Someone flipped the switch for south Texas and it is now Spring! From early blooms to butterflies and honeybees, we are soaking up every ounce of this season.
The girls and I have spent more mornings than I can count, planting seeds, weeding and getting our garden ready to grow lots of delicious food.
There is something so pure and enriching about working in the garden with children. It's also the cure for a habitual task minded, control freak like myself. From seed spacing to depth, everything is more of a suggestion when you are working with kids. And that's totally fine. I have to remind myself that Nature doesn't follow specifications and adhere to a grid, embracing nature, that's what we'll call it. Although Karen refers to it as, organized chaos.
Spring is also a time for cleaning, right? And that's not limited to just inside the house. There was a yucca, three of them actually, by our front gate. The yucca is also called the dagger plant, such a fitting name. That thing stabbed me weekly, notice I'm talking in past tense...Yup, the yucca had to go!
Initially I went out there with an ax and a pick, I was going to chop them down. Then I noticed how thick the trunks were, we needed to bring in the big guns.
I found some rope, tied some secure knots and put it in drive! They came our much easier than I thought, then I used the pick to hack out all the little baby ones that had started to sprout around the area. I'm very happy to say we are now yucca free.
Pulling the yucca must have ignited something inside me, because the spring cleaning then moved into the house.
When we bought the place all of the appliances came with it. While we found the stove, washer and dryer useful, the fridge was a hot damn mess. Thankfully we already owned one, so we simply moved it in to the space where the gross one used to reside. But that leaves a question, what happened to the old fridge? Well, it was moved into the corner with a promise from Karen, I'll get it out of here next weekend. Apparently next weekend is a date that never comes, because we were 4 months into living here full time and that huge disgusting eyesore was still taking up space in my kitchen.
While I did consider tying it up and yanking it out of the house, I can't live with a fridge sized hole in the side of my house. And we all know that Karen wouldn't ever find the time to fix it. So I had to get creative, and by creative I mean I fully embraced my redneck side and I took the railing off the porch and flipped it off!
Eventually I got it up on a dolly and wheeled it to the garage, where it now sits awaiting it's next journey to the dump.
All of this Spring craziness also served to remind Karen how not only am I an independent woman, but I am also crazy and determined.
The Spring cleaning train also had a route that lead to clean puppies. After rolling in countless things that shall not be named, they were not only visibly dirty but they were smelling ripe!
With the help of the girls, we managed to wrangle both of the boys and de-funk them. I noticed how much harder it was to get them into the tub and how small the tub looked with their big puppy bodies inside. This lead me to lifting each on and standing on the scale to get a better idea of their weight. As of now Loki is at 42 lbs and Thor is 52 lbs, have I mentioned that they are not even 5 months old?!
They are going to be some BIG boys! Although I question the purpose of giving them baths, as soon as they were out they proceeded to run around and roll in all the things again.
The girls have proven to be a huge help in more ways than just tossing seeds and wrangling puppies. They also helped me put up deer netting around the whole garden. As the puppies remind us every night, the deer like to take evening strolls past our garden, right past the garden. We haven't put all that work in to make a deer buffet, so we added a seven foot deterrent. With some bamboo poles and about 3million zip ties, we secured our future food plot. Take that Bambi!
After a productive and eventful week, there's nothing better than a Shiner and a sunset. Time to rest up and prepare for the adventures the next week holds. B.
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