Sunny Sunday

It was a nice turn-around for the weather today- sunny and warm. Art and I took advantage of it by spending most of it outside doing the things we couldn't do in the cold and rain yesterday. I did the laundry and finished placing hay around the plants in the garden. Originally I had just placed it around the tomato plants to prevent blight and also around the onion and garlic because they are a pain to weed. I have never covered the entire garden because I felt that would be taking the easy way out. I would always tell myself, "Don't be lazy!", but usually by August I have mowed over some plant or another because I'm so burned out on weeding. So this year I took the easy way out to prevent any kind of frustration fueled destruction. It's not pretty, but it'll do the job and save my sanity.

We also burned the mustard pile this morning- I know Google tells me to place it in a paper sack and burn it, but you tell me where I can find a paper sack large enough to hold a three-foot-high pile of mustard, so we just burned it in the open. I'm sure mustard seeds are floating in the air, just waiting to land and take root, but it was a south wind so it'll end up in the neighbors' corn field. They use herbacides, anyway, so it won't matter.

We also split some of the wood from the tree that fell a few weeks ago. Art cut up the trunk and I know we'll have even more to split next weekend. Art has become a wood snob, though. When we first started burning wood to heat the house, we used cotton wood that he got from a friend of his. Once he discovered oak and hickory, well, that cotton wood just didn't cut it because it's a softwood. The maple we split today is also a softwood and Art just didn't know what to do with it. Since it's not hardwood oak or hickory, it's not quite good enough for him. I told him that if we were living in Russia during WWII he would be thanking his lucky stars for any kind of wood, let alone hardwood. Sometimes I think I must have had a hard life in some past life the way I think. We stacked the inferior softwood in the corn crib and we'll use it in the winter. Art is also planning on putting a wood stove in his shop, so he could use it in there, too. A lot of people think he's crazy for putting a wood stove in his shop when he has the in-floor heating, but we only have the tubing in, no boiler. To actually hook up the system for the in-floor heating is expensive and since we have all the free firewood we want, for the time being it's far more cost effective.

I was so productive in the morning that I spent the rest of the afternoon in the sun reading my book and drinking iced tea.