another weekend where i was a whirling dervish of domesticity. i spent saturday helping chris and teresa pack up their house. as often happens when you’re hanging around a house that is in sorting-and-packing turmoil, i was the beneficiary of a number of cast-off things. today’s spoils consisted of: a trunk-load of of dirt, a bag full of spring onions and green garlic just picked from the garden, a spring-form pan (cheesecake shall be forthcoming), a roomba (look out, cats), a quart of chicken stock, and two decorative boxes that i believe contained christmas gifts from me to C&T last year and will likely be regifted right back to same again this coming christmas.

to augment the trunkful of dirt, i stopped at Lowe’s on the way home this morning to get potting soil and a couple of plants, and, while this week’s bread dough rose on the counter (i told you. Whirling Dervish. Domesticity.), i went outside to make a second assault on the garden. it felt like a lot of work for not a lot of results, but i managed to:

– plant tomatoes and basil in hanging buckets
– install hooks on the fence to hold said tomato buckets. i have to admit that the buckets were cheap but pretty ugly. i wonder if i can paint them? plastic-friendly spray paint or anything toxic is pretty much out now that there are plants inside, and i suspect that latex will just flake off. hmm.
– arrange cinderblocks up my porch steps into a sort of waterfall container garden. ask the internet how to paint cinderblock and make shopping list accordingly.
– clean up all the neighbor’s garbage that was in the back garden plot, shoot holier-than-thou looks at said neighbors.
– move a big planter barrel from the front yard to the back plot, and fill it up with the dirt from the car.
– dig a couple of other planters, in various states of decay, from neglected corners of the yard and set them up in the back garden plot.
– clean up more cinder blocks for terraforming the back plot.
– sweep up all the leaves and dirt and weeds all over our concrete-slab of a yard.
– plant impatiens in pots on the front porch. i planted impatiens seeds in those pots 3 weeks ago and watered and fussed over them every day and got zero germination. so i gave up and bought bedding plants instead
– wondered some more about the tiny mystery potatoes that are in my front garden bed. how did they come to be?