′ layout.  Patti and I plotted out the north and east side sunflower beds and the two pea trellises with stakes and twine.  Lance, his wife Heidi and their kids planted about 600′ of Arikara sunflowers on those sides, while Patti and I planted the peas.  Next week Lance will have 8′ metal stakes there for us to put up the physical trellises.  There are two kinds of peas planted there:  Alderman Telephone Pole shelling peas, and Sugar Snaps.  Both are seeds I have saved from previous years.  I have enough Sugar Snaps in my own yard for fresh eating, but the 120′ of them at their farm will give us all plenty for freezing for the winter as well.  Heidi told me they just had their last bag of frozen shelled peas from last year.  I have not taken the time to shell that many green peas in the past.  I have simply made sure we had enough seed for the next year and whatever we wanted to eat when the pods were ripe.

We finished the work we could get done yesterday by 430 there, we went home, cleaned up quick, and headed to David’s for dinner.  He had fired up the grill for pork tenderloin & chicken breasts as well as  picking up a container of baby greens.  I brought a couple of boxes of bowtie pasta and a quart of red sauce.  We stuffed ourselves silly, and then ate more when David brought out a pint of heavy whipping cream, a pound of fresh strawberries and a bunch of bananas.  He whipped the cream with vanilla and powdered sugar, and we had it mounded over the sliced fruit.

We were home and the kids in bed by 830.  I collapsed by 9, and woke up at 6 this morning, aching all over.  Long office day today, but meeting with my parents for lunch and to go over a Faribault Nursery catalog and pick out fruit trees that they will then go pick up, and on Tuesday after work I will head down to the Red Wing farm to get those planted.

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