Another season draws to a close
Oct. 8th, 2014 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rscToday is our last full day in Gloucester for 2014; there are getting to be too many cold nights (and cold days), and we have lots of reasons to be in Boston or Cambridge over the next couple of weeks. So tomorrow is moving day; we're committed, I already changed the address on our Boston Globe subscription. We will come back a few times to finish up fall yard work and eventually to drain the pipes.
One of the things that needed to be done was the preparation of the bed that contained tomatoes this year but will contain lettuce next year (which means it needed to be tilled this fall, because lettuce goes in as soon as the ground is soft enough). I also decided that the bed wasn't long enough to hold the number of varieties of lettuce I'm likely to want to plant, so I had to extend it.
The tomatoes weren't dead yet -- there were some ripe and unripe ones, and even still a few flowers, silly plants -- but the degree to which we'd been neglecting to harvest them lately suggests that we were, shall we say, fed up with tomatoes for this year, and anyway we're moving back tomorrow, so yesterday was the day. Extending the bed turned out to be a lot of work; I couldn't get the spade through the surface, and the tiller didn't like it either, and I had forgotten about the grub-hoe until John suggested it; fortunately that worked.
While I was working on this, a couple of local women came by on a walk and asked if I was digging for gold. I didn't have the presence of mind to reply that, actually, in a reversal of normal procedure, I had dug up the gold (those tomatoes) in order to get at the dirt. If they had come past again and asked if I'd found any gold, I could have said No, but I found some good-sized samples of excellent Cape Ann granite. (Which explains why the tiller wouldn't do anything at that end except bounce around.)
But I did get it done, and there will be room for lettuce next year. Hopefully we will in fact get to harvest some of it, rather than having it all devoured before maturity by rabbits (as happened this year).
Tonight is going to be a tough sleeping night, because of the rule that all the people get to sleep in the bed the night before we move back.
One of the things that needed to be done was the preparation of the bed that contained tomatoes this year but will contain lettuce next year (which means it needed to be tilled this fall, because lettuce goes in as soon as the ground is soft enough). I also decided that the bed wasn't long enough to hold the number of varieties of lettuce I'm likely to want to plant, so I had to extend it.
The tomatoes weren't dead yet -- there were some ripe and unripe ones, and even still a few flowers, silly plants -- but the degree to which we'd been neglecting to harvest them lately suggests that we were, shall we say, fed up with tomatoes for this year, and anyway we're moving back tomorrow, so yesterday was the day. Extending the bed turned out to be a lot of work; I couldn't get the spade through the surface, and the tiller didn't like it either, and I had forgotten about the grub-hoe until John suggested it; fortunately that worked.
While I was working on this, a couple of local women came by on a walk and asked if I was digging for gold. I didn't have the presence of mind to reply that, actually, in a reversal of normal procedure, I had dug up the gold (those tomatoes) in order to get at the dirt. If they had come past again and asked if I'd found any gold, I could have said No, but I found some good-sized samples of excellent Cape Ann granite. (Which explains why the tiller wouldn't do anything at that end except bounce around.)
But I did get it done, and there will be room for lettuce next year. Hopefully we will in fact get to harvest some of it, rather than having it all devoured before maturity by rabbits (as happened this year).
Tonight is going to be a tough sleeping night, because of the rule that all the people get to sleep in the bed the night before we move back.
