Time to Get Caught Up...

I haven't posted to the blog with an update in quite a while. We've had a busy weekend. Saturday we went to Madison to the Henry Vilas Zoo, Yue Wah, and a bunch of other errands. We stopped by State Street to have some lunch at Chipotle; there was a classic car show in progress and we took some photos of the cars. Here's a nice swoopy Jaguar convertible, and a view of the state capital on this lovely spring day.

Our electric mower died this weekend. Our reel mower works well for smaller jobs but the power mower is really required to kill all the weeds. Dad's buddy Charlie had a gas one he was getting rid of, and he said I could have it for a case of beer. Dad brought the mower over, so tomorrow I will go to Baraboo and get him a case of Budweiser. I'm also making him some onion-dill bread to go with it.

Today I worked until 11 am, and afterwards I worked on transplanting seedlings into the square-foot garden on the back terrace. I also put in the last of the 10 oak-leaf hydrangea bare-root plants I had ordered to replace our rotten back fence. So far, in the square foot beds, I have snow peas, long beans, Mr. Big peas, armenian cucumbers, a variety of mesclun lettuce, marigolds, and Indian mustard greens. I have made some chicken-wire tube supports for the climbers. We shall see if those are sufficient, or whether I need to escalate to livestock panels. The heirloom tomatoes are up, but still too small to transplant. The asian hot peppers seem to be a total bust; we may have to fall back upon jalapenos this year. I should have started the seedlings a little bit earlier, although this spring was so cold and yucky, it might not have made any difference.

This afternoon, it hailed pea-sized hail for about 20 minutes. Fortunately, it the storm missed Avinash's car at Badger.