Fun in the mud.

The weather is broken.

Once upon a time, a couple of weeks ago, I had lush green tomato plants with blooms and even fruit already, lounging around in my greenhouse taking up half the south bench.

The sun came out and I thought, “Almost June. Get ‘em planted before they lose their self-respect.”  Done.

Then the broken weather kicked in again with rain and 45 degrees at night, and now those tomato plants look like they would give their right leaf to be back in the greenhouse.

“Wish you were here,” they write back to the basil. “Having a lot of fun like if she planted us at the North Pole.”

Some plants are special in the rain.

Lady’s Mantle is called Alchemilla because the alchemists thought the glittery dew and rain that clings to its edges looked like an ingredient for mixing up a batch of gold. (Doesn’t work in my Kitchen Aid.)

The cabbage looks thrilled. But cabbage grows in the cold, in winters, in perhaps Siberia.  What’s a little rain to cabbage?

Some people can be chic in rain.

Some people can’t.

Max and I decided to go out today anyway, into the dark cold day.

I moved some plants.

Mr. O thinks I move too many plants. He thinks one day I move them one direction and the next day I dig them up and take them back the other way.  The same plants. Which tells you how much attention he pays.

Now this spring I did move and replant a new rhododendron three times. But that is rare. (I am working on a “cut and paste” attachment for my shovel, just to speed things up in this regard.)

I also dealt today with all three compost things. I figured I was all muddy anyway so why not wade into the compost.

Our oldest compost thing is an open pile, and today I turned it.  It is my favorite compost thing because I can turn it with wild abandon and also it isn’t plastic.

But I can’t put food scraps out there or it becomes a buffet for skunks, raccoons, possums and the dog. So this spring we got this tumbler composter from Costco.

The tumbler is great except it doesn’t have a handle– you have to get your fingers into those little indentations and then you have to sort push-push-push and somehow the contents is very wet and weighs maybe eight hundred pounds so sometimes I just give up and the tumbler doesn’t tumble. (Surprise it is my least favorite of our compost things.)

The last compost thing was subsidized by our County waste disposal people so it was pretty cheap at the farm store this spring.

This new composter just sits there, open on the bottom, top comes off and there is a sliding up door to dispense the finished material. But I don’t know how to make compost without stirring things up. So I pick up this open-bottomed unit, which leaves all the contents on the ground, and then I move the bin and pitch-fork the stuff back in to reverse its arrangement inside.

And it came with a groovy little lidded bucket to keep under the kitchen sink for tossing the food bits into and there’s a handle for cheerful carrying out to the bin.

In my experience it is hard to stop organic material from composting, so all these arrangements work okay. (I still like the open pile best.)

Keeping my chic.

Looks like more rain coming here in western Oregon, most of next week.

Tillie says….

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