Wet Wednesday

I came home Wednesday at lunchtime and warmed up a bowl of chicken noodle soup. The rest I put in three containers, marked them and put them in the freezer. As I stated in my last post, the noodles were phenomenal and the taste was pretty good. I cleaned up my mess and headed back to work.

I got home at 5:15 PM, went through all the usual commotion and the mail, then changed clothes and prepared to go outside. It's hot (88 degrees F. as we speak, or rather, as I write at 5:30 PM) and humid today. But I noticed this morning that the flowers in the front garden (the only one not mulched) are drooping badly. So, I need to water them. There is only a 30% chance of rain tonight and then nothing until the weekend.

Since I have to drag the hose out anyway, I think it's time I used the two bottles of Windex Outdoor Window and Surface cleaner I bought a while ago. I used this with great effect back up in St. Clair. You screw the bottle onto the end of the house and wash down the outside of your house with it. It has setting for "Wash" (when you are using the concentrate) and "Rinse" (when you are not, just rinsing) and shoots a remarkable high-pressure stream of water. I needed it back then as there were windows I just could not reach from the ground with the ladder that I owned, and it did a great job; Not only on the windows, but on the siding as well. So, I thought I'd try it on my poor, dusty (from all the construction), and dirty abode.

So, I went outside and start washing down the siding and windows. Now, either I don't remember how many bottles it took to do the house in St. Clair (two stories and at least double the size of this place) or I am doing it wrong. I thought about this afterward. Maybe I should have rinsed first (got everything softened up), then washed, and rinsed again. Instead I washed, then rinsed. So, by the time I got the back and north side finished, so were my two bottles of stuff!

So, the front and the south side will have to wait, I guess. Next, I hook up the wand (the one that dumps a LOT of water) and head out front. I get all the container gardens and all the other gardens done, (drenched and pooling water) and make sure to also do the lilac and the forsythia. I dragged the hose back in the back and do all the patio gardens as well.

I chatted for a while over the fence with the neighbor lady and got caught up on all the local gossip. Then I checked on the raised bed garden. Hmmm... the heat has not been kind to it. The radishes are all leggy, but with no round bulbs you could eat. The peas are huge, but with no pods and the spinach are starting to bolt. So, I pull the radishes, peas and most of the spinach and deposit the refuse in the compost heap. I knew that, as cool-weather crops, they were all planted a bit late, BTW.

I did harvest a handful of leaf lettuce for tonight's dinner, though. Then I hooked up the square sprinkler and turned the water on for 30 minutes. (I went back in the house and set the oven timer). I washed off the lettuce and set it in the drying rack, wishing once more that I owned a salad spinner.

When the timer went off, I went back outside and coiled up the hose. Since they were all damp, anyway, I took the opportunity to treat all the veggies with insect dust (not having a big enough garden this year to go with the "I'll let the bugs have some of the harvest and pick the rest myself" organic gardening theory. I went back inside and it was almost 8:45 PM.

My plan for dinner was to wrap the tuna salad in individual lettuce leaves. But, this leaf lettuce is not wide enough (tastes great, though!) This would have worked with, say, Romaine lettuce. So, instead, I lined the bottom of a bowl with lettuce and put the tuna salad on top (I just wanted to give it a little change in texture and taste - tuna salad gets boring, quickly).

I checked the TV, but nothing caught my eye. So I started reading and was asleep by 10:00 PM. At 11:30, a loud noise woke me and I realized it was thunder. I looked outside and in the flashes of lightning; I saw that it was raining hard.

This morning, I checked the rain gauge and we got just over 1/2 inch of rain...