To Do List

Since I am going to be showing you some market garden pictures, Alessia wanted you to also see some of our beautiful flowers. So she took my camera and here is the result.

The Friday after Christmas found me being driven to the other side of Auckland to have a tooth extracted. The word 'extracted' means major pain but I had been numbed up the whazoo and Dan and I headed back to the farm in fairly good spirits. And then we hit what turned out to be a 12  1/2 mile backup on the two lane road we HAD to travel. It took us almost a half hour to travel one mile. I was trapped!

In order to keep  my mind off my increasing pain as the numbness receded and the armies of pain marched into my mouth, I made a to-do list. Not for myself, you understand, but for Dan. After all what else did he have to do on his yearly vacation?

I will skip all the little things like being with the kids, tackling the ant infestation, removing vast numbers of spider webs, spiders, and cocooned insects, mowing the lawns, clipping the lawns, etc.

And, of course, there were the unexpected treats like the geyser (hot water tank) in my apartment leaking down through the garage and having to be drained. It is the holiday season and there is literally no one available to come fix the darned thing for 6 days.

But the list grew despite extraneous events. The market garden needed to be weeded. Those are not edible plants you see, those are various weeds that have thrived under our protective netting. The fruit trees needed to be weeded and mulched.  All the soon-to-be produce in the garden needed to be weeded, the dirt loosened, and mulched.

Anyway, you get the idea. I am showing you some of my success stories; cherry tomatoes, corn, and squash. Everything else is dead. I think we are going to be eating a ton of succotash. And I hope to can at least 48 jars of tomato sauce. Haven't got a clue what to do with all that corn (besides eat it fresh). I just can't see myself hulling the kernels and canning them. We are talking major work there.