Corona time this week has meant a lot of work in the garden for both Bill and I. One project is seasonal - our mulberry trees and our blackberry patch are in full bloom and producing faster than I can harvest. So far I've picked:* 18 cups of mulberries. We've made a pie, muffins, scones and 4 jars of jam.
* 18 cups of blackberries. We've made two pies, 8 jars of jam and maybe ate another cup as we've been picking.
To put the amount that I've picked and we've used into perspective... 3-4 cups of berries is a pound... So I've harvested approximately 9 pounds of berries this week. The mulberries are still raining down from the trees and the blackberry patch is filled with red berries starting to ripen. I'm about to start freezing berries to use when summer cravings hit. It's truly a bumper crop this year, and I'm totally grateful that I bit the bullet and bought my Pampered Chef Deluxe Cooking Blender. That thing is a rock star! I drop berries, water, pectin and sugar in it and 30 minutes later I've got jam. I've always fought making jam because I remembered the time and labor intensive process it was for my mother. This makes it a BREEZE!!! I even made orange marmalade and applesauce this week in that baby! If this makes you think "I totally need to look into that", hit me up... I started selling Pampered Chef a month ago as a side gig until I can start flying again.
One of the funny things about Corona life is I'm not showering as much... don't judge... y'all know you're in your pajamas as much as I am. Yesterday I spent most of my time shaking the mulberry trees to get the fruit and making jam... today, after I worked in our vegetable garden, I decided it was time to shower. As I was showering, I looked down at my feet and there was a full mulberry just sitting there... I'm not sure if it landed on me as I walked through the garden today or if I actually... SLEPT with it in my hair last night... I know I should show some amount of shame here but I just cant bring myself to do anything other than laugh at that.
I mentioned the vegetable garden... it's coming along beautifully. The tomatoes are getting big enough that they needed to be staked. I had Bill cut us 50 stakes out of leftover scrap from our old hardwood floors. Each of the stakes in the garden are pieces of original hardwood that broke as he pulled them up. They couldn't be reused but he put them to the side to somehow be recycled at a future date... and ta da!!!
Cherie and I have learned a wee bit about gardening from our Master Gardener class two years ago, and from working in the charity garden in Fayetteville. She recently even learned a trick on how to do the twine without bending over.... attaching the twine box to your belt, working the twine through a piece of pvc pipe and then making the pvc pipe do all the lower work. It went by quickly. When we were done with the twine we laid down hay mulch that our fabulous neighbor, Tiny, dropped off a couple of days ago. It actually LOOKS like we know what we're doing... and LOOKS like a vegetable garden. We're pretty excited about our progress.
Speaking of progress, we've been working on our fire pit area. A place where we can hang with friends and family... or just the two of us, and enjoy the outdoors like we're camping but have a big bed to go sleep in. A couple weeks ago we upgraded from a burn barrel to an actual pit... it was a big stretch... we removed the barrel and started burning on the ground... I grabbed a few stones from around the property and Bill finished the pit's circle. He then grabbed all of our outdoor chairs and put them around the pit. A few days later he strung white fairy lights in the trees around that circle. The one thing he complained about was having to move the chairs when our lawn guy came, so that he could mow the area. We talked about getting more stone, putting another circle around the chairs and filling the area with pea gravel. I put it in my mental to-do list and figured it would take a minute to feel financially secure enough to put money into an outdoor space. Then Bill went away for two days. One of those days I was outside and I looked at this... planter? old fountain?... something that was a big square of stacked stone filled with dirt right behind our house. I stared at that stone and had an epiphany. This area has to be demolished when we start our addition... here was the stones we needed to do the outer circle... all that it would take would be a sledge hammer, and a chisel to remove the cement from the stones... if it's free it's for me... 
Bill came back and I pointed out the brilliance of my discovery and waxed poetic on the beauty of the plan. He put it on his "Heather's list of 1000 things to do yesterday"... and walked away. I went into his shed and grabbed a crowbar.... when he saw what I was doing he handed me a sledgehammer and a mallet of sorts... and I went to town. By mid day I knew why he'd walked away and let me do this. It's not sooooo easy to deconstruct stacked stone. I did it. Nearly killed myself with my stubbornness, but I banged those stones out, chipped off that cement, shoved them in the wheelbarrow and plunked them down around the chairs. Ladies and gentlemen how many stones do you think I needed to do that project??? Seventy freaking seven. With my dying breath I counted those bloody tons of torture. When the last stone was placed I marched my middle aged butt into the house, tossed off my clothes and crawled into the claw-foot tub with a Grapefruit White Claw... I might have been crying "mommy"... This project still has a chance to kill me though... as my weed block fabric comes Thursday and I'm scheduling 60 cubic feet of pea gravel to arrive the same day... Pray for me y'all....
Pray for my hub while you're at it... While I was whining about moving a gazillion tons of stone, he was in the back spraying the kudzu. It's coming back... we're on year 3 of fighting this battle. It's an insidious plant that will kill everything in it's path if you let it be. We can see grass now where it used to be in our back 'cut'... it'll take a couple more years of spraying before we can see it gone for good. Anyway, spraying a poison seems to be relatively easy right? Unless you're on top of a slope and you make a misstep... and you find yourself on your knees mid slope staring at the rear end of a copperhead. Bill ran like a 10 year old, went to grab a shovel to kill it but it disappeared... Don't know who was more scared. Bill went back to spraying 30 minutes later and saw a scurrying by his feet... he thought 'here we go again'... and then realized he was staring at a lizard. He came over to me and asked what lizard has a pink head??? Funny enough we found that answer out later that day when someone posted this picture in Facebook asking what it was.... Apparently skink males heads turn pinkish orange during mating season. Good to know lol.
This morning I woke up, went to use the restroom - this isn't too much information, y'all know it's the ONLY thing that gets you out of bed on a lazy morning... anyway, when I was done, I stood up and stretched and scratched my ass... yes... y'all do that too... don't lie... and when I scratched I felt a bug bite... but it felt like there was a scab... and I thought "Lord please no"... I can't see my ass... I went into the other bathroom to find my big magnifying mirror... I still couldn't quite turn around enough to see so I walked dejectedly into the bedroom with my underwear half down, walked up to Bill and asked "Do I have a tick on my ass".
I am here to tell you, it's not really what any woman wants to have to ask a man.... and I'm pretty sure most men don't want to have to answer that question... but my hub looks from across the bed and replies calmly... "It looks like you've been bitten by something"....
"I feel something there. I think there's a tick." Next thing I know, I'm hanging over my claw-foot tub with my ass is in the air. My hub has put his headlight on his head to see better. He's verified that there is indeed a seed tick hanging onto my ass. He gently takes it off with tweezers then says in his deep southern drawl "make sure you put peroxide on that baby..."
So yes... ladies and gentlemen... the moral of this whole blog is working in the garden is all fun and games until a tick bites your ass.
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