Garden Removal Completed

   The garden removal job is finally finished. I was getting really tired of spending so much quality time with my new wheelbarrow.  I still have a few more things to plant in the new garden in the front yard, but all the dirt moving is finished.  So here I sit at my computer at 9:45 a.m. working on this blog post and the work crew still hasn't shown up.  I guess I'd rather be ready and not have them show up on the scheduled day than have them show up before I was ready.

      I had another complication added to my life this past Friday.  A man from the City of Everett Public Works dropped off a piece of heavy equipment for the access road project. I talked to him for a while and learned that the road wasn't going in exactly where I thought it was going to be.  There was a minor glitch in the placement of the stakes and the road was actually going to cut across the corner of the goat pen fence.  This meant I had to take down the affected portion of the fence and redo it .  I was already planning to redo the goat fence as I needed to fell a few trees within the goat pen.  However, I would have preferred to move the fence at my leisure rather than as an emergency project with a very short deadline.  To make matters worse I had church and work obligations for most of the weekend.

    I was finally able to start moving the goat fence on Sunday afternoon.  I try not to work on Sunday but I considered this to be a serious "ox in the mire" case.  I staked Buster and Black Jack out in our little woods and left them to an afternoon of gorging on blackberry bushes.  I then worked furiously to complete the project before dark, at least it was furiously by my standards.  I finally finished at about 9:00 p.m. with the light just starting to fade.  I was even able to move a little tree for Linda before it got pitch dark.

The new goat fence

The old fence line looking west

The old fence line looking east

    I generally let beans and peas soak overnight before I plant them.  I think they germinate faster that way and I can tell which seeds are viable before I plant them.  It's just like that scripture in Alma where it talks about being able to tell it is a good seed as it swells and begins to grow.  I had purchased a cheap package of Blue Lake pole beans that were on sale several months ago.  When I soaked them only 72 percent of the seeds turned out to be viable.  In this case it didn't matter much as I only needed about two dozen seeds to germinate. Several weeks ago I had done the same thing with the two dry bean varieties I planted in the new garden in the front yard. The difference was that every last bean of the Rockwell and Yin Yang beans germinated.  Seeds that are on sale are not always a bargain. Often they are old and of poor quality. The Yin Yang beans came from a friend and were harvested this past fall.  The Rockwell beans were purchased from Uprising Seeds in Bellingham, Washington.

73 percent germination