Washed off and brushed up

All the bedders are in the ground, the tomatoes underneath their cages and the others kinda spaced around.  One of the other things that’s coming back with spring is all the poison oak that’s invaded the front lawn and the garden, so before I set anything out, I mixed up a little batch of Roundup in a bowl, got a paintbrush and a pair of latex gloves, went out and painted Roundup onto the leaves and stems of all the poison oak runners.  With a little luck that’ll kill it back to the point where, with more gloves, I can start rooting up and throwing away the runners.

Once the poison oak was suitably poisoned itself, L and I got out and dug up encroaching grass, hacked back the turk’s cap that is all over the south fencerow and taking up a good foot’s width of garden, rooted out Bermuda and Saint Augustine grass runners, pulled up goose grass and henbit, and turned in some pecan shells to loosen and amend the sticky black mess we have for soil.  I set the cages, L planted the tomatoes (setting them extra deep so they’ll throw out adventitious roots—did you know tomatoes will do that?  I didn’t, until the nurseryman told me yesterday), and I found places for most of the rest of the herbs.  I also found that I shouldn’t have bothered buying any oregano, because I have a HUGE stand of it already established, so I gave the pot I had to our next-door neighbor, who was out watching us work while she loaded her clothes washer, which sits under a lean-to on her back stoop.

L shoveled a bunch more leaves from the overflow pile into the compost pen, as she’s been doing all winter, and the pile is now less than half the size it was when we began.  The great big group of five-gallon bags that we filled with leaves in the fall are also gradually collapsing as their contents rot down; pretty soon I’ll need to start turning them out into a big heap of their own.  M kinda-sorta helped with picking up a bunch of pecan twigs that something (a windstorm? squirrels?) had knocked down, so now those are in the can and ready for the yard-waste pickup next Friday.  L and I came in and had a communal shower (a habit I introduced her to when we started dating) and got the dirt and guck off ourselves, although L is complaining that her left knee is still red and bumpy tonight, where she knelt down on some broken pecan shells.  M had a short bath of her own later, to wash off general toddler stickiness.

So tomorrow, if it continues to hold off raining, I’ll tackle Piet’s maintenance.  I picked up a case of Valvoline 10W-30 and a new EGR valve at AutoZone this afternoon, and I already have the oxygen sensor, so I’m as ready as I can be.

The shifty textbook audits the sweet disk drive.  Fnord.